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There’s a Hot Pockets sleeping bag and I don’t know why
04.18.2017
11:15 am
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This is one of those things that exists in the world and I simply do not know why and cannot imagine who would want such an item. (And no, “irony” doesn’t cut it as an excuse because there is none.) Here it is: A Hot Pockets® sleeping bag. According to the description, its “Custom MicroWaav™ insulation system ensures your extremities stay toasty.”

During your next camping trip or marathon gaming session, this Hot Pocket Sleeping Bag will keep you warm and cozy. After the initial 2 minute period to reach maximum internal temperature, the integrated crisping sleeve allows for maximum warmth retention. Our custom MicroWaav™ insulation system ensures your extremities are always toasty while your core stays nice and cool. It’s perfect for backpacking, camping, or couchsurfing.

This is just a guess, but I’d imagine the #1 use for this particular sleeping bag is most assuredly couchsurfing.

Since it’s getting warmer outside and folks are going on camping trips or to festivals, I thought I’d hip you to this bag. No, you won’t look like a total weirdo at all sleeping in this. No one will look twice or think poorly of you, dumbass.

The Hot Pockets® sleeping bag sells for $79.99 over at Think Geek.

Now I have that damned Hot Pockets jingle stuck in my head… 


 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.18.2017
11:15 am
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Classic love and heartbreak songs illustrated in the style of Stephen King horror paperbacks
04.18.2017
10:12 am
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Artist Butcher Billy took iconic love and heartbreak songs and reimagined them as if they were Stephen King horror novels. They’re actually quite amusing and it works, in my opinion. The title of this series is called “Stephen King’s Stranger Love Songs.”

I may never listen to these sappy songs the same way again as I’ll have these horror-like visuals in my head from now on.

Prints and t-shirts of Butcher’s work are available through Redbubble.

A post shared by Butcher Billy (@thebutcherbilly) on

 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.18.2017
10:12 am
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Think Pink: Drool over vintage automotive marvel the ‘Pink Panthermobile’
04.05.2017
11:07 am
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An ad by auction house Robson Kay for ‘The Pink Panther Car’ credited to auto builder and designer Jay Ohrberg.
 
Before I decided to go to an actual (for the most part) college, I had given some thought to attending a vocational school so I could become an automotive mechanic. I was fascinated with cars when I was young and I still am thanks to my dad encouraging my curiosity under the hood. Somewhere along the line, I decided to become a journalism major, but my love of cars—especially Mustangs—has never faded. Which brings me to the topic of this post—a futuristic car constructed in 1969 called the “Panthermobile.”

The origins of the Panthermobile are, from what I can surmise, a bit contested. Many reliable sources point to the legendary car builder and designer Jay Ohrberg as the man responsible for the creation of the Panthermobile. Which is completely reasonable as Ohrberg has created and tricked out many other famous cars like the 1969 Dodge Charger from The Dukes of Hazzard, the DeLoren from Back to the Future and KITT the chatty car from David Hasselhoff’s other boob tube show, Knight Rider just to name a few. A quick visit to Ohrberg’s official site where his creations are cataloged which includes photos of a vehicle referred to as “The Pink Panther” car and also the “Pink Panther Limo.”

There are other sources that credit the great car designer Ed “Newt” Newton, the long-time pal of Rat Fink creator and fellow car designer and hot rod enthusiast Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Together Newton and Roth designed the “Orbitron”—a car comprised of parts of Roth’s 1955 Chevy, some Corvette valve covers, the backside from a 1956 Chevrolet and Lincoln breaks. Just looking at the Orbitron seems to lend more credence to the belief that Ed Newton is, in fact, the brainchild behind the Panthermobile which was built using the body of an Oldsmobile Toronado.

So who exactly came up with the idea for the Panthermobile? According to the book Americas Wildest Show Rods of the 1960s and 1970s authored by respected car historian Scotty Gosson, it appears that the design was conceived by Ed Newton and was then given to Bob Reisner of The Pink Panther Show.  Reisner then handed it off to a small team led by bonafide car legend and the inventor of the covetable “candy apple red” paint color Joe Bailon (aka “Candy-Apple Joe”) to build. This theory is also documented in the book by David Fetherston, Show Car Dreams. Now that’s some Scooby-Doo-style investigative reporting for you, Jack.
 

A shot of the impossibly cool interior of the Panthermobile.
 
