A Disturbing Little Tour Of Rogue Taxidermy

Rogue Taxidermy is a folk-art form where you use dead animal parts to create some new, unique creature that never could have existed... but should have! So appropriate for Halloween.

The folk art form of rogue taxidermy seems to be rooted in the midwestern United States, and can be considered a hallmark of Midwest Gothic. The most famous group is the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. One typical truckstop chimera is the jackalope:

Rogue taxidermists got so carried away with the jackalope thing that they managed to infuse the critter into the North American culture at large, and now no roadside truckstop is complete without a mounted jackalope head on the wall. There's jackalope tattoos and faux nature documentaries and hundreds of photo manipulations. Jackalopes are world famous, a triumph of rogue taxidermy! Future popularity to a similar degree may be won for the hodag:

Or the fur-bearing trout:

As you can imagine, there's a huge crossover between the rogue taxidermy and cryptozoology worlds. Whether through intentional attempts to hoax the public, or tongue-in-cheek attempts to hoax the hoaxers by going "Look, I found one!"

Zombie Transformation

Astounding engineering for a marble-moving toy

From the website woodgears.ca, creation of Paul Grundbacher of Switzerland.

If it walks like a duck, eats like a duck, and shits like a duck...

 ...it might only be a mechanical "digesting" duck.

Such was one of the iconic inventions of the dawn of the mechanical age, "The Duck." The steampunk creature of clockwork limbs could not only move, but simulate eating food and - sparing no effort in attention to detail - pass droppings as well, although the actual product was pre-stored and didn't involve actual biological digestion.

Such was the invention of Jacques de Vaucanson, widely considered to be one of the fathers of robotics or at least automata. He created this duck in 1738, for demos to the elite, using it to finance further creations.

Before you scoff too loudly at such frivolity, keep in mind that Vaucanson's major accomplishments included automated, programmable looms, which could be programmed with punch cards - in 1745. Later this same media storage format would be used to input data into the world's first computers.

You can still generate a punched-card design at emulators like this. I would recommend the 'bcd' command from the bsdgames package on Unix systems, but that's such lost technology that it's barely worth mentioning.

Who built the ruins on Malden Island?

Malden Island is a tiny uninhabited dot of land sticking up smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, part of what is today the Republic of Kiribati. It was discovered by a British sea captain in 1825. And upon discovery of this tiny ~15 square-mile island, a mystery was born.

Specifically, the uninhabited island was the site of many stone structures, including the ruins of "temples" or at least monolithic, temple-like structures. Nobody knows who could have put them there. To this day, your theory is as good as anybody else's.

Very little else is known about or written about this site; however, I did find one crackling good conspiracy theorist who classifies it as 'forbidden archeology.'

Horned-head

Just found it startling, that's all. Wikimedia commons images can surprise you sometimes.

Washington town erects giant lava lamp, for no apparent reason

Well, actually, there is an apparent reason: To attract tourist dollars. At least that's the plan according to the propaganda.

Which puts it right up there with 1000 other goofy roadside attractions peppering America. Honestly, it's the only damned charming thing about our country. How many times have foreign heads of power convened to discuss whether they're fed up with America's shit enough to nuke us already, and we were saved by somebody raising their hands and going, "But that would destroy the world's largest pencil in Baltimore, Maryland"? And the United States was spared once again.

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.

Stumbled on Star Wars in animated GIF form. The entire movie.

It appears to have been done entirely in MSPaint, to boot. What an artifact! Wonder how old this is? The domain shown at the end, www.barbelith.co.uk, is dead.

How long can life forms stay active in a sealed glass sphere?

The answer turns out to not only be fascinating, but a nice little cottage industry. Ecosphere is a company that sells just such an item: a glass globe with simple plant and animal life forms, which you just set in the window and let sunlight do the rest. It's basically a sealed, maintenance-free aquarium.

Here's a video of one in action:

From the site:

"Because the living organisms within the EcoSphere utilize their resources without overpopulating or contaminating their environment, the EcoSphere requires virtually no maintenance.
EcoSpheres have an average life expectancy of two years. However, it is not uncommon for shrimp populations to be thriving in systems as old as 7 years."

