The Fur Coat Club

Slaves to their uncontrollable urges, a pair of nine-year-old girls chase after old ladies and pimps in upper east side Manhattan to stroke their soft, sensuous fur coats. But soon their perverted lifestyle gets the better of them, and they are forced to change their sick, deviant ways. A little slow-going in the first half, but it gets spooky in the last several minutes. It's like a cross between an afterschool special, a John Waters movie, and 'Night of The Living Dead'. Also, little girls with guns.

Like the 70's classroom standard The Red Balloon, there's no dialogue, so the message can be interpreted the world over, free of language or cultural barriers. But whereas 'The Red Balloon' is all about Jesus, 'The Fur Coat Club' is all about the obsessive fetishes of a seriously disturbed filmmaker. Being a "Learning Corporation of America" production, it's clearly made for classrooms, but why? Is it supposed to impart a lesson of some kind? if so, the lesson might best remain untaught.

Synthdorks 2

Revisionist 3D

Youtube member "mazinz2" says:

"This is a rough test to show how you can make a true 3d motion picture from a 2d motion source, using Sony Vegas and the masking effect (this had to be done twice with three clips to present this 3d display) and using the free app Stereomovie maker."

I embedded them here, but be sure to hit the 'HD' icon, blow it up to fullscreen (the 'esc' button will return you to normal size) and dim the lights. These clips are very short (I imagine it's a ton of work), but still pretty inspiring.

King Kong:



Land of the Lost:



Evil Dead:



Hey, check it out: I've found another website that makes 3D dvd's. for $10 you can get a rip of, say, "House of Wax" or "It Came from Outer Space" in both anaglyph AND field-sequential format on one disc. So if you're like me and you enjoy anaglyph, but are considering upgrading to a field-sequential system at some point in the future, you're covered both ways. Visit HERE.

The Bel-Air Drive-In

The Bel-Air Drive-In Theater in Cicero, Illinois (just off the west side of Chicago) dated back to the late 40's. A feature unique to it was its double-sided screen; movies were projected on either face, and every night it was a double feature. In the early days, the two films would be swapped between the projection booths during intermission, so you could stay where you are and watch both movies. Also, when you entered the parking area you would drive through the screen itself in one of two tunnels, depending on which movie you were going to.

There used to be a playground under each side of the screen to keep the kids busy during the film. These were removed in the early 80s (for the same reason everything else fun disappeared in the 80's: lawsuits).

A third screen was added circa 1981, if I remember correctly. This made the capacity 1,000 cars, pretty big for a drive-in.


Because it was a ten-minute drive from our house, and admission was $2.50 for adults and free for kids, I'm sure I saw over 100 movies at the Bel-Air, dating back to before I could remember. Shortly before we got cable television, I saw my first R-rated movie here (The Brood) and went on to see dozens of the sleaziest, trashiest films imaginable with my dad, who'd always bring popcorn and drinks from home to save money at the snack bar and graciously brought along my friends. Without a doubt, I spent more time with my dad at the drive-in than anywhere else outside of home. It's often the first thing that comes to mind when I remember him, which may be why I'm both fond and wistful regarding drive-ins.

At some point the Bel-Air stopped being fun. When I was 16 a guy reached into my friend's car and snatched the jewelry off her neck. The last time I went, in the mid-90's, no one was sitting outside their cars in lawnchairs like when I was a kid, there was no playground, no speakers on steel posts (by this point they'd switched over to FM broadcasts). Nothing but a bunch of cars, a gravel lot and a screen with a cop car parked beneath it, facing the audience. It was a grim scene.

The Bel-Air closed in 1999. The screens stood until 2008, when they were finally torn down to make way for a home depot. Here you see the wrecking ball in the foreground.



There are still a handful of drive-ins around. Find one near you at (appropriately enough) drive-ins.com. And if you find any pictures or links about the bel-air online, let me know.


Relative to the near-demise of the drive-in and the rise of cable television, here's a PSA that used to show during intermission at drive-ins in the mid 70's, trying to put a stop to "pay tv". It didn't work.

Down in Jungle Town

LDS6

Screwballs

As of today, Screwballs is available on DVD! Now I can retire my fuzzy VHS tape which I've been torturing people with for decades; the greatest teen sex comedy in history is back in circulation.

