Monty Python: the Misanthropic Introspection Years

Hans Richter-ghosts for breakfast (1927)

There's GOT to be Another Way!

A Chirpractor is Growing a mullet to save lives Agassiz-Harrison Observer:

An Agassiz chiropractor is donning a mullet these days, and he's itching to be rid of it. Dr. Darren Paul has dropped his modern, clean cut look for the summer and is growing out his hair in the shaggy style more suited to the 1980s.

The Object of Fear is WITHIN!

Panic now, while there's still time!

An incoming asteroid is trouble whether you're a dinosaur or a Bruce Willis fan. But microbes living deep underground may actually welcome the news, according to a recent study.

A Cold War Radio Fragment

Radio Berlin International (DDR) - circa 1981

New and Improved Elektorsmog!

The Litzelstetter "tower-free residential area" club fears a new wave of elektrosmog. "I think it's the calm before the storm," club chairman Irene Mohn said when asked. The planned expansion of the high-speed network LTE (Long Term Evolution), they said will be a new tsunami of the mobile world over the cities and towns. Mohn believes that the electromagnetism is a pollutant, and thus believes it an increase on the burden on residents. This was why the club supports a possible low-emission, and thus human-friendly form of mobile communications.

I’m not sure if its attention seeking or hypochondria that drives these people, but despite the mere milliwatts that are at issue, and the fact that we shield the emissions of motors and other equipment in a way we never have before, they’re still at it.

Nonetheless, that kind of craziness sounds much better in the original Klingon:

Der Litzelstetter Verein „Mastenfreies Wohngebiet“ fürchtet eine neue Elektrosmog-Welle. „Ich denke, es ist die Ruhe vor dem Sturm“, sagte die Vorsitzende Irene Mohn auf Nachfragen. Mit dem geplanten Ausbau des Hochgeschwindigkeitsnetzes LTE (Long Term Evolution) rolle ein neuer Tsunami aus der Mobilfunkwelt auf die Städte und Gemeinden zu. Mohn geht davon aus, dass der Elektrosmog und damit auch die Belastungen für die Anwohner steigen. Dabei setze sich der Verein für die möglichst emissionsarme und damit menschenverträgliche Form des Mobilfunks ein.

Run! Hide! Save yourselves!

I Know they CAN, buy MAY they?

Video: Killer Asteroids Can Be Deflected With Nuclear Warheads, New Study Says

It is common knowledge that using a nuclear device on a killer asteroid on a collision course with the Earth would only produce perhaps thousands of smaller projectiles headed toward Earth -- making a bad situation possibly worse. And yet, a new study indicates that using a nuclear device might work after all.

It's hard to know exactly what to get panicked about some days.

From the Chronicles of European Wierdness

A Russian Man Was Caught Trying To Smuggle 200 Pounds Of Butter Into Norway

They Invented Their Own Worst Stereotypes

Now iss de time on Schprockets venn ve tance.

It's ART, you Ignorant Peasants!

Holiday jeers for Ugliest Christmas tree in Germany:

The startling Yuletide sight stands right next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the heart of western Berlin on Breitscheidplatz.

The “Traffic Tree” – the name being a nod to the hectic run up to Christmas - was created by 36-year-old artist Thomas Plattner, who specialises in creating sculptures from found objects. So, instead of traditional holiday baubles and tinsel, battered toys and discarded household items dangle from the tree’s scrap metal branches.

It has been christened the “ugliest” in Germany by the country’s biggest newspaper, Bild.

Normalweise, one would celebrate a meaningful date or event with the finest you can find, those things that show you've sacrificed the most you could... except in modern day Europe where you're supposed to not care.

In fact one can't even plausibly call this pile of literal refuse an homage to nature, or even an offering to the Gods of reccycling.

Among Other Things

Aside from common sense and tolerance, get a load of what’s banned in Iran.

Why am I Reminded of Devo?

Of cave paintings and the punk esthete: one writer is celebrating the human ability to give some of us an excuse for not progressing.

I had known of the Sex Pistols' association with 6 Denmark Street for a while, but a chance remark on a BBC 6 Music programme led to the discovery that the Pistols, and in particular John Lydon, had left a substantial body of graffiti there and that, surprisingly, it had survived. The findings are described in the latest volume of the academic journal Antiquity, published earlier this week.

The graffiti that fellow archaeologist John Schofield (of the University of York) and I recorded in an upper room at the back of a vintage guitar shop include both accomplished caricatures of Malcolm McLaren, Nancy Spungen and John Ritchie (aka Sid Vicious) and other items that record the use of the building by 4" be 2" (a band formed by Lydon's brother Jimmy), and later as the home of two members of Bananarama. But the importance of the site goes beyond the eye-catching graffiti.

Behold, the onetime shame and pride of Akron, Ohio

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\11B

What Are the Bees Telling Us?

Less than you think, outside of "activist-speak" pedantry:

“We have to wake up early enough to make a change,” said biochemist and beekeeper David Heaf, in the documentary.

After all, what modern cause is complete without refereing to some dead malthusian who can't clarify his argument after it's been wtong for the past 88 years of "mechanization"?

