How wild is this: investigators with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s office have recovered several items that are believed to have come from Adolf Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” chalet and may even have been personal possessions of Der Fuhrer himself! The items were apparently brought home from Germany as souvenirs following World War II, and they eventually ended up in a storage locker in West Valley City, from which they were stolen in 2005.
Okay, this is a bit silly, but I couldn’t resist: via Scalzi, who ganked it from Boing Boing, it’s The Monster Initial Stickers Name Generator! What’s that, you say? You don’t know what that means? Well, Monster Initials were these these things you could buy at the 7-Eleven back in the days of shag carpet and bitchin’ custom vans:
Released in 1974, the idea behind this collection was simple: create stickers for all the letters of the alphabet, but feature monster scenarios inside each letter. Alphabet letter stickers with monsters inside them that the kids will all want to collect until they can spell their own names with ’em? Brilliant!
As the blogger I’m quoting above goes on to explain, actual Monster Initial sticker sets are pretty tough to come by these days, so he and a programmer friend have cobbled together this generator thing to let you spell out your name in electronic facsimiles of those uber-rare ’70s-vintage collectibles. Cool, huh? Here’s my name:
Click ’em to see ’em big and admire the groovy artwork.
You know, I’ve got to be honest, I don’t remember these stickers. If they came out in ’74, I was probably just a shade too young to have had any experience with them. But the artwork reminds me a lot of stuff I do recall, specifically a series of monster-themed Slurpee cups that I always loved, and also a series of collectible stickers that featured gross-out parodies of various grocery items. You bought them like trading cards, in a pack with a stick of gum. Anyone remember what those were called?
So, I walked over to the bank on my lunch and hit the ATM for this weekend’s allotment of cash. No big deal, I do it all the time, right? But this time as I retrieved my debit card from the slot on the cash machine, my fingertips detected a sharp point along the edge of the card. Odd, I thought… never felt anything sharp on the card before. A brief examination revealed that my card is developing a longitudinal crack that runs right along the bottom edge of the magnetic stripe. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my debit card is coming apart.
I’m thinking maybe I need to reconsider just how often I use the damn thing if I’m literally wearing it out. Strange to think that just 10 or 15 years ago, I was extremely uncomfortable with the very idea of a debit card. Because they can track you with every purchase you make, you know.
Apparently, I got over that fear at some point. Probably when I realized that if some mysterious them really is tracking my purchases, they’re getting the worse end of the deal. It must make for incredibly tedious reading. “Good lord,” they must be thinking, “doesn’t this guy ever go to a different coffee shop? Always the same damn places…”
My parents maintained a pretty liberal movie policy when I was growing up. Unlike a lot of Utah households, “R” movies weren’t automatically prohibited from our home simply because of their rating. Instead, my folks — well, my mom, since Dad was never much interested in movies — would do a little research and maybe a preview screening to find out exactly why the movie was rated R. Bad language was no problem, since she correctly assumed that I’d already heard every naughty word in the book (and quite a few that no one’s bothered to write down) while hanging out with my dad in the garage. Violence was likewise allowable, once I got old enough to stop having bad dreams brought on what’s now euphemistically called “intense content” by the MPAA. (For example, she flatly refused to let my uncle take me to see Alien on the big screen when it first came out — I was around nine, as I recall — but she gave her blessing for me to see it on video a couple of years later. Looking back, I think that was a wise decision. I love the flick now, but at nine… well, I probably would’ve had nightmares for years.)
Sex, however, was a little more complicated. Mom generally didn’t get upset at brief flashes of nudity or Benny Hill-style innuendo. (I guess her thinking was that if I was laughing, I couldn’t be getting too many ideas, or maybe she just liked the fact that Dad and I, who generally had so little in common, both enjoyed Benny’s hijinks.) But she became very uncomfortable with anything more, well, educational. This, of course, made such movies intensely appealing to me. However, being a good boy who always followed his mother’s wishes — i.e., a kid who was prone to fantastic bouts of guilt at the thought of “getting in trouble” — I never tried to sneak around behind her back like some kids would’ve. If Mom didn’t think I ought to see something, I didn’t see it. And that’s how I missed out on a landmark movie called Porky’s.
The usual: work is crazy, no time to write a proper blog entry, but I really need to take a break before I kill an account manager or three. What to do? I know: I’ll gank a silly Internet quiz from Puffbird…
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Hm. How interesting that this is exactly what I would’ve wanted to be if you had asked, “Hey, Bennion, what musical instrument are you?” Results bias? Discuss quietly amongst yourselves while I get back to the never-ending hunt for missing commas and trademark symbols…
Sigh.
Some of my favorite books growing up were the so-called Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the pulpy adventures of a Civil War veteran from Virginia named John Carter who is magically transported to the dying planet Mars (Barsoom, to the locals), where he encounters all manner of creatures, monsters, beasts, villains, lunatics, arcane technology, ancient civilizations, and, of course, beautiful, scantily clad women as seen in the wonderful artwork above. (That painting by Michael Whelan was used for the cover of the first book in the series, A Princess of Mars, during the 1970s and ’80s, and is the imagery I automatically associate with these stories. Click to embiggen.)
For an adolescent boy who had moved beyond childish things but hasn’t yet hit the full flush of puberty — say around 11 or 12 — those books were like catnip for the imagination, amazing, swashbuckling stories in which swordplay mingled with anti-gravity technology, and adventure and feats of derring-do were always in the offing. Oh, and did I mention the scantily clad women?
There has been talk of a movie version of Princess of Mars for years, but nothing has ever come of it, probably because special effects technology just wasn’t up to the task of depicting what Burroughs described without coming off as impossibly cheesy. At least not at a halfway-reasonable cost. And an animated Barsoom movie, while always possible, probably would’ve been prohibitively expensive, too, certainly if it was going to be as eye-popping as it deserves to be.
That’s no longer a problem, however, and it looks like a John Carter movie may finally be happening. Even better, it’s being developed by Pixar, a film company with what I would consider to be a flawless record.
In response to a thought-provoking WaPo article about the future of museums in our ever-more digitized and entertainment-driven world, this guy asks:
If we can access a white-laser virtual model of the Mona Lisa at a resolution of 10 microns from our personal computer, why bother getting shoved around and consumed by the crush of tourists at the Louvre only to get no closer than 3 feet? …What’s the point of going to a museum today?
Um, to see the actual painting rather than a picture of it? Isn’t that astoundingly obvious?
So, it seems that X-Wing wasn’t the only craft from a galaxy far, far away clawing its way toward the sky over the weekend. A model Y-Wing also went up at the same model-rocketry event, with much the same results. Hey, nobody ever said those ships could really fly, only that they’re cool-looking. There’s a video clip of the flight — including some footage from an onboard camera — at Gizmodo. (I couldn’t figure out how to embed the clip, and none of the clips I found on YouTube were as good as the Gizmodo one.) Go check it out! And have a look at the construction gallery, too!
In the last couple of days at work, I have proofread 29 — that’s twenty-nine — two-page documents that are all composed of the same damn blocks of standardized text, just arranged in different patterns. Which means I’ve been essentially reading the same document — and marking the same damn mistakes — over and over and over.
At this point, I’m thinking it’s a good thing that the New Proofreaders’ Cave is on the first floor, instead of up on the fourth where we used to be. Management should be commended for being so insightful…
