Three random bursts of brilliant insanity from Jan Svankmajer

That's Jan Svankmajer - stop-motion animator who was one of the inspirations to Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame - in case you couldn't tell.

Tex Avery war propaganda - "Blitz Wolf"

Sure, you've seen classic WWII propaganda cartoons before. We've all probably watched the Donald-Duck-in-Nazi-land to death. But this is a rarer one, from the cheeky, loopy, surreal animation of Tex Avery. All the staples of Avery are there - fourth-wall-breaking post-modern sign gags, wolf whistles at a girly magazine, literal listening devices made out of giant ears that would tickle Salvador Dali, and improbably gag weapons.

Oh, and unfettered racism, nationalism, and jingoism. And buy some more war bonds, dammit!

Have I posted Cyriak before? Oh well.

Can't have a blog called "Mind--Blown" without tossing in a Cyriak video every now and then. His whole Youtube channel here, and there's more of his graphically-edited nightmares at Cyriak's home page.

Baby orc for dinner, perhaps?

Startling little bit of sculpture by Evan Campbell, detailed on Deviant Art.

A few entries from the Limerick Dictionary

This dictionary's written in rhyme,

and the results are quite sublime.

For a limerick form,

in this work is the norm,

Just don't turn to it every time!

Some gem entries:

"A deadeye's a marvelous shot;
Deadeye Dick has a Vonnegut plot;
Plus, a deadeye, you'll note,
Is a block on a boat,
And a line can be run through its slot."

"The abacus, pearl without price:
An ancient computing device.
Sliding beads strung on rods,
One can figure the odds.
You ask: "Why's it still used?" It's precise."

"Coney Island had sideshows and rides
On its boardwalk, and plenty besides:
Boats that rode in the dark,
And, in Steeplechase Park,
An ingenious assortment of slides."

"I'm efficient—I'm sure you'll agree:
I can juggle and dance on a ski,
Blow my nose, pen a rhyme...
At the very same time!
I'm so talented. Jealous of me?"

OK, maybe it's not such a hot idea. But regardless, are they going to finish this thing or what? It's only up the the E's.

Strip tease, zombie style!

Ksenia Vidyaykina is a Russian-born artist who creates performance art pieces with a feminist message. "Trapped" is a series of stories of women in distress, including a mermaid getting an abortion and a strip-tease by a dancer who starts tearing off her skin once she runs out of clothes.

David Lynch started a real club based on Silencio from "Mulholland Drive"!

How arty can you get? The club is in Paris, and it really is modeled after the "Silencio" set from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, along with numerous elements from other Lynch works. Awesome full story here.

Vending machine dispenses pure gold

These have been around for a couple of years now. There's one in Las Vegas, another at the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. And those tiny little wafers, not those big chunky bars like most people expect.

Mr. Yuk

A funny little series of PSAs created by Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, to clearly label poisonous and toxic chemicals so tots don't drink it.

"When you see it, you'll know quick! Things marked Yuk make you sick! Sick sick sick! SICK SICK SICK!" It's a prime example of '70s surrealism, with what sounds like sound effects from an arcade game leading it off. (Yes, they had them in 1970.)

More about Mr. Yuk here. It's high time we made a meme out of it and ran it into the ground.

Face the future blending of life and technology

With its haunting opening quote and mesmerizing imagery of half-organic mechanics set to beautiful music, this short film evolves the future where man engineers life directly. Indeed, there is no human or other recognizable life form present (with the possible exception of the end product), signifying that perhaps the machines that we leave behind us will continue to run without us after we are gone - and our machine-assembled descendants will awaken without knowing about us.

Or maybe it's already happened?

The Insect World Is An Alien World

Fantastic art video of a praying mantis and the predatory world it lives in.

Prie Dieu from Cokau on Vimeo.

If you've ever encountered a paying mantis in real life, these things impress you with how alert they are. They'll land right on your hand and turn around and look you right in the eye, challenging you to prove your sentience to them. If we didn't have praying mantises on our home planet, we'd be astounded to find them in space and instantly convinced of their intelligence.

