Happy birthday, lemon sucker!
Fifty years of Edsel.
Edsel had been a provisional name for the car, while researchers probed other possibilities. A few priceless duds emerged, like Elkherd and Utopian Turtletop. Pleasant-sounding nominees like Phoenix, Altair, and Citation were also on the table. In the end, however, a Ford committee decided it was fitting to name the car after Henry Ford’s son, even though research showed that consumers associated the word with “diesel” and “weasel.”
I resemble that remark.
Get the whole story from US Snooze and Edsel World. It’s surprisingly interesting, if you find that kind of thing surprisingly interesting.
Me, I’m getting ready to fly to Jolly Olde early Tuesday morning. I’ll set this to autopost Monday morning. I ain’t blogging from Stepfordtech, that’s for sure!
October 15, 2007 — 7:20 am
Comments: 39
Forget your troubles, c’mon get Happy
Hi! I’m Happy! Happy Bidet!
Did you know bidet is French for ‘pony’? The picture I just put in your head? You’re welcome!
I was born so that Stoaty would never again have to observe a minion’s natal day with a post about a one hundred year old unsolved cutthroat murder!
Yeah, see, this is what happens when I don’t have a deadline and I’m sitting in front of a cup of coffee and a nice, fresh copy of Photoshop. Yeehaw!
September 26, 2007 — 9:10 am
Comments: 20
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
Dismissalooza…!
It’s D-Day for Ward Churchill. The CU Board of Regents is holding a hearing right now to decide his fate. Ward is going to plead his case, but sadly that part is behind closed doors. Some preliminary remarks were supposed to be streamed online at 8:15, but it’s 8:55 and nary a peep yet. Some time after 4pm, they’re also supposed to be streaming video of the press conference announcing the result (same URL).
Pirate Ballerina‘s jwpaine promises live-blogging, whenever there is something to liveblog. He might even have thugs and/or goons in the area of the actual hearing.
Me, I just have some fashion advice for the professor. First, lose a few pounds or lose the turtleneck. Dude. Seriously.
Second, the hair. Yes, I realize long, straight hair parted in the middle is supposed to evoke the whole Native American thing, but your forehead is too low to support this ‘do. That’s something we have in common, Sir — hairlines so proximate to our eyebrows, the effect borders on simian.
Now, when you combine a low forehead with long, straight hair parted in the middle, you are presented with two options. You can hook all that hair behind your ears, flapping them outwards, cartoonishly. The Dopey of Tribe Disney look, as it were. Or you can let the hair fall where it may, which is going to be basically in front of your face.
When I went through my obligatory long-straight-hair-parted-in-the-middle phase in the early ’70s, I generally pursued the latter hairdressing strategy. Hence, for several years, there was nothing to see of me but two lank curtains of brown hair barely parted by the tip of my proud aquiline nose.
“You look,” my mother remarked, squinting at me, “like a weasel peeping out of a tent.”
Update: Lokki points out, they’re in a different timezone in Colorado. Ummm…duh, Weasel. Update, update: okay, NOW they’re really, really late.
UPDATE: gone, but not forgotten. Let the litigation commence! Somehow, I keep replaying in my head that ridiculous dogfighting speech by the ridiculous Senator Byrd, “the dawg dahd! …the dawg dahd! …the dawg daaaaaaahd!”
July 24, 2007 — 8:54 am
Comments: 36
Incoming!
Hi! It’s me! Unless things have changed, Logan airport charges for wifi access, so I wrote this Saturday and I’m timeshifting it forward. WordPress software has this neat feature where you can publish a post with a future date and it won’t appear until the timestamp is good. I don’t use it much; it isn’t often I have anything prepared ahead of time.
I’ve thought about using this function to play a cruel trick on myself. Like future post, “you people suck and my phone number is 401-331-XXXX!!!” to go live at, say, three in the morning. Then stumble off to bed drunkenly and see if my paranoia is sufficient to wake me out of a comfortable stupor in time to stop it. I guess this is what happens when you have sadistic and masochistic tendencies: you are amused at the idea of pwning yourself.
Anyhoo, I thought it would be cool to date this for 9am Tuesday, when my plane is supposed to take off. Then if we have engine trouble and go down in Boston Harbor, y’all can be, like, “oh my god! Stoaty’s last post ever appeared at the very moment the plane went down!”
If I survive, catch you tomorrow from Londinium. If not, feel free to phone in to the networks and claim to be my best friends ever. Somebody might as well enjoy my screaming arc of death.
May 15, 2007 — 9:00 am
Comments: 22
Die, smiley!
God, I hate graphical smileys. Not ASCII emoticons; those are cool. In fact, that’s partly why I hate graphical smileys: they took a rich and interesting form of post-modern folk art and crassified it.
Mostly, though, I hate them because they’re so fucking ugly and stupid. This little bastard has got to be my #1 graphical smiley hate object: 
The BBCode LOL smiley. Look at the way its upper lip is nickering up and down. Who does that with their front lip when they laugh? Horses! Who else? Giraffes. Who else? NOBODY! Jesus, where did this person go do art school, a dude ranch? You can’t even do that with your upper lip if you try. Go on. Try. Seriously. I’m not writing another word until you do.
Here’s a good one: 
. It means “I woke up this morning Chinese. And grumpy.” Well, at least that one may come in handy some day.
Then there’s: 
I am so constipated. And: 
Look! My mouth is like a red, red rose. And: 
I’m wearing a tiny bra on my face, and that makes me strangely happy.
I was horrified when I realized I had graphical smilies. Yes. Right here at S. Weasel. I made a happy little winky-smiley in my own comment section, and up popped a horrible squinty moonfaced yellow hobgoblin. Huh. They came in a little folder with the rest of the WordPress software. I did not know.
