Posted on by mwhybark

Victorian taxidermy

potter_working.jpgWalter Potter was a victorian taxidermist and eccentric. This website memorializes him and his freaky, wonderfrul taxidermy tableaux. Imagine “Dogs Playing Poker,” but with real, stuffed animals. Then, expand your imagination, and there ya go.

kitten_2_bodies.jpg

Scott will wish to visit on account of the gerbil cricket match.

Rebecca (who is doubtless busy kicking ass in the greater metro Boston area and will not see my link here) will come for the toads, without a doubt. Caution, sensitive souls – my dear sweat flavored gummi’s site is NEVER work safe and frequently features a top-of-page image that is intended to offend and disgust.

Poupou will enjoy the kittens, sort of.

I myself favor the kitten with two faces or that with 8 legs and two tails.

(UPDATE: Where are my freakin’ manners? I saw this at jimfl’s Everything Burns. My apologies for having unsourced this.)

(You know what would rock in MT? A source link field.)

Posted on by mwhybark

Friday the 13th proves lucky

Seattle man finds it’s his lucky day

SEATTLE, December 13, 2002 – Embittered, alienated cynic Mike Whybark opened his email today to find a note from another Michael, one Michael Griffin of the Fort Worth area. Mr. Griffin, also known as “tater-haid,” informed Mr. Whybark that he had mysteriously qualified to receive a commemorative promotional lunchbox featuring the design work of Mr. Griffin and the branding of Mr. Griffin’s vanity web site, or “blog”, known as “ultramicroscopic.”

Mr. Whybark’s qualification for the prize? He’d left the one-thousandth comment on the other man’s site. The comment? After an interregnum in which Mr. Griffin had not added new material to his site for a few days, the proprietor asked “What’d I miss?”

Mr. Whybark noted in reply, “Halle Berry was widely celebrated in the media.”

The promotional product is reproduced below.

lunchbox.gif

Somewhat later in the day, Mr. Whybark ventured into the palatial lobby of his apartment building to retrieve his mail, a mysterious box was noted, with a Seattle return address, and yet also credited as emanating from Maakies.com, the website of the prodigiously talented Tony Millionaire, and his hilarious, totally merciless alt-weekly comic, Maakies.

Mr. Whybark has reviewed both of Mr. Millionaire’s books favorably in the pages of Cinescape, but it’s unusual to receive a review copy without having some correspondence with a publicist or creator first. The box, however was about six inches square, not a book-like size.

Upon opening it, a six-inch Drinky Crow collectors’ figure was revealed, with no note or explanation. The vinyl figure comes with interchangeable eyes and a jug helpfully marked XXX. The jug may be fitted to the corvid’s mouth.

Credit has not yet been taken for the delivery of this item.

2pvc-crow.jpg

Posted on by mwhybark

Loter

tolkein_pbs.JPG

Allan notes a hilarious list of clueless critiques of the Lord of the Rings, constructed as satire of a fanboy nitpick list.

I laughed and laughed.

It also made me think I should offer my 2 cents on LOTR. Perhaps tomorrow. There’s a lot to say about it – more than a single essay, certainly.

One essay I will probably NOT write about here is my boundless admiration for the efficacy and beauty of the film trilogy’s astonishing marketing campaign. The sales drones over there are more than sales drones – it’s the most carefully thought-out entertainment marketing campagin I have ever heard of, let alone seen.

Every detail seems not only to be noted and accounted for but meticulously planned with an overriding strategy that, frankly, reminds me of a military campaign. Maybe the Bushies should hire Jackson’s wizards of marketing and actually listen to them.

That’s kind of an amusing contrast – one of the reasons the LOTR marketing is so effective, even globally, is that the films, Tolkien, and Peter Jackson strongly appear to have our best interests in mind as well as theirs. Think of the discomfort one experienced under that most recent Star Wars assault, for example. What’s different? We (and by we I mean I) think that Jackson and his team are doing something so special and amazing, something that transforms a cherised reading experience, often a childhood one, into a new form. It’s magic. It’s akin to faith, to religious experience, which is also why LOTR lovers (I’m one) are prone to lampoonable cultish behaviors.

