Burning Memories
I thought this image might be interesting to anyone who recalls the conclusion to Ruby Departed: Neighbours.
(Taken from this MSNBC article, regarding the burning down of a 30-story Shanghai apartment building.)
Category: junk thought
Single Source
![Frontispiece to Viaggio intorno al mondo fatto dalla nave Inglese il Delfino comandata dal caposqadra Byron (Florence, 1768), the first Italian edition of John Byron’s A Voyage Round the World in His Majesty’s Ship the Dolphin . . . (London, 1767) [Rare Books Division].](http://jrdskinner.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/patagoniangiants.jpg "Frontispiece to Viaggio intorno al mondo fatto dalla nave Inglese il Delfino comandata dal caposqadra Byron (Florence, 1768), the first Italian edition of John Byron’s A Voyage Round the World in His Majesty’s Ship the Dolphin . . . (London, 1767) [Rare Books Division].")
Imagine, after the first successful touchdown on the moon, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned to Earth with tales of moon giants.
“One day we suddenly saw a naked man of giant stature on the shore of the port, dancing, singing, and throwing dust on his head. […] When the giant was in the captain-general’s and our presence he marveled greatly, and made signs with one finger raised upward, believing that we had come from the sky. He was so tall that we reached only to his waist, and he was well proportioned…” – wikipedia
In 1520, the Magellan expedition, having reached South America, may as well have been on the moon – and who would doubt the first people to manage to make it from the Pacific to the Atlantic?
What if the follow-up Apollo missions also made the same claims?
More from the article:
In 1579, Sir Francis Drake’s ship chaplain, Francis Fletcher, wrote about meeting very tall Patagonians.
In the 1590s, Anthonie Knivet claimed he had seen dead bodies 12 feet (3.7 m) long in Patagonia.
Also in the 1590s, William Adams, an Englishman aboard a dutch ship rounding Tiera del Fuego reported a violent encounter between his ship’s crew and unnaturally tall natives.
That would seem to seal the deal – I mean, basketball coaches should be swarming the place like Farmville spam on a Facebook page, right?
The people encountered […] were in all likelihood the Tehuelches, indigenous to the region. Later writers consider the Patagonian giants to have been a hoax, or at least an exaggeration and mis-telling of earlier European accounts of the region. – wikipedia
How much of an exaggeration?
The men’s height ranges from five foot ten to six foot four. The women’s height is on average five foot six but can be close to six foot in some cases. – mnsu.edu‘s Tehuelche page
Say what you will about the robotic exploration of distant planets, but the Mars Pathfinder would never have claimed to have encountered twelve foot tall Martians.
(Unless it did.)
Questionable CNN
From the CNN front page:
Let’s ignore the fact that this sounds like a b-reel gag from a late-’70s/early-’80s car & cop movie – I’m looking at you, Cannonball Run – why is CNN presenting this as a question? The “?” actually detracts from the lurid tease.
Pea-Body
I noticed something odd about this box, a leftover from our move:
Frankly, using the adjectives “tender” and “young” in the title just makes me feel bad about eating them.
Tut-Teutul (The George C. Scott Problem)
I’m short on time today, but I wanted to post up a quick thought on an issue that I’ve been batting around for a while now.
While examples are pervasive in all forms of media and fame, I was originally reminded of the dilemma by a posting over at Mr. Blog’s regarding Paul Teutul Sr.
I’ve never been a fan of American Chopper, but I’ve had a certain amount of secondhand exposure, and it strikes me that Mr. Teutul suffers from something I call The George C. Scott Problem.
I’ve long held that Scott was one of the finest actors of the previous century – his roles are landmark and often brilliant, but, still, everything I’ve read implies that, in his personal life, he was a bit of a brute.
From the Wikipedia:
Scott had a reputation for being moody and mercurial while on the set. “There is no question you get pumped up by the recognition,” he once said, “Then a self-loathing sets in when you realize you’re enjoying it.”
