Arcade Attack

I discovered this on cable in 1982, as one of those shorts that HBO used to play between movies. Being a seventh-grader who read Heavy Metal magazine and spent every weekend in arcades and pinball palaces around the north side of Chicago, it was of course the most awesome thing I'd ever seen. I told friends about it, and none of them knew what I was talking about.

Seeing it now for the first time in 27 years, it's still pretty rad. And much better than Tron.

Ghost Rider

The Dungeons of Mutato Muzika

Every morning I pass by the lovely headquarters of Mutato Muzika on the Sunset Strip, location of my ultimate dream job (I was served my termination papers yesterday, so I'm waxing poetic). Mark Mothersbaugh, co-founder of Devo, started the company along with two other original band members, and composes original soundtracks for films, television series, commercials and video games.

The Chartreuse Turbine-Building's dungeons are the stuff of legend. Devo never threw away or sold anything, so the place is a museum of vintage electronics:



The most prized possession must certainly be Raymond Scott's Electronium, currently not working but hopefully to be repaired someday.

Upstairs, we find Mr. Mothersbaugh caressing his organ:

Mort Garson

Mort Garson was a very successful composer, arranger and conductor for Doris Day, Mel Torme, Glen Campbell and many others, but he eventually became one of those songwriters in the late 60's - early 70's who owned a Moog synthesizer. Ergo, he got in on the ground floor with tons of lucrative commercial work and record deals. But while most moog albums were covers of pop songs and classical composers, Garson wrote all his own material (except one album, interpretations from the Hair musical). His most famous is Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, which was expanded into a 12-album set (a full LP for each sign in the horoscope). Black Mass by Lucifer is my favorite, but everyone in the world needs to hear Wozard of Iz at least once in their lifetime, as traumatic as it may be. I find it both musically brilliant and extremely creepy. Zodiac is an overrated novelty album in my opinion, Plantasia is the most innocuous (but it's written for plants to listen to, not you or I), and Music for Sensuous Lovers is pretty interesting, but definitely NSFW.

I paid an embarrassing amount of money for the Black Mass vinyl at a record fair. But that was way back before there were music blogs. Normally I would never post album download links, but these are unavailable through any other means, so it's perfectly ethical: six albums are hosted by Egg City Radio HERE and HERE.

After several years of appreciating Garson's bizarro music, I've just found this on youtube and can finally put a face to the name:


Garson passed away in January 2008, allegedly while finishing up another concept album. No word as to whether it will be released.

Classroom Carcasses

(excerpted from an article on slate.com, which in turn is evaluating the book Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine.

This lost genre of photographs dates roughly from 1880 to 1930. The images, which were taken at medical schools across the country, generally display groups of student dissectors posing with their cadavers. At times, the students—who are mostly male but occasionally female—are actively dissecting. Not surprisingly, many of the cadavers look less like human beings than pieces of meat.

But in other images, especially those involving the skeletons that students used to help identify the bones and other landmarks in their cadavers, the dead are in unnatural positions, either by themselves or with students. A cadaver smokes a pipe; skeletons play cards; skeletons hug their dissectors; skeletons are even propped up to appear as though they are dissecting sleeping students.

Although there was surely dark humor in these photographs and inscriptions, they were not candid shots meant primarily to entertain. Indeed, the facial expressions of the participants are often solemn and even reverential at times. It was not uncommon for students to replicate these images on souvenir or holiday greeting cards that they sent to friends and relatives.

How can these photographs be understood? (the author) believes that dissection was a "communal rite of passage" for medical students at the turn of the 20th century and the images served as a "professional coming-of-age narrative." This function is made especially clear by a series of "class portraits" in which cadavers appear among dozens of formally attired students. Although the photographs may appear inappropriate to us, they commemorate a bonding experience between student and cadaver that was actually lost after 1930. After that point, a new era of objectivity and detachment entered medical education, ending the earlier emotional attachment to the dissection process.