Experts in the film see bees as a barometer of the health of the world. Queen of The Sun refers to Austrian scientist Rudolf Steiner who predicted the collapse of honeybees in 1923. “The mechanization of beekeeping and industrialization will eventually destroy beekeeping,” Steiner predicted.

The notable chappie cited also had this sort of science to his credit:

He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher. At the beginning of the 20th century, he founded a spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, as an esoteric philosophy growing out of European transcendentalism and with links to Theosophy.

But he couldn't transcend his propensity to throw spaghetti at the wall, despite his considerable career.

I don't mean to make light of the departed, but rather make light of people who will grasp at everything and anything. In this case, to prop up the fact that science already knows to be related to a mold, and that the bee population has been growing since it's decimation.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\11A

So, a Giant Asteroid is Heading for Earth…Again…

Or rather not "not-headed" in a especially scary non-way as previous asteroids headed for earth which weren't.

Like, between the moon and the Earth close. PC gamers may remember the last time this happened, in 1995. Back then, it was the asteroid Attila, and unlike YU55 - which should pass by harmlessly - it was headed straight for us.

Funny how they always get to that "gamer" level of plausibility and detail.

Now if they'll only have a few Children to Corrupt this way Mentally...

Passivity and sheepishness... It even extends to finding new and horrible ways to neglect their childrens' well being in "innovative and modern" ways:

German sex experts (and there’s a whole bunch of those, let me tell you) think that parents’ porn fears are exaggerated and that online pornography is actually a wonderful and thoroughly wholesome way to change the way young people learn about sex.

Here's an idea: stop experimenting with on your children, and they won't turn into serial killers.

Pretentious Crap, circa 1988

"Halb-Stadt" (Berlin West)

Where exactly DOES Art-Haus rubbish go when it dies?

You've Gotta Look Busy

If I could rename all those “International” Geneva-based institutions anything, I would call them the “Fake-Crisis Emergency Management Center”

A Nation of Sitzpinklers

Canada becomes Sweden.

Even more surprising, though, was the sign above the toilet, showing a stick man tinkling into a toilet with a line through it. Yes, Edible Canada has banned men from peeing standing up.

It’s a true advancement for social justice

The Accidental Mullet

Esquire: My Magnificent New Hair

He explained that no one should just grow out his hair. You'll grow a mullet, or an Afro, or something you probably weren't looking to grow...

Ugh.

From the Wonderful World of Persuasion, DDR Style

Permit me to present an excerpt from a 1981 East German publication for agitators. It was meant to give small-time propagandists who were supposed to work the barracks, the factory floor, and the like, examples of successful preaching to the imprisoned.

One choise piece provides an example of the limits of truthiness:

Italy: What are the Causes of Terrorist Actions?

The new year began in Italy as the old one had ended: with terrorist actions. On 31 December, Police General Enrico Calvaligi was shot at the front door of his home. In January, the kidnapping of Judge Giovanni D’Urso occupied public attention until he was a released. These were only the latest in a long chain of events that began on 12 December 1969 with a bomb at the Agricultural Bank in Milan and reached its high point so far on Bologna on 2 August 1980 when 85 people were killed and more than 200 injured. What are the causes of these terrorist actions, which have affected Italy in particular, but also other capitalist countries?

Bourgeois and social reformist ideologists and politicians generally, reject the claim that the roots are in the capitalist system. Explaining the causes, however, requires considering the whole interrelated complex of objective and subjective of economic, social, political, and ideological factors, and they develop from the nature of the capitalist system!

In the socio-economic area, terrorism is bred complex of factors of new and old contradictions, in the backwardness of the south, and particularly the sharpness of the economic crisis and its results. The inflation rate in 1980 was above 20 percent throughout the year, at the top of the leading capitalist states, and unemployment according to official figures remained at about 1.7 million, about 50 percent of whom are young people. In a situation of general uncertainty, extremist and anarchist ideas spread among dissatisfied and politically immature young people who want revenge on the bourgeois state. In this milieu, adventurers find an audience for their calls for “direct action” and terrorist acts, which they claim are the quickest path to social change. The crisis is also hard on the middle class, and produces not only anti-monopolistic views, but also radical views to the right and the “left.” Demagogic appeals to national sentiments, or to economic and social difficulties and social problems, allow neo-fascist and “leftist” extremist groups to win supporters in various social levels — from the poorest farmers in the south to some tradesmen, businessmen, civil servants, and students.

The two were, of course, kidnapped by the Red Brigade, well known for their “right wing views” to the East German listener of this bromide, and who were trained, plosletyzed to, and funded by the intelligence agencies of the Warsaw pact,making the entire thing a “Daddy drinks because you cry” type of argument.

Privacy is a Thing of the Past

Gotham, the City that never Sleeps, etal.: Explaining the Mullet Dude on Spring Street [Video]

Wednesday morning, we published a piece about an insanely coiffed mullet spotted on Spring Street. The dude sporting the classic hair style (along with tropical shorts) had a message, but it was abundantly clear.