Mac Tonnies was a ufologist, the author of After the Martian Apocalypse and The Cryptoterrestrials, and the blogger behind Posthuman Blues. He died on October 19th, 2009 due to heart complications.
The Cryptoterrestrials was released posthumously on March 15th, 2010. Fortunately, Mac gave numerous interviews on the subject of his book prior to his death, including this one with the Ballardian and an interview on Coast to Coast AM.
Since his death, a dedicated community of friends and readers has been working to preserve his legacy. Blazingbetta (aka Sarah Multiverse) has started a Mac Tonnies tribute site, and Capn Marrrk has been hard at work archiving Posthuman Blues. I talked to both of them via instant message.
Read the rest of this entry »
This is a guest post by Bill Whitcomb
Dr. Mortal
Dr. Mortal was an elderly, but brilliant mad scientist who lived outside the city with Marlene, his attractive young niece. Marlene discovers her uncle is creating monsters such as his Super Automaton, Man-Ape, and the Infra-Red Monster.
Again with the Comics: Dr. Mortal.
711
One thing’s for sure — no other had the same occupation as this one. He roamed the underworld by night, in search of villains to bring in, like a good superhero should. But in the daytime, he hung around the jail where he was a convicted inmate.
Toonopedia: 711
International Catalog of Superheros: 711
(Click to see full size)
Madame Fatal
Madame Fatal is notable for being a male superhero who dressed up as an elderly woman and as such is the first cross-dressing comics hero. The original incarnation of the more famous cross-dressing character, Red Tornado, later that year, would become the first cross-dressing heroine.
Wikipedia: Madame Fatal
Again with the Comics: Madame Fatal
The exact length of Tran Van Hay’s unwashed hair was unclear but some estimates put it as long as 6.8 metres.
China’s Xie Qiuping is on record as having the world’s longest hair, measured at 5.6 metres in 2004, according to the Guinness World Records. [...]
Hay, whose hair weighed several pounds, died at home Wednesday in the southern province of Kien Giang at the age of 79, Vietnam News said.
Telegraph: Man ‘with world’s longest hair dies’
(via Atom Jack)
Members at White Tail Chapel say they have no problem getting the word of god from a pastor in his birthday suit because they focus on worship.
The church’s pastor also says Jesus was naked during some of his most important moments.
Read More – ABC Local: Virginia church worships in the buff
(Thanks Paul)
Above: screenshot of the PDF form subversives are required to fill out.
The headline says “no joke” but I’m not convinced this is real:
Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina’s Secretary of State and declare their intentions — or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.
The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”
There’s even a $5 filing fee.
Raw Story: No joke: South Carolina now requires ’subversives’ to register
(via The Agitator)
Link to a PDF of the form at FitsNews (never heard of ‘em)
Backup copy here at Technoccult.
Geologist Juan Manuel García-Ruiz calls it “the Sistine Chapel of crystals,” but Superman could call it home.
A sort of south-of-the-border Fortress of Solitude, Mexico’s Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals) contains some of the world’s largest known natural crystals—translucent beams of gypsum as long as 36 feet (11 meters). [...]
Modern-day mining operations exposed the natural wonder by pumping water out of the 30-by-90-foot (10-by-30-meter) cave, which was found in 2000 near the town of Delicias (Chihuahua state map). Now García-Ruiz is advising the mining company to preserve the caves.
National Geographic: Giant Crystal Cave Comes to Light
(via, indirectly, Angadc)
This is from 2005, but still interesting:
Mr. Glassman, CrossFit’s founder, does not discount his regimen’s risks, even to those who are in shape and take the time to warm up their bodies before a session.
“It can kill you,” he said. “I’ve always been completely honest about that.”
But CrossFitters revel in the challenge. A common axiom among practitioners is “I met Pukey,” meaning they worked out so hard they vomited. Some even own T-shirts emblazoned with a clown, Pukey. CrossFit’s other mascot is Uncle Rhabdo, another clown, whose kidneys have spilled onto the floor presumably due to rhabdomyolysis.
New York Times: CrossFit: Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You
This is also interesting:
The Navy SEALs workout
Across South Korea, entrepreneurs are holding controversial forums aimed at teaching clients how to better appreciate life by simulating death. They use mortality as a personal motivator.