Let me go further to say that it's the funniest movie I've ever seen. I can appreciate the cerebral humor of Annie Hall or the anarchy of Duck Soup, but the fact is, no movie makes me laugh more than Screwballs. I don't know what it is; maybe it's the extreme vulgarity, combined with such immaturity that it seems quaint, even endearing. It's also completely shameless in its opportunism for cheap laughs. The character names of "Purity Busch" (the school virgin), "Melvin Jerkoffski" (the compulsive masturbator) and "Bootsie Goodhead" (the nymphomaniac) will clue you in to the level of humor at work here.



In doing today's research, I found virtually nothing about Screwballs anywhere, other than the above clip posted courtesy of this awesome blog. Hopefully it'll get a little more attention from this joyous re-release to home video.

If you're looking for the trifecta of horny teen movies, team this up with Joysticks and Zapped.

Cryptid Corner: Montauk Monster

Futurechimp.com's editorial staff somehow missed this story when it hit a year ago, but it seems to have caused quite a stir. The "Monatauk Monster" was a creature that had washed ashore on the beach near Montauk, NY in July 2008. The cryptid's horrible appearance, and the proximity of Montauk to The Plum Island Animal Disease Center (a government-run animal testing facility), led to speculation that it was a top-secret hybrid straight out of John Frankenheimer's Prophecy.



Dr. Naish, a British paleontologist, was able to conclude from the photographs that the creature was a raccoon with part of its jaw missing. The front paws are a dead giveaway. To help show his point, he presented an illustration drawn directly over one of the Montauk Monster photos:


Such things don't deter cryptozoologists, though. It's still a cryptid as far as they're concerned. An upside of this fiasco: some entertaining photoshop work was done over some of the more notorious moments of the 2008 election:

Cthulhu Bobblehead

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

A few weeks ago, I googled "Cthulhu Bobblehead" and was appalled to come up with nothing. With all the Cthulhu merchandise out there, and with seemingly every character in the world rendered in bobblehead form, no one has thought to make a Cthulhu bobblehead?

I've remedied the situation by creating, to the best of my knowledge, the ONLY Cthulhu bobblehead in existence. It sits 5 1/2" high and is cast in durable urethane resin. Sit it on your desk, the dashboard of your car, or your bedside table, where he'll patiently bob his head whilst waiting for the right moment to resurrect the Great Old Ones, bringing about such unfathomable horror to us mortals that death would be a reprieve most merciful.



Lots more photos can be seen here. I already poured an edition of five bobbleheads, with potential for additional ones in the future. Buy one HERE ON ETSY.

Weekend Project: Stooge Pilgrimage

If you live in the LA area, why not take some time out from your empty schedule this weekend to visit the grave of your favorite Stooge? They're all here, waiting for your company. Thanks to findagrave.com for providing locations and images. I'm just covering the four "prime" Stooges (the three Horowitz brothers and Larry), because that's where most Stooge interest ends. Here they are, in order of their passing:

Curly
1903-1952

Beginning in 1944, poor Curly spent eight years in seriously poor health, due to "extreme hypertension and obesity", and suffered a series of strokes. He was married twice during this time and managed to father a child, but wasn't the same Curly in the few Stooges shorts he appeared in. Long after Shemp had replaced him, he made a brief cameo appearance in Hold That Lion!. It was the only film that featured Larry Fine and all three Howard brothers. Director Jules White later said he spontaneously staged the bit during Curly's impromptu visit to the soundstage:
"It was a spur of the moment idea. Curly was visiting the set; this was sometime after his stroke. Apparently he came in on his own, since I didn't see a nurse with him. He was sitting around, reading a newspaper. As I walked in, the newspaper, which he had in front of his face, came down and he waved hello to me. I thought it would be funny, to have him do a bit in the picture and he was happy to do it."

Curly mercifully passed on in 1952 of a cerebral hemorrhage. You can find him at the Home of Peace Memorial Park in East LA. Plot: Western Jewish Institute Section, Row 5, Grave 1.

Shemp
1895-1955

My favorite Stooge's passing (and its bizarre consequences) was already covered in Shemp of The Dead, a previous Futurechimp post. He's buried in the same graveyard as his brother Curly, in the Mausoleum, second tier from the bottom.

