Bitter Laughter

I found this by total accident: a fairly long wikipedia page of Russian political jokes.

A few examples:

A knock knock joke about KGB. The "knocker" knocks on the "knockee"'s door (the joke receiver). The door answerer asks the questions "who is it". The knocker replies stating that he is the KGB, (knocker only says "KGB"). The answerer replies by saying "KGB who" as with all knock knock jokes. The knocker slaps the answerer before allowing the answerer to finish saying the previous line of "KGB who". Then the knocker yells "WE WILL ASK THE QUESTIONS!"

Or

A frightened man came to the KGB and said, "My talking parrot disappeared."
KGB: "This is not our case. Go to the criminal police."
Man: "Excuse me. Of course I know that I have to go to them. I am just here to tell you officially that I disagree with that parrot."

I think there's a fairly good chance Zizek himself wrote some of this.

It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening.

A time traveler from the future has been arrested at the Large Hadron Collider.  He was arrested after security guard caught him going through the trash looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device, CNET reports, "that resembled a kitchen blender."  Tell that to Mr. Fusion.

Corporations are not people.

If they were, they'd make better neighbors.

Stats

A little Wednesday afternoon statistics, to cheer us up.

What are the odds that you, as an individual, exist? Pretty good, you'd guess, since you're sitting right here reading this. But, in an abstract sense, the chances that you exist are really rather slim.

Click here to see the whole thing--and read all the way until the end. Via BoingBoing.

Now go be a statistical miracle.

The long life of the Vortex

Though a footnote in the wider project of England's only avant-garde, the vortograph was intended to be the photographic equivalent of Vorticism's flat canvasses and literary bombs.  So it was something of a surprise--a welcome surprise--to see Gizmodo hosting a competition to get folks to make contemporary vortographs.  The results are actually pretty great.

Salt Water Taffy

The NYT has a nice slideshow up detailing the variety of cover art for one of the best and most-often illustrated novels of all, Moby Dick.  Below is the strangest cover of them all.

The Atlantic also has a review up a really cool art book called Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page.  Below, a page by artist Matt Kish:

Self-parody alert

Eric Cantor to give speech on "how we make sure the people at the top stay there."  Not from The Onion.

Nothing bitter about it

The arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty in Madison Square Park, New York. These portions of the Statue were exhibited to raise funds for the completion of the statue and its pedestal. The arm and torch remained in the park from 1876 until 1882. Members of the public could pay fifty cents to climb to the balcony of the torch.

From BoingBoing.

The Industrial Production of Death

You know there's something wrong here when "the fish" are referred to in the singular, as if the moment they entered the boat the went from being animals to being food.  Surreal.

Via Gizmodo.

Youtube dreams

"We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

UC Berkley scientists are pioneering a system "to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips," technology that may someday allow us to TiVo our dreams. Yikes.

War Plan Red

Invasion of Canada. Bombing raids on British industrial interests. Naval blockade. Chemical weapons. Six million troops fighting on the Eastern seaboard. This wasn't a crazy Nazi plan. It was the United States' strategy to destroy Britain as a world superpower.

How the US Planned to Destroy Britain Just a Few Years Before World War II.  It actually sounds like this was a lot more than just an elaborate contingency plan, since the US had already built three disguised airfields in Canada for War Plan Red.

Nintendo Power

Wired has an amazing piece up about the "holy grail" of Nintendo game collecting, previously discussed on this very blog.  Of course, some trail-blazing video game collector bought 7 of the 26 known copies of the most desired video game on the planet sometime in the mid-90s.  He paid as little as $50 for what now goes for as much as $17,000.