R.I.P. Paul Newman

Rest assured that pumpkins will be carved in your honor every year.
Circles for eyes. Circles for eyes.

Friday Links.

This week in distractions.
FLICKR SETS
Lots of great paper ephemera
Cruiser ads of the past

VIDEO
Behind the scenes at The Price is Right 1982
Mapmaking is England 1953
Journeys in time and space

WHATNOT
Animation backgrounds, the art behind the art.
Dr. Strangelove beautifully recreated with everyday objects.
Embroidered text messages
The wonder, mystery, and loneliness of the monowheel
Books.

Old

Young Harrelson Learns To Boner

China's Cell Phone In My Butt Team

Jonestown, China-- Three Asian guys woke up this morning with vigor and zeal. They laid some Yen on the table and entered into a legally binding contract. Each man stood on his own. And bet the other that his rectum could hold the most mid-90's cellular phones.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2008-09-24-chinaspace_N.htm

Androgynous Salespersons Unite

Hi Friends,
I found a barrel. ‘Twas Covered in barnacles. You know, clams and such. If I crush them barnacles I get a smell. If I rub that smell I get youth. If I drink that smell I get drunk on the time space continuum. And I'm drinking tons of it. Pick me up yesterday at tomorrow o'clock.

Delner Tor Champson

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4703332a11.html

scuttlebut at the o

Welcome, good to see you again. Have a seat, won’t you? Yes, that one there is fine.

What’s that? Lindsay Evans? Why yes, I have met her before. Delightful young woman, isn’t she? She fancies herself quite the gamer, you know…

No – not those kinds of games. Those are quite unsafe, I believe. No…I’ve heard something more like trivia, Scrabble, crossword puzzles – you know, the classics.

Hmm? Yes, you’re absolutely right! Hit the proverbial nail on the head, you have! She was a lucky find for the Proposal team. Quite an asset. Years of big agency writing for radio, TV, print…a freelance magazine and newspaper writer…quite diverse.

Yes.

Yes. She’s written for all of those outlets.

Well now that you mention it, she actually has written a screenplay…the Olympics, I believe, though I’m not 100% on that. Something about a woman’s struggle to bake her way into the 2012 summer games…

No, I don’t think that would be a good idea - she’s married. Newlywed, in fact. Yes, I’m quite sure…perhaps a note of congratulations-slash-apology?

Ah, yes. Good point. Well now – would you care for a muffin? Or a scone perhaps? There’s a lovely tray of baked goods here.

That’s right, forgive me. And you know, that reminds me: Evans has family with celiac disease and nut allergies. It’s true. Forgive my use of the word, but there could be some synergy there.

What? Where are you going? Please sit back down…you have my word: I won’t pepper the conversation with any further “synergies.”

No, I don’t think it affects her. But you’re right - we should cancel the new hire walnut-and-gluten factory tour.

You must be going? I understand completely. Travis Dickens is not the type of man you keep waiting…stop by later, won’t you?

Yes, of course you will.

Ah yes, I almost forgot! Ice cream, cookies, cake, pie…

A fantastic collection

FLICKR SETS (get ready for a wasted day.)
Typewriter Ribbon Tins. Beautiful!
A fantastic collection of beauty.
Mad Men Illustrated.
An orgy of color and pattern. Zanis Waldheims.

COLLECTIONS
First read this. Then hum along while you check out these number crunchers.
The Flags of Tokyo. Long may they wave.
Who doesn't like a good gig poster?
Suspicious vans?
Pelican book covers 1930s - 1980s. The Pelican Project.

ARTICLES
Photographing John McCain. An interesting photo shoot for The Atlantic.
Where all the Dicks live. This place sure has a lot of dicks.
How long could you survive chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor? Take the quiz.

VIDEO
1950s Italian Police Motorcycle Drill Team - a model of synchronization. Video.
Tips for surviving the new depression. Video.
You know him you love him. Everyones favorite man-beast. Bigfoot..

AUDIO
Zingers from hollywood squares. Audio.

Early morning drinker

I sat watching a man in the airport terminal. Like myself, I assumed he was waiting for a flight. I noticed a small bottle of jack daniels in his hand, the cap removed, half the whiskey consumed. Although he had a newspaper in his lap, it was unopened. He stared into space, deep in thought. Slowly he turned the small cap around in his fingers. I found myself wondering what would drive a man to drink at the airport at 6:30 in the morning. What made me wonder further was the look on his face. The helpless blank stare that told me his mind was already hard at work. Maybe something had happened. Maybe something was about to happen. Maybe, just maybe, this man hated to fly and found a bit of comfort in that small bottle. Then a pinch, "stop staring," my travel companion said to me.  Later, after sitting down on the plane, I continued to think about that lonely man in the airport and his whiskey. I realized that I wasn't all that concerned with what was going on with him after all, I just wanted some whiskey.