Larry
1902-1975

Fine and the Stooges were working on the unfinished Kook's Tour (a "reality" show that followed the stooges on tour and showed them interacting with fans while out of character) in January, 1970, when Larry suffered a debilitating stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. He eventually moved to the Motion Picture House, an industry retirement community in Woodland Hills, where he spent his remaining years. Fine was confined to a wheelchair during the last five years of his life. Like Curly Howard, Fine suffered several additional strokes before his death on January 24, 1975.
He's resting in the Forest Lawn cemetary in Glendale. Plot location: Freedom Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Liberation.
Other graves you can visit while you're there: Forry Ackerman, Billy Barty, Joe Besser (the fifth stooge), Sammy Davis Jr., Stan Laurel, Harold Lloyd, Chico Marx, Frank Tashlin, Art Tatum and Johnny "Guitar" Watson.

Moe
1897-1975

After Larry's stroke, Moe replaced him with Emil Sitka, making him the seventh official Stooge. He was seen during their lucrative personal appearances, but no films or tv shows were shot with him in the role. As some films were in the works, Moe's died in May of 1975 of lung cancer. He can be found in Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, on the opposite side of town from the other three. Plot: Garden of Memories, Alcove of Love, Wall C, Crypt 233. Happy Stooging.

The Book of Sammy

Sammy Petrillo was the son of a Catskills vaudeville comedian, raised in New York City. He started performing with his dad at the age of six.

While a financially challenged teenager, he got a free haircut at a trade school. After the cut the barber-in-training started laughing: "I said, 'Whatta ya laughing at?' and he said, 'You look just like that Jerry Lewis!' And I said, 'Get outta here!' And everywhere I walked, people laughed and asked me if I was Jerry Lewis, it was unbelievable. And Jerry Lewis at the time, I guess, had made his second motion picture. I really didn't know that much about him. I kinda caught some glimpses of the movie and I saw he talked kinda high.... And I said, 'Gee, maybe I do resemble that guy and I can do that kind of a laugh, I could do that kind of a voice....”

Sammy scammed his way into meeting Milton Berle, who set him up to meet Jerry Lewis in person. After insulting him, "He said something to the effect of, 'Don't sign any checks and tell people you're Jerry Lewis!' He wasn't being funny. He was being serious". But seeing how uncanny Petrillo's look and appearance mimicked his own, he hired the 16-year old to play a dialogue-free visual gag on the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1950, in which he portrayed a baby Jerry in a crib. He rehearsed for a week and was paid $60 after the broadcast.

He was signed to Jerry Lewis' talent agency, but got no more jobs, and it was being suspected that Lewis had him signed to keep him from working. Since Sammy was a minor, his family nullified the contract. He went on to appear in a handful of variety shows, and moved to Los Angeles soon after.

It was in LA, through mutual friend Joe E. Ross (the burlesque baggy-pants comedian that shot to stardom on Car 54 Where Are You), that Sammy met Duke Mitchell, a lounge singer who could imitate the styles of a number of celebrities including Dean Martin. What a team!

In 1952, After a few successful nightclub gigs, Mitchell and Petrillo starred in their only movie, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. In this clip we see Sammy, Bela, and... wait for it... Futurechimp.com's spirit guide, Cheeta the Chimp.



I've always found Lugosi's films from this period to be almost too sad to witness, and Duke Petrillo has no screen presence, but the 18-year old Sammy is a wonder. Look for it in the dvd bin of your local 99 cent store.

The unstoppable duo went back to the nightclub circuit, but by this time Jerry Lewis was threatening to boycott any establishment that hired them. If you were a club owner, you'd probably cancel Mitchell and Petrillo if it meant a chance of getting Martin and Lewis sometime in the future. Sammy recalled a time they were hired to do a skit on The Colgate Comedy Hour which was hosted by Abbott and Costello, and were at the soundstage doing rehearsals:

“There was one of Jerry's cronies — one of the guys that worked for him — at the rehearsal. And he looked at us, and he walked out of the room. I turned to Duke and I said, 'That guy just went to call Jerry. We're off the show'. And then Lou Costello walked over to us and he says, 'Fellas, I hate to tell you this: NBC will not allow us to put you on the show, but we're gonna pay you anyway'. He said Jerry Lewis did it. That really happened, and then it happened in nightclubs. We were blackballed here and there".

Mitchell and Petrillo were actually offered a contract by allied artists, and they were pitched on a TV series. "We were offered things we turned down. We were stupid", Petrillo said. But despite Jerry's influence, they did manage to get booked for some short stints at Vegas casinos.