One wonders what the long-term implications of this would be. What if generations reproduced within the ecosphere - would they mutate? Could they evolve? Certainly, sealed systems in nature do tend to produce life forms with exaggerated characteristics. Could the system survive a global apocalypse? It needs sunlight energy, so we know it couldn't survive in space, but what if we included an artificial life source and launched it at habitable planets? Would the seed be planted for Earth-like, but adapted, life forms when we eventually go there?

Man draws maze by hand, takes seven years

Like mazes? You'll be begging for a copy of this one. A Japanese woman unearthed her father's maze, which he spent seven years drawing. Is he a graphics artist or perhaps in some mathematical or engineering field? No, he is a janitor at a university.

There are undiscovered universes inside of all of us.

The Iowa lapdance scholarship

You've probably heard more than one stripper, poledancer, or other adult entertainer claim that she's doing this to work her way through college. But how about, when you're done, you keep working to put somebody else through college, too? And that was the inspiration for the idea of the lapdance scholarship...

"The LapDance Scholarship was founded in December 2010 by Hailey Jude Minder, a self-proclaimed vaginally-funded experience artist.  As an artist, Hailey has always been interested in, and often troubled by, the sources of fine arts funding. Having become somewhat disenchanted with the whole search for funding and the sources of such funds, Hailey set out to make her own.  Moonlighting as a stripper twice a week, Hailey is bringing funding for the arts into the trenches.  She has funded her own art in this manner and now wishes to help her fellow artists achieve their goals."

Courtesy of The Great God Pan Is Dead, where the complete story also involves the amazing story of the project to turn copies of dildos into art.

One of which I'll post here, because to hell with being squeamish about it...

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!

Unbelievable hand-drawn sketchs animated as gifs

Haunting and whimsical artwork gallery by Dain Fagerholm. Save for your trippiest viewing experiences.

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.

Website featuring "Gothic Babe of the Week" since 1996 to present

I've often defined "Industrial Gothic" as a genre I sort of thought of on my own, to mean "horrors specific to the industrial age" - ghost towns, malevolent corporations, conspiracy theories, man-made monsters, haunted factories, mole people living in the sewers, and whatnot. Imagine my surprise when I poked about to discover whether the domain was taken and stumbled upon this site. Of course, "industrial" and "gothic", separately, are both genres of music and styles / cultures as well.

Gothic Babe of the Week, if its archive directory on the left bears true witness, has been in continuous business since January of 1996, making it one of the oldest surviving private websites from the pre-web-bubble era, and being a great example of a Tumblr type blog decades before anybody thought of Tumblr.

Anyway, if you like Goth gals, this person is really, really into them:

Swedish wooden toy plays cup-and-ball Monte, no elctronics

It's by a Swedish artist who makes wonderful and elaborate hand-crank wooden toys, see more in their gallery here.

The French postman who built his own rock castle

What you're looking at was all built by one man, a humble civil servant with no architectural training working only with his hands and carrying each stone home himself.

Ferdinand Cheval was a postman in Hauterives, France, a tiny community with a population all of 1500. In 1875, Cheval was making his postal rounds when he tripped over a stone (ready your psychedelic jokes) and became inspired to collect stones and build his own palace, which he called "the Palace Ideal."

He then proceeded to spend the next 33 years doing just that. Solo, without help, mixing his own mortar, carrying stones to the site with a wheelbarrow, and working by lamplight at night so as not to interfere with his day job.

Make no mistake - while Cheval had no training in art, his palace is a breath-taking structure of intricate detail mixing styles of architecture from Hinduism and Christendom. Having competed the work to his satisfaction in 1912, he sought to be buried there, but discovered that French law wouldn't allow this request. He then proceeded to build his own mausoleum in exactly the same fashion at the local cemetery, taking another eight years to finish it.

Having completed this final project, his most obstinate excellency retired to his palace for exactly one year, to be honored and recognized by such international artistic talents as Andre Breton and Pablo Picasso. Many came to visit and interview him. Then, he died in 1924, and was buried at his mausoleum. Because a man can't just sit around!

The palace is today a national landmark of France and a tourist destination. Find out more here.

Australian PSA makes wonderfully dark, cute entertainment

All this just to say "Don't do stupid things around trains!" More about it here. Watch it over a few times and catch new details by each of the cast. I'm totally going to join animator Julian Frost's cult.