Reporting from Daejeon, South Korea – For Jung Joon, the moment of truth arrives for his clients as they slip into the casket and he pounds the lid in place with a wooden hammer.
Insights arise, he says, as they are confronted with total, claustrophobic darkness, left alone to weigh their regrets and ponder eternity.
Jung, a slight 39-year-old with an undertaker’s blue suit and a preacher’s demeanor, is a resolute counselor on the ever-after who welcomes clients with the invitation, “OK, today let’s get close to death.”
Jung runs a seminar called the Coffin Academy, where, for $25 each, South Koreans can get a glimpse into the abyss. Over four hours, groups of a dozen or more tearfully write their letters of goodbye and tombstone epitaphs. Finally, they attend their own funerals and try the coffin on for size. [...]
Many firms here see the sessions as an inventive way to stimulate productivity. The Kyobo insurance company, for example, has required all 4,000 of its employees to attend fake funerals like those offered by Jung.
LA Times: South Koreans experience what it’s like to die — and live again
(via Dangerous Minds)
Pictured above: snake blood wine.
Tripbase: Illegal And Controversial Food From Around The World
What, no mentioned of Hákarl (fermented shark)?
See also: Steve, Don’t Eat It)
(via Mister X)
Craig “Lazie” Lynch vanished from Hollesley Bay Prison in Suffolk in September this year close to the end of a seven-year sentence for aggravated burglary.
Instead of hiding away from police Lynch has set up a Facebook account complete with a photograph sticking his middle finger up and boasts about eating 12lb steaks and his home being so warm it feels like the Caribbean.
The burglar has become prolific Facebooker with 199 friends and has even posted when he is going round to friend’s homes and attending parties and events.
Telegraph: Escaped prisoner taunts police on Facebook
(via Disinfo)
See also:
Barefoot teenage outlaw has eluded police for nearly two years
What Does It Take to Really Disappear?
Just don’t bring a goat to the game…
“Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon wiped his nose with a Pittsburgh Steelers Terrible Towel during a pep rally earlier this week. Moments before, the Cardinals mascot wiped his underarms with the yellow towel, which has become a symbol of the Steelers organization. Fans in the crowd chanted “Burn It!” in reference to the Terrible towels.
[..] Such antics aren’t likely to go over well in Steeler Nation. Earlier this season, the Tennessee Titans were accused of disrespecting the team after LenDale White and Keith Bulluck were seen stomping on Terrible Towels during the Titans regular season win over the Steelers. Defensive end Jevon Kearse wiped his nose with a Terrible Towel in front of TV cameras. Even though the Steelers are in the Super Bowl and the Titans were knocked out to the post-season early, some Pittsburgh players aren’t over it. “The Steeler gods are always with us, so you never know,” cornerback Deshea Townsend said with a smile.”
(via Now Public)
“Restored and remodeled by the Spanish modernist architect Antoni Gaudi in the years 1905–1907, Casa Batllo is now one the most overlooked buildings by the tourists who visit Barcelona. Although Casa Batllo is a museum now, Gaudi designed it for for a wealthy Barcelona Aristocrat. The local name for the building is Casa dels ossos (House of Bones), and indeed it does have a visceral, skeletal organic quality.”
(via Unusual Things)
“Pelicans suffering from a mysterious malady are crashing into cars and boats, wandering along roadways and turning up dead by the hundreds across the West Coast, from southern Oregon to Baja California, Mexico, bird-rescue workers say. Weak, disoriented birds are huddling in people’s yards or being struck by cars. More than 100 have been rescued along the California coast, according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in San Pedro.
Hundreds of birds, disoriented or dead, have been observed across the West Coast. “One pelican actually hit a car in Los Angeles,” said Rebecca Dmytryk of Wildrescue, a bird-rescue operation. “One pelican hit a boat in Monterey. While some of the symptoms resemble those associated with domoic-acid poisoning — an ocean toxin that sometimes affects sea birds and mammals — other symptoms do not. Domoic acid also apparently has not been found in significant amounts offshore, although more tests are needed.
Rescuers are wondering whether the illness is caused by a virus, or even by contaminants washed into the ocean after recent fires across Southern California. Many of the birds also have swollen feet.”