Martin and Lewis parted ways in 1956. In true fashion, Mitchell and Petrillo split up right after.

Post-breakup, Sammy surfaced in bit roles in a handful of the cheapest exploitation movies, but otherwise was not to be seen. But in 1962 he put out an album called My Son The Phone Caller, a collection of real prank phone calls, which may be the first record of its kind.

When Jerry Lewis was on the Today Show promoting The King of Comedy in 1982, Bryant Gumbel introduced a montage of Jerry's greatest moments. One clip was actually of Sammy, but the producers hadn't noticed because the two were virtually indistinguishable. Lewis said, on the air, “It was Sammy Petrillo, a kid that I found on 53rd Street here in New York, and I brought him out to Hollywood to work on a sketch with Dean and I." In other words, he lied. After destroying Sammy's career, he took personal credit for an imitator, which would be like Richard Nixon claiming he personally mentored Rich Little.

And Jerry Lewis knows how to hold a grudge; less than a year ago he hosted a speaking engagement where he learned that Sammy was in attendance. Jerry tried to have him thrown out. Sammy refused to leave, but he was heartbroken. He only wanted to see his idol.

Sammy passed away last Saturday from cancer. He was 74. Thanks to the WFMU blog for alerting me to this information. They have an interview with Sammy here, and at his obituary they've embedded a segment from a 60's softcore movie which is NSFW, but otherwise innocuous and charming.

"Kowai" or "Kawaii"?

Are You Listening?

The Barbarians

Finally available on youtube, it's the first starring vehicle for the Barbarian Brothers, directed by Ruggero Deodato, the same guy who brought us the Komedy Klassic Cannibal Holocaust! Click the links in the video player to see the rest.

Five William Castle Gimmicks

Emergo
At the climax of House on Haunted Hill (1959), as a skeleton slowly approaches the camera, an inflatable skeleton would appear from the side of the screen and hover over the audience's heads on a pulley. See the effect lovingly recreated here and here.


Percepto
For The Tingler (1959) William Castle attached electrical "buzzers" to the underside of several seats in the auditorium. The buzzers were small surplus vibrators left over from World War II. The cost of this equipment added $250,000 to the film's budget. It was predominantly used in the larger theaters. During the climax of the film, the tingler escaped into a movie theater. On screen the projected film appeared to break as the silhouette of the tingler moved across the projection beam. The film went black, all lights in the auditorium were turned off and Vincent Price's voice warned the audience "The Tingler is loose in THIS theater! Scream! Scream for your lives!" This cued the theatre projectionist to activate the buzzers and give several audience members an unexpected jolt.


Illusion-O
In 13 Ghosts (1960), the ghosts could only be seen with the special glasses left by Dr. Zorba. In the theatres, scenes involving ghosts were shown in Illusion-O. That is, the filmed elements of the actors and set were tinted blue while the ghost elements were tinted red, and the two were overlayed. Audiences received viewers with red and blue plastic filters. The red filter augmented the ghosts while the blue filter "removed" them. The latest DVD release includes versions with and without the ghost outlines and a set of the special viewers.


The Punishment Poll
When filming Mr. Sardonicus (1961), Castle, at the behest of Columbia Pictures, shot a second ending for the film in which Sardonicus is cured and survives . Castle, with his reputation as the "king of gimmicks" to market his films, used the alternate ending as the springboard for his latest gimmick. Audiences were given the opportunity to participate in the "Punishment Poll". Each movie patron was given a card that glowed in the dark. On one side was a glow-in-the-dark thumbs up symbol and on the other side was a thumbs down. The audience for each showing was allowed to vote, by flashing the relevant card side, whether Sardonicus would live or die. Supposedly, no audience ever offered mercy so the alternate ending was never screened.


