Human augmentations by Sarif Industries. Fake, for now.
Comment posted for this video on Youtube: “I can’t wait until this stuff is real… and only the top 1% can afford it, allowing them to cybernetically stomp on the impoverished underclasses.”
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Posting recently about Dog Day Afternoon by the late, great Sidney Lumet brought to mind various videos of informant New York cop Frank Serpico, who was immortalized by Lumet and Al Pacino in their 1973 film. From Corey Kilgannon’s 2010 New York Times article about the most famous cop on the force: “Anyone who has seen the celebrated 1973 film Serpico knows that he often dressed up — bum, butcher, rabbi — to catch criminals. His off-duty look was never vintage cop either, with the bushy beard and the beads.
This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.”
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Real Serpico watches Pacino’s Serpico:
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Pacino’s Serpico:
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Charlie goes Serpico on the gang on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
Tags: Al Pacino, Charlie Day, Corey Kilgannon, Frank Serpico, Sidney Lumet
Marijuana now free of grubby human paw prints. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
My Sister’s Tiny Hands
we came in this world together
legs wrapped around each other
my cheek against my sister’s
we were born like tangled vine
we lived along the river
where the black clouds never lingered
the sunlight spread like honey
in my sister’s tiny hands
but while picking sour apples
in the wild waving grasses
sister stumbled in the briar
and was bitten by a snake
every creature casts a shadow under the sun’s golden finger
but when the sun sinks past the waving grass
some shadows are dragged along
alone, I took to drinking bottles of cheap whiskey
and staggering through the back woods
killing snakes with a sharpened stick
but still I heard her laughing
in those wild waving grasses
still her tiny hands went splashing at the river’s sparkling shore
so I took my rusty gas can
and an old iron shovel
I set the woods to burning
and choked the river up with stones
every creature casts a shadow under the sun’s golden finger
but when the sun sinks past the waving grass
some shadows are dragged along
The artist downs colored milk and makes herself puke on a canvas. At least she didn’t ruin the bidet. (Thanks Vulture.)
Tags: Millie Brown
This, my friends, is an elegant way to take a dump. Even their toilet is a reflection of their runaway narcissism. (Thanks Reddit.)
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"It’s gonna be huge. Support us. The Cosmos are back."
The Cosmos, the New York soccer team that Steve Ross and Warner Communications built into a jet-setting, championship-getting phenomenon more than three decades ago, with the the aid of aging international stars like Pelé. Franz Beckenbauer and that ball hog Giorgio Chinaglia, are back–well, possibly. A British entrepreneur named Paul Kemsley is reviving the brand and hoping to coax lightning to strike twice, something the skies generally do rarely and at their own caprice. David Segal of the New York Times reports:
“’Thanks so much for coming,’ [Paul Kemsley] said, turning serious. ‘We hope you get it. It’s gonna be huge. Support us. The Cosmos are back.’
Hang on — the team that gave Americans their first taste of soccermania, once packing Giants Stadium with more than 77,000 fans? That rum band of night prowlers with their own table at Studio 54 and Hollywood hangers-on? The franchise that vanished not long after Steve Ross, the head of Warner Communications, decided that pro soccer had no future? Those Cosmos are back?
Certainly the brand is back. Amid all the team memorabilia on display at that February party were plenty of crisp new Cosmos shirts, shorts and warm-ups, part of a recently unveiled line of clothing from Umbro, the English company that co-sponsored the shindig.
But Kemsley’s ambitions far exceed retro sportswear. A former real estate mogul who flamed out spectacularly in England when the recession struck, he is now chairman of the Cosmos, whose rights he bought recently. Since then, the team has been his all-consuming passion; he talks about building a stadium as well as Cosmos-related restaurants and hotels in New York City. He predicts that he and Umbro will sell a fortune’s worth of shirts in Europe and Asia. He has a staff of 16 already (including an executive named Terry Byrne, a close friend and former manager of David Beckham’s). He is touring the world to spread news of a second coming.”
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The trailer for the Cosmos documentary, Once in a Lifetime:
Tags: David Segal, Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia, Pelé, Steve Ross
Behind-the-scenes look at a pizza commercial.
"Robert Earl fell into a muddy ditch and had to be pulled out with a tractor and belts by the town’s men."
