Here’s an amusing Vulcan baby planter by Etsy seller Clayflower22. It’s kind of fun for $22.00. I also really like the Baby Val sugar bowl.
On Sunday 7th March 2010, British artistic duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard will present their elaborate performance piece, Silent Sound, live at Middlesbrough Town Hall. From the artists’ statement:
“In 2006 we conceived and presented a project called Silent Sound. It was commissioned by A Foundation and was presented as a live performance in St. George’s Hall during the Liverpool Biennial and a 3 month long exhibition at Greenland Street. The work features an original score by J. Spaceman (from the band Spiritualized) and was introduced on the night by Dr. Ciaran O’Keeffe from Living TV’s ‘Most Haunted’
Silent Sound is conceived as an otherworldly experiment using controversial mind control technology to transmit a subliminal message during a live music performance. The new composition for the project by J. Spaceman is designed to carry the subliminal message. Silent Sound sets out to warp your perception and stage a remarkable experience loaded with potential which intensifies your experience of being in the here-and-now. Drawing on the powerful psychological set-up of 19th century Spiritualist public performances and inspired by Victorian entertainers The Davenport Brothers who were famed for attempting to contact the souls of the dead using their ‘spirit cabinet’, we will perform inside our own specially created soundproof cabinet. From the stage inside this cabinet we will repeatedly broadcast a spoken ‘message’, this signal is fed into our custom-made Silent Sound machine, which subliminally embeds the message within the music and transmits it throughout the entire duration of the performance.”
“Part classical concert and part public séance” as the AV Festival website says, the score for this, as you can tell from the video below, is absolutely gorgeous. Jason Pierce from Spiritualized will be playing live with the orchestra at the event.
Kenneth Anger will also be appearing at the AV Festival.
Above: Close up of the trichomes on a marijuana plant.
As the marijuana movement continues to grow and mature, new products and businesses are popping up to service the burgeoning industry. This is the historical moment analogous to the time when Prohibition was abolished and the bootleggers turned into companies we know today, like Jim Beam.
Another sign of changing times:
A Rancho Cordova-based insurer Monday launched what it calls the first nationally available insurance coverage designed specifically for the medical marijuana industry.
Only 14 states allow use of medical marijuana today, but Statewide Insurance Services is nonetheless offering coverage in all 50 states.
“Given the growth in the industry, I think it’s only a matter of time” before other states allow medical marijuana, said Mike Aberle, a commercial insurance agent with the local firm and national director of its Medical Marijuana Specialty Division. He added: “Now that we can offer (services) in all 50 states, we can start the minute they go legal, without delay.”
Aberle said the nationwide program covers “all aspects of the industry,” including medical marijuana dispensaries (MMDs for short), workers’ compensation, general liability, auto insurance (motor vehicles used to transport product), equipment breakdown/damage, property/product loss (including pot spoilage) and operations related to marijuana growing.
The door for dispensaries and commercial insurers opened in 1996, when California voters approved Proposition 215, which allows physicians to recommend cannabis for treatment of cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraines or “any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.”
Rancho Cordova-based insurer launches medical marijuana coverage (The Sacramento Bee)
Diogenes the Cynic roamed about around ancient Greece with a lantern searching for an honest man. But that was then and this is now. At the University of Montreal a group of scientists searched for men who had never looked at porn, but were unable to locate a single one!
“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.”
Although hampered in its original aim, the study did examine the habits of those young men who used pornography – which would appear to be all of them.
Prof Lajeunesse interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consumed pornography, and found on average, they first watched pornography when they were 10 years old.
All men watch porn, scientists find (Telegraph)
I’m trying to understand why Final Placement‘s people keep having everything FP related removed from the webernets (only to have it pop back up someplace else, pronto). Perhaps the same magical thinking that caused them to make the video in the first place is now causing them to believe they can make it all go away. I think they should take their own advice :
this is your life
this is your time
it’ll be alright
you’re gonna shine
a second chance
a brand new day
don’t give up
you’ll find a way
so take a deep breath
and close your eyes
this is your life
you’re gonna shine
cause this is your life
Let’s face it, with all of the many, many entertainment choices we have facing us, every minute of every single day, when it comes to the matter of what we choose to give our precious attention to, music videos tend to rank pretty low on the totem pole. There’s probably a pretty compelling reason MTV is no longer calling itself a “music” channel. So ‘80s, isn’t it? A three-minute music video? Who has the time?
