Diane

Well, why the feck not?

Doogle.org

(Not work-safe if your employer has trouble with the words “feck”, “drink”, “arse”, “girls”, or “Eurovision.”)

Okay, probably the North too.

Icebergs sing…

Sound waves from the iceberg had a frequency of about 0.5Hz, too low to be heard by humans, but when they were played at higher speed the iceberg sounded like a swarm of bees or an orchestra warming up…

Yet another critic takes a quick run at understanding C.S. Lewis in the New Yorker…

The two Lewises — the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint — do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life and thought — there are at least five biographies, and now a complete, three-volume set of his letters — the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end.

Gee, it must be nice to be that certain of what was going on inside somebody else’s head.

…Not sure I agree with more than half of what’s said, or implied in here, about my old master. But an interesting read nonetheless.

ETA: sorry, all the media previously linked to this is out of date… it needs to be converted to something more apropos for this decade. Please bear with me.

From fifty years ago or thereabouts, behold a couple of commercials I really love.

Both are German, from the postwar period. Forgive me for not subtitling them myself: I need to check some of the dialogue with friends who’re likely to more accurately render some of the dialect words. I ran into these years ago on one of the German channels we used to get on the old Astra analog satellite dish.

Each one is utterly bizarre in its own way. The first one, I’ve seen in both black and white and color — possibly the first version is a transfer from the second: I have no idea whether this ad ever saw theatrical release, as some early commercials did. In our cholesterol-nervous time, this one could very well leave you gaping, since it’s a butter commercial, and in it butter is suggested as the cure for all possible ills, especially overeating (the narration seems to suggest that eating too much stops up your liver and annoys your gall bladder into overflowing into the brain. I can just hear what my anatomy & physiology instructor in nursing school would have said about this). As part of the remedy for this situation, friendly German cows are seen making butter and then assaulting the unfortunate overeater with half-pound blocks of it, painting it on various internal organs…which the butter miraculously returns to working order after they’ve been malfunctioning. (The organs involved include not only the misbehaving gall bladder, but the kidneys, nerves, and heart, specifically the valves.)

…There’s a song, too. I particularly like the orchestration for zither.

The second one is an (occasionally) geniunely creepy ad for the well-known anti-overindulgence* preparation, Underberg. (Which really does work, by the way.) This piece of work has been seriously influenced by the German Impressionism school of film-making. Wild stuff.

I have to apologize for the trimming at the fronts and ends of the ads not being perfect, but in some cases either music or images overlapped with those from a previous ad on the tape. (Then again, maybe you get an extra shock for your buck in the form of the truly scary pointy underwear at the top of the Underberg commercial, or the cheerful band of chefs at the beginning of the butter ad, passing around cigarettes in the kitchen and pressing them on their youthful acolyte. Yeesh.)

Besides the Real Media versions of the ads linked to above, here are Macromedia Flash versions of the German Butter ad and the Underberg commercial. I’ve removed the .avi files that were here yesterday, as there seems to be something wrong with the encoding. Apologies for this — I’m still trying to figure out what went wrong.

…And now I’m going to go prepare to stop up my liver a little. To all who’re celebrating it, Happy Thanksgiving. And watch out for those cows.

*Read “hangover”. Though Underberg is also very effective against indigestion.

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But the Incredible Hulk likes Cream of Rice.

…I’m very fond of the Hulk. (And Doctor Strange, too, but in a different kind of way. Love that mustache. Nobody tell Peter…)

Posts like this are why when Charlie Stross starts holding forth about stuff, I tend to sit there in staring dumbstruck admiration with anime drool coming out of my mouth.

Seriously. Is anyone but Charlie and Bruce Schneier thinking straight about this issue?? (clutches head and runs around in small circle)

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The Golden Spurtle.

(Before your eyebrows go up too high, you should be told that this is simply the prize for winning the World Porridge-Making Championships. Ready to sign up? Here are the rules.)

Awwww!!

Cleese, who played a lemur-happy zookeeper in the 1997 film Fierce Creatures and hosted 1998 documentary Born to Be Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese, the comic now has a new species of the primate named after him.

Researchers at Zurich University have dubbed a tiny, leaf-loving lemur in Madagascar the Avahi cleesei.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer man, if you ask me. (Thanks to Mark Evanier for the link.)