During Bob Dylan’s performance of “Love Sick” at the 1998 Grammy Awards, a man, bare-chested except for the words “Soy Bomb” dawbed on his torso, ran onto stage and proceeded to gyrate, gesticulate, dance and just plain emote. If you watch the footage, you’ll understand why it took security about 40 seconds to realize he was not part of Dylan’s plans. His dancing fit the music in an odd sort of folk-blues-robot-expresive-modern-dance kind of way. Of course, this is to be expected from Michael Portnoy.
Fast forward from February to April 1st, and Rhino Records (best known for their releases of seminal 70s acts such as the Doors, the Grateful Dead and Genesis) announce that “Soy Bomb” has been signed to a two-year, six album recording contract. Soy Bomb’s debut album was to include covers of such pertinent classics as “Dancing Machine” and “You Dropped a Bomb on Me”. A spokesman for Rhino was quoted as explaining the reasons for Soy Bomb’s signing thusly: the experience of having seen him dance was
“kind of like
when you eat too many Whoppers and you feel a little nauseous,
but you’re so happy you ate them.”
On April 1st., 1957, Richard Dimbleby announced, on the respected BBC current affairs show Panorama, that Swiss farmers were reaping a particularly large harvest of spaghetti that year, thanks to a mild winter and the “virtual elimination of the spaghetti weevil”. The joyous news was accompanied by footage of buxom Swiss ladies and stout Swiss gents gleefully pulling copious strands of spaghetti from trees.
It is estimated that 8 million Britons watched the broadcast; when hundreds phoned the BBC to find out more about the spaghetti plant, and how they might go about cultivating their own spaghetti crop, the official advice from Auntie was to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best”.
Although it seems absurd that anyone would be taken in by such an obviously spurious item, it bears remembering that pasta was far from a common food in 1950s Britain, and was in fact considered quite an exotic delicacy, so perhaps th spaghetti ignorance of the public can be forgiven. Somewhat.
In the obituary for Charles de Jaeger (the Panorama cameraman who originally came up with the idea for the hoax) published in The Independent, Sir Ian Jacob, the then Director-General of the BBC, is quoted as having said to Leonard Miall, Head of Television Talks between 1954-61:
“When I saw that item, I said to my wife, ‘I don’t think spaghetti grows on trees’, so we’d looked it up in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Do you know, Miall, Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn’t even mention spaghetti.”
Originally discovered at John Sadowski’s website, this optical illusion is actually not really an illusion per se; rather it showcases how our visual memory informs the picture that we currently have before our eyes. In this example, our eyes are forced to see colour in a black and white picture, after our visual memory becomes saturated with shade and line data after staring at the negative image for 10 seconds or more. More, fascinating information on how this kind of illusion works can be found here.
There are many of these images around, and you can make your own in a matter of minutes with pretty much any image manipulation software. I’ve included my own in the form of an animated GIF. Stare at the centre of the negativised image. After 20 seconds, the black and white version will pop up, but you will see elements of colour, even though the image you’re looking at is fully black and white.
Seems like every cyber-corner you turn has a gang of cats hanging around it.
Typing the word “cat” into Google Images results in upwards of 27 million results, while a search for the word “dog” will return a mere 22 million (interestingly, the tides are turned if you search for their plurals, with 2.5 million more pictures of “dogs” than “cats” found by Google on the internet).
Lolcats are getting mainstream media attention and have spawned numerous imitations, my nerdy favourite being lolbots.
Here are two pictures of my new kitten, Timmy, sound asleep. Click on the thumbnails for the full-size versions. Feel free to download them. Add a caption if you feel inclined.
My other post with my Nintendo remixes has gotten buried pretty far down in the archives, so I thought I’d give the ongoing project a shot in the arm. This post will contain the most recent remixes that I’ve done. I’ll edit it as and when to provide links to the mp3s on Divshare. While I’m on the subject, Divshare seem to have changed their link coding, which now means I can’t offer a direct, direct link to the mp3 any more. I’ll provide one link to play the file in your browser, another to download the mp3.
Don’t forget to check out the other songs I’ve redone in a console style here and here.
My other post with my Nintendo remixes has gotten buried pretty far down in the archives, so I thought I’d give the ongoing project a shot in the arm. This post will contain the most recent remixes that I’ve done. I’ll edit it as and when to provide links to the mp3s on Divshare. While I’m on the subject, Divshare seem to have changed their link coding, which now means I can’t offer a direct, direct link to the mp3 any more. I’ll provide one link to play the file in your browser, another to download the mp3.