YABACS
Yet Another Bad Album Cover Site. I never get enough of these. I grew up thinking the world was a hideous, terrifying place…but it turns out, it was just the Seventies. Whew!
This site is particularly fun, as it’s the man’s actual vinyl album collection, and he offers digitized samples of the delights in store. Also, links to CD’s and DVD’s (uh-huh…some of this stuff has been recently re-released). Yes, they sound EXACTLY the way they look.
I found this trawling through my stats page. Whenever someone finds sweasel.com through a Google search, I always run the same search and see where I place next to the competition. This was an MSN search of “peanut lady fuck.” I do not actually have any posts about “peanut lady fuck” (and neither did this guy), but search engines aren’t very clever about these things. As long as those three words ever appeared together on a page (including comments), it’ll register a hit. That’s right; you guys contribute to my search engine mash-up weirdnesses. Thank you!
I am not an authoritative “peanut lady fuck” source (though I will be now). I placed on page eight. Somebody clicked through eight pages of links searching for his answer. Just, damn.
I am, however, hit #5 on page one for “supernumery nipples”!
That thumping sound you hear is my grandmother. In heaven. Wagging her tail.
September 21, 2007 — 8:31 am
Comments: 53
You know what’s enigmatic? How people can be such BONEHEADS
Augh! Some days I think the world exist to make a maniac outta me! So Deutche Welle does this little video feature about analzying Mona Lisa’s smile using computer programs designed to read human emotions. You know, in order to figure out what she was thinking while she was sitting for her portrait.
Hey, I can tell you what Mona Lisa was thinking. She was thinking, “Shit! That doesn’t look a thing like me! How much are we paying this old geezer?”
See, folks, Leonardo only knew how to draw one lady mouth, and you’re looking at it. Thirteen times. I went to the Artchive and grabbed every single smiling woman’s mouth drawn by LdV that I could find, and here they are.
As sure as the Simpsons are yellow…
September 18, 2007 — 1:22 pm
Comments: 18
Hieronymous Bosch Action Figures!
Cough. Right. Apologies. I didn’t mean to leave that ‘weasel in a farty prock’ thing hanging at the top of the page all day, sucking up attention. First thing this morning, I’m staring blearily at the Drudge Report and it suddenly comes back to me: I was handed a rush job last Friday that absolutely had to be done by Monday afternoon. So I’ve been doing that.
It involved faking up stupid marketing slogans on billboards, so my first stop was a Google images search for highway photos. Don’t ask me what the connection is, but these neato action figures turned up on some French site a few pages in. These things are almost as creepy as Pokémon. I find some of the strangest things through image searches.
When I tried to right click and save the images right off the browser, a dialogue box popped up that said “ATTENTION ! Tout contenu de ce site est soumis aux directives concernant let droits d’auteurs. Reproduction interdite.” This is français for “I’m a socialist Eurotard who doesn’t understand the first thing about marketing or I would realize spreading pictures
of my crap would probably help me sell it.”
So I did a screen capture.
I love Bosch. Ship of Fools and Death of a Miser are in the National Gallery in Washington and they were part of my regular tour, back when I hit the Smithsonian once a year. There really is something deeply spooky about his stuff.
A friend of mine tried to ruin Bosch for me by pointing out that these weren’t just fever dreams; all of these objects were specific religious symbols. Maybe. But, outside Breughel the Elder (who was a conscious imitator), nobody has ever painted anything REMOTELY like this stuff. So how universal could these symbols have been?
September 17, 2007 — 2:06 pm
Comments: 43
Where Connecticut kept her ham
Field trip! This here’s Gillette Castle in East Haddam, Connecticut. I toured it yesterday. It is, I feel sure, the tackiest private home I have ever seen — which, when you recall that I grew up in Nashville, is impressive.
