Ramblings & ephemera
Image via Wikipedia
Read this article about Paul Krassner’s experiences with the Manson Family & note the emphasis I’ve added – is this not the greatest sentence out of nowhere you’ve ever seen? How in the world did that ever seem like a good idea?
From Paul Krassner’s “My Acid Trip with Squeaky Fromme” (The Huffington Post: [...]
Posted on August 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, on writing, politics, true stories, weird | No Comments »
photo credit: hans s
From Errol Morris’ “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 2)” (The New York Times: 28 May 2009):
[Errol Morris:] The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, on writing, science, security, tech in changing society, weird | No Comments »
From David Foster Wallace’s “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Premier: September 1996):
AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, weird | No Comments »
From John Harlow’s “Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US” (The Times: 28 December 2008):
There are, according to the recently launched World Superhero Registry, more than 200 men and a few women who are willing to dress up as comic book heroes and patrol the urban streets in search of, if not super-villains, then pickpockets [...]
Posted on January 4th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: weird | No Comments »
From Anna Gosline’s “Death special: How does it feel to die?” (New Scientist: 13 October 2007):
Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people [...]
Posted on December 8th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, science, weird | No Comments »
From Jared Jacang Maher’s “DIA Conspiracies Take Off” (Denver Westword News: 30 August 2007):
Chris from Indianapolis has heard that the tunnels below DIA [Denver International Airport] were constructed as a kind of Noah’s Ark so that five million people could escape the coming earth change; shaken and earnest, he asks how someone might go about [...]
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, politics, religion, security, weird | No Comments »
From Carl Zimmer’s “The Return of the Puppet Masters” (Corante: 17 January 2006):
I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It’s [...]
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, weird | No Comments »
From Lauren Davis’ “Delusion or Alien Invasion? Disorders That Make Life Seem Like Scifi” (io9: 27 September 2008):
Capgras Delusion: You believe a loved one has been replaced with an exact duplicate.
…
Reduplicative Paramnesia: You believe that a place or location has been moved to another site, or has been duplicated and exists in two places simultaneously.
…
Alien [...]
Posted on September 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, weird | No Comments »
From Oliver Sacks’ “The Case of Anna H.” (The New Yorker: 7 October 2002: 64):
I was reminded of a blind woman, a contemporary of Mozart and a most remarkable pianist, who, it is said, could no longer play after she regained some sight.
Related posts
After a stroke, he can write, but can’t read
Why we can easily [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, security, weird | No Comments »
From Oliver Sacks’ “The Case of Anna H.” (The New Yorker: 7 October 2002: 64):
I recently received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist, who told me that he had a somewhat similar problem following a stroke: “The area affected,” he relates, “was my ability to read. I can write, but I can’t read [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: on writing, science, weird | No Comments »
From Les Jones’s email in Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (15 August 2005):
Avoiding rescuers is a common reaction in people who have been lost in the woods. See Dwight McCarter’s book, “Lost,” an account of search and rescue operations in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In one chapter McCarter tells the story of two backpackers in [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, weird | No Comments »
From George Pendle’s “New Foundlands” (Cabinet: Summer 2005):
Call them micro-nations, model countries, ephemeral states, or new country projects, the world is surprisingly full of entities that display all the trappings of established independent states, yet garner none of the respect. The Republic of Counani, Furstentum Castellania, Palmyra, the Hutt River Province, and the Empire of [...]
Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, law, politics, weird | No Comments »
From Jim Windolf’s “American Idol” (Vanity Fair: 20 December 2006):
A vestige of the franchise’s 1940s roots remains in the form of Jughead’s hat. In those days, explains Archie Comics managing editor Victor Gorelick, kids would take their fathers’ discarded fedoras, cut off the brims, and scissor them into jagged beanies. Archie artists have recently tried [...]
Posted on March 31st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, weird | No Comments »
From Alan Bellows’s “The Ruins of Fordlândia” (Damn Interesting: 3 August 2006):
On Villares’ advice, [Henry] Ford purchased a 25,000 square kilometer tract of land along the Amazon river, and immediately began to develop the area. …
Scores of Ford employees were relocated to the site, and over the first few months an American-as-apple-pie community sprung up [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, technology, weird | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “Chinese fugitive leaves cave after 8 years” (5 October 2006):
A Chinese man wanted by police on gun charges has given himself up after hiding in a cave constructed at the back of his house for eight years, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The 35-year-old man from the southeastern city of Fuzhou had tunneled [...]
Posted on October 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, law, weird | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “Body found in bed 5 years after death” (4 October 2006):
Austrian authorities have discovered the body of a man who apparently died at home in bed five years ago, a Vienna newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The corpse of Franz Riedl, thought to have been in his late 80s when he died, went undetected for [...]
Posted on October 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, true stories, weird | Comments Off
From Mica Rosenberg’s “Guatemala forces end 10-year prisoner rule at jail” (The Washington Post: 25 September 2006):
Guatemalan security forces took over a jail run for over 10 years by inmates who built their own town on prison grounds complete with restaurants, churches and hard-drug laboratories.
Seven prisoners died when 3,000 police and soldiers firing automatic weapons [...]
Posted on September 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, weird | Comments Off
From “Fuzzy maths” (The Economist: 11 May 2006):
MATHEMATICALLY confident drivers stuck in the usual jam on highway 101 through Silicon Valley were recently able to pass time contemplating a billboard that read: “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com.” The number in question, 7427466391, is a sequence that starts at the 101st digit [...]
Posted on June 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, cool stuff, technology, weird | Comments Off
From Brian Montopoli’s “The Queue Crew: Waiting in line for a living” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2004):
ON CAPITOL HILL, a placeholder is someone paid by the hour to wait in line. When legislative committees hold hearings, they reserve seats for Congressional staffers, for the press, and for the general public. The general-public seats are the only [...]
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, politics, weird, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Damn Interesting’s “Feral Children“:
One of the more mysterious cases is that of Kaspar Hauser, who was discovered in Nuremberg, Germany in 1828. He was unsteady on his feet, held a letter for a man he had never met, and only spoke the phrase “I want to be a horseman like my father is.” The [...]
Posted on May 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, language & literature, weird | Comments Off
