The Jacket Lunch Box is a Japanese blog dedicated to turning album covers into bento boxes. He’s done so many of them. This enterprise looks time-consuming. All hail our arts and crafts otaku overlord!
More bento boxes after the jump…
Isn’t this thoughtful? Those demented bawbags who are waiting for the Rapture this weekend have prepared a letter to help explain where they and “millions and millions” of the faithful have disappeared to.
Dear Friend,
This message has been sent to you by a friend or a relative who has recently disappeared along with millions and millions of people around the world.
The reason they chose to send you this letter is because they cared about you and would like you to know the truth about where they went.
This may come as a shock to you, but the one who sent you this has been taken up to heaven.
If you read a Bible, you will see that after chapter three in the book of Revelation, the church is no longer mentioned as being on earth. (The church are the believers in Jesus Christ, not the buildings in which people meet.)
In the Bible, 1 Thessalonians Chapter 4 verses 16 and 17 tell how Jesus came to take away His church. But, you have to believe the Bible is the Word of God in order to believe this.
I am sure that there will be a lot of speculation as to what happened to all these people. The theories of some scientists and world leaders will have so much credibility that most of the world will believe them.
It will sound like the truth!
But, there is only one truth. And, that truth is that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, came back to earth and took with Him to Heaven all who believed in Him and made Him their Lord.
If you would like to give your life to Jesus Christ and be born again, it is not too late. First you must pray to God saying"Father I admit I am a sinner, and I will turn from my sin and do good. I believe that Jesus was your son and that He came here to die for me so that my sins would be
forgiven. I ask you to forgive me and I will repent of my sins. In Jesus name I pray.”If you just prayed that prayer and meant it with all your heart, then God will know you as one of His own. You should now seek out others who have also given their lives to Christ, read a Bible daily, and do your best to bring others to Christ.
God bless you.
I don’t know how any of these people will be able to show their face next week.
Previously on DM
If you can’t make the Post-Rapture Party then try the Pre-Rapture Orgy
With thanks to Elizabeth Veldon
This is, of course, appalling but entirely predictable: Conservative Christian hate group “Save California” is starting to make waves with an online advertisement titled “Protect Your Children from Harvey Milk Day in California.”
I’d far rather see children protected from tiresome, ignorant religious fanatics than the memory of a slain civil rights leader…
Three quotes from Harvey Milk:
Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio there is a young gay person who all the sudden realizes that he or she is gay; knows that if their parents find out they will be tossed out of the house, their classmates will taunt the child, and the Anita Bryant’s and John Briggs’ are doing their part on TV. And that child has several options: staying in the closet, and suicide. And then one day that child might open the paper that says “Homosexual elected in San Francisco” and there are two new options: the option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight. Two days after I was elected I got a phone call and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said “Thanks”. And you’ve got to elect gay people, so that thousand upon thousands like that child know that there is hope for a better world; there is hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those who are blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s: without hope the us’s give up. I know that you can’t live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.
All over the country, they’re reading about me, and the story doesn’t center on me being gay. It’s just about a gay person who is doing his job.
We must destroy the myths once and for all. We must continue to speak out and most importantly every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in, and once they realize that we are indeed their children and that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do you will feel so much better.
Why does it bug these people so much to see this man honored? Not only that, Harvey Milk Day, each May 22, falls on the weekend this year. So much for protecting the kids!
I’m always of two minds when it comes to embedding idiotic videos like this, although I do tend to side with the “point and laugh” approach every time! I doubt that many—if any—DM readers would be swayed by what they see in this clip. The thing is, “Save California” can see where their traffic is coming from, so they will see a link to this post in their YouTube user stats and they’ll read it and see themselves as the object of scorn and ridicule. I encourage everyone to let them have it in the comments, because rest assured they will read it. If you want to flag their YouTube clip as “hate speech” you can do it here, where it says “Flag” just above the title.