Robert Earl Hughes was large of mind, heart and, unfortunately, body. Born in 1926, Hughes was a sweet-tempered Illinois country boy with uncanny mnemonic skills, who suffered from a malfunctioning pituitary gland, which caused him to grow larger and larger. As his weight gradually rose above the half-ton mark, he worked intermittently as a carnival attractiom, before dying at the young age of 32. Persistent rumors that he was buried in a piano case were unfounded. In “Heavy,” a Chicago magazine article, Robert Kurson recalls the man who became a prisoner to his ever-expanding flesh. An excerpt:
“Most Saturdays, the Hughes family would travel to the general store, where they would trade their farm goods for life’s essentials. When he was ten, Robert Earl stepped for the first time on the store’s platform scale, where the owner, Gerald Kurfman, added counterweights, then more counterweights, before announcing a reading of 378 pounds. Word spread to neighboring counties about the heavy lad in Fishhook. A doctor who came to examine Robert Earl told his parents that the boy would likely die by 15—that no heart could stand such stress. After that, Robert Earl avoided doctors whenever possible; he thought they were interested only in experimenting on him. While the Hughes family continued to visit the store, no one remembers Georgia watching Robert Earl’s calories or scolding him for coveting marshmallows or treating him differently in any way than she treated his brothers.
At school, Robert Earl leapfrogged his peers in reading and writing, and startled teachers with a memory that bordered on eerie. ‘If he read something or met someone, he would remember it forever,’ says Harry Manley, 77, who worked for a couple of years in the general store. ‘He only needed one time.’ Robert Earl sat in a specially constructed chair reinforced with wires. Every month that chair got tighter and tighter, and every month the boy seemed to get smarter and smarter, to know more about the world and its odd places with strange names. By 12, Kurfman had weighed him at 500 pounds, and Robert Earl had taken to carrying a gallon of milk and two loaves of bread to school every day for lunch. In the fifth grade, while walking home from school, Robert Earl fell into a muddy ditch and had to be pulled out with a tractor and belts by the town’s men. ‘It scared us all so terribly,’ recalls Gladys Still, a childhood friend who watched the rescue. Though the boy never spoke of dying, kids knew he wasn’t supposed to live long, and they remember that day as the first time they were scared for the life of their friend.” (Thanks Longform.)
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Robert Earl Hughes’ relations recall him:
Tags: Robert Earl Hughes, Robert Kurson
Where to start? Crappy 1973 sexploitation film with Chuck Norris (that’s him at the 43-second mark) and an evil clown. Holy smokes.
Tags: Chuck Norris
At the very beginning, in 1914, in “Making a Living.”
From a 1972 Candice Bergen article in Life magazine, on the occasion of Chaplin nervously returning to America to receive an honorary Oscar 20 years after he was denied entry into the country: “He boarded the plane to Los Angeles with great ambivalence. After agreeing in January to come for the Academy Awards, he felt–as the time grew closer–that he could not go through with it. The memories of what he was put through there were too painful. The thought of returning terrified him.
During the flight, he crossed to the other side of the plane to see the Grand Canyon. His face lit up. ‘Oh yes, this is the place where Douglas Fairbanks did a handstand on the precipice. He told me about it.’
As they got nearer Los Angeles, he grew more and more nervous, sure he shouldn’t have come.”
Tags: Charlie Chaplin
"Angell is the grand master of the first-hand observation, which is why his baseball writing in T"he New Yorker" is so original and lively and has been for 50 years." (Image by George Grantham Bain.)
The opening of “Still at the Top of His Game,” Michael Bamberger’s excellent new Sports Illustrated appreciation of nonagenarian New Yorker legend Roger Angell, who continues to write some of the most eloquent and incredibly visual sentences you could ever hope to read:
“Roger Angell’s memories of Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium are moving pictures in his head, deposited there when he was a boy absorbed by the pastime and the world around him. The Babe’s big bat, his heavy flannel uniform, the men in fedoras watching him: You and I, way late to the party, have been fed these black-and-white snaps by PBS specials and Hall of Fame exhibits, but that’s not the case for Angell. For him, they’re in color. Angell is the grand master of the first-hand observation, which is why his baseball writing inThe New Yorkeris so original and lively and has been for 50 years.
