Category: Oddities

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…

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).