I dissected my first cadaver in the 1980s—a "politically correct" era. Our introductory anatomy lecture implored us to respect the bodies and even referred to them as our "teachers." The year ended with a memorial service for the now-dissected specimens, another tribute to their memory. Aside from giving our corpses a few silly nicknames, we more or less behaved ourselves.

While these photographs come from a very different era, I wish they had raised the issue of contemporaneous objections. Did anyone within the medical schools or among laypeople viewing the various holiday cards decry what was happening, suggesting that the cadavers were inappropriately being used as a means to an end? Whatever society believed about the privileges of future doctors and the fate of the poor, did this justify voyeuristic displays of dead human beings in various comical and indecent states?

I believe the descendants of these anatomical subjects deserve some type of apology. Just because we might never identify their actual kin does not render this task unnecessary. Generations of physicians benefited from the use of these bodies—but also chose to treat them in an undignified, and at times repulsive, manner.

Every medical school in this country should get a hold of the images in this remarkable volume and show them to incoming students before they set foot in an anatomy lab. The mistakes of their predecessors might impart a needed dose of humility.

Full article and slideshow here.

Auction Pick: House of Wax

Being that Michael Jackson has withdrawn his estate from the auction block, you surely have tens of thousands of dollars in disposable income sitting around. Well, you're in luck: next week, Profilesinhistory.com will be auctioning 170 pieces from The Hollywood Wax Museum.

Most of the figures featured in The Challenge on my website are now available for purchase, along with many others from the same owner's Branson location (which explains the multiples of some celebrities).

Got a spare bedroom? occupy it with a full-scale depiction of the nativity, last supper, crucifixion or ascension (pp 101-105). A fan of M*A*S*H? Re-enact your favorite episodes with the entire cast, selling as a single lot (pages 39 and 45).

If you're an überfan of the Hollywood location as I am, don't worry; even though The Great American Success Story Spoony Singh passed away a couple years ago, and Madame Tussaud's is currently being built just a block away, the Hollywood Wax Museum doesn't seem to be in danger of shutting down. They're just liquidating their most ham-fisted sculptures to make room for the quality pieces (which makes this catalog such a gem of outsider art). Nothing in their excellent Chamber of Horrors is being sold, thank heavens.

Preview the items in person between now and tuesday (by appointment), and start bidding on May 1st at 6:30 p.m. PDT. Get a full-color catalog mailed to you for just $30, or download it in zipped .pdf format for free HERE.

On the same page, you'll notice they've also published the catalog for the legendary Forrest Ackerman estate. This is in-cred-i-ble. In addition to previously mentioned items, here are a few more of note:

A piece of the original 1932 Mummy, worn by Boris Karloff (p. 176), a buck-naked sculpture of Marlene Dietrich which was commissioned by Forry himself (p. 180), thousands of scrapbooks, photo albums, magazines and paperbacks (186-187), a lot of monster toys which inexplicably includes his esperanto membership card (192), a coffin which was a gift from the band Skinny Puppy (194), the original mask from Revenge of the Creature (203), and this spaceship control panel used in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (210):


And much much more. This auction has far surpassed my expectations. I will be bidding on an item myself, but I haven't listed it here so I might further eliminate competition. But be sure to download the catalog. It's the ultimate in Hollywood porn. Bidding starts at noon on April 30th.

UPDATE! The king of pop has resumed the auction of his estate yet again! Just checked the boards; there are zero bids on ms. pac-man and frogger, with an opening price of $1000 and $400 respectively. Register at liveauctioneers.com.

The Jaquet-Droz Automata

(all text is from wikipedia)
The Jaquet-Droz automata refer to three doll automata built between 1768 and 1774 by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis and Jean-Frédéric Leschot: the Musician, the drawer and the writer. The dolls are still functional, and can be seen at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland. They are considered to be among the remote ancestors of modern computers.

The automata were designed and built as advertisement and entertainment toys designed to improve the sales of watches among the nobility of Europe in the 18th century. They were carried around, and lost at several points. The History and Archeology society of Neuchâtel eventually bought them in 1906 and gave them to the museum, where they have been ever since.