William Gillette (1853-1937) was an American stage actor. He wasn’t the first Sherlock Holmes but he was far and away the most famous of his day. He must have been tolerable good at it, or the American public tolerable easy-going, because the guide told us he cleared $200,000 in an era without income taxes, which would be something along the lines of a squillion dollars in 2007. I didn’t know stage actors made that kind of scratch. Hence this expensive, lumpen folly of 1919.
This isn’t a stone building. It’s made of iron girders and wooden members with stones stuck all over the outside of it. With cement. Stone doesn’t so much provide a structural element as an unstable crust. The ones on the ceiling of the entryway looked especially eager to break free and smite me.
It looks less like a castle than the set of a dinner theater production of Bride of Frankenstein. ‘Bout right; Gillette had stage paraphernalia like curtain pulls and moving screens all over the place, and strategic mirrors so he could see people moving around and make dramatic entrances at them. This point was hammered home by a senile old coot in a deerstalker hat and briar pipe, who leapt out periodically and exclaimed, “huzzah! I’m a senile old coot playing William Gillette playing Sherlock Holmes!”
Gillette designed a lot of this himself. Like, his desk chair and the dining room table, which are on rails and slide back and forth, absurdly. And the ‘stained glass’ windows and light fixtures, which are often not made of stained glass at all, but hunks of regular glass painted bright colors and glued to stuff. Every once in a while, a chunk cuts loose and beans somebody. And check out the door locks, at right. He designed them. No two are alike; they’re hewn out of blocks of wood by a master carpenter using an adze. I’m not being rude — they really used an adze. See the adze marks?
He was a huge train buff, too. He had three miles of narrow-gauge railroad tracks snaking around the estate, with tunnels and bridges and stations. Albert Einstein was once a passenger. So was Calvin Coolidge. Ahhhh…picture that with me. The tracks are long gone now, alas.
Now, I enjoy a joke as much as the next mustelid. This place is pretty neat, in a glommy, make-believe way. If it had been built in the spirit of good fun — a sort of architectural costume jewelry — I wouldn’t be so snarky about it. But I have a bad feeling Gillette thought hisself some kind of Einsteinian sooper geeenius renaissance man and this, his stately country home. In his will, he declares how unhappy he will be if he returns from the dead to find his house has been sold to “some blithering saphead who had no conception of where he is or with what surrounded.”
As it turned out, he lost that bet. No other blithering saphead could be found who wanted the place, so the government bought it in 1943.
September 3, 2007 — 4:53 pm
Comments: 8
I have ceased. And also desisted.
In this case, my theft of was cleverly detected because I slipped up and posted, “I have nicked this graphic” and included a link to the site wherefrom I nicked it. D’oh!
See, this is why nobody ever invites me to mastermind a jewel heist.
Not twice, anyhow.
August 30, 2007 — 5:13 pm
Comments: 30
Something in my house is very, very dead
Note: please pretend this item was topped by a photograph of a squirrel skeleton; a priceless and unique work of the photographer’s art.
Not sure what, not sure where. Best guess: squirrel, walls. Never mind. Nothing says “buy this house!” like the pervasive stench of death.
Changing the subject, I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday (fine, thanks. Blood pressure check) and I read a really interesting article in Discover magazine about spontaneous remission of advanced cancers. Bad news: it’s extremely rare and they still can’t figure out why it happens. They think it’s an immune system thing.
In fact, they theorize that many of us host small cancers throughout our lives that we successfully put down. Only when a cancer reaches a certain potency are our immune systems overwhelmed. They liken it to a fire in the wastebasket: reasonably easy to put out unless the drapes catch.
They make the case that extremely early detection of cancers is, therefore, not such a boon after all. Especially for people at both ends of life. Relatively mild and slow-growing specimens of breast, prostate or skin cancer might smolder for many years with little impact; if you’re old, the cancer may be less life-threatening than the treatment.
When science developed a urine test for the common childhood cancer neuroblastoma, Japan began a routine screening program for infants. Ninety percent were screened, and those with the cancer were treated with the usual combination of surgery, radiation and/or chemo. Not only did survival rates for neuroblastoma not improve, but a percentage of infants died of the treatment. So some percentage of neuroblastomas clearly are either not life-threatening or spontaneously remit. The program was halted.
