Proto-shock jock Joe Pyne had a 1960s TV talk show that exploited vital issues with zestful tastelessness. Some of his most notorious interviews follow.
Satanist Anton LaVey.
Transsexual Christine Jorgensen.
Pimp Iceberg Slim, author of Trick Baby.
Tags: Joe Pyne
I was hoping for a worse jobs report (I love the mayhem)
I love seeing the Dow go down and people freaking out.
The fun I had watching the news 2 years ago…
Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Encouraging babies to relax in the hot tub after a long day's work at the tattoo parlor, since 2009. (Image by Tattoo Lover.)
- Classic Film: Punishment Park (1971).
- Old Print Articles: Funeral conducted via phonograph (1895) + Woman swallows lizard, dies (1900) + Taxidermists encountering difficulties (1887).
- Classic Photographs: Jack Dempsey engages in a double-fisted photo-op with Harry Houdini.
- Featured Videos: Last living witness of the Lincoln Assassination (1956) + Milton Friedman debates teenager; kid wins (1977) + Walter Cronkite’s first night as news anchor (1963) + Richard Feynman on the possibility of UFOs (1964) + Paul Williams performs in his Planet of the Apes costume (1973) + Pearl Bailey supports Gerald Ford (1976) + Future Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura selling beer (1984) + Leon Theremin plays his namesake instrument + Transmitting data via lightbulbs + Steve Jobs unveils the Mac (1984) + Nursing care robot can lift humans + Promotional Motorola cell phone video (1980s) + Bob Costas interviews Camille Paglia (1992) + William F. Buckley interviews Hugh Hefner (1966).
- Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist: Woman wants boyfriend, needs therapist + Searching for a shrinking potion + Mother-in-law not working out + Judgemental guy doesn’t like thongs + Judgemental guy doesn’t like Uggs.
- Google is preparing you for your brain implant.
- Ray Bradbury voices frustration about the space program in 1996.
- Brewster Kahle wants to collect every book ever published.
- Great Paris Review piece about a Kentucky ventriloquist convention.
- George Packer deflates the romantic reconsideration of large-scale slums.
- The apocalypse is always coming to Tbilisi, Georgia.
- Has D.B. Cooper finally been identified?
- Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell contemplates the nature of evil.
- Russell Davies predicts the true nature of the Internet of Things.
- In the Age of Kindle, should we take our books with us when we move?
- The Active Denial System exerts crowd control.
- Computer tablets for toddlers.
- Aquatic microbot spying device can walk on water.
- Afflictor Nation: Great Britain rules in July.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
Paglia, when she burst into the mainstream, with an unlikely interlocutor.
Tags: Bob Costas, Camille Paglia
Should someone who’s an adopter of e-books bring his paper volumes with him when moving cross country? It’s a question pondered by of New York Times journalist Nick Bilton in a blog post. An excerpt:
“During a work meeting at The Times, I began talking about my move to San Francisco, and which of my personal belongings would make the trip. When I voiced my reluctance to ship my books, one of my editors, horror-stricken, said: ‘You have to take your books with you! I mean, they are books. They are so important!’
The book lover in me didn’t disagree, but the practical side of me did. I responded: ‘What’s the point if I’m not going to use them? I have digital versions now on my Kindle.’ I also asked, ‘If I was talking about throwing away my CD or DVD collection, no one would bat an eyelid.'”
••••••••••
Horror punk icon Glenn Danzig shares his book collection:
Tags: Glenn Danzig, Nick Bilton
From the good people at Riken.
"He proposed that the ceremony be performed by phonograph."
The record player was initially a disappointing technology, but one nineteenth-century Brooklyn undertaker found use for it during an unusual funeral. An excerpt about the odd ceremony from an August 18, 1895 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Undertaker Stillwell of Gravesend has at last achieved his desire and held a funeral with the services conducted by a phonograph. In spite of its novelty there was nothing indecorous about the circumstances and in fact the mourners were visibly affected.
Augusta Burr, a baby of 16 months, who had been posing in a Coney Island museum as a freak, she being the size of a child of 5, and weighing ninety-three pounds, was in perfect health until Monday. She began to suffer from her teeth and then pneumonia set in. Thursday she died.
Mr. Stillwell was given charge of the funeral. As the relatives were non-residents, they desired a modest and speedy funeral, and being poor they wanted it to be cheaply conducted.
This was agreed to, and Mr. Stillwell had the body of the infant taken to his undertaking establishment, on the Neck Road, in the town of Gravesend, Saturday afternoon, when the mother and sister met with others to accompany the body to the Gravesend cemetery, where it was to be interred. The mother expressed a wish that a clergyman might be secured to conduct a burial service over the body of the baby. There was no clergyman to be got handily, and Mr. Stillwell so told her. Her grief at this statement affected him, and then he proposed that the ceremony be performed by phonograph. The mother immediately agreed to it.