The Musician is a female organ player. The music is not faked, in the sense that it is not recorded or played by a musical box: the doll is actually playing a genuine (yet custom-built) instrument by pressing the keys with her fingers. She "breathes" (the movements of the chest can be seen), follows her fingers with her head and eyes, and also makes some of the movements that a real player would do -- balancing the torso for instance.



The Drawer is a young child who can actually draw four different images: a portrait of Louis XV, a royal couple (believed to be Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI), a dog with "Mon toutou" ("my doggy") written beside it, and a scene of Cupid driving a chariot pulled by a butterfly.

The drawer works by using a system of cams which code the movements of the hand in two dimensions, plus one to lift the pencil. The automaton also moves on his chair, and he periodically blows on the pencil to remove dust.





The Writer is the most complex of the three automata. Using a system similar to the one used for the Drawer for each letter, he is able to write any custom text up to 40 letters long (the text is rarely changed; one of the latest instances was in honour of president François Mitterrand when he toured the city). The text is coded on a wheel where characters are selected one by one. He uses a goose feather to write, which he inks from time to time, including a shake of the wrist to prevent ink from spilling. His eyes follow the text being written, and the head moves when he takes some ink.

(bonus link: the creepiest automaton I've ever seen on youtube here)

The Carnivorous Syndrome

I recently visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology (for the sixth time - it never gets boring) and picked up this dvd in the gift shop. It's 23 minutes long (without the intros you see in these special online videos) and the 3D is excellent. In fact, no one has shot this sort of 3D before: time lapse macrophotography with camera movement. And to think it was done with an old digital camera and a robot built from a Lego Mindstorms set. From the filmmaker's website:

Normally, when one makes a 3D movie, two cameras are used--one to capture a left view, and another to capture the right view. However, if one wants to do macro 3D video, the cameras would need to be just 6mm (.25 inch) wide.

My solution was to build a robotic system that could move and operate a single digital still camera. The camera slides back and forth between two positions, 6 mm apart. By taking a picture at each position, the robot simulates two tiny cameras. In other words, the robot captures the view from the left, slides the camera over, and then captures the right view.

I wanted to see plants rotating while they grew, in 3D. In order to achieve this effect, the rotation module had to be capable of turning in discrete, .1 degree steps. This would allow the robot to take 1800 photographs over the course of a week or two, with the rotation occurring after each left/right pair. The end result would be 30 seconds of macro 3D timelapse video of a plant growing while rotating 90 degrees.

Blow up the above video to fullscreen, put on the glasses you've most surely acquired by now, and sit two or three feet back from the monitor. For much, much better depth and clarity, buy the dvd at the MJT for $12.50, or get it here for $15 postpaid.

part two
part three

LDS3

Viewer Mail

We'd like to compile some images which loyal Futurechimp readers have sent in the last few weeks.

L.E. of Brooklyn sent us these two pictures of an exceptionally precocious and handsome illusionist:



S.J. of Eagle Rock submitted this old poster image, which looks to be Shemp Howard's illegitimate offspring ("Shimp"?)


J.F. of Santa Monica gives us this disturbing Prog-Rock album cover:


and finally, B.W. of Echo Park presents this humanzee hybrid:

Goods and Services

Excerpted from Sciencedaily.com:

Wild female chimpanzees copulate more frequently with males who share meat with them over long periods of time, according to a study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

In recent research conducted in the Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire, Cristina M. Gomes and Christophe Boesch show that females copulate more frequently with males who share meat with them on at least one occasion, compared with males who never share meat with them, indicating that sharing meat with females improves a males' mating success. Although males were more likely to share meat with females who had sexual swellings (i.e., estrous females), excluding all sharing episodes with estrous females from the analysis, did not alter the results. This indicates that short term exchanges alone (i.e., within the estrous phase of the female) cannot account for the relationship between sharing meat and mating success.

According to Gomes, "Our results strongly suggest that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for sex, and do so on a long-term basis. Males who shared meat with females doubled their mating success, whereas females, who had difficulty obtaining meat on their own, increased their caloric intake, without suffering the energetic costs and potential risk of injury related to hunting. Previous studies might not have found a relationship between mating success and meat sharing because they focused on short-term exchanges; or perhaps because in those groups access to females was driven by male coercion so females rarely chose their mating partners."

