Photographer Michael Jang snapped these glorious photos in 1983 of people auditioning for the weather reporter position at a local TV station in San Francisco.
The series is called Summer Weather.
More after the jump…
Another election year installment of David Rees’ “Get Your War On.”
Mitt Romney gets the Lucille Bluth treatment on the website Lucille and Mitt. How appropriate.
Via Poor Mojo
An extremely odd ode to Pac-Man, I must say!
One question though: Why is Pac-Man so small? The proportions are all wrong.
Via Geekologie
Not exactly what I’d want in my mouth (and over my face) if I was getting high, but horses for courses.
Thanks to Rutch Dudder, by way of Grizz.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters traveled to England on their bus ‘Further’ in 1996, where they were interviewed by Rene Akker for this short video, in which Kesey explained part of The Pranksters’ philosophy:
“We stumble along and bumble along, and pretty soon, more and more stuff begins to stumble along and bumble along with us, until we’ve got a great group of stumble-bummers…
...You just don’t want to be entertained. If you want to be entertained, you’ve got MTV. But people want to feel part of a ritual, they want to be out there doing something with people. They want to sing and dance and make dance and they feel their input has some effect.”
Beautiful to see and hear the wonderful Mr. Kesey again.
Here’s something for casual Bowie fans and die hards alike. In fact, it doesn’t really matter if you are a fan or not, this is guaranteed to brighten up your autumn Monday blues.
Bowie’s pre-1970s career is rife for re-evaluation I reckon, and I think this is as good a place as any to start.
Love You Till Tuesday is a half-hour show-reel of Bowie and a couple of his compatriots performing his songs in a bare TV studio. It was recorded in 1969 at the behest of his manager Kenneth Pitt, and was due to be shown on German TV with some of the sections re-dubbed from English. Unfortunately it never aired, though it does contain the original promo clip for “Space Oddity” you may have seen, erm, floating around.
But really, none of that is too important. The thing is… it’s really fucking funny.
The film’s opening promo, to accompany the song “Love You Till Tuesday,” is like an exquisite distillation of everything that made the late 60s so kitsch.
Just look at little David flopping onto a pillow in the campest imaginable way, while boasting that he will love you for TWO WHOLE DAYS! Try not to think of Austin Powers. it’s pretty hard. There’s a big lol at 1:44, and the music itself is like something from a shitty 70s English sex-comedy, or perhaps one of those racist, unfunny sitcoms people were so fond of back then.
Sadly, David, this is much more Robin Askwith than Anthony Newley.
You don’t have to watch all of this film for the funzies, just the first 4 minutes. But if you care to watch on, there are some good tunes, including the very Kinksy “Rubber Band,” and a mid-section mime performance about a mask.
Well, it was the swinging Sixties, after all:
World, meet Rachel. Rachel explains to interviewer Sam Roberts why she’s waiting in line for an iPhone 5 on 5th Avenue in Manhattan “for no apparent reason.”
In the YouTube description, it’s stressed:
“This woman is not a plant, she is a real person, and she is brilliant.”
I’ll bet she’s an undecided voter, what do you think?
Via Boing Boing
Dave Hartnett the recently retired Permanent Secretary for Tax at HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is a controversial—some might say “scumbag”—career civil servant with a reputation for cutting sweet, sweet tax deals for the likes of Goldman-Sachs and Vodafone, allowing these entities to escape billions of pounds of British taxes. Articles in Private Eye and The Guardian newspaper exposed how these sweetheart deals went down.
Hartnett calls his negotiating skills—which, among other things, have cost the Treasury tens of millions of pounds in interest that Goldman Sachs should have paid dating back to 2002 because he waived them without even consulting with HMRC laywers—“non-confrontational” and “collaborative”!
Via The Telegraph:
Mr Hartnett was giving a speech at New College Oxford on Thursday when a group calling themselves WeAreTheIntruders, posing as employees of Goldman Sachs and Vodafone, interrupted to present him with a bouquet of flowers and the “Lifetime Achievement Award to Corporate Tax Planning”, otherwise known as the “Golden Handshake”.
HMRC was accused of agreeing controversial “sweetheart” deals with large businesses over outstanding tax bills while it was still run by Mr Hartnett. The issue exploded last year after a whistleblower revealed that HMRC had waived as much as £20m of interest on a £30m tax bill owed by Goldmans on bankers’ bonuses. It was also accused of letting Vodafone off as much as £8bn in taxes by accepting a £1.25bn settlement.
I wholeheartedly approve of things like this. but I just wish they’d have presented this bastard with the “Golden Shiv Award” right in his fucking rib-cage…
