You can’t really picture a regular encyclopaedia‘s entry on Nubia to be prefaced with the words For the Star Wars planet, see Nubia (Star Wars)
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Category: Oddities
Flesh-eating Kangaroos and other lost Australian monsters, because that’s the sort of thing Hezi drops casually into a conversation, sending me scrambling for Google.
Project Grizzly
Found in the depths of boingboing, Project Grizzly is a Canadian film about an amateur inventor’s quest to build a Grizzly-proof suit. From the site:
Meet Troy James Hurtubise, a self-styled “close-quarter bear researcher,” who’s obsessed with going face-to-face with Canada’s most deadly land mammal, the grizzly bear.
Troy is the creator of what he hopes is a “grizzly-proof” suit of armour — an extraordinary fusion of high-tech materials and homespun ingenuity — and of his own hybrid mythology that is part Hollywood, part Canadian shield.
Although it looks pretty impressive, when you watch the clip you realize he’s basically wearing a huge metal can (with it’s own air-conditioning).
He could really use some servo-motors on that…
Henry Darger
I was listening to Natalie Merchant’s album, Motherland, which in general I didn’t find too interesting *, when I came across a curious song called Henry Darger.
Turns out that Henry Darger was a solitary man, whose artwork and writings were discovered only after his death, when his landlord came to clean out his apartment.
Darger wrote and illustrated an epic fantasy story called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.. He’s considered a prime example of what is called “Outsider Art”.
The idea of someone obsessively writing and drawing a story meant only for himself reminds me of Robert Crumb’s brother in Terry Zwigoff’s film Crumb.
* – In most of the songs she sounds too much like Tracy Chapman or Joan Armatrading, which weren’t to my taste back when you couldn’t escape hearing them; Though I did enjoy the songs Golden Boy, St. Judas and This House Is On Fire (particularly the opening).
A pointless medley of assorted links, mostly to clean out my bookmarks / bloglines account:
- Robert Rodriguez’s 10-minute Film School.
- Fortean Times Gallery (old link from boingboing moldering in my bloglines account).
- Kottke’s best links of 2004, a set of fine articles and essays he’s linked to over the year. Surprising how many of them I remember reading.
- The Edge asks a bunch of clever people
What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
. Here are Kottke’s favorites, and here are Kakapo’s. The ones who have an idiosyncratic peculiar belief are more fun than the one’s who get all philosophical and evasive, but being without a K-initial, I consider myself free from the duty of listing my own favorites. A good browse, though. - Ian Hickson proves evolution (well, the principal of natural selection), using coins. I think this was apropos those appalling accounts of American biology teachers being ordered to tell their class that natural selection is “a theory” and point students to creationist pamphlets. I actually did something similar myself once, although I was simulating a pigeon in a skinner box, not a population of pennies.
- Jwz shows us what the internet looks like, and tracks an alarming tendency in news photography to use giant heads.