Boesch concluded, "Our findings add to the ever-growing evidence suggesting that chimpanzees can think in the past and the future and that this influences their present behavior. These findings are bound to have an impact on our current knowledge about relationships between men and women; and similar studies will determine if the direct nutritional benefits that women receive from hunters in human hunter-gatherer societies could also be driving the relationship between reproductive success and good hunting skills".

Happy Saint Frankenstein's Day

Science is Fiction

After being credited as the "chief ant handler" for Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, Jean Painleve began making his own films in 1927. Although sharing some theories with the French surrealists, Painleve didn't consider his work to be surrealism. He adopted the maxim "science is fiction", and spent the next five decades making films of the natural world, most of it aquatic (he was among the first filmmakers to shoot underwater). Painleve would often sacrifice scientific objectivity for the sake of art and entertainment (being sure to play up the more dramatic elements of violence and eroticism), and give human motivations and desires to his subjects. He is credited with creating a one-of-a-kind "scientific-poetic" cinema.

This is the only subtitled video I could find online, but 23 of his films will finally be released on a 3-disc dvd collection later this week (with 90 minutes worth of original soundtracks by Yo La Tengo). More here.

Red Light, Green Light

I had to watch this horrible film at least twice in the mid-seventies as a first or second-grader in school. It's the kind of experience you don't forget so easily.

At first you might think it's filled with good intentions, but there are a lot of bad suggestions: a sexual predator might not necessarily "look dangerous". The signals aren't always so clear, and the basic advice of "be careful around people you don't know" would be more beneficial and less harmful than what they're promoting here. There's also no mention of the fact that most sexual abuse happens within the family. The glib, irresponsible statement that parents, teachers, clergymen, authority figures are "green light" will only make the children who are the victims of these people feel more confused and helpless.

Then there's the more obvious message: All pedophiles are homosexuals (and by that logic, all homosexuals are pedophiles). Even the girl at the movie theater gets accosted by a woman. We have a long way to go in accepting different lifestyles, but at least some progress has been made in recent decades, and children aren't exposed to this degree of prejudice in the public school system anymore.

If you sat through that whole 20 minutes of fear and hate, you might want to follow it up with a few tips from The Safety Gang (courtesy Robert Smigel's TV Funhouse):

'No Bars, No Cages, No Danger'

(excerpted from laist.com)

As Los Angeles began to reach out in all directions from its tenuous core in the early part of the 20th Century, the city became a place for families and for visitors, and finding ways to make money off keeping them entertained was a frequent pursuit of many visionaries and entrepreneurs. Although a massive theme park like Disneyland didn't come on the scene until the 1950s, in the 1940s animals were the stars at many local attractions.

Sitting on prime real estate where the Cahuenga Pass at opens its mouth into--what was then the largely untamed land of--the San Fernando Valley was an attraction called Monkey Island. Home to hundreds of monkeys who mostly just cavorted as spectators watched, the attraction--a "Paradise of Primates!"--opened in 1938 and enjoyed a brief period of great success, then ostensibly disappeared and was forgotten.

It seems to have been conceived by Louis Weiss, who abruptly stopped making movies in 1938, with one of his last titles being "Jungle Menace" (and a few later titles like "The White Gorilla" and "Jungle Terror"). (He) and a Jack Cone were responsible for bringing 500 monkeys to the port in Long Beach on November 3, 1938--the "largest single collection of monkeys ever to arrive in America".

Opening a theme park based on monkeys was not entirely novel, in fact, it was part of a national trend, as zoos and independent businessmen were launching "Monkey Islands" in several US cities.

Monkey Island's opening was delayed by a couple of months in late 1938, but there was plenty of buzz around town about it. In his December 8, 1938 LA Times column "Lee Side O' L.A." Lee Shippey writes: "Painful Suspicion: A lot of newspaper boys recently have received free tickets to Monkey Island, where 500 monkeys are said to be running around loose. Could this possibly be an effort to confuse the public as to how many real monkeys are out there?"