The car itself was, of course, various shades of pink in and out and measured a whopping 23-feet in length. Behind the pink cockpit of the car lies a sick seven-litre engine and then something sexy called the “Pleasure Capsule.” This part of the Panthermobile lives up to its name as it is tricked out with a bar; pink satin upholstery; pink shag carpet; an old school pink push button phone and seats already in the recline position. It was also equipped with a little black and white television and a camera that allowed the driver to spy on the party going on in the back. The car was featured in a live-action intro for The Pink Panther Show cartoon during its very first season in 1969 which showed the car rolling through the streets of LA on its way to Mann’s Chinese Theatre, despite the fact that the Panthermobile never was, and probably still isn’t, street legal.

The Panthermobile was sold at an auction in 2007 for a cool $143,500. By 2011 the car had fallen into disrepair when it made another appearance at an auction in England where it was purchased by Galpin Auto Sports (who also credit Newton with the creation of the vehicle) in Los Angeles. The engine was toast, the interior of the car was a mess and the pink paint on the exterior of the car had been updated on more than a few occasions. Galpin’s restoration was so spot-on it is almost as though the Panthermobile had just emerged from some sort of super-secret hermetically sealed garage from the early 70s. I’ve posted a load of photos of the original Panthermobile and the new and improved Panthermobile below for you to check out.
 

The original Panthermobile.
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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04.05.2017
11:07 am
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A musical tour of Osaka’s Expo ‘70: Beautiful time capsule of futuristic design
04.05.2017
09:39 am
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Osaka Show 1970 was a hour-long musical produced by Valerio Lazarov for TVE (the national television station in Spain). It featured its countries biggest pop stars at the time: Massiel, Karina, Julio Iglesias and Miguel Ríos singing, strolling and galavanting through the amazing, colorful, awe-inspiring grounds of Expo ‘70 in Suita, Osaka, Japan. The TV special serves as a beautiful time capsule of the Metabolist movement. With a groundbreaking masterplan by Kenzo Tange and his team of a dozen Japanese architects, they successfully turned the expo park into a modern city with radical, urban design concepts which envisioned sea, sky, and space as future sites for human habitats.

The theme of Expo 70 was “Progress and Harmony for Mankind” and over 78 countries participated. As these Spanish pop stars take you on a utopian tour through the various pavilions you’ll see no shortage of incredible architecture, design, sculptures, waterfalls, skyways, modern furniture, roller coasters, monorails, animatronics, mirrored glass, domes, and people movers. Kenzo’s Tower of the Sun building which also served as the symbol of Expo ‘70 stands larger than life, Willy Walter’s Switzerland Pavilion illuminates with over 32,000 glass bulbs, while amazing details inside the pavilions are seemingly endless: The “Fuji Symphoni Toron” for example demonstrates a robot operated organ that could have served as the centerpiece of your living room today.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Doug Jones
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04.05.2017
09:39 am
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Iconic Raymond Chandler covers: The Complete Philip Marlowe Novels
03.27.2017
10:31 am
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Thankfully Raymond Chandler was a lousy poet.

Chandler started writing after he was fired from his job with the Dabney Oil Syndicate. He was vice president of the company. Made no difference. He was fired after spending too many days sitting in his swivel chair, foot-dangling, fooling around with his secretary and getting loaded. His alcoholism and absenteeism led to his dismissal. It was 1932. America was in a deep depression. Chandler was in his mid-forties. He had no money, no prospects, a worrying taste for liquor and an invalid wife to support. Chandler later said, there is nothing like losing your money to find out who your friends really are.

Chandler found out he had none.

That was when he made his most radical, most insane, and most important decision of his life. He decided to become a writer.

Chandler had picked up on the Black Mask detective fiction magazine. He read it and thought maybe he could write pulp fiction too. Chandler had once wanted to be a poet. It took him time but he eventually realized he was a poor poet. His poesy had too much verbiage, too much thinking and not enough doing. How different things could have been for 20th century American literature had Raymond Chandler stuck to writing verse.

Chandler decided he had better learn how to write. He signed up for classes in short story writing. He got an “A.”  He studied Erle Stanley Garner by copying out his stories to learn how they were constructed. He read Dashiell Hammett. He read Hemingway. He wrote pastiches of them all.

Hemingway, Hammett, and Garner taught Chandler how to cut the slack in his writing. He later claimed it took him two years to learn how to have a character leave a room or take his hat off. Simple writing, he discovered, was exceedingly difficult. His experiences writing short detective fiction for Black Mask taught Chandler everything.

After five years with Black Mask, Chandler wanted to move on. He knew his short stories were just thumbnail sketches for a much greater work. In the summer of 1938, Chandler spent five months writing The Big Sleep. It was the first of seven novels featuring his hardboiled private eye Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe was a composite of all the other private detectives Chandler had written. He plundered his back catalog lifting plots and storylines from his Black Mask stories. The Big Sleep used plot lines from earlier stories like “Killer in the Rain” (1935) and “The Curtain” (1936). Chandler was more interested in creating atmosphere than just writing plots. His novels were not whodunnits? but rather “whydunnits?” How Marlowe responded to each story was as important as solving the crime. Everything was refracted through Marlowe. It was a new way of writing detective fiction, one that changed everything—and one that would inevitably lead to the Gonzo writing of Hunter S. Thompson where the narrator is as important as the story he is telling.

