Category Archives: Weird

I love LieBlog so much.

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David Lynch and Joss Whedon to Collaborate on Sex and the City Remake:

David Lynch and Joss Whedon announced in an interview with SkyMall today that they are embarking on a long-awaited, must-see collaboration–a remake of Sex and the City! The pilot episode will be shown on HBO on September 10, 2011.

The remake, entitled “Sex and the Countryside” will be a faithful plotline-by-plotline, problem-by-problem, episode-by-episode remake of Sex and the City, but will be set in the 1620s English countryside, and every character will be played by a sheep, except God, who will be played by Steve Buscemi.

Since fashion played such a large role in the original series, SkyMall saw it fit to ask whether the sheep will wear clothes. Whedon laughed, and Lynch rolled his eyes and commented “Every role except that of God will be played ovinely. Fashion had a role; fashion too will be played ovinely.”

“Ovinely means, played by a sheep,” offered Whedon, helpfully.

There is no part of this that isn’t AWESOME

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Radioactive Boars Rampaging Through Germany.

Boars are a fucking menace even without radioactivity. I once put three .30-30 rounds into a sow and still saw her run off. They root around, destroy trees and crops, and are actually one of the only dangerous mammals still left in southern forests. Adding radioactivity — and, no doubt, the superpowers that this creates — can only mean certain doom for all mankind.

What better way to say “I have given up?”

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How about a wine glass that holds a full bottle? Check out the first Amazon review:

I am the third trimester of my pregnancy and I have put myself on bed rest. Any little convenience that helps with repetitive movement is a blessing, as staying in a relaxed state is critical to the well being of both mommy and baby. So having a large glass that negates the need for repetitive pouring of a wine bottle is one of those tiny little aids that helps add up to a state of relaxation. The only thing that could have improved this would have been the inclusion of a very long straw.

Excellent.

Here’s something weird: Consider the Potatohead

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File under “my brane works weird”, but I realized the other day that, when it was introduced in the 50s, the Mr Potatohead toy was actually just a kit of attachments and bits you’d shove into an actual potato.

At some point (Wikipedia says it’s the mid-60s), the manufacturers started providing an ersatz tuber with pre-selected holes, and now the whole idea of using plastic bits to make faces in cheap footstuffs probably strikes most people as weird, wasteful, or somehow gross — but, at introduction, it was probably seen as a frugal and inventive toy because the tater provided a sort of tabula rasa that was available in virtually any home.

During the same sequence of years, Americans as a rule have become more and more removed from the sources of their food, and using a plastic potato probably struck folks as upmarket or modern or more appealing by the prosperous mid-60s. The whole thing is emblematic of the rise of brands in American culture (nothing is more generic than a potato, but imagine a kid with a hand-me-down real-potato set being taunted by schoolmates for not having a “real” Mr Potatohead, complete with fake potato), and the acceleration of consumer culture that followed.

Weird.

If you visit, you can see the empty place on the wall where the Vermeer used to hang

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On March 19, 1990, a rather daring and amazing art theft happened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The take, now estimated at half a billion, has never been recovered, nor have the perpetrators ever been caught.

The rather curious conditions of Gardner’s will, however, insist that the museum be left in the precise configuration she chose; there were to be no new acquisitions, and no rotation of the art. Consequently, not only have the missing pieces not been replaced with other art; said pieces were also not even insured because, well, the trustees wouldn’t have been able to hang them.

Followup on weird Russians

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The Internet is made of win, as there’s already an article online providing much-needed context for the very strange vocal performance I linked yesterday.

The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil’, or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People’s Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.

The song he is interpreting, “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home,” is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words. I have seen a number of comments online, ever since a flurry of interest in Hill began just a few days ago, to the effect that this routine must have been meant as a critique of Soviet censorship, but in fact vokaliz was a well established genre, one that seems close in certain respects to pantomime.

Recent interest in Hill has to do with the perceived strangeness, the uncanniness, the surreal character of this performance. There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it’s-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please –to genuinely please– Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context.

How much do I love this device?

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Check it out:

Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.

If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.