Greg Martin Auctions is offering this beautiful vampire killing kit. A perfect Christmas gift for the vampire hunter in your life.
Extremely rare antique ivory vampire killing kit, consisting of an ornate ivory-mounted Christian cross integrating a steel, spring-loaded, .41 caliber single-shot percussion pistol, the center mounted with an ebony shield surmounted with a 8-pointed crown, the tips made from tiny semi-precious red stones. A ruby red five-pointed star adorns the center. The vampire pistol is contained in an ivory case, together with steel dagger blade which attaches to the end of the cross, an ivory cleaning rod, ivory powder bottle, and cap and ball supply. The entire case is made from fine elephant ivory and each element is engraved with letters representing the contents. According to consignor, this was reportedly one of four matching kits. By tradition, this example was brought back from Germany after WWII by one Sergeant Glen Pendelton who liberated it from a German museum in Berlin. A rare and very unique firearms curiosa.
Size: 4-3/4” X 3-5/8” X 1-5/8”.
Condition: Very good. One small ivory lid missing. Light wear and patina overall. Crown missing two stones.
Estimate: $4,500 - $6,500”
Lance Lund, a professor at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, is gonna show you how to royally fuck up with Sulfur Hexafluoride. Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth has nothin’ on Professor Lance Lund. Nothin’.
Oh, and if you’re curious, there’s a splendid remix here.
People of the great city of Los Angeles, can I have your attention for a moment? Our friends at Cinefamily have set up a Kickstarter fundraiser for what looks to be a very engaging and worthwhile—to say nothing of innovative—new educational program they’re supporting in conjunction with local high school, Fairfax High. They’re only trying to raise $1500 and your donations gets you all kinds of goodies, including one month CInefamily passes!
Just this fall, Cinefamily launched a program to support the curriculum of our neighbor Fairfax High, with screenings that relate to what the kids are learning in school! The first time we had the kids over (to see NETWORK to get pumped for their Speech and Debate class—it worked), we donated 100% of the cost of the program, and our employees worked on a volunteer basis.
This time, because it’s a two-day program, and we, like most non-profits, are on a tight budget—we’re only able to foot half of the $3000 cost. We need your help with the rest of this ambitious event:
We’re teaching 200 students about careers in film as part of their Life Skills class! First, we’ll show them a curated selection of behind-the-scenes docs. Then, entertainment industry professionals of every field from TV writer, to hair and makeup, to the guy that wrote WATCHMEN, to a dude that blows things up, will participate in a panel moderated by Cinefamily board member and A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE screenwriter Josh Olson, and answer kids’ questions!
Help us bring this awesome program to fruition: visit our Kickstarter page to help—and get kickass rewards, like handmade Cinefamily pins, one-month passes, schwag, posters—or, we’ll even program your Netflix queue! The deadline for donations is tomorrow (Wednesday) at noon—act now, and pass it on!
I wish there had been something like this in my school. Maybe I’d have turned up more often…
Senator Bernie Sanders (VT), the only socialist (not a “top Democrat” as the clip indicates) member of the US Senate tells it like it is. A must see-clip. I agree with him 2000%. About time someone said this. What the fuck is wrong with this country?
“Millionaires and billionaires do not need huge tax deductions, that’s the simple truth. If we’re serious about creating jobs in this country, which should be our main priority, that’s one worst way to do it. Much better to take that money, invest in our roads, bridges, railroad systems, infrastructure—you create jobs doing that.”
“Our Republican friends have got to be held accountable. The issue is the insult, the outrage that they want tax breaks for billionaires but they can’t in their heart come up with extending unemployment compensation so millions of families in this country can have a modicum of security. I believe, politically, we can rally the American people around that cause.”
Let’s hope he’s right. And fuck Obama and the Democrats, this deal is LAME. And furthermore, while they held the MAJORITY, why didn’t they CEMENT unemployment benefits into law to continue indefinitely in states where the rate of unemployment is over a certain threshold? Instead we’re being offered two more years of the Bush tax cuts on millionaires and billionaires in exchange for 13 months?? Is Obama bending over backwards—or merely bending over—to assure the Teabaggers that he doesn’t hold an anti-American, “Kenyian” viewpoint (as retardedly espoused by Newt Gingrich)?
We’re truly getting to well past the point where other countries (you know, the ones with universal healthcare and paid maternity leave and stuff like that) are just going to feel sorry for how fucking stupid we Americans are.
The beautiful and infinite geometry of our Universe is echoed in this vivid fractal journey generated by Chris Korda using the Mandelbrot set. Worlds within worlds within whorls.
Korda describes the making of the video:
This is an extremely deep dive into the Mandelbrot set, to 2^316 (binary). In decimal that’s 1E+95, or 1 with 95 zeros after it.
The video was rendered using my own fractal software, called Fractice, which supports distributed processing using a client/server architecture. The render took five months, using a cluster of up to 20 dual-core PCs on a LAN, all running the Fractice rendering server. The actual number of servers varied over the five-month period but averaged around 15. Rendering only occurred at night.
DEA agents burn a shitload of confiscated weed and the resulting cloud of cannabis smoke gets the attention of pothead dinosaur Ganjasaurus Rex in this stoner epic from 1987.