Mr. Stillwell is an expert in the management of the phonograph, and placed the records already made in their proper order, as the weeping relatives and friends gathered around the coffin containing the remains of their dear one.
First the Lord’s Prayer was rendered with a solemn emphasis that took away all the suggestion of mechanical effect. It impressed the mourners. Then a record by the Mozart quartet of the hymn, ‘Nearer My God to Thee,’ was given on another cup and after that the verses of the Scripture usually given at funerals and beginning with the words, ‘Man, who is born of woman,’ etc., were rendered with full emphasis. Then a solo, ‘The Sweet Bye and Bye,’ recorded by Miss Loreen Williamson of Gravesend was repeated. The closing portion was the committal service used by the Reformed Church denomination. The remains were then conveyed to the town cemetery, where they were interred without further ceremonies.
Mr. Stillwell, when spoken to on the matter last night, said he was entirely satisfied with the result. He said:
‘It was a solemn, if a novel scene. I confess I felt a degree of trepidation when the service began, but when the inanimate machine, with its whirring accompaniment, began the solemn words, they seemed invested with a feeling of comfort, and touched everyone present.'”
Yes, they discuss nukes.
Tags: Hugh Hefner, William F. Buckley
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to build a world-class science and engineering campus in Manhattan is the impetus for a debate in the New York Times about whether the Big Apple can ever overtake Silicon Valley as America’s center of tech. I think it’ll be a long haul at best. Tech-centric culture has been gradually and relentlessly built and nurtured in the Valley ever since Shockley and Hewlett and Packard set up shop there. It’s kind of like asking why Los Angeles can’t do better than Broadway or why a country that has never known democracy has trouble installing one. Minds have to be changed before reality can. An excerpt from the Times piece, which was written by Flipboard‘s Craig Mod:
“To be in Silicon Valley is to be completely immersed in technology. The building, the pushing, the hacking, the designing, the iterating, the testing, the acquisitions, the funding — it is everywhere and wholly inescapable. Here is a culture and place that emerged seemingly from nothing, and yet over the last 50 years it has developed a mythology deep and inspiring and all its own.
Anyone can take part in this great valley mythology. For a place so overflowing with money, there is shockingly little pretension. With sufficient curiosity and gumption you are in. This is what captures the minds of entrepreneurs around the world. That the great founders aren’t in Ivory Towers — they are standing in front of you, eating yogurt. That the great companies aren’t just of the past — they are being replaced by even greater companies. And those greater companies are hiring like mad.”
Tags: Craig Mod, Michael Bloomberg
Steve Jobs lets the Mac out of the bag in 1984.
Tags: Steve Jobs
"I'm looking for a real, working way to shrink."
help me find a shrinking potion (reno nv)
im looking for a real, working way to shrink. i know its very strange, but im serious, and i know that there must really be a way. i would like to shrink myself to 3inches tall. no joke. lol. im a 24 year old male. id do anything, anything to get a hold of something that really honestly works. thank you!
Babies with tablets is probably inevtiable, as a piece in the Atlantic about a new $389 model suggests:
“This month, Vinci, the 7-inch touch-pad tablet displayed above, will go on sale through Amazon, which is already accepting pre-orders. ‘The Vinci is not an imitation — it is a real touch-screen Android-based product, bringing the most advanced technology to the benefit of our youngest citizens,’ according to the product’s website.
Designed to compete with LeapFrog’s new LeapPad, a $99 tablet aimed at 4- to 9-year-olds, the Vinci targets an even younger audience (0- to 4-year-olds) — one it could potentially grow up with for some time. With its protective soft-corner case, this tablet is meant to last. And don’t let the non-toxic packaging or the durable handles fool you: This is far different than any other electronics you’ll find in the baby aisle. Vinci lacks Wi-Fi or 3G capability, but, with a Cortex A8 processor and 4GB of internal storage, it still packs a serious punch — it’s even outfitted with a built-in microphone and a 3-megapixel built-in camera to capture that special moment when your child first realizes just powerful our current computing technology is.”
••••••••••
To mark tomorrow’s release of the Planet of the Apes origin story.
Tags: Johnny Carson, Paul Williams
In “Practical Magic,” Russell Davies of Ogilvy & Mather provides his vision of the Internet of Things, which is borne of regular people futzing around with endless reams of data and cheap physical materials:
“Do you remember Big Mouth Billy Bass – the strange animated fish that became a popular novelty a few years back? It looked like a regular fisherman’s trophy but when you hit a button on the frame it would suddenly come to life and start singing ‘Take Me to the River’ or some other amusing aquatically themed song.