They say if you watch baseball long enough you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. Maybe that’s what has kept Roger—he’d invite you to call him that—so young, the promise of what the next game might bring. Reading him, you’d never guess his age. He’s 90.
Whatever he wrote in hisNew Yorkerblog last week, you won’t see anywhere else. His pieces get published, on the magazine’s website and in its pages, with no predictable pattern, and every time you come across one, it’s a delight. If you want a traditional ode to the new season, don’t read Angell. Only once, in 1963, did he compare the return of newspaper box scores in April to spring flowers. Only once, in 1988, did he call Bart Giamatti, then the president of the National League, a ‘career .400 talker.’ Only once did Angell compare Tim Lincecum’s stride to ‘a January commuter arching over six feet of slush.’ That was last year.
In his little 20th-floor office in the sleek Condé Nast building in Times Square, Angell—trim and fit in the tweedy uniform of the gentleman farmer—has a pile of Mead spiral-bound notebooks.”
Tags: Michael Bamberger, Roger Angell
Great find by Brendan Koerner (via Longform) in digging up “The Boys in the Bank,” the September 1972 Life magazine article about the unusual Brooklyn heist that inspired Dog Day Afternoon, the amazing 1975 film by the recently deceased Sidney Lumet.
From Life: “By now, John Wojtowicz wants to talk to the police. He wants to talk about negotiations, about hostages, about producing a plane which will carry him to distant places. But more than this, he wants to talk to the person who matters most of all. As worried married men will do, he asks to be allowed to talk to his ‘wife.’ The police send a squad car to the mental ward of a nearby hospital and pick up a 26-year-old male named Ernest Aron.
There was nothing in John Wojtowicz’s early years to suggest that he would ever find himself holding off police at the doors of a bank and haggling with them for a meeting with a homosexual spouse. For most of his 27 years his life seemed pointed to nothing more than a routine job, a faithful female wife, and someday a move to the suburbs.
His mother, Theresa, remembers a good boy who didn’t smoke, rarely drank. He played softball, collected stamps, and carefully clipped out newspaper stories about politics. He finished Erasmus High School with a 97% average, shining in math and mechanical drawing. His favorite extracurricular activity was Monopoly.
Only an occasional flare-up of temperamental rage marred an otherwise studious and pedestrian mind. It seemed right to his moth- er that her son should take a job in a bank directly after high school and that he should find a girl friend-and an eventual wife -who was also a bank employee. The first Mrs. John Wojtowiez was loud, jolly Carmen Bifulco, a typist at the Chase Manhattan Bank. She playfully called her husband a dingbat. He dubbed her in return a ‘mouth.’ The couple met on a bank-sponsored ski trip to Massachusetts, were engaged as Wojtowicz was drafted and shipped to Vietnam, and were finally married just as soon as he got back to Brooklyn, safe and sound, one year later. And then the trouble began.”
Tags: Brendan Koerner, Ernest Aron, John Wojtowicz
Even someone like myself who isn’t very fond of animation can be awed by the nightmarish creations in this video. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
Tags: John Nolan
Advertising legend David Ogilvy (of Ogilvy & Mather, of course) shares trade secrets with David Susskind in 1974. For better or worse, Ogilvy introduced market research to the movie business, which began way back in the days of Gary Cooper and Betty Grable.
From a Time magazine article about advertising in 1962: “Advertising is salesmanship—it is not fine art, literature or entertainment,’ insists David Mackenzie Ogilvy, 51, chairman of Manhattan’s Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. Yet it is Ogilvy’s flair for creating ads that are literate and entertaining while tugging at the purse strings that has made him the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry. It was Ogilvy who immortalized Hathaway shirts with Baron Wrangel’s eyepatch and bearded Commander Whitehead for Schweppes. Cultivated, charming and handsome enough to model occasionally in his own ads, British-born David Ogilvy studied history at Oxford, served a Depression stint as a chef in a Paris hotel, and sold stoves door to door in Scotland before coming to the U.S. to work for Pollster George Gallup. When he set up his agency in 1948, Ogilvy made a private list of the five clients he wanted most: General Foods, Bristol-Myers, Campbell Soup, Lever Bros, and Shell. Today he has some business from all five, and his agency’s billings ($47.5 million last year) are almost eight times greater than a decade ago. Recently he was selected by Washington to sing the charms of the U.S. to prospective tourists from Britain, France and West Germany. ‘Every advertisement I write for the U.S. Travel Service,’ he muses, ‘is a bread-and-butter letter from a grateful immigrant.'”
