Li’l Castros

[From Life magazine for April 13 1959.]

Of course, we all recall personally or at least have heard of the Davy Crockett Craze of the mid-1950's, when Disney's promotional genius had kids everywhere running around in coonskin caps. But who among us lately has dared to summon up memories of the Castro dressup craze from a few years later?

Yes, once upon a time, at the start of his revolution, Castro was received in the USA as a hero of the oppressed peoples of Cuba, and seen as a fit role model for tykes to imitate.

Please click on the image for the full glory of this era, and excuse any flash glare from my poor photo skills. I had to photograph rather than scan, to capture the full impact of the double page spread.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Sep 05, 2008 - Comments (8)
Category: Body Modifications, Facial Hair, Business, Products, Fads, Family, Children, Parents, Government, Military, Pop Culture, War, Weapons, 1950s

La Chute

Photographer Denis Darzacq captures images of people in the act of falling down:


I'm not sure exactly what that means, but his photos are cool.

Posted By: Alex - Fri Sep 05, 2008 - Comments (3)
Category: Photography and Photographers

Chuck’s Hand-Picked Overnight Weird News for Friday

Palm Beach County lost 3 percent of the votes cast in the primary last week (Ummm, nothing to see here, folks, just . . ..)
OK, so the intended-Democrat-friendly butterfly ballot from 2000 turned out to be way-un-friendly to Democrats. And the entire state has chucked the touch-screens from 2004 (paper-trail problems). So now they're onto state-of-the-art Sequoia optical-scan machines. In one judicial race, fella won by 17 votes, triggering a statute-mandated recount, which he proceeded to lose by 60 votes, and in the process the total of all ballots cast in the county fell from 102,523 scanned by precinct machines to 99,045 scanned by central-office machines. La-de-dah-de-dah . . .. Just move on along . . .. Palm Beach Post
Comments 'palmbeach_ballots'

Particle accelerators in the news
In France, they're being used to examine the glass content in bottles of wine to authenticate the age. But of course on September 10th in Switzerland, they'll turn on the mother of all particle accelerators, which will either devour life as we know it or reveal stuff that might make Stephen Hawking's toes curl, e.g., Hey, a Higgs Boson! Expected results: more knowledge of hadrons, quarks, thingies, and doohickeys, and also of whether people involved in this expensive project will ever be trusted with grant money again. Reuters via Yahoo // Agence France-Presse via Yahoo // "Large Hadron Rap" on YouTube
Comments 'particle_accelerators'

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals foiled again in its continuing campaign to de-emphasize the "justice" angle in capital punishment
Charles Hood's departure date was to be next week, but this time, a panel of outsiders convinced the state att'y-gen'l and governor to intervene and actually hold a hearing on whether Hood had been convicted by a prosecutor who was shtupping the judge during the trial. "Everybody" around the courthouse at the time knew they were hittin' it, but it was a small town, and nobody would go on the record. (On top of the story since 2005: Salon.com) New York Times
Comments 'charles_hood'

Update: By the way, Lizardman was at that Ripley's opening, too (not just yesterday's Cat Man)
Erik Sprague is also a News of the Weird Hall of Famer, he of the surgically split tongue that he has trained to do the woman-delighting trick of moving both halves independently. [Link has straight-up interview snippet with Cat Man] Daily Telegraph (London) // The Lizardman
Comments 'lizardman_ripleys'

Your Daily Loser

Eyewitness News
[news videos goin' around]
Apparently a big volcano in El Salvador erupted in 1922, which is why they have this-here annual festival where people actually throw fireballs at each other. The Sun (London)
Comments 'salvador_fireballs'

More Things to Worry About on Friday
Reuters headline: "Elephant Beats Heroin Habit with Detox" . . . . . One of the last legal brothels in Taiwan shut down, and the madam, 48, had to lay off her last two babes, 41 and 50 (pre-1974 whorehouses are grandfathered-legal) . . . . . The 44-yr-old annual British festival celebrating a village's hero on horseback will this yr have the hero walk through town because insurance for a horse-rider was too expensive . . . . . Organic frozen yogurt for dogs at $9 a 4-pack (Translation: Look how cool my dog and I are! Look at meeeeee!) (Bonus: In a taste test, 4 out of 5 dogs preferred regular frozen yogurt) . . . . . The three Filipino surgeons who YouTube'd their removal of a perfume canister from a patient's un-sunshiny place in January [NOTW M059, 5-25-2008] were reinstated by the hospital after 90 days in purgatory (Un-bonus: No link to the video because all versions I've ever seen were too grainy, with narrative in Tagalog). Today's Newsrangers: Jessica McRorie, Rob Snyder, Vic McDonald, Paul Music, Bruce Townley
Comments 'worry_080905'

Posted By: Chuck - Fri Sep 05, 2008 - Comments (0)
Category:

Candid Camera

Candid Camera was, in my opinion, the greatest TV show about psychology ever made, and this is one of its classic segments: Group behavior in elevator. It speaks volumes about the human need to conform.



