Fun With Photocopy Machines

Last week I posted this blog entry about the charcoal drawings I made from photocopies of my face. In the process of that little project I took about 75 photocopies of my face and hands getting material to draw. I uploaded some of my favorite outtakes to flickr.

Faces

Hands

Vinegar Boy

Yesterday I came accross an incredible story on CustomersSuck! that’s definately worth a read. It was posted by a guy who worked at a gas station. His tale begins with a hysterical lady entering the store and ranting incoherently at him while waving around what looked to be a half empty bottle of liquor.

I had no idea what she was on about and, before I could find out, the police arrived – but I hadn’t called them!
Now, I know nearly every cop within fifty miles of my site (I call them all often enough), so when they come in, I greet them by name and they do the same back and tell me they’ve been called here because of allegations I’ve poisoned a small child.
Wuh?
The crazy lady identifies herself as the kid’s parent and tells them I poisoned her lad. To avoid describing twenty minutes of ranting and gibbering on the woman’s part, I’ll cut right to the chase.
I had sold a 1L bottle of malt vinegar to a kid (about fifteen years old) that morning and he had taken the bottle home and drunk half of it – yes that’s right, he had drunk vinegar. Of course, he got sick as a dog and “redecorated” the walls and floor of several rooms.
[No, I do not know why a teenager, who should be old enough to know better (and be at school too, for that matter) would drink half a litre of malt vinegar.]
At this point the cops and I exchange looks and one said, “Damn Aaron, and we all thought you had finally snapped.” Ha ha. There’s always a comedian.

From there the story gets really weird. Read it here.

Courtroom Sketch Artists

David at Ironic Sans has an interesting post today profiling seven different courtroom sketch artists, and their work outside the courtroom.

Caldwell Mystery Thread

Caldwell, NJ – August 2, 1970 – Neighbors of Mr. and Mrs. Smith at 85 Forest St. reported a silver thread dangling from the sky right above the Smith’s home. Neither the police nor other visitors who came to see the thread could figure out what it was or where it was coming from. It stayed hovering around the houses in the area for a week before it disappeared. Supposedly a piece of the strand was taken to DuPont for analysis, but they were unable to determine the origin.

From Weird NJ

Killing Time

Are you bored ?
Need to kill some time ?

UFO Sightings Increasingly More Common

Or is it just a wilingness to report them? Either way, Britains Ministry of Defence reported 135 UFOs were reported in 2007, up from 97 in 2006. [Link]

A French aviation expert announced that last month he attended a three day, secret UN meeting on the UFO phenomenon. Among the topics discussed was the possible social upheaval from continued UFO sightings, and a need for more public disclosure of UFO phenomenon. [Link]

In 2005 Lt. Walter Haut, the public-relations officer at Roswell Army Air Field in the 1940’s, passed away. He left behind a sealed affidavit to be opened after his death. The affidavit was opened in June of last year and revealed Haut’s description of UFO debris and alien bodies recovered from the Roswell crash site. You can read the affidavit here (scroll about halfway down the page).

“The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.”

UFO sighting last year above O’hare:

Buzz Aldrin talking about a UFO he saw while traveling through space:

Unusual Deaths and Unusual Survivals

Unusual Deaths

Wikipedia has a neat list of unusual deaths throughout history. While many are likely only legends, the list is still a fascinating read.

458 BC: The Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a live tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone. The tortoise survived.

207 BC: Chrysippus, a Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after watching his drunk donkey attempt to eat figs.

270 BC: The poet and grammarian Philitas of Cos reportedly wasted away and died of insomnia while brooding about the Liar paradox.

1478: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence reportedly was executed by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine^[11] at his own request.

1868: Matthew Vassar, brewer and founder of Vassar College, died in mid-speech while delivering his farewell address to the College Board of Trustees.

1987: Dick Shawn, a comedian who starred in the 1968 movie The Producers, died of a heart attack while portraying a politician. Just before he died, he announced, “if elected, I will not lay down on the job,”.

1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination.

1912: Tailor Franz Reichelt fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he’d told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy.

1923: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

1979: Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford Motor Co. plant, was the first known man to be killed by a robot.

