Category: Oddities

Middle Earth 419

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date August 02, 2004

Bruce Sterling:Meanwhile, in the stricken Third World of Middle Earth –

Dear Beloved,

I am Vivien Grimhelm Wormtongue, The only daughter of late Counsellor Gríma Wormtongue of the Kingdom of Rohan.

My father was Chief Counsellor [equivalent to Prime Minister] to late lamented king Théoden of Rohan. In his position my father altogether legally and correctly acquired significant assets throughout Rohan in order to protect
the Kingdom from enemy forces within and without.

In the course of lamentable events succeeding, my father was illegally deprived of office and expelled from the Kingdom.

Before this he had with foresight already entirely legally deposited gold worth S$42,000,000 with one of the Africa leading Banks in Cote d’ Ivoire of which I will let you know if you identify your interest.

Le Parkour: Attack of the French Spider-Men

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date July 30, 2004

Le Parkour is a sport originating from France which involves treating the urban environment as an obstacle course. In other words, jumping about buildings like Spider-Man or Daredevil. It was used in one issue of Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency comic, and will probably make it into an episode of the TV series, simply because it’s so cool.
Ironically, in a comic (like the original GF story), it appears a lot less novel, because this is what acrobatic superheroes do all the time. On film it would be real cool (see the videos on the linked site for examples, including a BBC ad showing a man – Le Parkour creator, David Belle – beat rush hour traffic by jumping across rooftops, which looks like it was the jumping-off point for the GF story).

Oddities Resources short

A History of Ectoplasm

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date July 29, 2004

Cabinet Magazine Online – Ethereal Body: The Quest for Ectoplasm

Oddities

Coffee from Catshit

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date July 28, 2004

Nature: Cat droppings yield chic coffee

A food scientist has cracked the secrets of the world’s most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak
… The beans, which cost over US$1,000 a kilogram, are eaten and passed by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), which is a musky, tree-climbing cat-like creature.

…

Massimo Marcone, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, wondered whether it might be possible to reproduce the effect that the Indonesian civets have on the coffee. He searched the world for another place with both coffee plants and civets, and hit upon Ethiopia, where coffee itself was born.

“It was something I was just dreaming up,” he says. “Where else do we have coffee and the cat in a similar place?” In a forthcoming issue of Food Research International1, Marcone describes how he brewed coffee from beans that he personally picked out of the faeces of African civets (Civettictis civetta) and compared it with a mug of Kopi Luwak.

Oddities

Beowulf (I Am Deformed)

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date July 28, 2004

I’m listening to a bunch of mp3s by Momus, found via his LJ (I reached him through a link to his appreciation of David Bowie) . His voice is familiar from the Bran Van 3000 song, More Shopping (there was a video, but it went away. He wasn’t wearing an eyepatch in it).
Being a heroic fantasy geek, I perked up to an odd song about Beowulf (lyrics). Looking on the web, I find He Explains:

I have no idea where this one came from. I read Beowulf at university. I think the word looks good on the page, and I’m rather drawn to the, er, otherness of Nordic epic. But in my version the hero sent to slay Grendell the monster is deformed, a monster himself. It’s not surprising, really; you don’t tangle on a regular basis with the earth’s most vile and vicious bullies without sustaining some damage. The trouble is, our deformed hero can’t get people to take him seriously. They’re too busy laughing at his ‘helplessly flailing mutant apalling prosthetic thalydomide limb’ to realise that he’s Denmark’s only hope. Actually, this song probably relates to my experience this summer of returning to my home town only to have eggs thrown at me for looking ‘different’.

And if I’m putting links to songs, I am obliged to mention William Shatner’s cover of Pulp’s Common People, with Joe Jackson on backing vocals (an excerpt, but it goes as far as the first chorus. WMA file). You may shudder, I wanted more (link from Neil Gaiman, although I saw it elsewhere earlier).