What the Wizard Of Oz would look like if it were made today.
I was watching 2010: The Year We Make Contact over the weekend and I found it quite entertaining, more so than 2001 actually. Part of that entertainment was due the fact that the film had the colour red in it. Movies these days don't have red. I knew all about the "teal and orange" curse of modern films but this is the first time I really said to myself "Fuck, this shit has to stop!".
Get out your pots and pans and make ready to journey to the west coast! When that BP oil slick hits the Gulf stream "You're gonna see some serious shit!" Gold shit that is! With a little elbow grease involved with harvesting the crude oil washing up from the Atlantic, we could all become oil barons overnight! Think of the power we would wield! With this little bit of "North Sea Oil" we could all be buying more houses off each other than ever before! Suddenly the future seems a little brighter!
The Rebel county, and all that bollocks? Every other city I looked at had increasing temperatures (London is up by 5 degrees Fahrenheit). I think Cork's cooling has to do with the stellar work done by Cork based Green party member Dan Boyle. He with his magic Twitter account has brought down Cork's CO2 levels. Of course it could also be that the figures for other cities only went back to 1950 and omitted the high temperatures back in the 1930's. Whatever though, it's been proven that "man" is the only reason that the global climate changes. The Mayans died out because Cortez brought not only Smallpox to the South Americas but he also brought drought. You see, the ships in his armada were powered by primitive petrochemical products. Yep seems weird right? But no it's true. You see they had to have been, because the climate changed. And it was the same in Egypt. The great Sphinx shows signs of excessive flood damage but how could something built in a desert show huge amounts of flood damage? Simple! It was actually built in the middle of a lush jungle with loads of rain, but then LL Cool Pharaoh came along and made power boat racing along the Nile popular and whoops, there goes the climate again.
Oh I know the global temperature has shown signs that it has jumped up suddenly in the last 100 years, but I also know that we are showing signs of global cooling also. Truth is, we actually know shit about the climate. The most we know is if we stick our micky out the window and it comes back wet it's raining, that or we just got a blowjob. I'm a strong advocate of renewable and "clean" forms of energy, simply because we need more energy!! Not because driving your car to your grannies might burn a whale or something, but because old energy sources like oil will not be there forever, and we need to invest now! Maybe the climate is fucked because of CO2 and maybe it isn't, who cares! You can't do anything about it. We are eventually going to use up all the oil one way or another anyway, quickly or slowly, there is no doubt about that. Fuck it, lets just blame BP.
Jaysus, tis' been tropical for the last few days. Fair steamy like, sweat dripping off me balls with the even mere thought of physical exertion. Reminds me of that line from "Good Morning Vietnam": "It's hot and wet. That's nice if you're with a lady, but it ain't no good in the jungle!"
This probably only relates to the Irish pronunciation of the disease. Jow Duffy himself had to be corrected on the correct pronunciation recently, on his own radio show: that's why I'm posting this now.
I've been watching this for the last three days constantly. I can't get enough of it. From the same person who created the brilliant Avatar Sex animation.
Granted he's kinda similar to Enda, but c'mon, how could you honestly make this mistake. Do you not have any pride in your job? Listen RTÉ, I will do the same work as the person involved in this cock-up, for a fraction of their salary. This is exactly the reason I got rid of my television so I didn't have to pay lazy staff in RTÉ.
I can only imagine how this happened: "Dude, we need a picture of Enda Kenny for this news segment. Dude, lets just use Google Image search. Dude, these pictures are too low res. Dude, here's a hi-res one. Dude, you sure that's Enda Kenny? Dude, for real. Google sez so. Dude, ok." I am assuming that they used this copy of the image from Skangerland's blog. The blog post actually details how Victor Garber is a bit of a ringer for Enda.
The mind boggles, inept research and production about an inept party leader. It must be infectious.
[Afterthoughts] Of course, how could I be so blind. It's Nuacht so NOBODY IS FUCKING WATCHING IT ANYWAY!
“Lenin was a mushroom. Moreover, he was not only a mushroom, but also a radio-wave. His armored-car, the famous ‘bronevik,' served as a spawn while Lenin was a fly agaric.”
19 years ago on 17 May 1991 Russian avant-garde musician Sergey Kuryokhin presented his theory, claiming that Lenin was a mushroom. This mystification based on real research and documentary evidence, was broadcast live on the Soviet TV show 5th Wheel" and caused sensation in the society.