Now imagine that Billy had the intelligence of your average smart phone. He’d know where he was in the world. What the time was. What the weather was like. Who’d won the football. Whether the trains were running late. And, assuming you’d programmed a little bit of profile information into him, he’d know which of your Foursquare friends were nearby, and which of your favorite bands were playing in the area. He’d know a lot. With some simple text-to-speech stuff in his head and a bit of ingenuity, he’d be able to tell you all sorts of interesting and useful things when you pressed that button. And you would press that button, wouldn’t you?
Well, something like Billy will get made. It’s bound to. Cheap electronics, cheap plastics and cheap intelligence are going to get welded together with free, ubiquitous data feeds to make hundreds of products just like him. It’s the warped magic you’ll get when two waves of innovation crash together – the flood of data from the internet and the sea of stuff from Chinese factories. That right there is your Internet of Things.” (Thanks Browser.)
••••••••••
Big Mouth Billy Bass:
Tags: Russell Davies
Tbilisi, 1911.
Sweltering summer temperatures seem to be just part of the reason why the people of Tbilisi, Georgia, tend to see the apocalypse hurtling toward them from all directions. From an interesting New York Times report by Ellen Barry:
“Word that scorpions had been sighted on her street clinched it, as far as Nana Beniashvili was concerned.
The giant locusts had been bad enough, and the snakes, which are known in Georgian as ‘that which cannot be mentioned.’ She actually hadn’t seen any scorpions herself, but she believed that one of her neighbors had, and in the asphalt-melting, earth-parching, brain-scrambling heat of midsummer, she was not in the mood to be fastidious about evidence.
‘This means the apocalypse is coming,’ said Ms. Beniashvili, 72, who was leaning out of a window. ‘I cannot tell you exactly when, because I am not very knowledgeable about this. But it is clear that the apocalypse is coming. The world has gone crazy.
‘Anyway, I hope we will survive,’ she sighed, and went inside to look for lemonade.”
••••••••••
UFOs attack Tbilisi:
Tags: Ellen Barry
Harald Haas explains how a simple bulb can outperform a cellular tower.
In a Spiegel interview, Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell discusses Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik and the nature of evil. To counter Mankell somewhat, I do think that some people may have a greater proclivity to violence based on biological makeup, and there may be neurogical reasons that arise which can trigger violent impulse. But, yes, these probably are exceptions, and extreme environments can certainly lead to extreme behaviors. An excerpt from the interview:
“SPIEGEL: Does our consternation over the mystery of evil also stem from the fact that Breivik, as the police put it, literally came out of nowhere?
Mankell: We want to recognize the characteristics of evil early on, and we search for marks of Cain and stigmata, the warning signs of the horrific before it occurs. But that kind of thinking is based on magic.
SPIEGEL: But it isn’t just a question of the banality of evil, but also of our fascination with evil.
Mankell: You address an important aspect. What I fear most of all is that a new discussion will emerge about the concept of innate evil. That was the way people thought 500 years ago. No one is born evil. People become evil through external circumstances, which provoke evil behavior.
SPIEGEL: But everyone has the inherent capability to be evil?
Mankell: In the Balkan wars, following the breakup of Yugoslavia, neighbors who had lived together in peace until then suddenly began attacking one another. I saw child soldiers in Africa, 14 and 15-year-old boys, who slaughtered their parents after someone had held a gun to their heads. I’m not sure what I would have done, as a child, in their situation. The explanation for evil lies in its circumstances and conditions, not in its diabolical nature. That is what Hannah Arendt taught us.”
••••••••••
Mankell at the Strand Book Store in Manhattan in 2010:
Tags: Henning Mankell
A predictive 2000 Nightline doc about overpopulation, which was far too dire.
Tags: Ted Koppel
KFC in Lagos, Nigeria. (Image by Qasamaan.)
From “Megacity,” an excellent 2006 New Yorker article by George Packer which deflated the recent romantic reconsideration of large-scale slums by Western intellectuals:
“When I first went to Lagos, in 1983, it already had a fearsome reputation among Westerners and Africans alike. Many potential visitors were kept away simply by the prospect of getting through the airport, with its official shakedowns and swarming touts. Once you made it into the city, a gantlet of armed robbers, con men, corrupt policemen, and homicidal bus drivers awaited you.
Recently, Lagos has begun to acquire a new image. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Third World’s megacities have become the focus of intense scholarly interest, in books such as Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, and Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities. Neuwirth, having lived for two years in slum neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and other cities, came to see the world’s urban squatters as pioneers and patriots, creating solid communities without official approval from the state or the market. ‘Today, the world’s squatters are demonstrating a new way forward in the fight to create a more equitable globe,’ he wrote. What squatters need most of all, he argued, is the right to stay where they are: ‘Without any laws to support them, they are making their improper, illegal communities grow and prosper.’
Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a business strategist based in Marin County, California, goes even further. ‘Squatter cities are vibrant,’ he writes in a recent article on megacities. ‘Each narrow street is one long bustling market.’ He sees in the explosive growth of ‘aspirational shantytowns’ a cure for Third World poverty and an extraordinary profit-making opportunity. ‘How does all this relate to businesspeople in the developed world?’ Brand asks. ‘One-fourth of humanity trying new things in new cities is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors.’
In the dirty gray light of Lagos, however, Neuwirth’s portrait of heroic builders of the cities of tomorrow seems a bit romantic, and Brand’s vision of a global city of interconnected entrepreneurs seems perverse. The vibrancy of the squatters in Lagos is the furious activity of people who live in a globalized economy and have no safety net and virtually no hope of moving upward.” (Thanks TETW.)
Tags: George Packer
"Vulgar."
Free mother-in-law (CT)
I am willing to give away for free my mother in law. . Let me tell you about some of her “charms”
Pushy
Nasty
Loud
Vulgar
Fat
Big “ego”
Self-centered
Major “controll freak”
If you love being put down every chance she gets then.. she is for you
If you love being kicked in the ass when you are down then.. she is for you
If you love being told how to run your life then………………… she is for you
If you love someone who is nasty towards you then………….. she is for you
If you love being “blamed” for everything then……………………. she is for you
If you love getting “no respect” then she is for you
Will consider FREE shipping if you live in any one of these remote locations:
Canada (past the artic circle)
Russia (siberia)
North or south poles
The outback
If you are an ET and would like her for research on your home world.
If you like hunting wild game
For the love of god or anything else out there in the universe PLEASE!! take her off my hands.
Leon Theremin playing his namesake instrument.
From a 1967 New York Times interview with Theremin: “He ushered the visitor into a room in which a small dance floor had been constructed. Mr. Theremin stood on the floor, raised his arms, made motions, and started to play the Massenet Elegy on nothing at all.
The room was filled with sound, and it was positively spooky. No wires, no gadgets, nothing visible. Merely electromagnetic sorcery,
‘I made my last public appearance in 1938,’ Mr. Theremin said. ‘I sometimes think it would be nice to come back once more to United States and show my latest instruments.'”
One of the best opening sentences I have read in a while comes from Avi Steinberg’s excellent new Paris Review piece about a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky. Here’s that opening line plus the rest of the first two paragraphs:
“I’m waiting for the elevator in a medieval-themed hotel in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, when the elevator doors open to reveal a heated exchange between a bald man in a Hawaiian shirt and a puppet shaped like a toucan. My presence brings an uncomfortable end to their private imbroglio. Both stare at me silently as I enter the elevator, and for five awkward floors I’m brought into direct contact with what George Bernard Shaw described as the “unvarying intensity of facial expression” of puppets, an attribute he believed makes them more compelling actors than humans.
I’m at the Vent Haven ConVENTion where, each July, hundreds of ventriloquists, or “vents,” as they call themselves, gather from all over the world. For four days, they attend lectures on the business, getting advice on AV equipment, scriptwriting, or creating an audience through social networking. They listen to a keynote address by Comedy Central’s ventriloquist-in-residence, Jeff Dunham, who exhorts his notoriously defensive colleagues to ‘quit complaining that people say we’re weird. We talk to dolls. We are weird, ok. Just own it.’ They eat at a Denny’s off the highway and visit the creationist museum down the road. And they don’t go anywhere without the accompaniment of their alter egos.”
•••••••••
Magic trailer, 1978:
Dumbstruck, a documentary about Vents:
Tags: Avi Steinberg, Jeff Dunham
From the Escapist comes a report about Brewster Kahle’s Herculean effort to collect every book every published, in original dead-tree form:
“Kahle, a computer scientist with a degree from MIT, is most famous as the creator of the Internet Archive, a non-profit group formed in 1996 with a goal of preserving every web page ever created.
In that same archival spirit, Kahle has recently set his sights on preserving the existing written history of mankind, and he’s off to a pretty solid start.
To date, Kahle’s warehouse in Richmond, California houses 500,000 books. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 130 million tomes collected by Google in its efforts to digitize the entirety of our literature, but Kahle is heartened by the speed at which his group has been able to accrue their half-million books.
The existence of Google’s aforementioned project also causes one to question Kahle’s motivations. After all, if we’ve got the text available online, why keep their archaic dead tree iterations?
‘There is always going to be a role for books,’ Kahle says. ‘We want to see books live forever.'”
•••••••••
Kahle discusses his work in digital archiving at TED:
Tags: Brewster Kahle
Tags: Abraham Lincoln