Friday Links.

Test your color IQ. Or see what sort of sorter you are. here.
The beauty of a Soviet book cover.
Exhibit A in the case for convenience leading to the downfall of our society. I guess you don't want to talk to me anymore.
Beautiful illustrations of Radios, among other things.
Courthouse Confessions.

shut the fuck up donny!

Captain Embarrassment's cape is yellow like sun
a beer in his hand he gets his best work done
the ladies find him unsettling, fellas question his worth
a result of his apathy and its massive girth

but fret not friends he's here to save the day
by fucking it up in some major way
with a stain on his T and a joint on his knee
The Dude incarnate; shut the fuck up donny!

The Mark of Fashion

1970 Sears The Men's Store.
To see a full Flickr set click here.

Fine mind for foresight, or just out of coffee filters? (It's such a fine line)

It was a good 45 minutes from the time I woke up and heard the particle accelerator test went smoothly, until I finally left my house and saw another human. The whole time all I could think about was that it didn't go smoothly and my blackhole-proof pajamas worked and now I was the only one left. I was going to make the Sears Tower my residence, a la the main character in Vonnegut's Slapstick.
Anyway, I am kinda bummed because I thought if we were to go down in a blackhole I was pretty proud of the fact that I was on my last coffee filter today. I thought that was some pretty accurate estimating of ones need of coffee filters. Now instead of bragging it up on the underside of a blackhole, I am just out of coffee filters. So it goes.

Summer Vacation where you done gone?

So here I am, back at PF headquarters... I can see no one dusted while I was gone... and someone ate my pickle stash. No matter. I am back and ready to welcome fall in all her deciduous glory. Nothing will deter me from my mind. And today my mind happens to have it in itself to tell you of my summer vacation.

Since you have last heard from my I have sunned myself on a beach towel that looks like the Puerto Rican flag, came unwillingly within inches of 2 coyotes, jokesters, switched to sheep cheese, been told with a straight face that it has a "barnyardy" taste, fought with elevation and came to a draw, smiled a lot, driven a minivan, had my identity stolen, luckily I don't really know who I am anyway, so they didn't get far, made a conscious effort to use apostrophes in my contractions, bought a paper shredder, overestimated the power of that shredder, need a new shredder, seen some really good music, not played enough really good music, saw the planets align, fished so much that my wrists hurt like hell, had some really good dreams, thought about giving a speech so much that I could probably give a wicked good speech about thinking about giving speeches, laughed at repetitive jokes, laughed at repetitive jokes, fell in love with the north woods, written songs in my head about stuff I don't know about, cared about politics like I never really thought I might, sent an egg in the mail (safely), made lists like it was my job, seldom crossed things off those lists, note: look into list-making job, played multiple games of badminton on the Fourth of July, that same day played croquet with a chip on my shoulder, left my Don Rickles Hello Dummy! record at Dan's house, tried to do my best, had raffle fever, golfed, bought some new seersucker, heard tell of a friend using the, "baby please, I am not from Havana!" line in context, and fell asleep during a PBS documentary on Alexander Hamilton.

The whole time a little part of me was looking forward to getting back to the PF grind. Dusting off my old milk crate, sitting down at my TV tray desk, and blogging like a bloggin' bloggy-blogger. It seems that day has come... so here is to sweatshirt weather, pumpkin patches, playoff baseball, and wood burning stoves. It is good to see you again, do you think I can borrow 40 bucks, just 'til payday?

Oh, I am between jobs right now... you know just taking it easy and thinking things through... but you know I am good for it right? You don't care if I drank some of your beers, right?

in lieu of pay, check out some pictures of Signs and Doorways.

Why do I always get a warped one?

comet bar

The place is dripping with class. I left there one night and some crazy half dressed lady down the street was yelling at me. The street was dark except for a single light hanging from a wire that ran diagonally across the intersection of 2 streets. She was in the middle of the road underneath the light, shuffling in my direction. I made anonymous love to her underneath that light. I took her right there - there on the broken asphalt...under the hum of a single burning streetlight. And then, like two ships passing in the night, we went our separate ways. Her to the abandoned building across the street, me to my car. I had a case to crack...she had crack to freebase.

Indestructible (mr.) T

I loves me a good T-shirt. Hell I'm even found of the shoddy ones. The love-affair began back in high school when I acquired a bright green T with a yellow lawnmower on it; above it the words: John Deere. It was a fucking awesome T.

