Weird Universe Archive
February 2011
February 15, 2011
Follies of the Mad Men #131
Cereal for mutants only.
Posted By: Paul - Tue Feb 15, 2011 -
Comments (2)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Food, 1970s, Fictional Monsters
February 14, 2011
News of the Weird / Pro Edition (February 14, 2011)
News of the Weird/Pro EditionYou're Still Not Cynical Enough
Prime Cuts of Underreported News from Last Week, Hand-Picked and Lightly Seasoned by Chuck Shepherd
February 14, 2011
(datelines February 5-February 12) (links correct as of February 14)
Foliate-Obscured Psychosis, Plus Meat-Eating Furniture and the $4,000 Fanny Pack
★ ★ ★ ★!
Leaf Man: You might remember Matthew Hoffman, 30, from November for having killed a neighbor couple in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and kidnaped their teen daughter, who was rescued several days later in a basement after cops got around to investigating Hoffman, the neighborhood weirdo. Hoffman's safely locked up, and police last week released some investigation records. Hoo, boy! Photos of the Hoffman abode revealed (according to ABC News) "a living room stuffed with leaves, a bathroom lined with more than 100 bags of leaves," "mounds of leaves so high [the cops] feared that bodies could be buried underneath them." And since there were only two trees in his yard, and he rarely raked there, he actually had to haul all his leaves in from elsewhere. ABC News
"Ehhh, I Dunno, What Do You Want to Do with It?: The late outlaw novelist (literaraily-speaking) William S. Burroughs, whose best-known work was Naked Lunch, supposedly saw the butt-end of his last lunch on Earth epoxied for posterity, and now two ridiculously intellectually manic artists are about to make use of it. Except for the sophistication of the science, it sounds like a fraternity prank. They plan to take DNA from his feces and copy it, soak it in gold dust, load it into the kind of air pistol that's used to insert DNA into plants and animals for experiments, and shoot it into a mixture of blood, poop, and semen, to make "living bio-art." Either that, or these two guys (one a college professor in San Diego) are punking us something awful. AOL News
Time Flies: "You're not going to like this," said NPR's Robert Krulwich, as he introduced a wall clock that theoretically supplies its own power not by sunshine but by trapping houseflies and converting the carcasses into electricity, using flypaper and a razor-like scraper. Right now, the prototype's housing requires too much electricity to operate, but the clock itself runs for 12 days on eight dead flies, said the co-designer. (And Krulwich addressed the slippery slope toward carnivorous machines that might someday eat us, raising the point that self-sustaining robots at least ought to be vegetarian-only.) NPR
Big-Dog Chinese Businessmen Carry, er, Purses: It's a luxury designer's (Hermes, Coach, Louis Vuitton, etc.) dream market, in that both women and men are in a frenzy about upscale purses. Coach will have 53 stores in China by mid-year. And "upscale" means upwards of $1,000. (Why, yes--this is the same China that's number one in the world in knock-offs.) Meanwhile, on the runways in New York's current Fashion Week, a $4,675 fanny pack. Los Angeles Times /// Wall Street Journal
License Weird-News Columnists! A Wall Street Journal report on overregulated occupations, e.g., shampooers (100 hours of "theory and practice," including neck anatomy, required in Texas), barbers (1,500 hours' experience required in California), manicurists (750 hours' training required in Alabama), interior designers, tree-trimmers, kick-boxers, cat groomers, tour guides, casket makers, points out that the real deal is that incumbents in those fields use "licensing" to limit competition and squeeze prices upward. Yr Editor, too, would love to limit competition, to return to the good old days when I almost had a lock on the field, with no wannabes underpricing me with inferior goods. Plus, the way these licensing schemes work is that top-drawer incumbents (like me and Roland Sweet) would get grandfathered in. The others would have to do hundreds of hours of "training," and fill out forms, and get recommendations, and prove they're up to the job! Yeah, that's the ticket! Wall Street Journal
More in extended >>
Posted By: Chuck - Mon Feb 14, 2011 -
Comments (6)
Category:
February 12, 2011
Table Manners
Yes, even if you are left-handed, you must eat your soup with your right hand! Or else!
Posted By: Paul - Sat Feb 12, 2011 -
Comments (3)
Category: Etiquette and Formal Behavior, PSA’s, 1940s
February 11, 2011
Russian Twix Commercial
Twix from Igor Kozhevnikov on Vimeo.
Posted By: Paul - Fri Feb 11, 2011 -
Comments (3)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Candy, Russia
Aleksandr Hrustevich
Classical music on an accordion? Is that allowed?
Posted By: Paul - Fri Feb 11, 2011 -
Comments (2)
Category: Eccentrics, Music, Russia
February 10, 2011
War Dogs
Little did you know that WWII was actually fought and won by canines!
Posted By: Paul - Thu Feb 10, 2011 -
Comments (8)
Category: War, Cartoons, Dogs, 1940s
February 9, 2011
Postcards
This one's for Paul, a bunch of cool old postcards displayed for your perusal.
Posted By: Alex - Wed Feb 09, 2011 -
Comments (2)
Category:
Paper Doll
Paper Doll 《紙紮》 from Bernadette Choy on Vimeo.
No English translation of the dialogue, but that just makes it all the weirder.
The website "explains" thus: "An animation film about CHUNG's afterlife journey, in search of his cause of death. Chung look back his lifetime, and travel across the 'middle-land'. In the meantime, he made friends with the Paperdolls (paper work Chinese offering figures ). This is a relaxing and humorous animation that introduces the Chinese dead's world."
Posted By: Paul - Wed Feb 09, 2011 -
Comments (2)
Category: Death, Religion, Video, Asia, Fictional Monsters
News of the Weird / Coupla Corrections
In Monday's Pro Edition, "Allen County" Texas is really "Allen Independent School District." In Tuesday's Pro Edition, the 1,000-page poem is really 10,000 pages long. In Sunday's standard News of the Weird column, the "ringworm" that aids digestion isn't really a worm, but a fungus, and it resides actually beyond the stomach.
Posted By: Chuck - Wed Feb 09, 2011 -
Comments (6)
Category:
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| Who We Are |
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Chuck Shepherd Chuck is the purveyor of News of the Weird, the syndicated column which for decades has set the gold-standard for reporting on oddities and the bizarre. Our banner was drawn by the legendary underground cartoonist Rick Altergott. Contact Us |