The Fright Break
At the climax of the film Homicidal (1961), a 45-second timer overlaid the film's climax as the heroine approached a house harboring a sadistic killer. A voice-over advised the audience of the time remaining in which they could leave the theatre and receive a full refund if they were too frightened to see the remainder of the film. About 1% of patrons still demanded refunds, and in response:
"William Castle simply went nuts. He came up with 'Coward's Corner,' a yellow cardboard booth, manned by a bewildered theater employee in the lobby. When the Fright Break was announced, and you found that you couldn't take it any more, you had to leave your seat and, in front of the entire audience, follow yellow footsteps up the aisle, bathed in a yellow light. Before you reached Coward's Corner, you crossed yellow lines with the stencilled message: 'Cowards Keep Walking.' You passed a nurse who would offer a blood-pressure test. All the while a recording was blaring, "'Watch the chicken! Watch him shiver in Coward's Corner'!" As the audience howled, you had to go through one final indignity -- at Coward's Corner you were forced to sign a yellow card stating, 'I am a bona fide coward.' Very, very few were masochistic enough to endure this. The one percent refund dribbled away to a zero percent, and I'm sure that in many cities a plant had to be paid to go through this torture."
(from Crackpot by John Waters)

Seventh Grade Yearbook

I rediscovered my junior high yearbooks a year ago, and was amused by the statements written in the back pages by my classmates. I've reprinted them here, being careful to preserve the syntax, and scanned the corresponding pictures of the signers. These are all from the seventh grade, 1982. Names have been withheld to protect the dorky.

Steve, don't be drawing anymore perverted comics, or you'll really be dead meat -SB

Steve learn to draw. May many orges (sic) be succesful you owe me 15 cents some friend only kidding, the great PD
my closest friend in junior high and fellow comic book nerd.

Steve, Don't have to much fun drawing dick man (this was one of my recurring comics characters) and get the titty this summer. Good luck in 8th you are a cool penis. - BH p.s. you ass is grass along with hitler.

Steve you are a strange guy just like me - JK

Steve, Defender really chews my quarters but TEMPEST doesnt - signed, Picasso (WT)

Roses are red violets are blue you are a disgrace to the human race. Good luck in 8th grade - RP

Are you sure you're not my clone? Let's disect a pig over the summer! - ES
biology partner. We cut up a frog over the course of days or weeks, and it really started to reek towards the end.

I hope you have an excellent summer long live Harley Davidson - MB
How cool was she? She shared my love for Heavy Metal magazine and The Ramones. She often wore an izod shirt, with the trademark alligator clumsily torn off and sewn back on upside-down, and with fake blood spattered onto it. (sigh) where is she now?

Steve, next year remember PENCIL and PAPER to class. MW
He had the misfortune of sitting next to me in math class, where I was always unprepared.

Steve - you draw very funny pictures even if they did get me in trouble a couple times. See you next year, KB
she had the misfortune of also sitting next to me in the same math class. I passed her comics I was drawing, which were sometimes intercepted.

Steve, It's been a great year! Even though I hated it! Ozzy Rules! Y.T.- LH
classmate since kindergarten.

Sting rules, soccer's the best, - AK

Steve, DONT rape old ladies over the summer - JN

have a nice summer, GR
way to keep it short, mr. next-door-neighbor-and-best-friend-since-we-were-five. We went on to get stoned after classes everyday from the 10th to 12th grade.

BELL, YOU ARE A FUCKHEAD. YOU ARE THE BIGGEST SCUM AND ASSHOLE I'VE EVER SEEN YOU FUCKIN ASSHOLE. - D.H. THE GREAT
This psychopath threatened me with violence constantly, although he never delivered. On the last day of school he saw me with my yearbook and said "give me that. I'm going to sign it." I knew it wasn't going to be pleasant. His angry scrawl filled the entire page.

In closing,

Rock / Nicht Rock

Das Ist Rock:



Das Ist Nicht Rock:



Das Ist Rock:



Das Ist Nicht Rock:

Auction Pick: Stinkor

We've been getting a skunk in our backyard just about every night for the last few weeks. He shows no fear, having lumbered around just below me when I'm in the hammock on more than one occasion.

But for those of you who aren't so lucky to have nightly skunk visits, here's the next best thing: STINKOR, the toy that smells horrid!

From wikipedia:
Stinkor was first introduced in 1985 as an action figure from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toyline. It had a semi-foul scent, giving it the distinction of being one of the few toys whose "action feature" is an odor. The unique scent was achieved by mixing the plastic used in the mold with patchouli oil. It was done this way, instead of being sprayed or coated, to prevent the smell from wearing off over time. Many toy collectors mention that, even 20 years after its original purchase, the Stinkor toy still retains its smell.