So when you hear about some “cool” new music video — maybe your tweeps told you about it — it had, well, better be good. Chicago-based indie rockers OK Go know this. Their 2006 video, Here It Goes Again, featuring the group doing a synchronized dance routine on treadmills, has been viewed by about 50 million people, so the follow-up had, well, better be good too.
Trust me, it’s great. I could describe for you the Rube Goldberg-inspired centerpiece of the new This Too Shall Pass video, but since their record company finally relented and allowed the piece to be embedded (I mean, what was that all about?), you can simply press play and see for yourself.
Engineered with help from CalTech and MIT, and built by Syyn Labs, the video — and its kinetic sculpture centerpiece — is nothing short of astonishing. Like its predecessor, it’s bound to snag all kinds of kudos and awards. This Friday, March 5, in LACMA’s West Penthouse, OK Go will be having a video release party, where I’m sure they’ll spill some of the secrets of how this mini-masterpiece came to be. If you can’t make the LACMA party, there are some videos on the OK Go website that will enlighten you.
A prank phone call made by British author and comedian Robert Popper apparently fooled a few of the British dailies, including The Telegraph, The Sun and (sort of) The Financial Times. Popper, who makes crank calls and puts them on his website, called talk radio station LBC and pretended to be a woman who had seen Gordon Brown throw a tangerine into a laminating machine during a temper tantrum. The hoax was reported as true in The Telegraph and The Sun. The Financial Times also published a blog post on their website, stating that the call was probably a hoax and have since issued a follow-up confirming this.
Here’s an abridged version of what happened, written by Popper himself on the BBC Comedy blog:
Last Monday I decided to do one of my silly and—admittedly—childish phone calls under the guise of my Timewaster Letters character, Robin Cooper.
So I switched on LBC (a London talk radio station) where the topic was Gordon Brown’s alleged bad temper. I called up and got through almost instantly. “What do you want to talk about?” asked the LBC operator. Without time to think I replied, “Gordon Brown visited my place of work and lost his temper right in front of me.” Very soon I was on air, explaining how Gordon Brown had toured my workshop - a “lamination factory”—and thrown a tangerine into one of the machines, breaking it, before calling a member of staff a “citric idiot.” It was all I could think of at the time. A load of nonsense. But I was quite proud of the phrase, “citric idiot.”
Anyway, skip forward to Friday night. It’s midnight. I’m lying in bed when I get a message on twitter that the tangerine story had been mentioned on BBC Two’s The Bubble. I clicked on iPlayer and fourteen minutes in, I see the brilliant David Mitchell telling his guests that Gordon Brown had allegedly thrown a tangerine into a lamination machine.
What?! I immediately stuck my phone call up on my site (I’d animated it with my crap drawings), mentioning how it had been picked up on The Bubble. Very soon someone tweeted saying that they’d read about the tangerine incident in the Financial Times. And there was a link! Within seconds, someone else added that it had been in The Telegraph, with the headline: “Gordon Brown accused of throwing a tangerine.” The article went on to say, “One of the factory workers told The Sun Mr. Brown became angry and threw a tangerine he was holding into a laminating machine.”
But my favorite part was when a Hong Kong news agency, which had previously, and bizarrely, animated various incidents of the Brown bullying story, animated my story as well. There it was in black and orange: a sort of man throwing a tangerine into a machine. I laughed so hard, I almost puked my lungs onto my legs. To think that 6000 miles away, a news director in a Hong Kong office had actually instructed one of his animators to show the British Prime Minister throwing a tangerine into a lamination machine. Did the animator have to google ‘lamination machines’ for reference? Actually, the tangerine and the machine looked pretty good, but the factory resembled a sort of over-sized torture chamber.
Popper goes on to write that only the Financial Times was suspicious of the prank, but added “[...] to The Sun and The Telegraph, I just want to let you know that I have another amazing story of the time David Cameron visited the very same factory, and threw a carton of milk into the very same machine, before calling the very same factory worker a “lactic imbecile.”
Via Xeni Jardin/Boing Boing; cross posting this from Brand X
Autechre are one of the most consistently interesting and uncompromising electronic music outfits around and new output from them is always an event. At the moment they’re doing a 12 hour live broadcast from their site, so hop on over ! Oversteps
1923 is one of two new animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage. 1923 is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from 1923.