(I dug around to try and find how many cases turned up before and after they instituted the screen. Interestingly, many hits were to old articles praising the policy and claiming an overall reduction of mortality. Later reports, not so much. Sadly, it takes time for data to catch up with practice. Number of cases caught by screening in one prefecture were ten times the prior number).
This reminds me of something Theodore Dalrymple wrote (in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Medicine, I think): there is no hard evidence that preventive medicine is a good idea. The whole Health Maintenance Organization structure is built on the proposition that catching disease before people feel sick saves money and lives in the long run. Sure, it makes sense. But lots of things that make sense simply aren’t true. Medication problems, mis-diagnosis and aggressive and dangerous treatments make over-doctoring a risky proposition.
Modern Western medicine is a great achievement. The moment I feel sick, you can be sure I’ll run to the man in the white coat and commence throwing Franklins at him.
But there’s a lot to be said for waiting until you feel sick.
August 23, 2007 — 1:11 pm
Comments: 14
I found a cranky Victorian gentleman hiding in my basement
Look what I found. Man, I had totally forgotten this thing. It’s an egg cup. I made it in my twenties. It’s quite small. In fact, too small to hold a jumbo egg — all I have at the moment, which is why it’s shown here eggless.
I got a surprise when I turned it over: a slightly raised signature in three different colors of glaze. Yes, it’s an “S” and yes that’s really my first initial and yes that’s how I signed stuff in my twenties. I must’ve thought I was going to be so huge they’d call me by my first name, like Michelangelo or Leonardo. Or Cher. Or Madonna. Or Buckwheat.
I didn’t do much 3D work in school, but after I dropped out, I had a fling with bizarre porcelain tableware. The thing about hand-built clay sculpture is, nobody likes to fire it. If you goof up and get an air bubble in the clay or don’t dry it properly, your piece can explode violently in the kiln. Worst case, it ruins everything else in the kiln, and sometimes damages the kiln itself.
This is very bad mojo when you make your living firing slipcast pots painted by little old ladies. So I had a hard time finding someone who trusted me and my stuff.
When he retired and moved away, I was screwed. So I thought, what the heck? I’ll apply for an arts grant and buy my own damn kiln.
I hate public funding of the arts. I think it’s been a gigantic factor in the butt-uglification of modern art. But I was very, very poor and I had an idea for a whole series of sculptures I was itching to do, and, hey, I’d paid taxes into the system for years. So I sent away for the forms.
First requirement? Attach photographs of twenty examples of the sort of work you have in mind.
Hey geniuses: if I could produce twenty of the thing I have in mind, I wouldn’t need your stupid grant. Feh. First and last time I tried to stick my snout in the public trough.
About that time, someone (I think it was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) sponsored a sculpture competition. The idea was to make a mad tea seat for a mad tea party. My entry is below.
I convinced someone to fire it because these are mostly slipcast rather than sculpted (less likely to ‘splode). Alas, before I got to the final glazing, the competition was called off for lack of interest. And that was pretty much it for my pottery fling. Not long after, I got my first computer and disappeared up it for twenty years.
August 14, 2007 — 6:32 am
Comments: 28
The gentle whimsy of days gone by
Sometimes the best way to appreciate the past is directly. Instead of reading a book about 1890, read a book from 1890. Only, they used such awfully big words and difficult sentences then. I’d rather look at the pictures.
Like this picture. Note how the creepy deaf person and his primitive finger-talking are kept safely behind iron gates. With his own kind. It’s just better that way (she looks like she smells a turd, doesn’t she?)
This and other adventures in the mind-bending iconography of our great-grandparents can be found at PennyPostcards.com. I’m not sure the site has been updated since I first found it, but I can always spend a happy hour flipping through its pages. I have a short memory.