You're in luck, kiddies: A Stinkor is available on ebay, M.O.C. (mint on card), with an opening price of only $205.00. There's nothing like cracking open a virgin Stinkor package, and taking in that first whiff of patchouli. Mmmm, smells just like burning man, for less than the price of attending it! The seller proudly states that this item received a score of '80' by the Action Figure Authority, so place your bid NOW.

View-Master's Last Gasp

Disappointing news from the monkeygoggles blog:

Fisher-Price announced recently that they have ceased making reels for View-Master 3D viewers, save for a handful of children's titles.

The View-Master is as perfect a marriage of form and function as the iPhone. Though the quality of its manufacture has deteriorated steadily over the years – from sturdy bakelite to soft, shoddy plastic – its basic shape hasn’t really changed and doesn’t have to. With its two protruding viewing lenses and its flat back, the ViewMaster looks as modern today as it did 70 years ago, when Portland, Or. inventors William Gruber and Harold Graves introduced the iconic viewer. And unlike nearly every piece of software you’ve ever owned, the View-Master’s stereoscopic reels never go defunct; I can pop a 1939 reel into a View-Master made last year and still get the same view of layered trees, strangely dwarf-like human figures and gelatinous water.


But check this out: you can still make your own view-masters at home, and it's easier than ever before: it involves taking the images you shot with a digital camera and converting them to the correct size via photoshop. Then, in an ironic reverse-technology process, you must convert these digital files over to slide film transparencies. Unless you own a film recorder, you'll have to get this done at a lab, which may cost as much as $5 per slide. Fortunately, viewmaster images are small enough that you can fit a reel's worth of pictures onto four slides.

Then you cut them up, insert them into blank reels, and get out your vintage bakelite view-master (or, if you have guests over, your sawyers polarizing stereo projector) and marvel at full-spectrum 3-D, without the frustrating color imbalance and eye strain you get from red/blue glasses.

A kit with everything you need is sold HERE for $50. Extra blank reels break down to $2 each.

Also, as someone who's been collecting view-master reels for 15 years, I'd like to share three favorite items which are currently for sale on ebay here, here and here.

Also, another blog post with behind-the-scenes images of view-master diorama sculptors and lots of links HERE.

The Green Slime

Anatomical Waxwork Tips n' Trix

Medical sculptor Eleanor Crook demonstrates the art of making a wax anatomical model. Produced for The Wellcome Collection in London, which I visited a few months ago and posted about here on this blog before. Turns out a new exhibit just opened titled Exquisite Bodies, which will feature a glut of waxworks. And I'll be back in London in a few weeks. Will 3-D photos of anatomical waxes be appearing on this site soon after? I do believe they will.

Another video preview of the exhibit can be seen here.

Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast?

I had this posted on my website awhile ago, but had to bring it back. An educational film with nothing to say, it's perhaps best described by a comment on one of the youtube pages as "the Waiting for Godot of classroom films".

The same folks behind this made another head-scratcher entitled Why Not Snack?

AquaChimps

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis contends that human ancestors had to adapt to an aquatic environment to survive, and this is what makes them different from us chimps. The theory is easy enough to disprove, and the wikipedia page makes quick work of it. But it's been around for a while, mentioned way back in Desmond Morris' classic book The Naked Ape and still held by a few hominids today.

The supporters of the theory use obvious evidence, such as "chimps have fur and we don't, so our ancestors must have adapted to water". But there are many contemporary aquatic mammals covered in fur. Also, the human body is, actually, very poorly designed for water. The most telling evidence is the human's lack of natural defenses for waterborne pathogens. The list goes on. No educated evolutionary scientist gives the idea consideration.

The hypothesis does NOT seek to prove that human ancestors originated in water, or even lived in water for extended periods of time. It only speculates that proto-humans had to live near water and dive deep distances to retrieve food from the ocean floor, and these conditions influenced natural selection. Even so, there's little evidence.

But fundamentalist creationists, being the obstinate dicks they are, grossly misrepresent the aquatic ape hypothesis and go on to insist that all "evolutionists" support it. It makes for entertaining reading (as well some great images, like the one above). I will now quote from a creationist website at length:

Evolutionism is a cancer on rational thought. Just when you think Evolutionists couldn't be any more confused about the origins of Humanity, they go and prove you wrong. According to the Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT,) we all came from apes that lived underwater, much like the Sea-Monkeys seen in the back of old Archie comic books.