Through the years I have gone through many a cotton/poly blend. Some of my favorites are: the white number with the face of Spanky from the Little Rascals on it; a canary-yellow shirt with blue writing I got in New Orleans (when the time came to discard this buddy I couldn't do it and it now lives inside my mandolin case as a shammy); the Dead shirt from that little Headshop in Pontaic that served as my uniform when I washed dishes until it literally disintegrated due to countless washings. I could could go on and on, but shan't. Instead please allow me to wax your upper-lip poetically (of course).

My most prized specimen ( at this point in time) is a blue T that I got when I signed on to bus tables at a local family eatery. Must have been 1995 or 96. This sucka is over 10 years old and it looks not a day over 3. No really. The logo of said eatery is plastered on the back and it looks pristine and new even after all these years. I'm not sure what PANTONE might call this shade of blue. Me I'd say its Navy and it makes me feel like a Sea Captain. That or a slightly balding middle-aged male wearing a vestige of his youth. Really depends on how much I've had to drink.

Desert Solitaire for Johnny Spirit

Dear Mystery Companions,
As I was cleaning ones and zeros from my electric and all encompassing computer hard drive I came across a book report. This report I authored dutifully for a graduate level course of the Parks, Recreation and Tourism Resources Department at Michigan State University. Never mind the absolute shit-bagginess that I feel now knowing that my Master of Science degree, in part or in whole, was earned on the grounds of a fucking book report. Academia, how convincingly challenging you were. And how confidently hindsight says you were bunk steel on wheels. That said, I felt good about reading my book report. Felt good like a man feels good having shit on a rock after a hard day of smoking pot in the woods. Please enjoy this in all its verbatim goodness.

Voice of a Traveler
3/19/04

Edward Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness over the course of two summer season employment terms at Arches National Monument, Utah. The book was “pasted together-composed would be too generous a word” (p. x) from his journal entries. The reader floats swiftly along on Abbey’s stream of consciousness stopping periodically to speak with tourists at the front gate of the monument, push a cattle herd to summer pasture, follow General Powell’s expedition through Glen Canyon, or rappel into The Maze. The current flows with brutal arguments for wilderness, the myth of American culture, the failure of the government’s land management agencies and the anti-climactic destiny of mankind. As each of these sentiments uncovers the core of the Edward Abbey the man, they also whittle away at the primitive dirt-loving morality that is common in today’s headstrong environmentalists.

This book is either damning evidence that some people just don’t worry so much about why they are doing something as much as the fact that they are doing something; or a well orchestrated cover-up job. Given Abbey’s history as a free-spirit, activist and harsh critic of popular culture the conclusion is therefore the former. The essence of the free spirited human, mythical or factual, cannot be captured by assumption, speculation, thinking about the “why?” of it all. But the attention of the readers and the graders cannot be harnessed without these things. So this paper will assemble, because Desert Solitaire wasn’t telling, the basis of Edward Abbey’s motivations to get up and go and the satisfaction he experienced as a consequence thereof.

Eric Temple’s video (Edward Abbey: A Voice in the Wilderness, 1993) provides the basis for the argument that Abbey was just born for a life on the road. He had an early fascination with the American West and spent a great deal of his time riding the rails and hitchhiking there. John De Puy, illustrator of Desert Solitaire, speculates that it was a love of both the landscape and the sense of freedom that attracted Abbey to the West. In his own words Abbey states, “Once caught by this golden lure you become a prospector for life, condemned, doomed, exalted” (p. 242).

But one dares not assume that hopes of reliving old country songs or pages from paperback novels motivated him to move west. On the contrary Abbey believed, “a man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces” (p. 129). A more realistic assumption is that Abbey may have foreseen the extinction of the American West and chose to witness its final days. Chronicles of the demise of the cowboy way of life are found in two chapters (Cowboys and Indians I & II). Obviously dissatisfied with the state of the modern West, he states with spite “cowboyism rides rampant as never before on a field of golden neon dollar signs” (p. 109) and “the make-believe cowboys flourish and multiply like flies on pecan pie” (p. 110). In closing, with eulogistic overtones he summarizes, “cowboys and indians disappear, dying off or transforming themselves by tortuous degrees into something quite different…the originals are nearly gone and will soon be lost forever in the overwhelming crowd” (p.111).

His desire to witness the fading American west may have also been coupled by a need to escape modern society. Abbey’s trip tracing General Powell’s journey down the Colorado supports the escapism argument:

(My God! I’m thinking what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives – the domestic routine (same dreams every night), the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back at the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in…what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote!) (p.155)

The desert was a venue for Abbey’s escape from modern culture and for this purpose it seems to have satisfied him greatly. He states, “Wilderness. The word itself is music” (p. 166).