Another segment I like is "The Interpreter," from the British Candid Camera. Watch as the interpreter never questions the romantic advances the woman makes toward him, even though her "fiancee" is sitting beside him.

Posted By: Alex - Thu Sep 04, 2008 - Comments (1)
Category: Television, Video, Psychology

Follies of the Mad Men #23

[From Newsweek for January 10 1944.]

Surely nothing better evokes the confusing and guilty sensations associated with a "what's my name, and where did I leave my panties?" lost weekend better than a forgotten drink high atop a pole you shimmied up while looking for the bluebird of happiness.

Posted By: Paul - Thu Sep 04, 2008 - Comments (3)
Category: Animals, Business, Advertising, Inebriation and Intoxicants, Corrections, 1940s, Weather

In the Rocker by the Hearthside

I'm home now from my trip to the West Coast for only twelve hours, but I made sure that my first task was to read the last week's worth of WU posts and comments. Unfortunately I don't have a second, in the face of various deadlines, to respond to every single great comment on the assorted FOLLIES OF THE MAD MEN posts. But rest assured that I enjoyed each one, and continue to be amazed at the sagacity and enthusiasm and wit of the WU family of readers and contributors.

As for Chuck and Alex, they did tremendous work taking up my slack, with dozens of really great posts. If I can single out one, it would be Alex's talking goats video, which confirms that the earlier image I posted of goat testicles was accurate.

And that's what we're all about: accuracy in weirdness.

Please have one more FOLLIES, following this post. Then, tomorrow, even more goodies!

Posted By: Paul - Thu Sep 04, 2008 - Comments (2)
Category: Animals, Weird Universe, Alex, Chuck, Comments, Paul

Chuck’s Hand-Picked Overnight Weird News for Thursday

Dept. of Homeland Security denied a complicated immigrant-asylum application by looking up stuff on Wikipedia
And the Board of Immigration Appeals also said it was OK, but the U.S. Court of Appeals has now dispensed some sense.
Wired.com Threat-Level blog
Comments 'dhs_wikipedia'

Recurring Theme: Anger-releasing service center
It's been done in Japan and Singapore, but now Sarah Lavely has opened her Smash Shack in a downtown San Diego storefront, where when you get really pissed off, you give Sarah $10 or $45, and she lets you break some plates and stuff in one of her rooms. You can even put the bastard's picture on the wall to have something to aim at. San Diego Union-Tribune
Comments 'sarahs_smash'

The family of that beheaded Canadian bus passenger is suing, er, Greyhound, of course
They're suing the actual lunatic-murderer, too, but that guy's income-producing prospects are dim, and they might as well go Greyhound for the big bucks (which, of course, it's not about, according to the lawyer). [Ed.: Jeez, if I remember correctly, at least half of all Greyhound passengers at any one time look capable of slicing your neck.] Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News
Comments 'beheading_greyhound'

News of the Weird Hall-of-Famer Dennis Avner, in London
The 50-yr-old computer programer*, reputed to have the world's most modified body, was scheduled this week at the London opening of a Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum. Avner is the Cat Man (fangs, whiskers, clipped ears, striped tats, and a whole lot more). Of course there's a photo (but he's not hard to find elsewhere on the Internet, either). Metro.co.uk (London) // TattooCulture.ro
Comments 'avner_london'

Pain art: She hangs from hooks to protest sharks being hung from hooks
Brit Alice Newstead, who's had her torso, arms, legs, stomach, and knees pierced because hanging from hooks is her thing, wants you to know that sharks get a worse deal when they're hung (so that their fins can be sliced off for shark-fin soup). Of course there's a photo (Bonus: Gal appears to be enjoying hereself!). Daily Telegraph (London)
Comments 'alice_newstead'