Harvey Milk is a man who will never be forgotten. No matter what these ultimately impotent hate groups like “Save California” think or what they may say or do, nothing is ever going to change that. It’s called American History and it’s not on their side.
I’d be remiss in my duties as a liberal scold if I didn’t ask the members of “Save California” how they will feel in the future when their own children and grandchildren—who they tried so, uh, valiantly to “protect” from the legacy of a heroic man like Harvey Milk—come to realize what monstrous, hateful, small-minded assholes their parents really are?
The trailer for Rob Epstein’s Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. You can watch the entire film on YouTube here.
Via Joe.My.God
If you can’t wait for the Post-Rapture Party, then why not attend the Pre-Rapture Orgy? Organized by Ammon Kamutef Allred, Karen McCarthy, Matt Riddle, and Felonius Screwtape, who together have started a group page on Facebook inviting all to attend the orgy tomorrow night:
After the Rapture, America is going to be awesome! Universal health-care, gay marriage, easy access to birth control, a progressive tax code and strong environmental regulations.
You don’t want to miss all the fun! Come to our pre-Rapture orgy to make sure that you’ll be here come May 22, 2011.
The Pre-Rapture Orgy takes place Friday 00:00 - Saturday at 00:00, on the “Streets of America, Baby” and no doubt everywhere else, check here for details.
Now for some arbitrary “Rapture” mash-up.
Previously on DM
Post-Rapture Looting Event on Facebook
A 50-year-old auto salvage yard in Maxwell, Nebraska is liquidating hundreds of cars made from the 1940s through the 70s on Sunday, July 17, 2011.
Here’s the auction website.
I don’t want to see these artifacts of a bygone age sent to the metal crusher. I may buy one and use it as a giant planter in my backyard. Yeah, they were once gas guzzling pollution machines, but stripped of their engines, they persist as art.
Via Jalopy Journal
It must be Terry Riley week. How else to explain the sudden emergence of this pristine footage, which I’m sure some smarty-pants will shortly point out to me is actually from some DVD or such, this week along with revelations about the fine composer’s questionable eating habits. Terry Riley’s all night organ and tape loops concerts are the stuff of legend and it’s pretty marvelous to finally have a bit of filmed evidence to gawk at.
Even more interesting is this sadly brief little clip of the quartet of Riley, La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath and Marian Zazeela playing live in Rome. Riley doing a respectable job on the tablas:
And just for good measure and because it sounds great to me at the moment, here is a portion of La Monte Young’s The Second Dream of the HighTension Line Stepdown Transformer for your listening pleasure:
With thanks to Lance Grabmiller
I love how Kirk Cameron has become the de facto “go to” dummy whenever the media needs a kooky comment about something related to Christianity. Like a kicked puppy coming back for more punishment, Cameron is always ready to oblige with his version of a “quip.” Today Cameron told TMZ that Stephen Hawking has nothing to back his claim that there is no Heaven and that it is merely a “fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
“Professor Hawking is heralded as ‘the genius of Britain,’ yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life.”
He adds, “Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking’s writings if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?”
So how does John Lennon fit in to all this? Cameron explains:
“[Hawking] says he knows there is no Heaven. John Lennon wasn’t sure. He said to pretend there’s no Heaven. That’s easy if you try. Then he said he hoped that someday we would join him.”
“Such wishful thinking reveals John and Stephen’s religious beliefs, not good science.”
He’s an actor, so he knows a thing or two about science. It’s settled, then!
Mike Seaver 1, Stephen Hawking 0!
It was about Nuclear War. Of course. What else could it be about? Director Alex Cox on his first major movie, Repo Man. Yes. It was about Nuclear War:
And the demented society that contemplated the possibility thereof. Repoing people’s cars and hating alien ideologies were only the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg itself was the maniac culture which had elected so-called “leaders” named Reagan and Thatcher, who were prepared to sacrifice everything—all life on earth—to a gamble based on the longevity of the Soviet military, and the whims of their corporate masters. J. Frank Parnell - the fictitious inventor of the Neutron Bomb - was the central character for me. He sets the film in motion, on the road from Los Alamos, and, as portrayed by the late great actor, Fox Harris, is the centrepoint of the film.
