People's Choice

Recent applications of scientific aesthetics to the field of religion, allowing respondents to pick-&-mix their preferences for various possible components and variables, have established that the Most Wanted religious symbol in Australia -- scientifically proven to appeal to 72% of viewers -- would be a 2/3-size Jack Nicholson, wearing boardshorts and shades and an expensive watch, crucified on an inflatable mattress.

This important result was obtained by Komar and Melamid's People's Choice methodology. Recall that this approach resulted in

the "most wanted" and "most unwanted" paintings of 11 countries. The artists commissioned polling companies in the 11 countries [...] to conduct scientific polls to discover what they want to see in art.

In 1996 Komar and Melamid extended the project into the musical field, with a survey designed to delineate the world's Most Wanted song; also the Most Unwanted song, which most of you probably have on your playlists already. As yet there is no accompanying video.

UPDATED: Bonus Most Unwanted religious symbol here.

Roots

Too late, Paddington Bear realised that spending all that money to trace his ancestry and re-unite with his relatives was maybe not such a good idea after all.

We're gonna need a bigger cat-door

Meet Mrs Spat. Do not fuck with her. She will cut you and break your stuff.

Not yet age 2, weighs 7 kg., still growing.

An iron sun, the forbidden circle

"Dream for us, Grodd!" said the Pointy-Stick People. "Give us a mighty dream, for tomorrow we hunt!"

"Certainly", said Grodd. "Which animal shall I dream?"

"Not of cave lions," said the People. "You are nothing but trouble after you have had the Cave-Lion Dream. Seek the pastures of the horses and the aurochsen, for it is them whom we shall hunt."

Grodd took his fox-skin pouches of ground ochre and of charcoal. He climbed the mountain-side to the edge of the pine forest to gather the red-caps, the sons of thunder, then

[several lines erased; possibly describing the preparation of the mushroom]

and in the deepest womb of the cavern he went traveling to the dream pastures.
Surely Shiplap the Father of Shamans had heard Grodd's prayer, for his dream was good, with a quarter-moon of animals, mares and auroch-cows and bulls, white shining silver studs with their nose in flames, more than Grodd had ever dreamed before. He opened his pouches of pigment, and with the brush of morgellon-fibre that had been his teacher's before him, by the flickering gerbil-oil flame of a wick alight in a spondylus shell, Grodd painted what he had seen.

But what are all these circles? Grodd certainly had not seen them in the dream, but they showed up everywhere in the painting. He was puzzled. The odd thing was that exactly the same thing had happened last time.

"I shall call them 'orbs'," Grodd said.

WHAT!!! It's a rollercoastal ride with Bristol and Levi

OMG, They've split. Faster than a dysentery causing amoeba!!!

Von has challenged us!

Here. OK:

There once was a man
Whose dick was so long he could
He said with a grin

I think I'm getting the hang of it.

Least-favourite version of Beckett's Endgame

It was a difficult decision for the judges to choose this hotly-contested title, with literally pairs of candidates coming before the panel. Special mentions must go out to (1) Andrew Lloyd Webber for managing to re-imagine Beckett's mordant vision of paralysis and deterioration as a West End musical (with extra kitschness points for inserting an extraneous sub-plot borrowed from Orpheus in the Underworld); and (2) the St. Petersburg State Dance Corps, for performing it as a ballet, on ice.

In the end, though, after a frank and open exchange of views chaired by Evangaline Van Holsteren keeping order with the help of a fire hose, the panel were able to settle on David Lynch's version.
As you see, Lynch moved the bare, partly-underground interior specified by Beckett's script to the Red Lodge. He has cast Michael J. Anderson in the role of Hamm's servant Clov, while three quite dissimilar actors take turns as the wheelchair-bound figure of Hamm himself, though their difference does not really show up since in this production Hamm is never seen directly but only as a grotesque shadow cast on the wall. Nagg and Nell have been re-named "Fig V" and "Fig VI" for no apparent reason.