Really though, it’s almost too easy to argue that Tolkein’s beautiful vision represents a myth that extols a colonial past that had failed when the book was published, among other things. I recall having my first lit-crit discussion ever with my dad on the books, having noted that they were written in the shadow of World War II and can easily be understood as an allegory of that war, (and of course more than that, but! As I said, too many essays here to write them all).

And also: goody! I can’t wait.

(Hey look! I’m back on schedule!)

Posted on by mwhybark

It's a blog's life

Is it normal to have random people drop by with questions associated tangentially with a topic you’ve written about, but for which you have no answer?

How about for people to simply miss the point of the post altogether and develop their own interpretations of what the comments are intended for? (This one actually has a clear moral duty associated, which is, um, unexpected. I think the title leads to to misunderstanding.)

It happens here all the time. I would like to take the opportunity to both run my lovely original art again and give myself a big slap on the back! Thank you, self! Yes, I drew it!

n.b.: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE “SEATTLE PACIFIC ZEPPELIN AIRLINES”, although wealthy investors are encouraged to lodge inquiries with my solicitor. Idle and/or curious inquiries will be referred to Mr. Hand. A click on the inline graphic will, however, provide the idle “web-surfer” with a fully-scalable PDF, suitable for printing on your office’s large-format color printer.

Posted on by mwhybark

Donkey poser

Out-guilting my mother, noted holiday celebrations expert Ken Goldstein notes that he’s already bought my Christmas present, and handily provided a direct link to it so that I can precisely calibrate the appropriate item to reciprocate with.

Some might say that the creation of one’s own personal fan club might be a fair exchange, but far be it from me to point something like that out.

Now, Ken is referring to our happy days at M-2K when we toiled under initial release posters from the fine folks at Demotivators – Ken’s was “Apathy”, while mine was something about silver linings and big, black, scary clouds.

Last year, it should be noted, Ken and his crack staff arranged for me to get a special letter, signed by the director of the FBI, in a gentle teasing gesture to my concern over the erosion of civil liberties in our great nation in the recent past.

So many choices! No small, inexpensive skee-ball games appear to be available, I’m sorry to say (memo to the ball-bearing manufacturers of America: get with the program, folks!).

More tomorrow, natch.

Posted on by mwhybark

the power of christ compels you

The DiaryLand Diary (courtesy the good graces of tireless internet researcher poupou) of realjesus.

In the holiday season, it’s nice to remember the true meaning of Christmas, and its’ incredible usefulness as a tool of heartless, ball-peen cruelty to the humor impaired.

bakeracted! psyhce ward!

“THOU SHALT NOT BE MEAN TO JESUS IN AIM”

Ah, reading this while listening to the immortal strains of El Vez’ “Merry Mex-mas” takes me right back to those heady days of yesteryear, when South Park illuminated the true meaning of Christmas via that there newfangled internet thingy.

Posted on by mwhybark

BAM!

I just drove our formerly perfectly-maintained ’97 Corolla into the support pylon of our street-front garage.

Score: one garage door, one side fender. Match to pylon.

Maybe I don’t really need a driver’s license after all, and all these years of avoiding it were for a reason.

Posted on by mwhybark

Two years before the thesaurus

Then the starboard watch board the main tack, and the larboard watch lay forward and board the fore tack and haul down the jib sheet, clapping a tackle upon it if it blows very fresh.

and

When all was right, the bunts were triced well up, the yard-arm gaskets passed, so as not to leave a wrinkle forward of the yard — short gaskets, with turns close together.

are sample sentences from Richard Henry Dana’s 1843 Two Years Before the Mast, which I am currently reading, having found a copy in a secondhand bin for a dime or something.

My wife’s brother lives in Dana Point, which is named after the gent, he having been engaged in “hide droghing” along the coast of California in the 1830’s, which forms the bulk of the book’s narrative.

Great hanks, however, are devoted to old-timey seamanship, and hover on the very precipice of intelligibility; and I find these passages exhilarating. The use of a specialized jargon reflects my own speech when I’m isolating bad ram, for example, or reformatting a hard drive, or performing a low-level diagnostic in an effort to isolate bad sectors.

There’s a sort of poetry of possibility in jargon, and reading it in Mast makes it plain, as it’s stripped of referents for me. I know not a thing about sailing, and thus the language strikes me in a manner similar to a dada or futurist poem – sounds with no literalist meaning available to me, only tributary and referential meanings traversing time into my mind.