Joshuah Bearman

There he is!

 
 

What do you do in Henai province when you find an alien baby eating your cucumbers?

Take it to the local police and demand to have it arrested: 

P.s. I like how the alarmed housewife first saw this dude and "thought it was a harmless rabbit."  

Proof that peace in the middle east is possible

If only everyone could get ahold of whatever turkish delight this guy ate and and just dance:

 

Last shuttle touchdown

Incredibly, tragically, horribly, this is not a parody.

The New York Post finds news in long-since shark-jumped Williamsburg. It's all in the video. Watch the video. 

The Army Arts and Crafts Department sent her to Korea

Where she saw things. Wonderful things. And now she loves wiggles. And just. Can't. Stop.

Before you see the new The Thing, make sure you see the old The Thing

The John Carpenter version is one of those rare remakes that is superior to the original. Infintely so, even though I'm sure there are dedicated b-movie originalists who adore the 1951 black and white schlock and will argue to the death in favor of its schlocky genius.

They will be wrong. Remakes are all about context. To be remade as in the late 70s and early 80s, is especially in sci-fi/horror, is to have been born in the last golden age of your genre. Even after the big, brassy, majesty of Star Wars, this was the era of sci-fi as art film, commercially-sized. Like Alien, whose trailer should be in the MoMa permanent collection, and whose titular creature does not even appear until half way through the movie (making all the more scarier). Or Outland. Or Altered States. Or, in the pure horror realm, An American Werewolf in London.

These are all masterpieces, a word not lightly used by me. (Except for maybe Altered States.) The sheer quality of these movies was something I always felt like I knew, even as a kid, and not just because I was six years old when I saw Alien in the theater, or a few years later when I saw a double feature of American Werewolf and Outland. (Both true!) I have gone back and seen all of these movies again recently, curious as to whether they loomed mythically large in my mind by virtue of youthful viewing or were genuinely great. Turns out that they seemed great because they were.

Even The Thing, with it's bloody puppetry and practical effects, held up entirely. Or maybe it held up precisely because of those effects. The limitations made the film focus on generating fear mostly from atmosphere and character psychology, and the pointed use of the occasional gnarly head-turned-into-a-crab-monster.

Fangoria centerfold gnarliness aside, what really comes through in the movie is the lonely, claustrophobic, frozen waste of the Antarctic research station where Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, et. al. find themselves stuck with that thawed out shape-shifter. More dangerous than the monster almost is the cold and isolation, things that are rarely conveyed well in film. But The Thing does just that, by alternating between gore and quiet in such a way that films no longer understand, or have the patience for.

Which is why I do not have high hopes for The Thing re-remake, or prequel as they're calling it. The trailer is all about scares, jumps, and people being dragged off into the snow. The emblematic sequence of John Carpenter's The Thing is the least kinetic, when everyone is tied up, waiting to find out who among them is not really them at all. It's scariest when the heated needle sizzles into the blood harmlessly, because it means we still don't know who's human. And when the poor humans do find out, there's nowhere for them to go. Because the final enemy is outside. Which is why the end of The Thing is so great. 

Anyhow, this whole jag about The Thing's atmospherics was mostly meant as an introduction to these photos of Antarctica: 

Pyongyang Paradise

In pictures: 

Fixin's Bar

I was really pulling for OSU that day...

I think this guy was at MacDowell with me, finishing up some of his video game reviews on Amazon

I wish I had been a woodcut illustrator when I was nine so that my Dungeons and Dragons drawings would have looked like this:

Via BibliOdyssey, woodcut illustrations from Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia, a work of natural history by an Anabaptist heretic who didn't believe in the Trinity but did believe in this dude:  

As with all seventeenth century science, Aldrovandi's field notes overlap at times with AD&D Module X4. If only he had been able to nail down AC, hit points, etc., the world would not have been forced to wait three centuries for Gygax's Monster Manual with its awesomely inferior cover and illustrations. According to Linneaus, Aldrovandi was the father of natural history. He created Bolognia's pioneering Botanical Garden. How is there no exhibit on Aldrovandi at the Museum of Jurassic Technology? Maybe there is. I haven't been in a while. A long while, come to think of it. These woodcuts make me want to go back. More: 

Badass Book Store

In Sao Paolo: 

Lady Chatterley's Flowers

And other embroidered book covers. Another favorite, Goblin Market:

Only $1681! Next to that, the Mushroom Girls Virus Book is a steal at $385: 

"Like a Spartan from 300 kind of, except he was a banana."

That's my favorite line from this news item:

 

Looks like Socialism might be better for Capitalism than Cato Institute

So says Inc. Magazine, of all places, in this interesting article about entrepeneurialism in Norway. I saw this awhile ago, forgot to read it, then just came across it again. The gist: Norway, with its cradle to grave social welfare system and higher tax rates, has stronger entrepeneurial growth than the tax-cutting, business paradise America. Huh. So, one might ask, is this writer daring to suggest that thirty years of reflexive anti-tax dogma with little supporting evidence might not actually be right? That certainly doesn't square with the well-known of Obama trying to transform our great freedom-loving land into some kind of Continential socialist hell hole? Well:

...there is no statistical evidence to prove that low taxes result in economic prosperity. Some of the most prosperous countries—for instance, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and, yes, Norway—also have some of the highest taxes.

Norway, which in 2009 had the world's highest per-capita income, avoided the brunt of the financial crisis: From 2006 to 2009, its economy grew nearly 3 percent. The American economy grew less than one-tenth of a percent during the same period. Meanwhile, countries with some of the lowest taxes in Europe, like Ireland, Iceland, and Estonia, have suffered profoundly. The first two nearly went bankrupt; Estonia, the darling of antitax groups like the Cato Institute, currently has an unemployment rate of 16 percent. Its economy shrank 14 percent in 2009.

But that stuff we knew already. (Despite that you would never see even so much as a mention on CNBC, et. al.) What is more interesting in the story is how the attitudes of wealthy businesspeople in Norway are so vastly different than here. Which makes all the difference. They simply don't mind the taxes, which pay for social services that make their labor easier to employ, their market easier to exploit, and improves the lives of them and their customers. "I could live in the tax-free in the Cayman islands," one CEO says, "But I don't want to live in the Cayman Islands. I want to live here."

Nor do Norwegian magnates see taxes as a disincentive -- because they're not. They in fact point out that their mixed economy enables start up business because it allows people to take risks and strike out on their own without worrying, for example, about health care. The writer even directly asks Inger Nicolaisen, a scrappy Norwegian beauty product magnate famous for hosting the Norwegian version of The Apprentice, why taxes didn't discourage her from growing her business. It's a proxy question for the narrow-minded American attitude towards business as all bottom line. And the answer is obvious: "I'm an entrepreneur. It's in my backbone." Sounds like the entrepeneurial spirit Americans are supposedly famous for.

Carson: Seen any good YouTubes lately? Me: Yup. Lookwell. The best.

Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.

Polariods from the set of Blade Runner: 

I'd saw somewhere around 6,000,000 of these views are mine

How is it possible that I only just discovered Samoyeds?

They are fluffy white singing dogs. There is no part of that does not tickle my YouTube fancy. Or my regular fancy, come to think of it:  

It's like a modern Aladdin's Lamp; you rub it and it gives you the things you want

So great and charming: 

Among my favorite things about this

is that it was posted by the kid himself, all grown up now: 

Classic cameos in a classic cookie

Oreo portraits!

And, weirder, floral dioramas that bring new meaning to the phrase tooth and nail: