double posting because something this awesome needs to be shared.

San Francisco artist inspired by natural motion. His work is AMAZING, no lie.

Maker Profile - Kinetic Wave Sculptures on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Ad tips, Mad Men, and Chocolate

Lessons from Mad Men taken to heart: Congrats Snickers on your new European ad campaign.

It definitely caught my attention lol. Keep up the ... good?... work!

:D

Lesson 1: Sex sells... including intergenetic nonconsensual sex.

Don't worry, the candy bar totally wanted it.

Lesson 2: If the message stays with the viewer after they see it, then it's working.

... and the answer is "no" especially if he's asking lol

Lesson 3: Controversy is welcome.

This, however, might be pushing it. just a little bit.

Lesson 4: When in doubt, bash the competition.

'Nuff said.

And now, I'm going to get myself a candy bar. I've got a hankering for some Snickers lol

In Honor of Mad Men: The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads of All Time

What do murder, pedophilia, suicide and a baby tiger have in common? They have all been used to sell stuff in these amazingly disturbing vintage ads!

These are real, untouched advertisements from the good old days. It doesn't matter if it's lovely ladies or adorable clowns, somehow these old-time ad wizards found ways to traumatize us while peddling everyday products.

Enjoy them now, call your therapist later!

15. White Bread Demon
"Bread is swell, but what I'm really excited about is eating jelly made from the blood of the innocent!"

14. French Suicide Sausage
It's enough to make you want to eat Kosher forever.

13. A Girl Around The House
It's nice to have a girl around the house... especially if you are a psychopath serial killer who makes women into rugs!

12. Chubby
Who needs self-esteem when you can have a free fashion book for chubbies? Also, proving that advertising weight representation has always been screwed up, the girl pictured is totally not chubby.

11. Christmas Weapons
The family that guns together, has funs together.

10. Eye patch. Shirt. Baby Tiger
Sexy?

9. Chase & Sandborn Spanking
She totally deserves it. Seriously, what kind of woman doesn't "store test"

fresher coffee?

8. Fry's Chocolate Nightmare
Nothing wants to make consumers buy chocolate more than 5 faces of a sickly kid looking 5 different shades of miserable.

7. Root Beer Baby!
Mama, please DO NOT give your baby another glass of Root Beer. It is clearly doing something horrible to him. He is terrifying.

6. Locked Out
You better wash out your privates with Lysol, or your husband will install cartoon on the door.

5. Pears Soap Disaster
"Pears Soap- now with such a soothing lather, you won't notice that your baby has gotten into a horrible accident!"

4. Postage Meter Murder
"Is it always illegal to kill a woman?" This is a truly important question and makes us want to buy a new postage meter.

3. Shave Yourself
The old man baby's gonna sing karaoke into a razor! Hooray!

2. Baby Soft
JonBenét Ramsey, eat your heart out. (Too soon?) This ad makes us want to scream, gouge out our eyes and then barf.

1. Chocolate Poulain
Drink that cocoa, or this clown will murder you in your sleep.

Horrah for Innocence... I think

A dirty mind is a beautiful thing to waste

a copywriter was hired to make ad for a mouth coolant. copywriter happened to be from sweden. hilarity ensues.

A thinker:

Politics Explained

FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all of the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.

BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and put them in a barn with everyone else's cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as the regulations say you need.

FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.

PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.

RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and shoots you.

DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.

BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

PURE ANARCHY: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to take the cows and kill you.

LIBERTARIAN/ANARCHO-CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

wrap your head around that one, lol

...and i PROMISE to never play post-hookey again. it's been a long week.

Excuse Me While I Weep For Humanity...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0025KUIFU

Tonight is the night that I talk about the nonsense that is Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight saga". If you are the type of person that considers yourself a "Twihard", I highly suggest that you back away slowly from this post before you experience some serious hurt.

There is so much that I could say about the series, itself, much of it negative, but I would have to create multiple posts to really detail the grievances I have with those books. So, to save myself the time and time spent slaving over my laptop, I encourage, no, demand (in the nicest way possible. There's only so much power I have over you guys) you all to check out these brilliantly accurate summaries of the entire series. They are written by a former Mormon woman who, while making fun of the books, does so in a way that captures how ridiculous they truly are.

Anyways, the above Amazon link. If you've clicked on it, then you would see that it leads to a lovely little page summary about a book being offered up for sale on Amazon. Not only does it seem that Amazon sells just about anything these days, but that Ph.D's are being given out to people like they're candy. Couples' counselor, Jim Lee, decided to hop on board the marketing giant that is the Twilight saga and profit off of it by appealing to the series's rabid teenage fangirls and Twimoms by writing a book aptly titled, Everything I Needed to Know about Women I Learned by Reading Twilight: A Vampire's Guide to Eternal Love. Fictional though it may be, the fact that the Twilight series is even considered appropriate reference material to be used when analyzing relationships gives me some pause.