My first thought was to biff the whole directory and go back to clean, pure ASCII emoticons. And then I had a second, more weasely, thought. In short, weasels. I would replace the lot with spritely, handsome weasels. Smiling weasels. Frowning weasels. Jaunty weasels thrusting their pink tongues in good natured ribaldry.
I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I had to design the occasional icon back in the days when you got 16 colors and 16 pixels square. It was an asshole of a job. I am not a minimalist. But I figured I’d start with the basics — frowny, smiley, winky and the tongue (sounds like a Hannah Barbera cartoon starring three crime fighting teenage pop musicians and a rogue body part). It went something like…this:
Only frowny really looks like a weasel, because frowny is the only face weasels got. The others look like animatronic gophers or something. No matter. By the time it was squoze down to the standard 15×15 smiley size, I knew they wouldn’t look like anything at all. And they didn’t. At that size, I couldn’t tell one from another.
For a moment, this pleased me. I imagined replacing all the icons with Frowny Weasel, so no matter what you tried to emote, out popped that cranky little puss. But then I realized I would never know what you, my minions, were trying to tell me. Are you happy? Are you sad? Do you have a rogue body part you would like me to examine? I must know these things.
So I gave myself another ten pixels. A 25 pixel smiley is going to blow out the line spacing (I almost said “the leading”; god I’m old). But, hey, it’s not like I’m in some kind of design contest or anything, is it?
So here they are: π π π π π I added a LOL, so that peals of merry laughter can ring throughout Castle Mustelid. You still can’t really tell what’s what, but I drawed them and I can. Invoke them with 
. Any other emoticon will get you a busted graphic icon BECAUSE I KILLED THEM.
Have fun and drive safely.
April 19, 2007 — 4:38 pm
Comments: 35
Five thousand rabbits block Hungarian highway
Truck accident. They were headed to the abattoir. Five hundred were killed on the spot. Four thousand four hundred were rounded up on the scene, and another one hundred were given the gift of sweet, sweet freedom. But, being bunnies, they will undoubtedly wander onto the highway in the next few days and meet Rabbitgod.
What’s interesting about this is the place I found it: a Basque newspaper, a thousand miles away. Reinforcing my belief that newspapers all over the world employ someone whose main job it is to comb the wires for weird-ass stories from faraway places. If you want to know something bizarre about a nation, cruise newspapers halfway around the world. Bunnies on the highway is a relatively benign example; most of them are of the “Oh Those Silly People from Fillintheblankistan!” variety.
Americans who read the foreign press are all too familiar with this. When I’m in the UK, I don’t even recognize the America they describe. The Brits’ imaginary US of A is, like, fifty percent inbred Bible-thumping retards and fifty percent pornographers. I get the impression people from India aren’t too pleased with Western news reportage, either; all those stories from remote Indian villages about inappropriate people being reincarnated as inappropriate animals and genital-stealing monkeys and so on.
Now clearly I…me…S. Weasel, proprietor of this blog, cruise foreign newspapers looking for mischief. But I am a mere clown. I clown for you, my seven imaginary friends. I don’t claim to be a journalist. Not sober, anyhow. Assuming anyone sober could claim to be a journalist.
Don’t news organizations have an obligation to give us an accurate picture of the world? Aren’t they always banging on about how important they are in that respect? If they feed us a steady diet of stories about the world that are, strictly speaking, true but not at all representative, isn’t that an especially pernicious kind of lie?
April 17, 2007 — 6:45 am
Comments: 6
Ben sez: None of your beeswax
Okay, one more coin. This is the Continental Dollar; the very first coin of the brand new United States. It was designed — couldn’t you guess by looking at it? — by Ben Franklin.
The motto “Fugio” (I fly) together with the sundial means “time’s a-wasting.” This motto also appeared on the penny at right some years later; it’s often called the “Fugio” penny. Check out the goofy little R. Crumb face on the suns.
It isn’t certain whether Ben meant “Mind Your Business” as in “you there! Look to your factories and your warehouses, Sir” or “sticketh not thy snout where it should’st not be.” With Franklin, it could go either way.
April 3, 2007 — 11:58 am
Comments: 19
Friday, March 30
March 30, 2007 — 5:10 pm
Comments: none
Watch for falling cats
Hey, look what I found in a forgotten corner of my hard drive (I clean my hard drive to relax; I’ve had a molten asshole of a day).
This was the very first placeholder graphic on my very first corner of the Web — that free meg of space ISP’s gave you. I figured out early on I could cram in much more art per byte by sticking with monochrome. Small file sizes were, of course, seriously important then.
“Then” would’ve been, maybe, 1994? I think that’s the year I first saw the Web. I had read Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web concept paper via Usenet in 1990 and thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. People creating content for free, and letting other people link to it? Pff! Stupid hippies!
But then, a few years later, a friend showed me the Web in action, and then I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. Seriously, the early Web was lame-o, lame-o. Until there was a certain critical mass of content, it wasn’t good for much at all. It wasn’t even that fun. And it was ugly.
Except for Find the Spam (lovingly reproduced with historic exactitude here). I thought Find the Spam was the most hysterical thing I’d ever seen in my life ever. Like, ever. Odd, though…when I laughed, dilithium crystals shot out of my nose.
Anyhow, I wish I could remember where this drawing is. I think it’s much better than it looks in this grievously squoze-down version. The odd part is…how did I get it in the computer? Monitors of the era were capable of much better graphics than you usually saw on them, because there was no way to get pictures in. It was way before digital still cameras (we had a video camera that could frame-grab; the whole setup cost around a hundred grand). I think it was before those horrible little hand scanners (remember those?). Maybe we had desktop scanners at work by then.
Cat blogging. I been doing it a long, long time.
March 22, 2007 — 5:33 pm
Comments: 4