The graphic arts of the Nineteenth Century are the spookiest; the category weird seems entirely superfluous. They’re all weird.
I’m having a hard time translating the captions (even adding Babelfish to my Tennessee High School French isn’t powerful enough, believe it or not), but there are odd themes emerging here. Gambling. Drunkenness. Vanity. If I’ve got my old timey symbolism right, these French people with antlers must be cuckolds.
What the hell? What happened to “having a wonderful time, wish you were here”? I have to assume people bought penny postcards to taunt each other through the mail, presumably anonymously. It must have been common, because there’s a whole range of unpleasant postcards.
Damn. That’s enough to make an onion cry.
August 8, 2007 — 6:18 pm
Comments: 9
Trilogy of Terror
Earlier this week, Weirdomatic published a series of creepy ads from times gone by. You probably saw it; the link was going around. In fact, they got so much traffic it knocked their server down and they had to throw up a temporary Blogspot page for that one post. Check it out if you missed it; there’s some fun stuff there.
I wanted to call your attention to three images that especially creeped the bejesus out of me. They all involve children, food and madness. Take this little girl. This isn’t how you look at bread and jam. This is how you fix your gaze upon the world-crushing tentacles of Cthulhu. That sammich must be positively non-Euclidean. This is what it looks like when you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back. And she’s the abyss.
I can’t imagine there was ever a bread called “Cellophane.” It must be an advertisement for cellophane, that marvelous, hygeinic modern packaging material that drives small children yodeling mad.
And speaking of creepy teeth…we weren’t, but I did think that little girl had the creepiest teeth ever, until I saw the porcelain tiles on this strapping lad. His teeth are so terrifyingly wrong that a forkful of spaghetti is recoiling in fear. Check it out.
I don’t know how the food stylist made pasta defy gravity, but I imagine the photographer was thinking, “see, he’s shoving that spaghetti in his mouth so fast, it’s blowin’ in the wind.” That or, “he’s screaming ‘thanks Mom!’ so enthusiastically that spaghetti is whipping around like a sail in the breeze.”
Look, he’s clutching a half-eaten weiner in his fist. And there’s another weiner, and a Vienna sausage, lying right on the fabric tablecloth next to him. As god is my witness, I will never be hungry again.
This little girl Cannot. Fucking. Believe. that piece of ham. Nothing in her five fucking years on the planet could even BEGIN to fucking prepare her for that fucking piece of ham. Fuck.
She is hamsmacked. Hamblasted. Hamstruck. Behamnifyed. Hamazed. Hamstonished.
Awww…I’m just joking. She’s obviously not even looking at the piece of ham; her eyes are unfocused, off in the middle distance. It’s an expression poised so poignantly between rapture and terror, I’m guessing her water just broke.
I can’t begin to explain these ads. My only thought is, maybe it was so difficult to get kids interested in food that images of children staring at comestibles with psychotic lust was a selling technique.
Man, we fixed that problem, didn’t we?
August 2, 2007 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 38
Art from the Weasel Collection
Happy garbage day! I tried and, once again, failed to put these items in a sack and leave them at the curb. These lovely objects are crafted from red, silver and blue glitter, Elmer’s white glue and burnt matchsticks. It’s a cross and a jewelry box. They were made by an inmate of the Tennessee Correctional System. My mother corresponded with him for a time. I do not wish to know why.
“What’s he in for?” I asked her, naturally.
“Murder, I think,” she said. “You hate to ask, you know?”
I didn’t know. My life had been free of this particular awkward social challenge.
I’m having an asshole of a week. Much to do at work, much to do at home. Trying to clear away some of the results of my twenty years of pack-rattery, among other unpleasant jobs. The fun will continue for some time, so you’ll probably get to meet lots of my stuff (in lieu of the usual thoughtful, high quality original sweasel content). Hope you don’t mind.
I need all the imaginary friends I can get.
July 30, 2007 — 6:17 pm
Comments: 21