I dug Chandler from the day I pulled The Lady in the Lake off the library shelf. Chandler hipped me to a world of action and a style of writing that changed my life. I eventually bought up all the Marlowe stories I could afford. Then through time and foolishness, lost them all again. Before Christmas last year, I picked up a boxed set of the complete Philip Marlowe novels. They were the same set of green-spined Penguins I had first started reading way back when I thought these the coolest books I had ever seen. Designed by James Tormey, the covers used colorized stills from original 1940’s Marlowe movies featuring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Robert Montgomery, and Dick Powell.

About a decade ago, I snapped up another set of Penguin Marlowes, this time with iconic, minimalist covers by Steven Marking. Both sets of covers are cool but the contents will always be best.
 
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See more classic Raymond Chandler covers, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.27.2017
10:31 am
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A Marilyn Monroe-themed house is up for sale and it’s batshit crazy-looking
03.22.2017
09:41 am
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A shot of the living room in the Marilyn Monroe-themed house in Dublin currently up for sale.
 
If your dream has ever been to move to Ireland and live in a house that was once owned by Marilyn Monroe’s number one fan, then you may finally get to live out that very strange and oddly specific fantasy. Nearly every wall of the 1,200 square foot, three-bedroom, one bathroom house at 44 Harelawn Drive in Clondalkin, Dublin is covered in images of Marilyn and has been painted in blinding pop-art style colors.

To say that the home is tasteless would be an understatement—just looking at the photos included in the listing nearly gave me a seizure. And everywhere I look, I see Marilyn’s famous mug looking right back at me. According to the listing, the decor inside this little slice of heaven is described as “quirky.” But since the home is located so close to the pleasant-sounding Liffey Valley Shopping Centre, I’m sure someone will express interest in making this their new digs. But will they keep this zany decor? And while it may seem like a deal to some people, the current asking price is around $230,000 USD (or €185,000). I’ve posted images of the Marilyn Monroe house of horrors below.
 

The plain, rather normal looking exterior of the Marilyn Monroe house.
 

This room is purple. Very, very purple.
 

The stairway leading to the second floor of the Marilyn house.
 
More Marilyn after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.22.2017
09:41 am
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Sit on my face cushions
03.02.2017
08:44 am
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If you’ve more money than sense or suffer from acute separation anxiety or maybe just want a self-referential talking point that lets all your friends know just how fun and wacky you really are then you may want to consider splurging on a cushion with your face or the face of a loved one printed on it.

The Mushion is (apparently) the must have homeware accessory for the urban young and chic. It’s a service run by Firebox, where you simply “upload a good clear picture of the faces you desire” and let have them transformed into “distorted and squishy cushions for you to do with as you please.”

To do with as you please?

The cushions are seven inches in width by eleven inches in length. They come in single, couples or (fnarr-fnarr) threesomes...with at a cost of about twenty bucks a pop—-or around $36 for three.

So, if you want to sit on your own or your loved one’s face then do head over to Firebox for details.

Mush, by the way, is a Cockney slang word for face—via the Romany for friend.
 
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H/T Bessie Graham and Ufunk.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.02.2017
08:44 am
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Beautiful panoramic Cubist drawings of China’s urbanized landscape
02.20.2017
08:53 am
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Panorama of Tuan Jie Hu.
 
I spent twenty minutes looking for Waldo but was too overawed by the sheer magnificence of these panoramic drawings that I gave up looking for the stripy little fucker.

Not that I would have ever found him in these stunning, breathtaking, incredible, ___ [fill in the blank with your own adjective] architectural drawings of Beijing’s downtown districts. These massive, painstakingly created drawings are the work of artists/architects at the Drawing Architecture Studio, China. The images form part of their Urbanized Landscape Series.

Awesome, aren’t they?

Just take a look at the panorama drawing above (and its details below) of Tuan Jie Hu—“old residential area located by the East 3rd Ring Road in Beijing”—which “vividly depicts the views from the daily life in this busy local community.”

At the same time, the piece also shows some new exploration in architectural drawing techniques. Some 45-degree axis from different directions allow the viewers to constantly change their viewpoints, which is like a Cubism painting.

The Drawing Architecture Studio was founded by architect Li Han and designer Hu Yan in Beijing. Their intention is to offer a “creative platform integrating architecture, art, design, urban study, pop culture, and aiming to explore the new models for the creation of contemporary urban culture.”

