Nice Glockenspiel, Lady!

Creepy Number Station goodness, for all you wierdos out there.



I say it’s art.

Kein Schwein War Da...

Fans of pointless phrases should certainly enjoy this.

As it turns out, reading Schiller’s plays and singing Goethe’s poems doesn’t actually make you fluent in contemporary German.

Well, now!

Alas, Memory Lane

Ikea's bottled "Swedish Festive Easter Soft Drink"

It wasn't stunningly foul, but tasted oddly familiar. It tastes like the stuff branded as Pepsi that they sold in East Germany.

It's kind of a mild malt flavor. The reason the DDR-licensed Pepsi tasted this way, was because the eastern licence-users refused to pay Pepsi to import the syrup, and wanted the formula. Naturally, the licencees of products such as this didn't see the past behaviour of the COMECON crowd as terribly honest in these matters, and refused.

Nonetheless, even in the worker's paradise, a corporate logo's appeal was even understood by the Nannies-in-Chief of the people.

And You Though that it Just Didn't Matter

The $3873 mullet

RICK McLoughlin reckons his new short hairstyle is much lower maintenance than the mullet he has worn for years. Rick, who works as a safety adviser at Gorgon Construction Village on Barrow Island, sacrificed his crowning glory and in the process.

In Case You’re Wondering...

...what Ost-Berlin Mitte looked like in the 80’s, it looked like Ost-Berlin Mitte in the 50’s. That is, if you just scratched the surface and got away from the Potemkin village near the Fernsehturm.

The Neo-Bauhaus Modern Architecture of Everyday Life

This photo collection and this book’s website may be the best collection summarizing a sense of a style and time that I’ve seen so far. Discount the weather, the ubiquitous Berlin graffiti, and the effects of time on these buildings, and the futurist’s-optimism inherent in the outlook from which they were built seem to radiate off of the precast concrete and Portland cement plaster that most of them are garbed in.



Despite that, as much of this work is found today, one gets the sense that you find yourself in a modern form of a bleak, abandoned ancient ruin: the dry husk of the near distant ago, and on the set, perhaps of A Clockwork Orange.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2012\04A: An Urgent Report

Noting the nuttiness of people's fears, the extent to which they are convinced that the world, as usual, is just about to end, I have been noting the nature of those who seem to love the sort of hysteria surrounding the prospect of an asteroid doing us all in.

It's a metaphor, you dopes. A metaphor for whatever fashionable piffle children are being taught to wet their beds over - by which I mean the idea that man can alter the world's temperature through self-flaggelation and feelings of sever contrition, and that a giant human-caused-weather-related wave is coming to wipe us out. Even the landlocked.

I thought I was beavering away in lonely isolation. Now, even storied philosophical figure and popular writer Pascal Bruckner is starting to get worried about our worries (and distracting preoccupations with something that only matters to a haldful of detached activists).

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun. The former had involved expectation, the hope that the human race would proceed toward some goal. But once the end of history was announced, the Communist enemy vanquished, and, more recently, the War on Terror all but won, the idea of progress lay moribund. What replaced the world’s human future was the future of the world as a material entity. The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was likewise replaced, little by little, with the Planet, the new paragon of all misery. No longer were we summoned to participate in a particular community; rather, we were invited to identify ourselves with the spatial vessel that carried us, groaning.

And so forth, undsoweiter: the fear of wrong simply becomes fear, and redemption, well - if you don't beileve in anything, you won't find any of that either.

The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God’s kingdom. Today’s has nothing to offer. There is no promise of redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos, as in Cormac McCarthy’s fine novel The Road. How can we be surprised, then, that so many bright minds have become delirious and that so many strange predictions flourish?

As far as I'm concerned, if you're preoccupied by human extinction, and have a "love-hate" relationship with the idea, make a good example of yourself and go first. After all, if the life of all of us is a cheap tool to make yourself heard, then your life is unserious and cheap to begin with.

Leipzig, 1971

Street Images

Meet the Bauhaus

The HuffPo Reader's Idea of "Street Cred"

One can only wonder where they think that street is - or rather at least what part of Northeast Philadelphia they think it is.

'Part-Time Hair Piece, Full-Time Lady-Getter'

You go, "Lady-Getter" ( ...? ! ?... )

Clearly, it has worked: After selling out of their stock of 2000, the couple just placed an order for 10000 additional mullets. So let's get to the most important question: Are the mullets synthetic or real human hair?

Important, indeed. Almost as important as parading you're wife's silly ironic name.

My wife Morgan went to high school with a friend that originally had this idea. He had the stuff sent over from China and had a prototype made, but let it go. We were in Cabo in 2010 and a group of tourists walked by with real mullets, and we both agreed that we should talk to our friend about getting the business off the ground.

Their choice in vacation locales says the rest.

Hair on the Sports Page Again

Someone, please find me a hockey fan to whom this could possibly matter:

ESPN: Kane opts for playoff beard over mullet

Bill Smith/NHLI/Getty Images Patrick Kane grew a playoff mullet instead of a beard in 2010. Youthful-looking forward Patrick Kane garnered national attention when he grew a playoff mullet two years ago as the Hawks went on to capture the Stanley Cup.

Questions no-one is Asking

About the ignoble mullet.

Should Eighties girls stick to referencing the clothes or the music rather than the hair? Do you even like Eighties-inspired hair? Is the Eighties the decade the stylish should just forget? Hi [sic] did see a great mullet/rooster harido the other day.

Heavens, no, child.