Death art: The goldfish-in-a-blender guy is back
Marco Evaristti's first splash was in 2000 when he put goldfish in 10 electric blenders at a gallery in Denmark and invited visitors to push the buttons. His latest is a deal with Texas death-row inmate Gene Hathorn, 47, who is on his final appeal of a three-murder conviction, and if the appeal fails, Evaristti will have the right to freeze Hathorn's body and chop it up as food for visitors to feed to fish. Daily Telegraph (London)
Comments 'evaristti_texas'

Your Daily Loser
Police couldn't catch the F State cross-dressing purse-snatcher, but they did get their hands on a clue when one of his bra-stuffings fell out. Florida Today (Melbourne)
Comments 'crossdress_falsies'

People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Yeah, this guy again: The Washington state 20-yr-old who flashes baristas in the drive-thru lane [mentioned in this space, 8-21-2008] now wants the police to know he's grateful that they caught him: "Once you start, it's hard to stop." Everett Daily Herald
Comments 'barista_caught'

Eyewitness News
[news videos goin' around]
Behold a photo spread from the World Bodypainting Festival!
[Ed.: My fascination with things like this is twofold: First, you have to be weird enough to think of crap like this, and then, beyond that, you have to actually go to a serious amount of trouble to carry it out, requiring, at minimum a total absence of self-doubt.] Pravda
Comments 'bodypaint_festival'

More Things to Worry About on Thursday
King County (Seattle) is sorry that it used its official logo (the face of Martin Luther King, Jr.) on county-branded garbage bags [Wait, The official logo of King County, Wash., is Dr. King? Can they do that?] . . . . . Riviera Beach, Fla., caught its first perp under the new "pull up your britches" ordinance . . . . . A new book that encourages girls to be daring suggests that Aussie daughters take up the didgeridoo, but Dr. Mark Rose (identified as an expert on Aboriginal culture) said that's terribly insulting (in that the didgeridoo is for males only!) and that besides, any girl who touches one will become infertile . . . . . And in more sensible news from Australia, a 19-yr-old man was arrested for excessively, defiantly belching in a police station . . . . . According to British researchers, the South African bird, the Green Wood Hoopoe, gathers in rival groups, which squawk the ornithological equivalent of "You suck!" at each other. Today's Newsrangers: Bruce Alter, Matt Mirapaul, Bob Pert, Erik Madsen, Emory Kimbrough, Mark Neunder, Paul Music
Comments 'worry_080904'

[* Words of one syllable, and words accented on the last syllable, double a single final consonant before adding a suffix beginning with a vowel. Hence, "spammer," "befitting," "wandering," "programer"] [Or, y'know, whatever.]

Posted By: Chuck - Thu Sep 04, 2008 - Comments (0)
Category:

Follies of the Mad Men #22

[From Newsweek for September 25 1950.]

Pure jittery brainbuzz in a handy grenade-shaped shaker.

Beware of putting anything in your mouth that comes from a company named "International Minerals & Chemical Corporation."

Posted By: Paul - Wed Sep 03, 2008 - Comments (2)
Category: Business, Advertising, Food, Inebriation and Intoxicants, Science, Technology, 1950s

Chocolate Teapots

Back in 2001, Simon Bradshaw and his colleagues published a tongue-in-cheek article in Plotka analyzing the utility of a chocolate teapot. They were inspired by the phrase (common in the UK) that something is as "useful as a chocolate teapot." Their conclusion was that chocolate teapots are indeed not very useful since they leak everywhere, and therefore they "serve as an excellent baseline of uselessness against which to compare other, similarly dysfunctional, items."

The article became a minor classic of scientific humor. (Yeah, science humor tends to be a bit nerdy) and was replicated by other researchers.

More recently, the Naked Scientists (authors of Crisp Packet Fireworks) decided that the problem was that the teapot was too thin. If you make the chocolate thick enough, it'll hold the hot water and brew tea. But how thick? Two centimeters proved to be enough. They note:

The main structural design defects were the lid, which melted, and the spout, which collapsed after the tea was poured.

Posted By: Alex - Wed Sep 03, 2008 - Comments (1)
Category: Food, Science

The Upside-Down House

A businessman has built an upside-down house in Trassenheide, Germany. He says that it's meant to be "an experiment for the senses." Not only is the house upside-down, but so is everything in it. You enter the house through the attic and ascend to the ground floor. I assume the plumbing fixtures are just for show and don't actually work.

Pics can be found here, here, and here.

Posted By: Alex - Wed Sep 03, 2008 - Comments (1)
Category: Architecture