Alex Cox is cinema’s great wayward genius who has continued to make films against the odds and on ever decreasing budgets. After Repo Man (1984) came his flawed punk biopic on Sid and Nancy (1986), which owed more to Cox’s imagination than fact. But let’s be fair, it’s Cox’s imagination that makes his films so interesting, even when it is demented, as was seen in his 1987 romp, Straight to Hell, which starred Dennis Hopper, Shane MacGowan, Elvis Costello, The Clash and Courtney Love in what was really a semi-autobiographical home movie as comic Spaghetti Western. The film was hated, but not quite as much as his next, the politically weighted Walker (1987), which paralleled the America’s involvement in Nicaragua in the 1800s with American foreign policy in the 1980s:
William Walker was an American soldier of fortune who in 1853 tried to annex part of Mexico to the United States. He failed, though his invasion contributed to the climate of paranoia and violence which led to Mexico surrendering large areas of territory shortly thereafter. Two years later he invaded Nicaragua, ostensibly in support of one of the factions in a civil war. But his real intention was to take over the country and annex it to the U.S. He betrayed his allies and succeeded in making himself President. He ran Nicaragua, or attempted to run it, for two years. In the U.S. he had been an anti-slavery liberal, but in Nicaragua he abandoned all his liberal pretensions and attempted to institute slavery. He was kicked out of Central America by the combined armies of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras.
Walker tried to go back twice and was eventually caught by the Hondurans and executed…
...Walker was made in 1987, in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people. We made it with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks’ outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation. Then, as now, this was not a popular position with certain people in power. But it was the right one.
Denounced by critics and politicians, Walker finished Cox’s Hollywood career - a damn shame, as it is Cox’s masterpiece, a brilliant piece of cinema, that exhibits the kind of intelligence, humor and political film-making Tinsel Town desperately needs.
While Repo Man may be Cox’s best film, it can only be hoped that the future will see Alex Cox given the opportunity to bring his own particular vision to the mainstream, and not tread water with the so-so follow-up Repo Chick (2010), or gimmicks like Repo Pup.
Alex Cox discusses Repo Man here.
Straight to Hell Returns is now available.
Bonus clip of Alex Cox discussing ‘Walker’, after the jump…
NJ.com’s Stan Goldstein reports on the much-maligned, and deservedly so, sculpture of Bruce Springsteen that is on display in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
The bust has been put up as part of what’s called Sculptoure, which is sponsored by the Arts Coalition of Asbury Park (ArtsCAP) and the Shore Institute of Contemporary Arts (SICA).
The five-month long sculpture display will take place in Asbury Park and Long Branch and runs from May 7 until Sept. 11.
According to a story in “The Coaster” an Asbury Park weekly newspaper, the Springsteen sculpture was molded out of cement and done by Princeton trained sculptor Stephen Zorochin.
Stephen, I’m sure you worked hard on this bust, but sorry, it is hideous. Bruce with a red bandana and the nose the size of a ski slope just looks creepy.
The rendering of Springsteen is lacking a certain je ne sais quoi, to put it mildly. It makes the boss look like Abraham Lincoln if Lincoln were in a motorcycle gang.
But even more disturbing to my eye is the artist’s take on Jimi Hendrix (visible behind the Springsteen bust). He looks like Ronald McDonald extruded from the anus of Anubis.
“Scuse me while I eat some fries.”
Via The Daily Swarm
Mad Monster Party
Rankin/Bass were famous for their stop motion Christmas favorites like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman. The film was directed by Jack Bass in their signature “Animagic” process.
Many of the characters in Mad Monster Party
Mad Monster Party