Well there you have it kids, only a couple of months before the zombie apocalypse begins. No exact date given for it, of course, cos anon doesn’t want to be held to that sort of detail like Harold Camping or something. But if nothing out of the ordinary (at least in terms of normal American stupidity) happens by the end of September, I think we’ll all be justified in laughing at this guy as much as we are this one…
Happy (?) 115th anniversary, Library Paste Man.
Music-related story of the year so far is the amazing “crossover” between Taylor Swift and Cabaret Voltaire:
A Taylor Swift fan in Staffordshire got a creepy surprise when she tried to play her brand new, orchid-coloured vinyl copy of Taylor Swift’s Speak Now.
Instead of hearing Swift’s re-recorded versions of Back To December and Sparks Fly, Rachel Hunter was confronted with a collection of dark and disturbing British electronica.
The opening song contained messages about “flakes of flesh” and “endless rows of sardines”, while another sampled cult the 1960s horror series The Outer Limits.
“There are 70 billion people on Earth, where are they hiding? Where are they hiding?” intoned a husky male voice over a sinister, droning synth.
“At first, I thought maybe the vinyl had a secret message from Taylor,” Hunter tells the BBC.
“But when I flipped to the b-side it started saying ‘There’s 70 billion people on earth, where are they hiding?’ I started to get a little scared.
“I was alone and it was late and my vinyl was playing creepy messages.”
It transpires that the tracks on sides A and B of this version (which now has its very own Discogs entry) are actually sides A and B of a compilation of 90s weird British electronica called Happy Land which came out a couple of months ago, which was pressed at the same French vinyl plant as Tay Tay’s “new” album, which I suppose at least partly explains how this happened, but even so… I know there’s been notable examples of this happening in the past, but something about this almost feels deliberate—if only because the disjunct between what the listener would expect and the actual “cursed” product is so great—and in any case clearly no one was doing quality control at the pressing plant. Wonder how many of these “crossover” copies actually got made? It’s got me interested in hearing Happy Land, anyway…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. press dinner explodes in war of words and farting
Page Six regrets to report that a press dinner to boost Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign descended into a foul bout of screaming and polemic farting Tuesday night.
The White House hopeful attended the affair at Tony’s on the Upper East Side, no doubt hoping to impress on the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate his worthiness to sit at the very same Oval Office desk once occupied by his late uncle.
But a shouting match over climate change broke out between two boisterous old men, sending the evening down an extremely unfortunate path.
The gaseous exchange — to which Page Six bore reluctant witness — began after a guest asked Kennedy, founder of the ecological organization Waterkeeper Alliance, about the environment.
And it seems that the mere inquiry was enough to set off apparently drunk gossip columnist-turned-flack Doug Dechert, the host of the event, who became enraged and screamed at the top of his lungs: “The climate hoax!”
Meanwhile, octogenarian art critic Anthony Haden-Guest, who appeared to have been sleeping happily for most of the dinner, was roused by the abrupt rumpus.
Haden-Guest suddenly opened his eyes and denounced his longtime pal Dechert, calling him a “miserable blob.” […]
Here, it seems, Dechert sensed the need for a new rhetorical tack, and let rip a loud, prolonged fart while yelling, as if to underscore his point, “I’m farting!”
The room, which included a handful of journalists as well as Kennedy’s campaign manager, former Rep. Dennis Kucinich, was stunned, seemingly unsure about whether Dechert was farting at Haden-Guest personally or at the very notion of global warming.
I normally wouldn’t read Page Six, let alone post anything from it, but this just fills me with joy. If RFK2 weren’t the person he is, I’d almost feel sorry for him, and I’d be wondering why Doug Dechert was even invited; he’s a right-winger who’s apparently helped get book deals for a bunch of other right-wingers (including professional racist Laura Loomer) who apparently couldn’t even get the people at Regnery to look at them. But RFK2 is who he is, so, you know, fuck him. Not like his own publisher doesn’t have some kind of dubious books on its list, too…
The James Webb Space Telescope is marking its first anniversary, and it’s released this image to celebrate:
This, I am told, is the Rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex which is the nearest star-forming region to Earth. I, on the other hand, suspect it is actually some vast Lovecraftian entity. I mean, look at it, fucking tentacles everywhere. The mere fact that it may be a giant cloud of gas doesn’t necessarily make it not a Lovecraftian entity, there’s a sentient gas creature in Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath so obviously this could be another one. Good thing it’s about 400 light years away so it could be a while before it comes to feast on whatever’s left of humanity by then…
In other use, a bunch more Twitter employees could soon be ex-employees…
Ever since Meta launched its competitor to Twitter last week, Elon Musk has been attempting to tear it down, denouncing Threads’ approach to content moderation, threatening to sue for the supposed theft of “trade secrets,” and even challenging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a penis-measuring competition.
Some of his employees, however, are thoroughly enjoying the new app.