Just how many monkeys were really there is also an amusing point of obscurity; we know Weiss and Cone imported 500 monkeys initially, but some promo material may have doubled that figure, and some who remember visiting may recall only being lured by 100.

Of course, Los Angeles had to make our monkeys more show-bizzy than any others. "Monkey Island was designed by pioneer Hollywood studio art director Paul Palmentola with assistance from architect George Sprague," explained the blog Outside the Berm (now offline, but viewable via cache). Guidebooks touted its construction as being steel reinforced concrete, oval, and surrounded by a moat fifteen feet wide and filled with three feet of clear, circulating water. Having the moat meant that the monkeys could roam freely without the restriction of cages. The center of the attraction was a 40-foot high plastic mountain that the monkeys could climb and scamper around. Gavin Elster of the blog Sequoia Sempervirens adds that "there were palm trees, swings and billy goats for the monkeys to amuse themselves, and waterfalls where they could keep cool. Visitors paid to come in and watch the monkeys and feed them peanuts and vegetables."

The hilly landscape, with its "two palm fringed mountains, [was] meant to duplicate the look of active volcanoes. Which is a little odd considering that the monkeys were imported from Calcutta, India - not an area especially known for Volcanic activity."

The monkeys lived in "dormitories" that could house up to 2000 simians, and were hauled out to frolic for guests of the park, then sent back in to sleep on steel shelves covered in straw.

A hot spell in September 1939 caused one reporter to write up an article for the Times on the 22nd about how animals cope with the heat. Seems like the monkeys of Monkey Island had it made in the shade--or at least the celebrity monkeys did: "[Most monkeys] huddled together at miniature waterfalls as the sun's rays poured down on their bowed heads, but their elder brothers Jiggs, an orangutan, and Sammy and Sourpuss, chimpanzees, reveled in a cake of ice, a streaming hose, lemonade, and ice-cold watermelon".

But roaming about and accepting tossed peanuts wasn't all the monkeys would do. There was some "talent" in the bunch. "A very talented Orangutan named Jiggs would walk around and greet visitors and climb up and down the ladders in the center ticket area." (Hollywood 1900-1950). There were also, eventually, more than just monkeys cavorting around the plastic hill on Cahuenga.

In March of 1939, a Burbank woman's goat gave birth to quadruplets, who were then given to Monkey Island so the monkeys could have some playmates. "The monkeys and the goats find each other mutually amusing," apparently. ("Nannie"). The goats came into play the following summer, when 100 monkeys fled (do you blame them?) when their moat was drained, only to be lured back to captivity by food.

The article features a picture of monkeys being fed by attendant John Kosik, with one of the monkeys riding on the back of a goat. The monkeys were also used by area hospitals for experimental purposes, which Weiss seems to have conducted as a side project perhaps to compensate for the fact that some might believe the monkeys were being exploited uselessly.


In a 1940 LA Times article, Gene Sherman writes: "Many of the chattering little animals from the island, we learned, become funny faced martyrs. Weiss, before the war, supplied local hospitals with 150 or more a month for serum testing. There's an embargo on monkeys now and not so many jungle clowns are being received from Northern India."

Heavily promoted to tourists as a place where one could rub elbows with Hollywood stars and celebrities, Monkey Island took strong advantage of its Hollywood location. This from the guide book: ' Nowhere else in Hollywood can the visitor to Southern California come closer to the screen celebrities than at Monkey Island. There are no police, no ropes, no barriers between the great people of the cinema and those who come to Hollywood to view them at close range.'

Was this how a young Warren Miller, later film-maker, author and skiing columnist, was convinced to visit Monkey Island as a young boy? He recalls, "I had come to visit a new tourist attraction that was built right near the first Valley stop on The Pacific Electric Railroad, the route of the Big Red Cars. Some investor had built a 40-foot-high, fake plaster and cement mountain and surrounded it with a 20-foot-wide moat of slimy, green, stagnant water. The attraction was 100 undernourished, morose monkeys sitting on the concrete mountain watching you watching them. For 10 cents, you could watch the monkeys. For another five cents, you could buy a bag of peanuts and throw them to the monkeys."