Hopefully Blogger will cooperate with a non-YouTube video, but the thing is aparently only available on Vimeo.

Stuffed, Mounted Griffin, Anyone?

Sarina Brewer is a taxidermist who makes fantastic creatures from mythology, and this is her website.

Brewer is a devoted wildlife preservationist and naturist who also volunteers at the Science Museum of Minnesota. She follows a "waste-not, want-not" policy, so that none of the animals she works with were killed for the express purpose of taxidermy. Obviously, when you follow a policy like that, you end up with lots of spare parts, and well, this happens...

The Eye of Nature

Here's looking at you kid.

Fingernail Clippings Turned Into Patriotic Art

This guy is selling his fingernail clippings on an attractive American flag design for $1776. You have to like an artist who puts so much of himself into his work.

6 Examples of literature produced under a writing constraint

In 1939, novelist Ernest Vincent Wright produced the novel Gadsby without using the letter 'e'. This is an example of a lipogram.

In 2004, French author Michel Dansel, using the pen name of "Michel Thaler", wrote Le Train de Nulle Part ("The Train From Nowhere"), a novel written without using a single verb.

In 1996, mathematician Mike Keith wrote a short story, Cadaeic Cadenza, where each word corresponded by letter length to a consecutive digit of Pi. This is an example of Pilish.

The final chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses contains no punctuation.

In 1974, author Walter Abish wrote Alphabetical Africa, a novel written with the condition that the first letter of each word in each chapter start with a successive letter of the alphabet; chapter 1 had words starting with 'a', chapter 2 with 'b', and so on.

Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham using a vocabulary of only 50 words, reportedly written to win a bet. In alphabetical order, the word list is "a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you."

Dentist gets revenge on ex-boyfriend

I keep waiting for it to come out that this story is a hoax, because it seems so unlikely. But for the meantime, I'll pass it along: Woman dentist gets revenge on boyfriend who dumped her by pulling out all of his teeth.

A number of questions I can think of:

Why would you go to your ex-girlfriend for dental work after you'd dumped her? Wouldn't you, you know, expect it to be awkward?

And then let her knock you out with anesthetic? Whatever the original reason he was there to see her, it must have been serious enough to warrant some dental surgery.

Um, how long does it take to pull out all 32 teeth? Wouldn't this take all day?

Apparently he didn't realize his teeth were gone until he got home? Look, I've had a tooth or two out myself. You know. Believe me. Even if you weren't awake for it, your mouth feels different afterwards.

He says afterwards that he didn't have any reason to doubt her?

Things just keep not adding up here. The source appears to be the UK Daily Mail, not renowned for its standards, and reporting on a story from Poland at that.

But it's still too bizarre to pass up!

---

UPDATE! THIS STORY WAS A HOAX! Yahoo updates us. I knew it all the time. There were too many loopholes here.

Which still makes it a fascinating incident. Why did the reporter fabricate such an unbelievable story from whole cloth? This wasn't just a mistake - NO bearing on reality was found anywheres near a dental practice in Poland. Daily Mail reporter Simon Tomlinson (soon appearing at an unemployment line near you) just plays dumb. Why, Simon, WHY???

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Home Business 101: Pencil-Sharpening Service

While the rest of you sit around trying to figure out how to get rich, and complaining that your degree isn't worth anything in the job market, David Rees makes money sharpening pencils.

Granted, David Rees is also a satirical comedian whose clip-art comic "Get Your War On" is syndicated in newspapers nationwide, and he has other comic projects afoot, and he's also a blogger over at Huffy-Poo, but that's all just his rent money. His true passion in life is producing the ultimate sharpened pencil, and he has a video here explaining his business:

Yeah, he wrote a book on the subject, too. No, really, it's a real book!

No pun intended, but you may be asking yourself, "What's the point in all this?" Well, see, it's a satire. It's a commentary on our society at this point in time, when the very pencil itself holds quaint nostalgia for most of us in this digital age. Along with the sheer uselessness of most of us, now that all of our jobs went away. Along with our sloppy, feckless, ignorant society that doesn't give a shit about doing anything right anymore.