Tags: David Ogilvy, David Susskind
Squatter punks in London in 1983 are the focus of this smirking Aussie doc.
From Japan, of course. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
David Byrne, 1978. (Image by Michael Markos.)
“Nothing But Flowers”
Here we stand
Like an Adam and an Eve
Waterfalls
The Garden of Eden
Two fools in love
So beautiful and strong
The birds in the trees
Are smiling upon them
From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it’s nothing but flowers
There was a factory
Now there are mountains and rivers
you got it, you got it
We caught a rattlesnake
Now we got something for dinner
we got it, we got it
There was a shopping mall
Now it’s all covered with flowers
you’ve got it, you’ve got it
If this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
you’ve got it, you’ve got it
Years ago
I was an angry young man
I’d pretend
That I was a billboard
Standing tall
By the side of the road
I fell in love
With a beautiful highway
This used to be real estate
Now it’s only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it’s nothing but flowers
The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture
I thought that we’d start over
But I guess I was wrong
Once there were parking lots
Now it’s a peaceful oasis
you got it, you got it
This was a Pizza Hut
Now it’s all covered with daisies
you got it, you got it
I miss the honky tonks,
Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens
you got it, you got it
And as things fell apart
Nobody paid much attention
you got it, you got it
I dream of cherry pies,
Candy bars, and chocolate chip cookies
you got it, you got it
We used to microwave
Now we just eat nuts and berries
you got it, you got it
This was a discount store,
Now it’s turned into a cornfield
you got it, you got it
Don’t leave me stranded here
I can’t get used to this lifestyle
Tags: David Byrne
Like a reverse Molotov cocktail.
"Exclamation points, sometimes as many as 50 a page, added empha." (Image by Allan Warren.)
From the New York Times obituary of the former schoolteacher who made a mint by selling David Cassidy and Leif Garrett to infatuated adolescent girls:
“Charles Laufer, who as a high school teacher in 1955 despaired that his students had nothing entertaining to read and responded with magazines aimed at teenage girls desperate to know much, much more about the lives of their favorite cute stars, died April 5 in Northridge, Calif. He was 87.
The cause was heart failure, his brother, Ira, said.
Mr. Laufer’s best-known magazine was Tiger Beat, published monthly. With its spinoff publications and its competitors, of which the most popular was 16 Magazine, Tiger Beat had it all covered — or at least what mattered most to girls from about 8 to 14. The Beach Boys’ loves! Jan and Dean’s comeback! The private lives of the Beatles!
Exclamation points, sometimes as many as 50 a page, added emphasis. Pix, as pictures were known, were glossy, glamorous and frequently poster-size. Fax, as facts were known, often included ‘101 things you never knew about (fill in star’s name)’: he uses a blue toothbrush!”
Tags: Charles Laufer, David Cassidy, Leif Garrett
Piaget tests showing the Preoperational stage. Soon it will all be clear to them. (Thanks Reddit.)
Tags: Jean Piaget
Dutch artist Theo Jansen creates self-propelling sculptures that he calls “Strandbeests,” which are fashioned from recycled plastic tubing and bottles. The “creatures” are left on the shore to fend for themselves, using the wind to “walk.” Jansen wowed the crowd with this TED Talk several years ago.
Tags: Theo Jansen
From Italian television. The Fab Four was accompanied by Mia Farrow and Donovan. No Monkees were there, but lots of actual monkeys were. The whole trip to find enlightenment at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi didn’t pass the stink test, but the footage is still amazing.
Tags: Beatles, Donovan, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Mia Farrow
According to a new BBC article, retro computing enthusiasts will soon be able to purchase a retooled version of that old 1980s favorite, the Commodore 64. An excerpt.
“Commodore is making a Windows PC that fits inside a boxy beige shell that looks exactly like its original C64.
The 8-bit machine was released in 1982, had 64 kilobytes of memory and became one of the best-selling computers ever.