According to his wife Anastasiya, Kuryokhin made this theory up in order to prove that almost anything, no matter how absurd or surreal it looks or sounds, can be 'proved,' especially on live TV. (A. Kuryokhinas interview to Komsomolskaya Pravda).
The advertising campaign, entitled Pin-up Calendar 2010 made the agency Butter for the company Eizo, which manufactures medical diagnostic equipment. The originality of this calendar is that it shows not just a half-naked models, as in many other similar calendars, and radiographs of these models.
I hate posting stuff that may be extremely popular all over the net without my knowledge, but I do like this lot so fuck it.
Richard Bruton reads my blog. He has often left comments here, telling me about the great advances in "Penis Enlargement" and "online gambling". So it came as little surprise when he sent me an email thanking me for being the defining factor in driving him towards Fine Gael leadership.
Dear Gammagoblin,
How are you, my old chum. I just wanted to tell you that after reading your blog post entitled: "Abandon All Hope" I knew it was time to take action against the ineptitude of our current leader, Mr. Kenny. Don't get me wrong, Enda is a fine fellow, personally. He tells the dirtiest jokes you will ever hear. He's always coming up with a good limerick. Take this one for instance: "There once was a Health Minister named Mary, Whos cock was incredibly hairy, At first we weren't sure, If she was a whore, because her dick makes us terribly wary." Ha ha, women with hairy cocks. That Enda is a riot! But he's a fucking dope too! All that "Sign the contract" shit in the last election? What the fuck was he thinking. Oops, sorry for my most unparliamentary language there.
So that's all I wanted to say really. I'm attaching a photo of me viewing your blog post [pictured above]. It really did give me an epiphany, in my head, in my heart and in my trousers. Speaking of trouser epiphanies, can I just remind you of that special offer on Viagra I told you about in a comment earlier. 60 tablets for $20. Real deal! Totally genuine, and will not cause blindness (sorry about those other tablets, I'm not using that supplier again. Tell your readers to avoid Kunta Kinte Enterprises!)
Hope to see you on the other side,
A chara,
Richard Bruton (Future Imperial Tyrant of Ireland).
Well I must say I was honored when I got this email and picture. Thank you Mr. Burton, I'm sure you will be just as shit as the rest of the useless cunts in Dail Eireann. Long live shit governments, and long live cheap cock throbber medicine!
I did this one day last year, when I stuck in bed with the flu. I saw a similar process a few years ago done by some university study and I was inspired to give it a go myself. I wanted to see what would happen if I took an average of all the faces of women that I've mentioned on this blog that I've found attractive (as I often think I have an unusual choice in women). Well first off, it's not very extensive as I've only used a handful of images, and it's not exactly very scientific but it is kinda interesting. It's missing a lot of ethnicities (particularly some women of African origins*) and the choice of images arent that great (for instance, I wish had a better pic of Katharine Cullen) you get the idea anyway, and I preferred to have a more honest selection of candid shots than 'shopped to the max glamor pix.
Not going to go into huge detail with the process but basically I merged two images together each time and then merged another image into each result. I did multiple cross mergings of images and resultant images so that a non-weighted average was formed. You can make out most of this process in the video below... (music by me too btw <--- for the copyright police). Faces include: Billie Piper, America Ferrera, Kate Beckinsale, Katerine Cullen, Evangeline Lilly, Selena Gomez, Isabelle Adjani, Danay Garcia and Crown Princess Victoria.
There were three main stages to the process. First, I simply layered each image on top of each other, linearly. Then I took the first merged result and merged it with the last etc. Then I finally merged them all back to back again. (and I think I did a few more mergings <--- shit loads of mergings basically).
Unlike most other studies similar to this process, I choose to alter the shape of the features each time so that they lined up almost perfectly. Most other studies simple lined up hundreds of selected images and let the dominant position of features dictate the position of each feature in the final result. It was nesescery for me to alter the features at times due to the uneven nature of model angles in image sources, plus I had a much smaller sample set of images to work from. I also like the chaotic nature of changes created with each iteration. I also altered the width of the images as I saw fit (<--- scientific eh?)
To finish off I submitted the result to http://myheritage.com to see what happened. Not surprisingly, I got a lot of Latin/Mayan results but interestingly Evangeline Lilly appeared in the results, and Ornella Muti who starred in Flash Gordon, which was the first film I remember seeing, and she was quite nice in it. So that's kinda deeply psychological right? :)
I had planned writing something very scientific, in dept and personal about all this, hence why I delayed posting for so long, but I got sick of seeing this in drafts so this is what you get now. Fantastic!