Read the whole article HERE. Thanks to J. Furmanski for the referral.

Auction Pick: Jacko's Arcade

Starting today (April 14th) you can go to the Beverly Hilton Hotel, pay $20, and gawk at a bunch of useless junk. Sure, you can see most of the same stuff at "The Sharper Image", but this is Michael Jackson's junk, you see. It's the multimillion dollar auction you've probably heard about. You can also see every extravagant, tacky item in the four-volume catalog (only $200) or peruse it for free at the juliens auctions website. Part of the lot is his personal arcade. Most of it is pretty generic shopping mall arcade games, but he has a few gems: There's a handful of original penny arcade-era fortune telling automatons (page 22) Ripley's Believe It or Not Pinball (page 44) Six Player X-Men (page 47) and Frogger (page 57).

The arcade items will be auctioned starting at 9:00 AM on the 24th, also at the Hilton. Given the identity of the previous owner, you'll probably pay more than you would through craigslist or ebay. But just think of the activities committed on or near these machines. The mind boggles.

The rest of the catalog is worth a look. Aside from some genuinely cool items, like "House On The Rock"-style music machines, it's clearly the collection of a person who had a lot of money and a compulsion to spend it, but was running out of ideas as how to do so in the most wasteful manner possible. A bronze statue of The Hulk? A life-size Darth Vader made out of Lego blocks? Who would actually want this shit? Even if it were free?

The commissioned art is some of my favorite, like this lovely airbrushed work on the hood of his golf cart (also for sale):


Warning: the catalog can take a very very long time to load on your web browser, but it's worth it. Start Here.

UPDATE: Michael Jackson has cancelled the auction. He decided he cannot live without all that stuff. But you can still see the exhibit at the Beverly Hilton. Guess I'll have to buy my Frogger arcade game from some anonymous nobody.

Find The Chimp

A chimp is lurking somewhere in this clip. See if you can locate him.



Anyone else remember this depressing show? Ark II premiered in 1976 somewhere in the saturday morning network lineup. Only 15 episodes were made, but it kept airing for a few years. The whole series was shot over one summer in Malibu Creek State Park, which is not just a great spot for mountain biking but was also a filming location for the Planet of the Apes movies and M*A*S*H.


The show's premise was very similar to that of Damnation Alley, which came out a year later: The Ark's inhabitants travel through a wasteland of 25th century earth, searching for any signs of civilized human life. Sound boring? It is. The multiracial castmembers are named after characters from the Old Testament, and just look who plays the part of "Adam". This is indeed a positive sign for the glorious future of our chimpy species. Be patient, fellow apes.

New Metal Robots Single

Hear the full LP and meet the band HERE.

Tomorrow?

Brain Cables

This is an actual image of the human brain's electrical wiring, which has recently been found to be a key factor of intelligence. From a story on NPR's All Things Considered a couple weeks ago:

The smarter the person, the faster information zips around the brain, a UCLA study finds. And this ability to think quickly apparently is inherited.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, looked at the brains and intelligence of 92 people. All the participants took standard IQ tests. Then the researchers studied their brains using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI. (It's) a variant of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that can measure the structural integrity of the brain's white matter, which is made up of cells that carry nerve impulses from one part of the brain to another. The greater the structural integrity, the faster nerve impulses travel.

"These images really give you a picture of the mental speed of the brain," says Paul Thompson, Ph.D., a professor of neurology at UCLA School of Medicine.

Thompson says DTI scans of the 92 participants in the study revealed a clear link between brain speed and intelligence.

"When you say someone is quick-thinking, it's genuinely true," Thompson says. "The impulses are going faster and they are just more efficient at processing information, and then making a decision based on it."

Thompson's study also found that genetic factors played a big role in brain speed. The team was able to figure this out because the 92 people in their study were all twins. Some were identical twins, who share all the same genes. Others were non-identical twins, who share only certain genes.