Why, you ask? (I'm looking at you, Twihards.) Very simple, dear reader. The main relationships portrayed in the series between Bella and either Edward or Jacob are neither healthy, nor the relationships that any couple should model their own after.

Let's start with Bella and Edward's "true love" (omg you guise. They're totes meant to be togetha 4 eva!): while Bella, herself, isn't the strongest of female characters ever written, she's not the worst I've ever encountered. She's intelligent to an extent (and I give her that begrudgingly), but when it comes to forming healthy relationships in both their platonic and romantic forms, she's rather stunted. As for darling Edward, the boy's a 107 year old virgin vampire. That's an anomaly, if I've ever heard of one. But in addition to that glaring detail about him, many of his tendencies regarding Bella frankly freak the ever-loving hell out of me. Get the two of them together and it's something that I cannot believe made the amount of money that it did. Prior to their dating, Edward would sneak into Bella's room and watch her sleep (I'm sorry, but that is not and never will be romantic. It's creepy and most people would call that stalking. To quote Edward, "You can google it."); during the 2nd book, New Moon, Edward goes off to Italy to kill himself by sparkling in the sunlight because omg Bella almost died because of him and that's the only way that he can make up for that. So what does Bella do in the meanwhile? Well first, there's the spiraling depression she sinks into where she isolates herself from her family and what little "friends" she has (luckily, these kids see the light, say, "Deuces, bitch", and peace out of her life) for three months. The book? Oh, yeah; that's right. It goes blank for THIRTEEN FUCKING PAGES. But somehow, Bella gets out of that depression thanks to her Quilute Indian friend/werewolf, Jacob Black.

Jacob's always had some feelings for Bella, but with Edward out of the way, he feels it's time to mack on his friend. Very quickly, though, Bella realizes that whenever she gets in danger that she can hear Edward's voice in her head. Not wanting to lose that, Bella decides to do the most logical thing possible: throw herself off of a cliff! Then she'll have Edward's voice in her head forever. Genius plan, right? Attempt suicide because your boyfriend is trying to protect you? Dammit! Why didn't I think of that? Such an amazing lesson. :')

Eventually, Bella and Edward get back together, get married, and spawn a child with the worst possible name ever, Renesmee. And here comes my favorite part: Jacob realizes that the reason why he liked Bella so much was because he's in love with Bella and Edward's newborn baby girl, Renesmee (read: this is just a huge excuse to allow pedophilia in the series).

Due to these relationships, I can never, rationally, see how anyone can base their own relationship off of the one's found in Twilight.

I hope you all learned something today.

Get Ready For Some Politics!

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2009/06/americas-death-star-of-freedom.html

"America's Death Star of Freedom". Yes, you did, in fact, read the end of that link correctly. And normally, I'm all for the geek reference to the original (and best part) of the Star Wars series (suck on that, George Lucas), but on this occasion, I'm assaulted with the memories of learning about another famous political happening that also involved the series that made me fall in love with Harrison Ford ('cause seriously; who else could get away with saying, "I know," after a girl tells them that she loves them but Han Motherfucking Solo? Haters can step to the left).

And considering what the article is discussing -- a defense system created as means to warn the U.S. to a possible North Korean missile attack -- and the shape of the system -- for now, the U.S. government is calling it the "golf ball" -- jokingly calling it "America's Death Star of Freedom" seems rather appropriate and, possibly for those who don't know their history, quite funny and witty.

But I happen to know my U.S. history (and, to be fair, I'm sure the writer of the article knows his as well) and the only thing that kept running through my mind as I read this was, "Aren't the 80's over? I thought we already went through this with Reagan?" There was also a heavy sigh accompanying that thought, but needless to say, I kept thinking about the "hip, catchy, Hollywood" name that the Reagan administration and the 80's media concocted to name the satellite-run missile defense system that would save us from those crazy Russians should they decide to lay the smack down a la Red Dawn. And yep; you guessed it. The nickname they came up with was....wait for it...STAR WARS.

It was only too perfect. It was exorbitantly expensive, ran an orbit around the earth, and, like the pin-point accuracy of the Death Star's laser cannons, would blast those damned Russian missiles to hell and back (or should I say, to Hoth and back? I know. Cheesy joke is cheesy). In fact, the plan was so ridiculously far-fetched and expensive that it never came to fruition. But it seems that our current administration was somehow able to pull the funds out of thin air in order to create their own version of Reagan's Star Wars. Dreams really do come true! :')

No matter how you look at it, though, the new name of "the golf ball" given by the author of the article was meant to be a joke. So that's what you should take it as. It sounds like some bit of truthiness that Stephen Colbert would create, if only to get a brief laugh and, because as a faux-Republican, that's what he gets paid to do. Either way, I got a bit of a laugh out of it and so should you.

...I'm thinking next time, a commentary on Twilight is in order.