“Potzilla, Potzilla!”
Ganjasaurus Rex is out of print, but Amazon has got a copy here for $85. I’ll wait for The Criterion release.
O, he was loved, but did he know it? And if he did, would it have made any difference? For the great comic actor Kenneth Williams was torn by the need to be loved and the fear of intimacy that love brings. Should we be surprised? For he was shaped as much by his parents as he was by the times. A gay man in a country where homosexuality was illegal and punishable by gaol. His parents formed the two poles to his world: his father - morose and homophobic; his mother - theatrical and needy. Yet, Williams was to find a halfway-house while serving in the army:
I found that if I got up on the stage to entertain the troops I could make them shut up and look.
Through performance, Williams created a persona that protected him and allowed him to live vicariously. It was how he was. He made a career out of being Kenneth Williams. Over thirty films, innumerable TV and radio shows, he perfected his comedic style of camp double entendre. The innuendo suited Williams, for it allowed him to imply without having to commit; and commitment was something Williams was unable to do.
In one recently released letter to his two close friends, Clive Dennis and Tom Waine, Williams gave a moving declaration about his frustration at ever finding true love:
“All problems have to be solved eventually by ONESELF, and that’s where all your lovely John Donne stuff turns out to be a load of crap because, in the last analysis, A MAN IS AN ISLAND.”
We were only to find out how lonely Williams was when his diaries were published posthumously. He kept a diary for over 40 years, and as writer Christopher Stevens uncovered in his recent biography on the actor, Born Brilliant, Williams coded his diary entries with a colored pen - “[He] wrote in red pen when discussing his health and in blue when he had dramatic news, for example.” More interestingly Stevens noted how Williams’ writing style would changed dramatically through the forty-three volumes, depending on his mood, whether frustrated, boyish, intellectual or depressed. Always at the heart of his life was a failure to celebrate his sexuality and find happiness with someone.
“Living with someone always means a denial of self in SOME way and I suppose I have always known it was something I couldn’t accomplish. So I’ve always stayed on the sidelines. Getting the pleasure vicariously. It’s not wholly satisfactory, but then of course no lives are, and you know what I think about indiscriminate sex and promiscuous trade. I think it’s the beginning of a long, long road to despair.”
The Kenneth Williams Diaries haven’t been out of print since their first publication in 1993, and have added an extra dimension to a talent who is best remembered for his work on the franchise of Carry On films, a series that defined British comedy through the 50s and 60s. By the 70s, the humor was tired, and the audiences demanded more explicit material, something Williams was unable to give. He returned to TV and became a fixture of chat show programs, most notably Michael Parkinson’s excellent late-night series. On the chat show, Williams was able to entertain and captivate, but without a script, without a character to play, he mined his own life, his own history, himself and TV soon ate him up. As he wrote in his diary:
“I wonder if anyone will ever know the emptiness of my life.”
Here are a selection of highlights from Kenneth Williams’ best moments on the BBC chat-show Parkinson.
Kenneth Williams on Parkinson 02/17/1973 Part One, with Maggie Smith and poet Sir John Betjeman. Here Williams describes critics as the eunuchs in the harem. “They’re there everything night. They see it done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.”
More Kenneth Williams plus bonus radio and TV clips and ‘The Vag Trick’ after the jump…
Killing Joke, one of the most ferocious and intense live rock acts of all time, are currently on a North American tour in support of Absolute Dissent (Spinefarm Records) their 13th full-length album and the first to see the original lineup of Jaz Coleman (vocals), Geordie (guitar), Youth (bass) and Paul Ferguson together in 28-years.
12/06/2010 Cabaret Du Musee – Montreal, QC
12/07/2010 Phoenix Concert Theatre – Toronto, ON
12/09/2010 Crofoot Ballroom – Pontiac, MI
12/10/2010 Empty Bottle – Chicago, IL
12/11/2010 Empty Bottle – Chicago, IL
12/14/2010 The Venue – Vancouver, BC
12/15/2010 Showbox – Seattle, WA
12/16/2010 Wonder Ballroom – Portland, OR
12/17/2010 Regency Ballroom – San Francisco, CA
12/18/2010 Wiltern – Los Angeles, CA
Below, Bruce Alexander Prokopets interviews Jaz Coleman over the weekend in New York. Coleman reveals a few extraordinary facts about the life of one-time Killing Joke bassist, Paul Raven, who died in 2007. If you just want to cut to the chase, go to about 7:00 minutes in.
Nearly anybody within proximity of a radio or TV in the last 30 years knows the hits by Los Angeles synth-pop band Berlin. In fact I just heard them in my local grocery store, no joke. Utterly shameless in their sincere pretentiousness and desire to appear European (hence the name, duh…) they nonetheless knew how to craft a hit song as well. I had never seen these pre-fame very home made looking promo clips before including what seems to be a practice run at their future mega hit, Metro. The first clip here, however, with its weathered VHS vibe, absurd attitude and solid analogue groove, could easily pass for a current ironic hipster chillwave band or something you’d see on Tim & Eric.