(via The Seattle Times)
All I know is that the shoes hanging in my neighborhood mark gang territory…
“For 30 years the branches of a tree on the busy A40 have been bedecked by dozens of pairs of shoes, many hanging from their laces, tied neatly. But a four-year project, funded by the National Lottery to discover why the shoes are dangled, has borne no fruit. The shoe tree, between High Wycombe and Stokenchurch, Buckinghamshire, is currently decorated with around 50 pairs of shoes, ranging from tattered working boots to smart looking women’s slip-ons.
More than £265,000 pounds of heritage lottery funding was granted to The Chilterns Woodlands Project to help provide a definitive answer – but just rumour and legend continue to live on. Some say the shoe dangling ritual, which began in the 1970s, has pagan origins and has just continued over the years. Others believe the shoes were originally thrown up as a witchcraft ritual to put a hex on unfortunate souls. Local David Holmes, 45, said: “There are so many stories about why the shoes appear in the branches.”
(via Telegraph)
“For those of you perplexed by love’s elusiveness, take heart: Science is on the case. But even if researchers can turn love into peer-reviewed literature, they might not be able to bottle it. “People think we’re going to get a love potion, and that’s nonsense,” said Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University evolutionary anthropologist. “I don’t think they understand how complex the brain is, and what a powerful role experience plays.”
Fisher’s comments were prompted by an essay, entitled “Love: Neuroscience reveals all” and published Wednesday in Nature, on emerging research into those four little letters that make the world go round. This research shows how a “biochemical chain of events,” as essay author and Emory University neurobiologist Larry Young calls it, produces neurological patterns associated with subjective experiences described as love. (If that sounds overly technical, it’s meant to: Identifying brain patterns is just one step in explaining how they become thoughts and feelings.)
Studies on the more-or-less monogamous prairie vole, for example, suggest that a neurotransmitter called oxytocin is important to mate bonding. Oxytocin interacts with another transmitter, pleasure-inducing dopamine. In humans, brain regions associated with dopamine are activated in mothers looking at pictures of their children, and lovers at each other — and, perhaps instructively, in drug addicts taking heroin or cocaine.
Also, a gene associated with paternal care and long-term bonding in prairie voles led to the identification of a human gene variant that correlates loosely with the ability of men to form caring, stable relationships. To Young, all this means that science may soon treat lovelessness as easily as it now treats depression and anxiety. “Drugs that manipulate brain systems at whim to enhance or diminish our love for another may not be far away,” he writes. Not so fast, said Fisher.”
(via Wired)
(See also: “Love spray being developed by scientists” via The Telegraph)
“It was a blood-curdling discovery. The mummy of a young man with his hands and feed bound, his face contorted in an eternal scream of pain. But who was he and how did he die? On a scorching hot day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of the 40 kings and queens found a few years earlier in an astonishing hidden cache near the Valley of the Kings.
The 1881 discovery of the tombs, in the Deir El Bahri valley, 300 miles south of Cairo, had been astonishing and plentiful. Hidden from the world for centuries were some of the great Egyptian pharaohs – Rameses the Great, Seti I and Tuthmosis III. Yet this body, buried alongside them, was different, entombed inside a plain, undecorated coffin that offered no clues to the deceased’s identity.
It was an unexpected puzzle and, once the coffin was opened, Maspero found himself even more shocked.”
(via The Daily Mail)
First of all, there’s the nearly unbelievable story of the Denver Police Union’s commemorative T-Shirts from the 2008 Democratic National Convention.? There’s a caricature cop with a club, and the caption “WE GET UP EARLY, to BEAT the crowds” — seriously.? Here’s the story courtesy of Denver’s ABC affiliate station…and it had to be Channel 7, right?? It’s been that kind of day:
Like the Universe had to rub it in? The lead quote everywhere is from Barney Frank…he’s got a different context in mind but it’s remarkably appropriate: “One of the Truly Great Coincidences in the History of Numerology” The law of averages recieved a further blow when the markets released their closing statistics: “Dow plunges over 7%, S&P over 8%, Nasdaq over 9%” — but before jumping to occult conclusions, let me recommend two great reads from back when Rigorous Intuition was really dropping gems: The Banality of the Weird and most of all, The Higher Coincidence.
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