As we rapidly approach an age where ever facet of a celebrity’s life is on display, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate their private positions from their work; does Scott’s early philandering detract from his turn in Dr. Strangelove? Does the fact that I disagree with his politics make his realization of General Patton any less astounding; his role in The Changeling any less affecting?
I realize there is a difference in maintaining a sense of personal privacy and putting your full life on display, but does his terrible parenting make Teutul Sr. any less of a master bike-builder?
What of Charlie Sheen or Edward Norton? What of Michael Jackson?
Breaking News
Absolutely not from the CNN front page.
The Down-low
Acts of architectural daring are one of the few lasting memorials that will keep a name on people’s tongues – art, fashion, entertainment; all of these may pass into history based on the fickle opinion of the public, but, build a two-story bathroom and people will remember you.
From wikipedia (emphasis mine):
The Hooper-Bowler-Hillstrom House was built in 1871 in Belle Plaine, Minnesota by Sandford A. Hooper […] In 1886, it conveyed to Samuel Bowler, a founder of the State Bank of Belle Plaine and lumber-yard owner. Bowler added a new kitchen, buttery, and a five-hole, two-story outhouse that is connected to the house via a skyway.
I’m no outhouse expert, but five holes just seems decadent – I mean, for an outhouse.
Devisionism
Right now this is a blog post about media, but in 20 years I may edit it to make puppies the focus.
Remember that movie, Goldeneye?
Pierce Brosnan as James Bond doing the shooty-jumpy-explodey-spy-thing. They turned it into a video game at the time of its release, a classic for the GameCube that I wasted many hours on in my youth.
Like many media properties in these apparently creatively-devoid days, someone thought it was time for a remake. This time around, however, Brosnan isn’t the man facing off against rogue Russians, they’ve opted to update the game by inserting current-Bond, Daniel Craig, into the role.
This, to me, falls directly in line with the buggering up of Star Wars, and the removal of weapons from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.
At some level these are pop-cultural artifacts that are being monkeyed with – what happens when DVD becomes entirely digital and then that becomes some crazy cloud based share-system, and the “early versions” are progressively culled?
“So what?” I can hear that guy at the back of the room saying, “I don’t care if Han shot first.”
Fine – but what happens when a precedent of historical editing is put in place and Akira Kurosawa’s great-great-great-granddaughter decides Seven Samurai would be better if it featured an animated cyber-rabbit as well as digitally inserted Olsen-Twin septuplets as the leads?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3-LxmrFm40]
Breaking Bread
This is a bit of a follow-up post to my recent considerations regarding Natural Flavour – why is bread the only thing we’ve injected with a spectrum of vitamins and nutrients?
I occasionally worry that some of these items are actually a by-product of the industrial process.
Which food group is my best source for molybdenum?
The More Things Change
There seems to be a perennial temptation on the part of civilization – or, at least, western civilization, although I’d guess its a universal human trait – to believe we live in the most morally bankrupt era yet known; that everything is falling apart around us.
What we need is a true knight in shining armour to help guide us out of this corrupt time of murderers, thieves, and (to borrow Billy Winnipeg’s term) kiddy fiddlers.
Enter Gilles de Rais (and wikipedia):
Gilles de Rais, seigneur et baron de Rais (1404–1440) was a Breton knight, a leader in the French army and a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc.
Fantastic! A thousand more men like him and we’d be –
In 1434/5, he retired from military life, depleted his wealth by staging an extravagant theatrical spectacle of his own composition and dabbled in the occult.
Ok, Ok, sure – but sometimes rich people do stupid things, and, seriously, who wasn’t dabbling in the occult back then?
After 1432 Gilles engaged in a series of child murders, his victims possibly numbering in the hundreds.
Oh.
In his own confession, Gilles testified that “when the said children were dead, he kissed them and those who had the most handsome limbs and heads he held up to admire them, and had their bodies cruelly cut open and took delight at the sight of their inner organs; and very often when the children were dying he sat on their stomachs and took pleasure in seeing them die and laughed…”
Ugh. I’m sure glad we don’t live in those barbaric olden days.