Commodore’s updated version will run Windows 7 but also has an emulator capable of playing games written for its ancestor.
Commodore has started taking orders for the C64x, priced at $595 (£364), and said the machines would ship between May and June. It is expected to appear in shops later in the year.”
"The newly arrived class, among whom incendiary fires occur, contains many people who are ignorant, filthy, dishonest and little appreciative as yet of American ways and American law."
There were many different reasons why people set fires during the 1890s, and the scary results didn’t always bring out the most enlightened responses from reporters at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, as the following quartet of pyromania-related articles prove.
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“The Firebug, Zucker” (December 29, 1896): “The conviction of Zucker, the firebug, and his likelihood of serving the state in prison for the rest of his days, will tend to restore a measure of public confidence. There have been quite too many fires of late. They have a way of breaking out in places that are insured, and insured to at least the value of their contents. In order to avert suspicion themselves, some of the people who set fire to their shops and tenements have deemed it wiser to hire the work done by others, and Zucker, with some confederates made this his business. It is believed that he made $200,000 out of his fees for starting fires and out of his share of the insurance that was paid on burned buildings. The newly arrived class, among whom incendiary fires occur, contains many people who are ignorant, filthy, dishonest and little appreciative as yet of American ways and American law. The conviction of Zucker must serve to them as a warning and deterrent.”
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“A Boy Firebug” (April 29, 1899): “The most youthful prisoner ever accused of the serious crime of arson in Queens County was arraigned to plead to an indictment before County Judge Moore to-day. The accused is George Spillett, 15 years old, of Flushing, L.I. He pleaded guilty to a charge of arson in the third degree, when he admitted that he had set fire to a barn in College Point several weeks ago. Young Spillett was caught redhanded with the torch in his possession after he had ignited a bundle of straw. The boy has been acting queerly for a long time past and it is believed that he is somewhat demented. About a year ago he was arrested for stabbing a playmate named Joseph Schuester during an altercation, but escaped punishment.”
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"The girl is now under arrest, after having admitted that she set fire to the house no less than nine times, the last fire resulting in the complete destruction of the interior." (Image by Henry Mayhew.)
“Is the Little Firebug Mad?” (January 7, 1895): “The mystery surrounding the series of fires in the house of Adam Coldwell, at 84 Guernsey street, has been explained by the confession of Rhoda Carlton, the 14 year old daughter of Mrs. Coldwell, by a former marriage. The girl is now under arrest, after having admitted that she set fire to the house no less than nine times, the last fire resulting in the complete destruction of the interior, so that the family is now homeless and dependent on the charity of neighbors for shelter.
The girl made a full confession to Captain Rhodes of the Greenpoint police yesterday. She said that she was tired of living in the house and thought she could frighten her family into leaving. She said that she was not happy at all. The girl, who is not bad looking and is rather large for her age, cried as she told how she dropped lighted matches behind the wall paper and in the bed clothes.
Rhoda cried a great deal in court and when asked why she had started the fire she wailed: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to see my mamma.”
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“A Peculiar Case” (July 14, 1898): “The Fire Marshal is to-day conducting an investigation into the circumstances attending a peculiar case of alleged arson which occurred yesterday in a two story frame house at 369 South Fifth street, in the Eastern District. The house is occupied by Mrs. Rose Gavin, her son, Isaac Morris, a bartender, his wife, Mrs. Antoinette Morris, and her niece, Annie Mitchell. Mrs. Morris has two children, one of whom died lately. Several years ago she met with an accident, injuring one of her legs. The wound proved intractable and since then it has been necessary to place the patient under the influence of ether no less than eighteen times in order that pieces of the putrefied bone might be removed from the limb without pain. Latterly it has been noticed that the injury and incidental worry has been affecting Mrs. Morris’ mind.
At the Bedford avenue station Mrs. Morris loudly protested against the charge of arson preferred against her. ‘As God as my witness,’ she said, ‘I am innocent of this charge. For a long time my mother has been acting in a strange manner toward me. I wish I were dead.'”
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Tags: Adam Coldwell, Annie Mitchell, Captain Rhodes, County Judge Moore, George Spillett, Isaac Morris, Mrs. Antoinette Morris, Mrs. Coldwell, Mrs. Rose Gavin, Rhoda Carlton, Zucker