halloween 2009

(Cover illustration by Chris Ware via The Jailbreak)

there are monsters

Via my friend N, something in the spirit of the day.

were we've been

Via Erin O'Brien, comes this intriguing bit of cultural archeology. It seems that back in 1961, one Chris Kendall broke a fall by grabbing for a hot stove and had to be taken to the hospital for treatment of the resulting burn. Here, in its entirety, is the sum total of all the paperwork generated by this medical encounter:

And oh yeah, fuck Joe Leiberman.

bonus post

Because it's almost Halloween. Or something.

yet another great moment in advertising

There seems to be an almost never-ending supply of stuff like this. It's dispiriting.

plastic

This photograph is from Midway - Message from the Gyre, a series of photographs by Chris Jordon of dead albatross chicks on Midway Atoll. To quote from the introduction:

“These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.”

Follow the link above. Look at the pictures.

paul haggis resigns - very publicly - from scientology

Director Paul Haggis has apparently been a member of the Church of Scientology for something like 35 years. It appears that he has had a recent epiphany and has tendered his resignation from the church in a very blunt letter to national Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis.

His letter has been made public online over a period of days in four parts here (note that it isn't until the third part that readers discover that the writer is Haggis):

Part A

Part B

Part C

Part D

As anyone who watched Tom Cruise jump up and down on Oprah's couch knows, Scientology (AKA, The Church of Xenu, alien emperor) actively courts celebrities, having a "Scientology Celebrity Center" in L.A. dedicated to pandering to their egos. They also have a history of aggressively attacking those who dare to speak out against them. While I'm not a big fan of Mr. Haggis as a filmmaker, his heart has always seemed to be in the right place and I respect his going up against them so publicly.

It will be interesting to see how the "church" responds.

Update: The letter can now be found in its entirety here.

an open mind

(via scanners)

psa

Now this is how it's done.

(via Skull Swap)

my first computer

Well, not that exact one, obviously, but one just like it.

It's a Commodore Pet. It had a funky calculator-like keyboard and a built in B&W display and a cassette drive (for loading and saving programs). It had a version of Basic in ROM and initially there were no pre-written programs for it at all. You were expected to write your own. I had the expanded memory version with a huge 8 kilobytes of RAM. That's 8192 bytes. (The computer I'm using to write this post has over 4 billion bytes of RAM.)

Back when I bought my Pet, the other popular choice was the Apple II. In retrospect, I probably made the wrong decision.

Wouldn't be the first (or last) time.

(photo via nerviosismo (except for the red marking, of course))