By comparing the groups, the researchers were able to tease out genes associated with the structural integrity of white matter. And it turned out many of these genes were also associated with intelligence. Richard Haier, Ph.D., emeritus professor at the University of California, Irvine, says this may explain something scientists have been wondering about for a long time.

"We know that intelligence has some genetic component," he says. "And what the Thompson study is showing is that a large part of the genetic aspect of intelligence has to do with the white matter tracks that connect different parts of the brain."


Haier says the good news is that we're not necessarily stuck with the brain, or the brain speed, we inherit. He says thinking is like running or weightlifting. It helps to have certain genes. But anyone can get stronger or faster by working out.

The brain is like a muscle, Haier says: "The more you work it the more efficient it gets." So people who practice the violin, or do math problems, or learn a foreign language are constantly strengthening certain pathways in their brains. And Thompson notes that our brains, unlike our bodies, peak relatively late in life.

"The wires between the brain cells, the connections, are the things that you can modify throughout life," he says. "They change and they improve through your 40s and 50s and 60s." Thompson says there are practical, as well as academic, reasons to measure brain speed. The technique can spot problems such as Alzheimer's disease, which slows down the brain. And because the scans are so sensitive, they can show whether new drugs for Alzheimer's are actually working.

Attack of the Star Wars Clones

Three Star Wars imitations you should see before you die:

Starcrash (1978)


Message from Space (1978)


The Humanoid (1979)


I bought the DVD's by mail so I could screen them for friends many many times (Humanoid is the favorite by a longshot, although I prefer Starcrash because it has more action and babes), Or you can see all three of these officially unreleased movies in their entirety on youtube:
Starcrash
Message from Space
The Humanoid

Hemp for Victory

Cryptid Corner: Sinful Dwarf

The Nain Rouge (french for "red dwarf") originates in the folklore of Normandy, and is considered to be a "lutin", not unlike the devilish house-spirits of other European mythology, like gnomes, imps, and hobgoblins. But we yanks have our very own Nain Rouge right here in the states; he's been causing all sorts of dwarfy mischief around Detroit, Michigan for the last 300 years.

Also known as the "Red Gnome", Detroit's Nain Rouge is the harbinger of doom; his mere presence is a forewarning of terrible events for motor city. You'll recognize him by his dwarfish appearance and red fur boots. He also has burning red eyes and rotten teeth. From wikipedia,

The creature is said to have been attacked in 1701 by the first white settler of Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who soon after lost his fortune. The creature is also said to have appeared on July 30, 1763 before the Battle of Bloody Run, where 58 British soldiers were killed by Native Americans from Chief Pontiac's tribe.The small tributary of the Detroit river,which still flows through what is now Elmwood Cemetery, turned red with blood for days after the battle.It is said he was seen dancing on the banks of the Detroit river.

Famous multiple sighting occurred in the days before the 1805 fire which destroyed most of Detroit. General William Hull reported a "dwarf attack" in the fog just before his surrender of Detroit in the War of 1812.

A woman claimed to have been attacked in 1884, and described the creature as resembling, "a baboon with a horned head...brilliant restless eyes and a devilish leer on its face." Another attack was reported in 1964.

Other sightings include the day before the 12th Street Riot in 1967 and before a huge snow/ice storm of March 1976, when two utility workers are said to have seen what they thought was a child climbing a utility pole which then jumped from the top of the pole and ran away as they approached.

And the sightings go on. Keep up with the latest breaking news about this little bastard on cryptomundo.

Robot John

I like how the cosmonauts named their robot "John". It's unpretentious and colloquial.

From Planeta Bur, a smart and visually magnificent Soviet Sci-Fi made in the early 60's. Look for it at any discerning, independently operated video store that stocks bootlegs, or buy it here.

Destroy All Humans

(warning: disturbing content and jackass narration ahead)

Green Porno

Futurechimp readers are hip enough to have already seen Isabella Rosselini's surreal Green Porno shorts about the sex lives of invertebrates, which has been available exclusively on the sundance channel's website. But did you know she's just finished a second season, focusing on sea creatures, which premiered a couple days ago? Check them out HERE.