Here’s security camera footage of a nun—dressed in a traditional habit stealing beer (and some Four Loko?) from a convenience store. If she even is a nun, and not just a clever grifter disguised as a nun, because everyone knows that nuns don’t shoplift. Whatever the case may be, she’s a dangerous mind, indeed…
Via Geekologie
A creeptastic photo from the Miss Lovely Eyes Contest in Florida, circa 1930s.
And speaking of Hannibal Lechter, readers who live in Los Angeles should go to see the hilarious new play Silence! The Musical (the unauthorized parody of The Silence of the Lambs), now playing at the Hayworth Theatre on Wilshire Blvd.
Via Retronaut
I dig these handmade unscented brain candles—suspended in gel wax—from Think Geek. Even though they’re being marketed as Halloween décor, I think they’d be a fun accent all year around.
Each brain candle is $19.99.
Via Technabob
Devil’s Harvest - now that’s a damned fine name for a good smoke.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
This is Your Brain on Marijuana
With thanks to Edna Bakewell (Mrs.) via Suicide Blonde
In 1943, Groucho Marx wrote a letter to U.S. troops stationed in Suriname in 1943 in a gesture of solidarity. It’s quite funny and the mention of marijuana in 1943 proves Groucho was a head of his time.
GROUCHO MARX
August 18, 1943.
Dear Corporal Darrow,
You asked me if I have a message for the soldiers in the jungle. I could probably send one but it would be collect and would only run into money. I imagine it’s difficult enough to stay awake on those lonely islands without having to read messages from me.
I don’t want you to worry much about the 4-Fs back home—true, we have been deprived of a few things but nothing of any importance. We don’t get much meat any more—the butcher shops have nothing in them but customers. Fortunately, I don’t rely on the stores for my vegetables. Last spring I was smart enough to plant a Victory garden. So far, I have raised a family of moles, enough snails to keep a pre-French restaurant running for a century and a curious looking plant that I have been eating all summer under the impression that it was a vegetable. However, for the past few weeks, I’ve had difficulty in remaining awake and this morning I discovered that I had been munching on marijuana the whole month of July.
Anyhow, we miss all you boys (I have a son in the Coast Guard) and we wish you were all back again raising hell and children. We are doing what little we can to further the war effort—we buy bonds, play service camps and short-wave broadcasts to our soldiers on the foreign fronts. We drive carefully, we take no vacations and, in general, do what we can. God knows it’s little enough. We all know that you boys are doing the real job.In closing, all I can say is good luck, God bless you all and hurry home—remember, America is pretty empty without you kids.
Yours,
(Signed, ‘Groucho’)”
Via Letters Of Note
A few of you emailed me wondering why I didn’t weigh in with my 2 cents on the debate and it was simply because I was aghast at what I saw. And just so there is no confusion, I saw a bravura performance from a lying plutocrat shitbag who will do or say anything to win the election and a shockingly listless Barack Obama who could barely seem to rouse himself out of a Valium stupor long enough to babble for a moment or two.
Then I watched the media report on how Romney had won the debate—it looked that way to me—but never mentioning that he blatantly lied about everything. It was also covered so thoroughly on every nook and cranny of the Internet by folks who were apparently left less slack-jawed than I was, so I saw no point. To be honest, this election can’t be over fast enough to suit me. I’m bored by it and sick to death of writing about it. Enough already.
Still that didn’t keep me from being curious about what Jon Stewart would have to say…
Mayonnaise “artisans”!
There is an artisanal mayonnaise shop in Brooklyn. I know I hate this—and believe me, my hate is pure—but I’m not actually sure why.
I delight in unexpected foods. I like nice things, and I like mayonnaise. I like bahn mi and euro-style fries and even the classic turkey sandwich. But it does represent something very generic, doesn’t it? Mayonnaise, I mean. Or am I besmirching a noble condiment out of hand, motivated by my own prejudices?
Maybe it’s political. I could be put off by the standard mayonnaise archetype—a wholesome Hellmann’s jar gracing the tables of 1950s suburban middle-class households
Maybe my objection is feminist. There is the mythos of a condiment once fine, now ubiquitous to every insipid kitchen, making a mockery of traditionally feminine labor with its diminishing quality. What was once a delicate combination of oil and water, a volatile emulsion requiring expertise to produce, now only evokes the vulgar industrial tubs of my food service days. Mass produced mayo was meant to simplify, save time and enrich the lives of women, like the vacuum cleaner. But with the vacuum cleaner came the standard of wall-to-wall carpeting—slightly differentiated dull labor and a more stringent barometer of cleanliness. Have our innovations in modern domesticity only made domestic life that much more banal and disaffected, haunting us like some sort of technocratic Betty Friedan nightmare?
Or is it a cultural issue with these people? These… mayonnaise people. Have I assumed their pretension too harshly? Did I falsely detect a sense of irony so thick they don’t even know when they’re kidding anymore? Why do I assume they aren’t earnest in their love of mayonnaise? They look like nice people.
Why would I hate the mayonnaise artisans? I mean, hey, I’ve often waxed affectionate over the esoteric intellectual motivations of my dearest friends. My favorite people always have some sort of strange specialty; one friend with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1980s queercore punk rock, another a talented typesetter, passionate over fonts. How does artisanal mayo inspire such ire, while the relentless academic pursuit of a near-forgotten Marxist inspires such tenderness? Could I ever become endeared to these people, as I am endeared to my dearest of comrades? Could I really see them, as lovely to me as my own loved ones, who know every Richard Pryor routine by heart, or who would stirringly lecture you about art nouveau toilets?
No. I could not. Because it’s artisanal mayonnaise, and I have my limits.
When you work on a blog, you have to deal with the occupational hazard of Internet trolls on a daily, even hourly, basis. Being told how fat, old, ugly, ignorant, that you’re “on Obama’s payroll” and stupid shit like that throughout the day gets old really fast. Moderating the Disqus thread in the morning means you take your coffee with a nice slice of invective, even for the most innocuous things (like the idiot I banned who reacted to me posting a Neil Sedaka video—Neil fucking Sedaka!—as if I was the biggest fool on the planet, that my shitty taste in music had made me the goat boy laughingstock of the entire Internet, etc., etc. Why all the hate for Neil Sedaka, buddy? Forget your meds that day?).
In any case, this morning, I happened upon an especially inane string of LOL moments courtesy of a YouTube comment thread supposedly about the nearly forgotten early 70s British prog band Atomic Rooster (former members of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown).
What do any of these comments have to do Atomic Rooster? Nothing, not a blessed thing:
These comments reminded me of Brit wit Adam Buxton’s recent series on Sky HD in the UK, Adam Buxton’s Bug. Bug is ostensibly a show about music videos, but the music videos themselves are really just an excuse to give Buxton a reason to do his hilariously droll comic readings of YouTube comment threads. Here he is reading the thread for Die Antwoord’s “Enter the Ninja” video:
After the jump, the Atomic Rooster clip for “Devil’s Answer” that begat all this silliness…
Colbert on the “Thrilla Between Chocolate and Vanilla”:
“On day one, our new president must be able to face Iran’s leader and ask him if the place where he bought that shirt also has a men’s department.”