From what I can piece together from the incoherent Evolutionist literature, the Aquatic Ape story goes like this: Billions of years ago a bunch of monkeys lived under the sea. Then one day, one of them gave birth to a human baby. Soon after, all the sea-monkeys began giving birth to human babies. Eventually, there were only humans living under the sea. Then the sea-humans decided to live on the land, so they did just that. Many years latter, one of these now land-living sea-humans gave birth to a baby who was named Charles Darwin. And they lived happily ever after.

From a proper Biblical perspective, we know that the Evolutionist's "Just So" story is false. The Lord created Man after his own image, not after that of a swimming monkey. However, the Evolutionist is correct that we do have semi-aquatic traits. So how then do we answer the Evolutionist's question as to the origins of these traits in mankind?

First, let us dispense with the notion of our aquatic origins. Genesis 1:26 says that God gave Man dominion over all of the earth, so we know that early Man couldn't be entirely aquatic (as the Evolutionists hold) since he would need the ability to go upon the earth in order to exercise his dominion over it. This passage also says that Man was given dominion over the fish of the sea, but it explicitly does not say that Man has dominion over the sea itself. Clearly this means that Man couldn't go into the sea, further ruling out the idea that Adam was an aquaman. To top things off, the Garden of Eden as described is clearly not an aquatic environment and so its inhabitants must not have been aquatic.

Where did these semi-aquatic traits come from then? Well, the obvious and only answer to that is: From God. He must have created us semi-aquatic, starting with Adam. But why did He do this? As we will see, the answer to this question can be found in the greatest aquatic event ever in the history of the World: the Great Deluge.

At the time of creation, semi-aquaticness wouldn't have been useful. Adam and Eve lived on land and ate of the herbs of the Garden, and thus would have no need to go into the water for food or habitation. Studying the Bible, one sees that there is no mention of traveling on the sea using boat technology until the time of Noah in Genesis 6. From this we can rightly conclude that ship building was unknown to Man until the Lord instructed Noah on how to construct the Ark (this also explains why none of the wicked men of the time survived the Flood by getting into boats of their own.)

Why then would the Lord see fit to give Man semi-aquatic traits? The Lord -- being omniscient -- knew that He would bring a Flood upon the Earth and that the few humans chosen to survive would need ship building technology. But more than that, these humans would also need semi-aquatic traits so that if one fell off the ship he or she would be able to tread water until the others could help. To this end, He created Adam and Eve with semi-aquatic features such as relative hairlessness and the ability to gulp air with their mouths as a pre-adaptation to the diluvian environment. He did not, however, make Man totally aquatic because He knew that if He did, the wicked men of Noah's time would survive the Flood, thus defeating its purpose.

So our semi-aquatic traits come not -- through degradation -- from brutish, inhuman sea-apes, but instead come via our ancestor Noah as a gift from the Lord, who cares about our safety at sea.

See a lecture by Elaine Morgan in support of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, from the TEDtalks series, over here.

Hands-Off Sociology

A friend and fellow theremin player sent me these links to flickr pages along with his own captions:

So many theremins... so many deeply unattractive peoples...

I'm going to get a captain Stubing hat and demand people wear it while playing my theremin... it may cut down on usage.



Some guy from Tech Services playing a theremin:



OK so this guy is kinda cool:



Is this the geek version of "let me show you how to make that pool shot" grab-and-grope mack daddy move?



assistant gym teacher:



So I've been trying to pinpoint when exactly my love for theremins did a full 180 into something resembling exasperated-annoyance-pity-hate. I think it was right when this picture was taken:



I like the rubber stopper on this guy's antenna. You think his mom made him put it on there because he kept jabbing himself in the eye?



OK so this is a little too fish in a barrelish for my tastes, but I feel I must go out with this one:

Play It Again, Chimp

excerpted from the BBC:

Chimpanzees are biologically programmed to appreciate pleasant music.
The discovery comes from experiments showing that an infant chimpanzee prefers to listen to consonant music over dissonant music. That suggests the apes are born with an innate appreciation of pleasant sounds, say scientists in the journal Primates. Until now, this was thought to be a universal human trait, but the new finding suggests it evolved in the ancestors of humans and modern apes.