In the end, with his skepticism, aphorism, cynicism, anarchism and near-mysticism temporarily aside Abbey reveals that all the perfections he sees and feels in Canyon Country cannot snuff the flames of the “insane compulsion to be gone, to be elsewhere, to go, to go (p. 269). It seems he gains satisfaction by peering, no, hanging by fingertips, over an edge. Whether by rope over the physical edge of The Maze or by thought over the philosophical edge of the status quo Abbey claims, “Balance, that’s the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds” (p. 265). Bedrock and Paradox, the concluding chapter of Desert Solitaire, permits the reader to interpret, loosely of course, that Abbey’s inspiration to travel is cyclical. Some motivation, in his case birth, leads to total self-immersion in some experience. Abbey’s style of immersion is like a rock grinding ritual where all the dimensions of his experiences are momentarily converted to fine sand and stored in thoughts and words. This process itself seems a source of motivation, thus with the circle completed he is off again. The cycle is perpetual, and in this student’s understanding, is the blood of his writings. In the case of Desert Solitaire, his stay at Arches National Monument motivated Abbey to begin a new adventure on the flipside of the canyon’s coin in “Megalomania, U.S.A.” (p. 265), better known as the East Coast.

It is these kinds of radical changes in behavior that support an argument that Abbey was operating under shotgun style productions of internal motivations. His stream of consciousness does not reveal a process that governs menial decision making. Instead it argues for the existence of some non-process which allows an individual to experience his or her surroundings without being dominated by the passage of time, cause and effect relationships, or feelings of displacement, awkwardness or the longing for material comfort. Abbey’s satisfactions, like everyone’s, are a product of the war between reality and expectation. Through Desert Solitaire he reveals that wilderness, humankind’s only true reality, is his greatest satisfaction.

recap

20,000 years ago, water boiled and a city crumbled. Deserts blew from left to right.

5,000 years ago, blue became light green. Parrots got feathers. Pictures were invented.

1 hour ago I had a sandwich for lunch.

Star Named in Tabby Love Scandal

Hollywood, CA--- And you thought your neighbor’s “Meow If You’re Muscular” bumper sticker was crazy. Some residents of a posh Beverly Hills community are calling for swift vigilante justice having learned of videos confiscated by local authorities in a routine body cavity search. Cameron Diaz, appearing in court for a simple urinating in public offense, behaved erratically in the courtroom prompting authorities to conduct a routine investigation into her state of mind. “She had on a funny kitty cat hat and at one point regurgitated what appeared to be at least a plateful of homemade lasagna onto the floor” said courtroom bailiff Trent Dyson. “It had canned mushrooms in it, too”

And the deeper they probed the more they found. Among the treasures of the day was an hour-long video of Diaz’s horny escapades with feline sensation Garfield. The pro shot DVD video was found lodged approximately twelve linear feet from her rectum in the lower intestine. Jalyn Tennyson of local Girl Scout Troop #4317 said, "Just thinking about humping cats makes me feel grody, I'd like to get some of my friends to gang up on [Diaz] and punch her in her f*#king face".

Other residents were optimistic, “I see it as both a true medical miracle and a tasteful contribution to the American art form” commented Dr. David Janz, founder of Proctology to the Stars a local astronomy club for hemorrhoid sufferers. “If only more people had her brand of courage.”

Neither Garfield nor Diaz could be reached for comment.

Clubs Trump

Some jackasses are building a machine that could accidentally unleash mini-black holes on your neighborhood.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23844529/

If it were me, I'd rather not have mini-black holes unleashed on my neighborhood. If God were to come clean today and tell me, all black hole opinions aside, that the world must endure a mini catastrophic event to fulfill some divine scripture or something, I would certainly lobby against the mini-black holes. No matter what the consequences.

Of course old God could trump me up by suggesting eerier alternatives. And crooked smilingly force me to choose from these alternatives a new fate for Earth. You know, the "choose wisely my son" routine. I'd rise to the occasion, in fulfillment of some milder scripture. A second rate scripture perhaps. But one sans mini-black holes.

Fellow Earthlings, I would ensure our cosmic prevalence by choosing one of these alternatives:

- Mini butt rapings by mini prison guards
- Mini eye gougings by three mini stooges
- Mini bowl cuts by mini second rate female hair stylists
- Mini herpes infections spread by mini non-disclosing rural high school aged queens of the "outdoor party"
- Mini white holes