*But wait! There's more! Since penning this post almost 12 months ago I've gone back and added a few more faces (for the lulz) and deliberately added in the lovely Gabrielle Union as I felt that side of things in particular was missing.
So this is the original picture at the top of this post plus the extra faces of Anja Pärson, Gabrielle Union, MyAnna Buring, and Sienna Guillory. The can see the order or merging in the direction process tree picture thing below.
Click for bigger...
Once again, the image was submitted to MyHeritage.com and here are the results. Lost of Asians appearing this time. Understandable as there appears to be a slight palpebral slant developing in the eyes. Kate Beckinsale appears strongly also. While I don't put much if any faith in MyHeritage.com's recognition algorithms, there does seem to be a similar trend going on with the faces I've chosen.
Finally, the most important question to answer: what do I think of the resultant faces? Yes! Both are fabulous, my dear. I would rate them both highly on my Jackson Pollock scale of facial beauty, the second one in particular acquiring a few extra Jackson Pollocks.
Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi. That's his name! Or Alexander Siddig to his friends, or Dr. Julian Bashir to his Star Trek fans. I must say, an amazing discovery.
This post has been a draft for the best part of a year now, so it's well about time I published it. The picture to the left was snapped by me about 4 weeks before last years jazz festival kicked off, so I deem it unrelated to the festival. For some reason Long Island management thought it fit to proclaim their premises a "Jazz Free Zone". I found this kinda ironic. Except for the Jazz festival once a year, Cork is pretty much a city devoid of jazz! Long Island seemed to think they were located on the main street of New Orleans or something!
The above pic above was taken on the just before The Bad Plus took to the stage. I hadn't heard them before, but tey were good stuff anyway. Mad drummer! But not the maddest I've seen :) Later that evening, The Sun Ra Arkestra took over. Totally cosmic! Part of the enjoyment came from seeing how many people got up and left confused before the show ended. They just couldn't handle the jazz! :)
I also went to see Al Di Meola which was excelent but the show was rather short. We were done out of two encore pieces aparently, as the group had to rush off to catch a plane to another country. The delay in initally getting the show off the ground which caused the timing problems was supossidly the blame of the organisers and not Al Di Meola. Anyway, before his act got underway, an Irish Balkin group called Yurodny performed. I was looking forward to this as I love a bit of Balkin :) The song embeded above (might need a mouse-over or mouse-click for it to appear; stole the player from MySpace) "Red Hora" was one song in particular I was looking forward to hearing and Yurodny didn't disappoint.
I wonder what the 2010 Jazz Festival will bring...
I came across this book recently: "Breeding Between the Lines". Basically its a controversal study in how cross breeding of human "races" produce better looking and healthier offspring. I was intrigued, so I googled around and found the website. I read the first tag line about Tiger Woods and laughed. I thought "poor old Tiger Woods, even this book has it in for him and his wandering micky". I assumed they were making refernce to how his willy would be less prone to cock-rot after sinking a few "birdies" (I think there was a similar joke floating around at the time). Reading it again however and paying closer attention to the name mentioned at the end I began to realise that this was far more literal than figurative. Then I saw the book was published in 2006 and the gigue was up!
I think Woods will forever be known for his extra marital affairs rather than for his golf performance, but at least it won't be for this awful hair style. Spookily, one forum poster in 2005 made this comment about it: "I'm wondering what he did to his wife to make her do that to him in his sleep." I have nothing further to add. Fin.
I read this earlier, I still can't figure out what part Sarah Cawood plays in this relationship between Konnie Huq and Charlie Brooker. It's like the graphic is for a completely different story. Perhaps Sarah Cawood is Charlie Brooker at the weekends, or maybe she's the sex maid who comes in and cleans up after particularly messy cum sessions. Perhaps she's just the person that wrote that three sentence article and felt the need to have her own pic as big as the pictures for the subject matter. I actually don't know.
My last idea of legalising heroin, for drug tourism and VAT revenue, didn't fly so well, so now I've come up with an idea that even Joe Duffy could support: We should sell Ireland to the Chinese! Just look at this news story: "Man builds homemade cannons to fight back property developers." Look at that! The building industry is still so vibrant in China that they're declaring war on people, booting them out of their homes to build even bigger homes! If that doesn't bring a tear to Liam Carroll's japs-eye, nothing will.
"Back! You Bowen Construction bastards!"
We have people doing similar in Ireland now, but they're aiming their cannons at approaching bank managers and sheriffs... oh and smug "We've heard all the excuses" TV licence inspectors.
Inspired by Sparks and their copious use of Yamaha Motif sounds in their last few albums, this is a rather simple little tune, built from a basic 8 bar loop of phrases I played using nothing but Motif samples (the samples are as is bar a little bit of reverb. Plus the percussion instruments are Reason stock sounds). I then built the tune up from selective muting and unmuting these loops as I saw fit, live. A little bit of tweaking (particularly in the percussion track) came later and that's it. Needs a few key changes, chord progression and stuff... but it really was just a little mess around with Motif samples rather than an actual song.
It still annoys me to this day, that I never took any pictures of the construction of the M8 motorway in all the opertunities that I had to do so. Literally hundreds of trucks diggers and dumpers all lined up in formation at the end of a working day. Oh well. I decided to do a u-turn in my weekly travels to get these shots just north of Kilkenny because of it. Only a few dumpers here but still looking impressive enough.
I decided to write George a letter after viewing his latest masterpiece, Survival Of The Dead(2009).
Dear Mr. Romero,
Let me first say you have made many a fine movie over your long career. You have in fact made one of the finest movies of the 20th Century, which is also one of my personal favorites of all time: "Dawn Of The Dead(1978)". The tv trailer for the follow-up movie "Day of the Dead(1985)" is the earliest trailer for a movie that I can remember seeing (The images of zombie arms breaking through the wall are permanently etched into my brain). It therefore comes as great personal sorrow to have to say: "Please for the love of mother fucking god, STOP MAKING SHITTY MOVIES!"
You have pumped out two of the shittiest turds of movies I've had sit through in recent years, and I was was very apologetic about Land Of The Dead when I watched it, so in retrospect, that's probably quite shit too. You're latest crapfest "Survival Of The Dead" AKA "Survival of a franchise Name in an effort to suck fans dry" nearly reduced ME to a zombie-vegetative state, and my tv to pile of scrap as I flung things at it out of frustration.
A bad movie is one that makes you laugh at its crappy'ness, a really bad movie makes you angry, and then there's the level of despair created by your last two films. "Diary of the Dead (2007)" was perhaps the worst thing you ever laid a hand on. You should have named it "Diarrhea of the Dead" and flushed it down the toilet.
You're overuse of cheap shitty CGI makes me wonder if you ever liked the look of real gore because you seem to be doing all in your power to fake it up as much as possible. Of course, the same can be said of the plot, the storyline, the acting...
If you continue to make shit like this, it will pollute the honor of your past movies and make them look like flukes! Or worse, will call into question how much of that spooky gritty atmosphere was really just bad movie making.
That's about it anyway, oh and remember the classic line from Dawn of the Dead, up-dated now...
"When there is no-more room on my shelves, I will fuck your DVD's out in the bin"
A [Dawn of the Dead] fan.
This Youtube clip is scarier (and more entertaining) than anything Romero has done in the last 25 years...
A bit of an auld belter of a day in Cork today. It was so bad that I said fuck it and actually used the aircon in the car for once (technically, I do use it from time to time, but never for extended periods).
Sometimes it gets so warm that stripping off to your bare skin just doesn't do it, sometimes you feel like you need to go one step more. That's what the video above is about. Originally completed for a lady on Twitter.
The toxicology report has came back for two teenage Britons who were reported to have died because of taking Mephedrone, a then legal stimulent. After their deaths the sale of the substance was banned in Britain, as well as Ireland. So what does this toxicology report say?
Well surprise sur-fucking-prise. Not only did the teens not die from Mephedrone but they hadn't even consumed the product! They did lash the booze into themselves though, but I'm sure that's not important...
International hero, Professor David Nutt said the findings were "embarrassing" for the government, media and police.
"If these reports are true, the previous government's rush to ban mephedrone never had any serious scientific credibility - it looks much more like a decision based on a short-term electoral calculation. This news demonstrates why it's so important to base drug classification on the evidence, not fear, and why the police, media and politicians should only make public prouncements once the facts are clear."
I'm glad to see that we are still burning witches in 2010....
Doesn't this case worry you though? Look at what it means: laws are being written, criminals are being made based on shitty decisions by fuckface politicians, more afraid of loosing a vote than loosing a life of their electorate. It really does undermine the quality and legitimacy of every other drug law as they stand now.
"So many laws, so many rules, so much protection... so why the fuck do I feel so scared?"