Tasuku Sugimoto and Kazuhide Hashiya of Kyushu University in Hakozaki and colleagues in Japan tested how a young captive chimpanzee named Sakura responded to music as she aged from 17 weeks to 23 weeks old. Sakura had been been abandoned by her mother, forcing members of the staff at Itozu-no-mori Park in Fukuoka where she lived to care for her. Crucially, she had never been exposed to any form of music before she took part in the trials.

During the experiments, Sakura lay on a bed while a woollen string was attached to her right hand, allowing the infant chimp to pull on the cord at will.

A music player and speakers was then set up around her, playing melodies lasting between 38 and 63 seconds long. Every time Sakura pulled on the cord, the music would be repeated. During six trials, conducted one a week for six weeks with each lasting around 20 minutes, the researchers played Sakura a range of tunes. One was a 38 second minuet from Duette Englischer Meister in F major. Another, a 38 second minuet from a handwritten sheet of German music composed in 1720.

These consonant tunes were also adjusted using orchestration software to make them dissonant. For example, all the Gs in the 38 second Duette Englischer Meister music were altered to G-flat and all the Cs to C-flat, creating 32 dissonant intervals. In three of the six trials, the researchers first played Sakura the more pleasant consonant music and in the others, they started with the less pleasant sounding dissonant music. Across all six sessions, Sakura pulled on the cord to voluntarily listen to the pleasurable music significantly more often than to the dissonant passages.

"Our main surprise was the results being so consistent," says Hashiya. "She rapidly learnt the rule of the setup and consistently produced consonant music over dissonant music for longer duration."

The discovery that an infant chimp, with no prior exposure to music, innately prefers to listen to consonant melodies could have important implications for how an appreciation for music evolved.

Taxitrocities

Check out the Crappy Taxidermy Blog, a huge photo archive of unfortunate critters existing in a purgatory of perpetual humiliation.

The Telltale Heart

From the first chapter of An Evening with Edgar Allen Poe, a made-for-TV hour long special from the early 70's starring Vincent Price. Follow the links to see the rest.

I'm posting this to promote Nevermore, a one-man show currently playing at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood (just around the corner from my house). Jeffery Combs (star of Re-Animator and From Beyond) intensely portrays Poe, mixing autobiographical information and recitations of his poems and stories, including this one. It's written by Dennis Paoli and directed by Stuart Gordon (also the team behind the two films mentioned) and only costs $10. We saw what was supposed to be the final performance last weekend, but it just got extended until the end of August. Check it here.

Looking without a Lens

Excerpted from the New York Times, this article may come across as a bit condescending, but it's still an important reminder about art appreciation in the age of information:

Spending an idle morning watching people look at art is hardly a scientific experiment, but it rekindles a perennial question: What exactly are we looking for when we roam as tourists around museums? As with so many things right in front of us, the answer may be no less useful for being familiar.

The Louvre puts some 100 immaculate objects from outside Europe on permanent view in a ground floor suite of cool, silent galleries at one end of the museum. Feathered masks from Alaska, ancient bowls from the Philippines, Mayan stone portraits and the most amazing Zulu spoon carved from wood in the abstracted S-shape of a slender young woman take no back seat, aesthetically speaking, to the great Titians and Chardins upstairs.

A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four might help them see what was, plain as day, just before them.

Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride.

Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement. Partly we seem to go to them to find something we already recognize, something that gives us our bearings: think of the scrum of tourists invariably gathered around the Mona Lisa. At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint — to record their memories and help them see better.

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

We could dream about covering lots of ground thanks to expanding collections and faster means of transportation. At the same time, the canon of art that provided guideposts to tell people where to go and what to look at was gradually dismantled. A core of shared values yielded to an equality among visual materials. This was good and necessary, up to a point. Millions of images came to compete for our attention. Liberated by a proliferation, Western culture was also set adrift in an ocean of passing stimulation, with no anchors to secure it.

So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.

The art historian T. J. Clark, who during the 1970s and ’80s pioneered a kind of analysis that rejected old-school connoisseurship in favor of art in the context of social and political affairs, has lately written a book about devoting several months of his time to looking intently at two paintings by Poussin. Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.

Until then we grapple with our impatience and cultural cornucopia. Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be. I almost hesitate to mention our sketching. It seems pretentious and old-fogeyish in a cultural moment when we can too easily feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed just to look hard.

Artists fortunately remind us that there’s in fact no single, correct way to look at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience.