Know Your History

I really really try to not blatantly rip-off boingboing on a daily basis but this it too fantastic:



And it has an annotated version (swoon!):



This is the same guy who made a "premake" of Ghost Busters (sadly not as good). See also Steve Martin's underrated Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid:



It also reminded me of this fantastic Origins of the Moonwalk video (which along with my previously posted Little Prince video is a little damning for MJ):





Lastly there's the kids adaptation of Raiders (that I have and can give to you if you want it—call me) which I'm obligated to add:



Good night Amsterdam!

My New Favorite Font

Loyal readers will remember that my all time favorite font is Rad:



Today that has changed. Henceforth I will only be using Barf Bold:



End of message.

The Maria Bamford Show!

I just watched every one of these and wish there were more. Another person on my list of people I wish I was friends with (new tag!). I think this is the best web series I've ever seen. I'm going to rip each one off youtube before they disappear!

Season One

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

Season Two

 [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20]

"I believe in the human mind's power to create 

fantasies that reassure itself in times of trouble."

Where No Man Has Gone Before

Oh Jesus. I just read this on the New Scientist website:

A recent finding by Sasha Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, does not make sense. His team has found a group of galaxy clusters moving at an extraordinary speed towards a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. Kashlinsky calls it the "dark flow", in tribute to those other cosmic mysteries dark matter and dark energy.

There is no obvious reason why the clusters should be moving at such breakneck speeds, unless they are experiencing an unusually strong pull from something beyond the visible horizon. But what? The most obvious answer is that there is something big out there, far bigger than anything in our known universe. Such a behemoth would impose a kind of "tilt" on the universe, causing matter to move in one particular direction - as observations of the dark flow suggest.

If such cosmic megastructures do exist, though, they merely replace one mystery with another. One of the foundation stones of cosmology is the Copernican principle, which says that there is nothing special about our region of the universe. So if there are megastructures beyond our horizon, there should be megastructures in our patch, too. We haven't seen any.

There are also suggestions that the pull might be from another universe altogether. That would be good news for proponents of eternal inflation theory, which suggests that the universe should actually be composed of "mini-universes" that have bubbled off from one another.

You and I however both know that beyond the edge of space is a giant electrical storm that after flying through for no good reason, gives god-like powers to those it doesn't kill:

Lovecraft / Doré / Ernst Mashup Illustrations

I just wandered across these illustrations for H.P. Lovecraft's literally awesome story At the Mountains of Madness from what I believe was a 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. Besides looking a little like Matt Diffee's New Yorker cartoons, they also reminded me of Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's Inferno. If no one does it soon I'm going to add making a collaged together Doré illustrated Lovecraft à la Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté to my list of neverending art-projects!







Doré's illustrations of Dante and Virgil at the Gates of Hell: