Photographer Bobby Neel Adams has a web gallery of images, including a set of what he calls “age-maps” which are created by photomontaging images of the same person at radically different ages.
At first they look kind of cool, but the more I look at them the more they creep me out. Really, really creep me out. I can’t figure out why, but they just unsettle me.
The sample here is one of dozens at the gallery, and is just as creepy outisde of the gallery context. I think part of it is just the juxtaposition of the child imagery with the older face image–like the little anchor shirt being alongside the face of the older man.
I’m not really a fan of sports writing generally, since I’m not really a fan of most sports. However, there are exceptions. For example, when Hunter S. Thompson was doing sports writing, he could make it interesting to me, even though I didn’t care at all about the sport he was nominally writing about.
Another scenario is the one where the sport is kind of tangiential to what is actually being written about, as in this article about pitcher Dock Ellis and stories like the no-hitter he once pitched while tripping on acid:
He had four hours to get to San Diego, warm up and pitch. If something didn’t happen in the interim, Dock Philip Ellis, age 25, was about to enter a 50,000-seat stadium and throw a very small ball, very hard, for a very long time, without the benefit of being able to, you know, feel the thing.
Which, it turns out, was one of the least crazy things that happened to him on that particular day.
Tell me that doesn’t draw you in. Or bits like this:
Throughout his 12-year career as a player, he was often labeled a different kind of dangerous. Brash, gifted and impetuous, he would do almost anything to make a point he believed in. When baseball brass complained about his haircut, he wore hair curlers on the field. When a heckler called him nigger during a minor league game in Alabama, he entered the stands, sat among the hecklers and said, “What happened to all those niggers up here? All those niggers calling me nigger?” (In Ellis’ version of the story, he also has a gun in his pocket.) When the Cincinnati Reds taunted the Pirates after beating them in the 1972 National League Championship Series, Ellis decided to motivate his team by hitting every single batter in the Reds’ lineup. He hit the first three and walked two before he was pulled. He had, in short, that certain combination of raw talent and insanity that very rarely creates Hall of Famers but almost always creates legends.
And that’s not even mentioning the letter from Jackie Robinson, the story about his kids & his nigh-magical abandonment of drugs, etc.
I can’t believe I just read a baseball history article all the way through.
Apparently even the home supply store business is pretty rough in modern day Russia.
A gas attack in a home-supply store on one of the busiest shopping days of the year sickened scores of people yesterday in an incident that police called likely motivated by a commercial dispute or blackmail attempt.
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Seventy-eight people sought medical care: 66 were briefly hospitalized and sent home, officials said. Police said the store where the people were sickened hadn’t opened for the day and all those affected were employees or police, ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
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“The first reaction is that it is one of the competitors of this store chain,” St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said in televised comments.
Damn. That makes the Home Depot / Kent rivalry look like a bunch of eight year-old girls slap-fighting.
The people I work with already think of me as the “tinfoil hat” paranoid guy, who is always worried about weird security issues. I can’t imagine how they’re going to react when I whip out my new tinfoil-lined wallet and start spouting off about the evils of RFID tracking and the consequent invasion of privacy. (Also, I do tend to make a bit of a fuss out of being an engineer, rather than a computer science guy–which will line up nicely with the wallet being made of duct tape.) [via]
I wonder how old a child has to be before they can safely play with the Avenging Unicorn play set? Because you know “Everyone wants an imaginary unicorn friend that they can call forth to smite their enemies.” Actually, I think that’s true. My life is full of irritations, and I bet Sarah also has many irritants based on her occasional bouts of frustration, and “The Avenging Unicorn Play Set has everything you need to use the power of the unicorn to rid your life of irritations.”
I love Archie McPhee. And not just because the mimes must die.
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The first web site I ever put together, back in the early 90s, carried this banner proudly. And I am still proud to have it on the most recent iterations of my site.
The best way to ensure that she won’t continue to date you. While it won’t do the job he wanted it to, it’s pretty funny. And hey, if it were me, Figure 3 would have the legend the other way around.
I was mildly amused by the Craigslist post of 10 reasons why gay marriage should be illegal. Here’s a sample:
02) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
Speaking of funny lists of ten things, techies should also check out this list of Ten predictions for the new year from one of the Firefox developers. A sample of that list:
The RIAA will be granted its long-awaited patent on the concept of suing your own customers and promptly sue the MPAA for violating it. Buoyed by this success, the RIAA announces its intentions to patent the act of granting patents and threatens to “sue the patent office out of existence” if it is granted.
