Whoa – this is an excerpt from an email I rec’d at work today on the subject of a wikipedia entry for “edible gum”, which is apparently an East Indian hallucinogen/dessert…
I wonder why I built Taj Mahal. I thought Shakespear would play in it. But why is Ronald Reagan saying that? After all, Alexander could be right. Who knows!! May be I need to rediscuss this with my kids – Elizabeth Taylor and Martin Luther King Jr. Son, get my elephant on the rikshaw. I need to get my breakfast from McDonald’s before going on for WW1.
Big octopus squeezes itself through a little hole – video
Cory Doctorow: This video of an octopus squeezing its large, rubbery body through a one-inch hole in a plexiglas box is positively eerie and entrancing. Octopi are freaking amazing, whether they’re running on two legs and impersonating a crab or strangling sharks or escaping from their cages in feats of mechanical derring-do. Link (via Digg)
From the moment I experienced my very first brilliantly stupendous episode of the Ren & Stimpy show my brain has ruminated on how to get my hands on that wonderful vintage “incidental music” that sets the tone for their zany, wacky, madcap antics. Eventually the internet taught me that the music of Ren & Stimpy comes from all over the place. Some was written for the show, some are well known classical pieces, and there are quite a few works by Raymond Scott. For me, the most elusive stuff has always been the authentic “production music” from the 1950s. The bulk of the tracks they used came from just three albums that belong to the ever popular KPM music library. (The discs are KPM 81: Light Activity, KPM 82: Drama, and KPM 83: Showbiz and Romance.) A handful of these tracks were released a while back on a compilation called Music for TV Dinners. It literally took me three unfulfilled ebay transactions and a cancelled Amazon order before I finally obtained this CD. Now anyone can just grab it HERE.
(rather HERE.)
Then a couple months ago I discovered that some dear soul (or souls) had assembled a massive collection of these aural delights, and made them available on a torrent site. It was as though the Gilded Yak had answered all of my letters at once! And you guessed it, I’m making this marvelous collection of classics available to you today, free of charge!
Put simply, these melodies have enriched my life. Play them on your drive to work and you’re the star of an instructional traffic safety film, turn it on during dinner and mealtime becomes 80% happier (but be careful.. play the wrong track and you could wind up with a touch of Space Madness). Best of all you can listen and imagine that you live in the world of Ren and Stimpy where the walrus-napping horse is your next door neighbor, where the toy stores are stocked with Log from Blammo, and a visit from Powdered Toast Man is just a complaint away!
Since this stuff is already ‘out there’ I decided to add some extra value before I handed it off to you folks, and therefore I did the following..
-Designed an “album cover” for the collection (as seen above)
-Hunted down and tagged the name of every artist for every stinkin’ track
-Added a couple tracks that I had that weren’t included in the bundle
-Crated a track listing based on musical styles. It kicks off with some general ’50s domestic lollygagging tunes and then it gets more downtown hustle and bustle-ish. After that it goes glamorous, scary, romantic, and finally dramatic.
It is my pleasure to present you with the unofficial Ren & Stimpy Production Music collection. Be happy happy and enjoy joy joy it!
109 Total tracks (MP3, 192 kbps)
Download from Sendspace (All one ZIP file, 208MB)
Download part I from Rapidshare (72MB)
Download part II from Rapidshare (70MB)
Download part III from Rapidshare (67MB)
(these are not ’split-archives’ so you don’t need all three files before you can start extracting and listening)
David Pescovitz: New York artist Takeshi Yamada creates spectacular taxidermy gaffs–frauds and fakes that are right at home in a Victorian cabinet of curiosity or PT Barnum’s American Museum of the 19th century. (Seen here, Yamada’s Human-faced fly with penny.) Culture chronicler Silke Tudor wrote a wonderful profile of Yamada in last week’s Village Voice after meeting him at a recent bizarre taxidermy confab orchestrated by BB pal Robert Marbury of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy.
From the Village Voice profile:
Born out of the mythos of Coney Island, Yamada’s present-day cosmos includes several six-foot-long Mongolian death worms; a pair of Fiji mermaids; a two-headed baby; a hairy trout; a seven-fingered hand; fossilized fairies; jackalope stew; a five-foot-long bloodsucking chupacabra; a 16th-century homunculus; a legion of samurai warriors trapped in the bodies of horseshoe crabs; a tiny marsh dragon; a coven of freakishly large, nuclear-radiated stag beetles from Bikini Atoll; and a furry mer-bunny, all of which are brought to life using old bones, shells, resin, origami, and bits and pieces of refuse, both inorganic and fleshy.
“In the East, abnormalities are not seen as shocking,” explains Yamada as he slogs through a deep, soggy thicket behind a baseball field. “The freakish is not a bad thing. It can represent the mystery of the universe. An expression of divinity. A blessing.”
He felt a bit differently when a tiny, horn-like tumor began to grow out of his finger after he moved to Coney Island.
“Shazam!” exclaims Yamada, as he often does. “I was like jackalope!”
Link to Village Voice article, Link to Yamada’s page at Sideshow World