Unusual Survivals

The Free Fall Research Page has information on people who have survived free falls without a parachute. The most notable free falls are listed here, and other amazing free fall stories here. They also have a guide to surviving a free fall without a parachute here.

The website’s owner, Jim Hamilton, has self published a book on free fall survivals which contains over 200 stories of people who have survived unplanned free falls without a parachute. You can purchase a copy of Long-Fall Survival for $19.98 here.

Lt. I.M. Chisov, a soviet pilot, holds the record for surviving the longest free fall without a parachute. Eugene Hecht told the story of Chisov in his text book, Physics: Calculus:

Lieutenant I. M. Chisov of the former Soviet Union was flying his Ilyushin 4 on a bitter cold day in January 1942, when it was attacked by 12 German Messerschmitts. Convinced that he had no chance of surviving if he stayed with his badly battered plane, Chisov bailed out at 21,980 feet. With the fighters still buzzing around, Chisov cleverly decided to fall freely out of the arena. It was his plan not to open his chute until he was down to only 1000 ft above the ground. Unfortunately, he lost consciousness en route. As luck would have it, he crashed at the edge of a steep ravine covered with 3 ft of snow. Hitting at about 120 mi/h, he plowed along its slope until he came to rest at the bottom. Chisov awoke 20 min later, bruised and sore, but miraclously he had suffered only a concussion of the spine and a fractured pelvis. Three and one-half months later he was back at work as a flight instructor.

Video Scratching

Video Scratching is a video editing technique where an artist cuts up video from various sources and edits them togething into a rythmic sequence, sometimes adding a beat and instrumentals to the audio.

Years ago I had a VHS tape of a group called Emergency Broadcast Netowork (EBN) who pretty much pioneered the art of video scratching. I don’t know what happened to that tape, but luckily nearly all the videos are available on YouTube.

They gained the most notoriety for a video they did of George Bush Senior performing the Queen song We Will Rock You.

One of my favorites is this track, titled Get Down.

A recent favorite video scratch of mine is Aaron Valdez’s Big Screen Version:

A YouTube user by the name of Rx2008 has been posting some wonderful, fresh video scratches. Here are a few:

GW Bush covers REM’s End of the World:

Tony Blair covers The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go:

Bush and friends cover John Lennon’s Imagine:

Culture Jamming on the Internet- Part I

The origin of the term ‘culture jamming’ is credited to the band Negativeland, but the philosphy and aims of culture jamming go back (at least) to the 1960s with the pranks of Abbie Hoffman, Joey Skaggs and others.

Wikipedia lists the aims of culture jamming:

• To create a contrast between corporate or mass media images and the realities or perceived negative side of the corporation or media. This is done symbolically, with the “detournement” of pop iconography.
• To renew civic engagement and social connectedness through shared radical ideas.
• To reawaken a sense of wonder and fascination about one’s surrounding environment, inspired by the frequent intentional ambiguity of a specific culture jamming technique, which stimulates personal interpretation and independent thinking.

An excerpt from Negativeland’s radio broadcast, Over the Edge, sheds more light on what is meant by culture jamming:

“The cultural jammer works his secret in public, the skillfully reworked billboard with new lettering painted in the same style that the original has, turning strategic corporate elements back on themselves in a manner which is itself, invisible, directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy in the context of a thoughtful reaction. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large, his tools are paid for by others, an art with real risk. You people still painting out there – all you crazy stonecutters: Would you go to jail for your art? Well?!”

For part I I’m going to focus on some of the more well known culture jammers on the internet.

Encyclopedia of Life

I’ve been waiting for Edward O. Wilson’s Encyclopia of Life to open for about a year, and the wait is finally over.

From the website:

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth…

The EOL dynamically synthesizes biodiversity knowledge about all known species, including their taxonomy, geographic distribution, collections, genetics, evolutionary history, morphology, behavior, ecological relationships, and importance for human well being, and distribute this information through the Internet. It serves as a primary resource for a wide audience that includes scientists, natural resource managers, conservationists, teachers, and students around the world.

There isn’t a ton of content yet, but the site has some nice features such as presenting information for a general audience, or for experts. A sliding bar on each page lets you reduce or increase the amount of information presented to you on a single page. Also, the photographs are all either under a creative commons license, or have no license at all.