Watch this man. If he can put all this thought, this care, this attention to detail into putting a nice cone on a number-2, could the rest of you maybe be bothered to spell a word or two per sentence correctly? Turn on your turn signal once in a while? Hang onto your trash until you walk that ten feet to the next trash can? Yes... yes you CAN!

A nightmare vision of industrial hell: MetaChaos

Darn, I wasn't even going to post today, being Easter and all. But I got bored by night and moseyed around and stumbled upon this. Least appropriate thing I've ever watched on Easter.

John Titor, the greatest Internet prankster of all time

In November of 2000, someone created an account on several bulletin boards claiming to be "John Titor". But soon his claims grew much more fantastic than just an unusual name. He claimed to be a time traveler from the future. Over time, he responded to many forum member's questions, weaving a detailed, intricate story. He vanished after 2001.

During his "visit", he made predictions about the future (all of them in the immediate decade, all of which have proven untrue), spun a story about his mission being to recover computer technology for the future preservation of data, posted detailed explanations of how a time machine works, and supplemented his claims with many images, including diagrams of supposed future technology and his military insignia, shown above.

From all of this, Internet culture has built a Byzantine mythology. A book was published, John Titor A Time Traveler's Tale. A play was also produced, called Time Traveler Zero Zero. He became a regular topic of discussion on the radio show Coast To Coast AM, a wonderful program full of midnight wackiness and conspiracy theories. While his story has been shot full of holes, there are nevertheless people who *want* to believe and will never be unconvinced.

We are left with a few mysteries: The supposed original "john Titor" has never been identified. We also cannot pierce his motives; either he was a desperately delusional schizophrenic who believed his own story, a very dedicated surreal practical joker, or (my favorite theory) a budding (or perhaps even already made) science fiction author using the Internet as a test audience for some ideas he was kicking around.

There is even the remote possibility that it was all an attempt at a viral marketing campaign for some summer blockbuster that never got made (remember that the dreadful Blair Witch project was made with similar marketing right around this time). Or perhaps it was a psychologist researching people's threshold of disbelief. Maybe it was a test program by the US government to gauge whether they could invent an urban legend. Perhaps, because it singled out a potential problem with Unix-based systems, it was anti-Linux astroturf by Microsoft.

Why is the test-audience idea my favorite? Because I use this method all the time. In my creative work, be it my home blog, my webcomic, my funny pictures blog, my paid online freelancing work, or this very blog before you, any joke or theory or rant probably started out as some discussion I ignited on a web forum. I may even "troll" by pretending to take an opinion, while actually reading through the responses to see how people react to it. Later the idea might be fleshed out into a story, a joke, or an article for a client.

Now, I hasten to add, I don't get one-tenth as carried away as our "John Titor" example. When I test an idea, it's a couple of paragraphs maximum. So even the "testing ideas" theory doesn't hold water when someone keeps at it for a year and a half. 

There is also a great deal more analysis and exploration of the ideas provoked by Titor at this site, including extended chat room logs and excerpts from his messages and those of others. Note, in studying the transcripts, that he might have been an elaborate liar, but not a very good one. For instance, in one chat he says "But Im a little pissed right now.", then follows with "Is that still the right word?" Now, he had detailed future knowledge of our culture if he's telling the truth, so why should he have to ask? He only claimed to be from a few decades from now, so why assume that language changes so fast? The word "groovy" might have fallen out of vogue in our time, but you can still use it without raising more than an amused smirk.

Who is John Titor? The world will never know, because conditions are such that even the original person would not be believed. What were his motives? Whatever they were, if it was all just for a laugh, he must still be rolling around in stitches after all this time. Because it was the most successful joke in history.

Bistro - Unforgettable short film

This under-three-minutes excursion into sparkly-eyed madness got awards at a 2011 film festival. Twilight Zone episodes (the new ones) don't have this much bite.