“I’m going to get fired for this, but I work at Twitter right now and have never really used it. Threads is just better,” a current staffer wrote on Threads last week. “Here’s to a new world!”
“[Not gonna lie] the signup flow was really nice,” another Twitter employee posted, referring to the process by which users register for an account.
The Daily Beast took a random sample of 133 current Twitter employees, identified by their LinkedIn accounts, and found that 31 of them—nearly a quarter—appeared to already be on Threads. Musk said in April that Twitter employed roughly 1,500 people, suggesting that hundreds of its workers may be using its rival.
Yeah, “random samples” like this always get blown up to produce a spurious number, and I suspect this “hundreds” is really as bullshit as all these other reports you see in media about how 64% of Inner West residents believe in land rights for gay whales, that sort of thing. Still, I suspect that those 31 Twitter staff are indeed not the only ones, and Oolong will use this information to find out who they all are and sack the lot of them, cos if there’s one thing Twitter really needs it’s even less people working there…
Apparently it’s a proper blizzard out there again…
Sydney’s cocaine use has rebounded, as new data shows the city consumed more of the drug in December than any other time in the past two years, and most arrests for possession of the $300-a-bag drug are taking place in the CBD and eastern suburbs.
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission released data on Tuesday night showing Sydney consumed 13 doses of cocaine per 1000 people per day in December 2022.
That is a significant reversal from the historic low set in August 2022, when Sydney ingested just three daily doses.
I find that phraseology very amusing, cos for me if no one else it summons up images of the actual city itself rather than the people snorting the stuff. Imagine the Queen Victoria Building with a little snifter, lower Oxford Street inhaling a line while Taylor Square’s buzzing on viagra and speed instead, Parramatta Road’s grumpy cos it’s only got enough money for meth, Anzac Parade’s just drinking to forget it all, Belmore Road’s got the munchies for Turkish takeaway from Matraville, New South Head Road’s trying a bit of everything before heading out to some shitty club up the Cross…
What’s a “dose”, though? Is that a standard unit of coke snorting or something, and if so, how much is it? For the current population of Sydney, that works out at nearly 70,000 “doses” between us. How much actually is that? Article says $300 a bag, but how many “doses” per bag? And the cited arrest rates puzzle me too; Waverley LGA had “265 per 100,000 people”, but there aren’t even 100,000 people in that area, it’s actually about 68,600 per the last census. Why not just give the actual number (which is more like 180-odd) rather than this “per 100,000 people” nonsense? That puts it only slightly ahead of Randwick, with 117 arrests per 100,000 people, or about 175 in real terms, compared to how the article seems to want to present it. I don’t get it…
New video from Shaun, who is one of those Youtubers who makes only a few videos a year but they tend to be really substantial when they do appear. This is a nearly two-hour extravaganza on Pissy Parker, whose recent visit to our fair shores you may recall, and which is an important part of the video… but OY it goes so much further than just mother Minshull being weirdly comfortable with Nazis agreeing with her; I actually didn’t realise just how much of a piece of shit she actually is until Shaun brought it to the surface.
This is something I found on Tumblr. The artist is Franklin Booth, apparently he specialised in absurdly detailed drawings of this sort (you can click on it to enlarge) because he saw the illustrations in magazines from when he was young and didn’t realise they were actually made from wood engravings, so he set out to recreate that sort of detail and texture with pen and ink.
From what I can find, this is an illustration for a story called “A Remembered Dream” written by one Henry van Dyke and published in 1917 in Scribner’s. I have not read this story, no idea what it’s about (apart from what the title perhaps indicates), and I’m just mesmerised by this image from it. What’s actually going on in it? Why is everyone fleeing the cathedral except this one person we see from the back? Is there a vague shape hidden in the texture of the background? Is the cathedral… leaning a bit? Did Satan appear to the people? Did God appear (which I would find more frightening)? When you don’t know what’s going on in the picture, it’s more alarming and suggestive than the actual explanation probably is…
Another WhoCulture video. Several of these are random and usually brief intrusions by crew members, but I don’t feel like I’m spoiling much by noting that #1 is the justly legendary incident with Malcolm Terris’ splitting pants in “The Horns of Nimon”…
…but I’m more intrigued by an item lower on the list, that being an episode of “The Chase”…
…in which a camera can be seen for a few seconds in the background of this shot. As the narrator says, this probably wouldn’t have been noticed back in the days when the show was shot in b/w 405-line (and being viewed on much smaller screens than we have now) compared to PAL colour… but then never mentions the time the same thing did happen in colour…
…that being “Planet of the Daleks” episode five where you can indeed just about see the camera lurking, and also one of the extras playing a Spiridon, standing at the right of the shot with his fur covering hanging slack and making bugger all effort to move out of shot. A bit odd they brought one up but not the other, and I didn’t see any of the commenters bring it up either (though I did discover a new favourite error, that being a random stagehand’s hand in “Pyramids of Mars”)…
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