Sounds good to me. They also sell a variety of products which you check out here. Click on the images below for a closer look.
 
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Detail of Tuan Jie Hu panorama.
 
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More gorgeous panoramic maps of downtown Beijing, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.20.2017
08:53 am
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Stark war memorials of Yugoslavia
02.17.2017
11:04 am
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The Stone Flower, a structure known as a “spomenik” located in Jasenovac, Croatia. Built in 1966, it commemorates the thousands of victims who were executed during World War II at the Jasenovac forced labor and extermination camp which operated on this very location by the river Sava.

To be honest, there is about a zero percent chance that I will ever travel to any of the countries of the former Soviet Union. Which is a shame since I really, really love vodka. However, if I did ever venture to that part of the world I would make it a point to attempt to see at least a few of the haunting sculptures or “spomeniks” that were erected all over what was formerly called Yugoslavia. These stone architectural marvels are meant to serve as grim reminders of those who fought and died in various military events that took place during significant battles, involving among other things resistance operations meant to repel the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s.

Most of the structures were built in the late 60s. One of the most striking is the Monument to the Revolution which is located in Podgarić, Berek. The futuristic-looking sculpture was built by Croatian sculptor Dušan Džamonja and still stands as a memorial to the citizens of Moslavina who died while resisting the German forces during WWII. Others appear to be channeling the architectural design directly from 1976 and the film Logan’s Run—which is perhaps yet another reason I find them so compelling to look at. 

While they are quite beautiful to behold, it’s critical to understand the meaning behind the monuments that serve as a reminder of time much more daunting than what we are being faced with right now. As well as the fact that those who do not remember the past—specifically the numerous historical examples in Yugoslavia that saw the people adapt to authoritarian regimes—will likely allow such events to repeat themselves. Many of the images of notable spomeniks in this post were taken by famed Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers and are the featured in his 2005 book, Spomenik. If you’re interested in learning more about the history behind the spomeniks, I would recommend spending some time at the extensively detailed online resource, the Spomenik Database.
 

A set of sculptures that stand in Bubanj Memorial Park built by Petar Kristic. Located on a hill in Niš, it marks the location where more than ten thousand Serbian people were systematically executed by German forces.
 

“Bulgaria’s UFO,” the Buzludzha monument. Designed by Georgi Stoilov, the monument officially opened in 1981 on the top of Mount Buzludzha which was also the infamous site of the last stand between Bulgarian rebels and the Ottoman Empire in 1868.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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02.17.2017
11:04 am
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Territorial Pissing: The 19th century public urinals of Paris
02.10.2017
09:14 am
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A man entering a public urinal or ‘pissoir’ at Place Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, Paris, 1875.
 
The photos in this post were taken by one of the most notable and gifted photographers of the nineteenth century, Charles Marville. So revered was Marville in his native France that he was chosen by the city of Paris to document the changing city, especially landmarks that were built by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann who had been tasked with the job of giving Paris a makeover of sorts. According to details found in Haussmann’s biography, he was also responsible for the introduction of new and improved water supply and drainage for the overcrowded city in an effort to remove “foul odors” from the streets. Which brings me back to Marville’s fascinating photos of public urinals—or as they were called during this time period pissiors—that were located all around Paris during the late 1800s and well into the turn-of-the-century.

The pissoirs were conceived in 1834 by Claude-Philibert Barthelot, Comte de Rambuteau—a French official who pioneered and implemented improvements to the existing sewer system in Paris. Barthelot was convinced that the poor, unhealthy conditions of the streets were directly correlated to a massive cholera outbreak in 1832. However, it would be Haussmann that would be instrumental in helping install pissoirs of varying styles and sizes all around Paris, which helped confine the stench of urine that before their arrival was overwhelming the city. Thanks to Marville’s camera lens, this transformative time in Paris was beautifully chronicled in his photographs.

Most of the pissoirs that Marville photographed are quite beautiful despite their lowly utilitarian purpose, while others are not much more than a slab of carved concrete for Parisian men to relieve themselves on instead of a wall. At one time approximately 1,200 pissoirs stood around Paris and according to some the more private varieties were also used during WWII as places to discuss private matters without worrying if a Nazi was eavesdropping on you (or perhaps this was just what the men who frequented them told their wives?) By the time the 60s arrived, the city of lights had begun the process of removing its pissoirs, and only one still stands in the city on Boulevard Arago near the intersection of Rue de la Santé. Photos of Paris’ elegant pissoirs follow.
 

Boulevard Sébastopol 1875.
 

A large, elegant pissoir located at Champs-Élysées 1874.
 
More period pissoirs of Paris after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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02.10.2017
09:14 am
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