I don't remember any mutant exploding walrus or bathtubs full of brightly-painted machine tools from the other productions I've seen.

UPDATE: Bonus Belgian production.
The judges were forced to disqualify this one from competition for its clumsy attempt to sneak into the earlier suet-sculpture thread.

Solar Tsunami swamping us right now!!!

The Daily Torygraph exposes Sun's role in destabilising earth

The explosion was aimed directly towards Earth, which then sent a “solar tsunami” racing 93 million miles across space.

Only the fearless Telegraph would tell us the troooooth about the dastardly plot by the Sunnies to destabilize communication satellites around the earth and bring on the Moozelum Caliphate. I guess that that bit got censored out with great tyranny.
Actually, to be coldly cynical, the article doesn't mention anything about Global Warming being due to Solar activity and how this "Solar Tsunami" might make the temperature rise or something. I guess it pales into insignificance beside the revelations from Climategate that prove that fap = fap.

Hitler's on the phone from Berlin

Can't be arsed reading The Spear of Destiny so this is all second hand through T. J. Constable's retelling:

Adolf Hitler considered Dr [Rudolf] Steiner his most important and dangerous enemy. The reason? Steiner could maintain surveillance from the astral plane of the machinations of the satanistic Thule group that had recognized Hitler as the Luciferic messiah.

[...]

Hitler planned the assassination of Dr. Steiner at the Munich railway station in the spring of 1922. Inside his compartment, a sawn-off, double-barreled shotgun was to be discharged into the face of this Christ-like man. Dr Steiner knew of this planned murder through the same faculties that had opened the inner workings of the Nazis to him. His high ethical and moral standards however, would not permit him to use those powers to avoid this attack, for this would constitute black magic or misuse of those powers. He consequently arrived at the Munich railway station on time.

Before Steiner could board the train and meet the bloody fate planned for him by the Hitler gang, [...] Dr Walter Johannes Stein arrived with friends and students of Rudolf Steiner. Surrounding the great teacher, they hustled him rapidly from the Munich station to safety. Walter Johannes Stein had penetrated the Thule group around Hitler, and learned in time of the murder plot.

Am I alone in seeing this as the plot for a movie? I envisage Robert De Niro in the role of Steiner. Tom Cruise is not acceptable in any position. But best get onto it quick before Charlie Stross appropriates the story for a Laundry novel.

Weird scenes at teh goldmine time

I play intertube scrabble against my wife (yes it is so Scrabble, it has a different name that's all Bwah ah ah ah) and she has just beaten me by several hundred points but I used all my letters first. Game over right???
NOOOO!!! it has the last word I put in, but no points have been awarded and I have the three letters back again, even though they are on the board still, where I put them.
Who is fooling around with my enterinets????

David Beckham turns aside from the true path

SHAMEFUL STORY HERE
If the man is too compromised to allow him  to pass through the portals of Great Justice, he should just say so.

I hear the music daylight disc

All the cool kids are getting into Orb photography these days. Of course it's easy now with your digital cameras and your flash. Back in our day we had to muck around with lens flares and darkroom chemicals and infra-red film to get decent results.

Trevor J. Constable explains all about the invisible etheric / plasmatic life-forms that inhabit our skies in his books "They Live in the Sky" and "The Cosmic Pulse of Life".
The local library allegedly has a copy of the latter, which I haven't read for three or four decades. It should provide the finishing touch for my petition to the appropriate UN authorities, to have Orbs declared a NZ Cultural Treasure (or 'Taonga' as we say in moments of multi-culturalism). T. J. Constable is New Zealand-born, you see,* so we have sound legal grounds for claiming intellectual property rights on the Orb photography.**

If you hear no more from me, you'll know that my attempt to borrow the library's copy went very wrong, perhaps because I alerted the Men in Black by searching the catalogue.

* As is Bruce Cathie.

** Constable is not a single-issue writer; he's written some well-received books on WWII aviation history. He is also an expert on cloud-busting and smog dispersal using Reichian orgone projectors, for which he really deserves to feature in his own Kate Bush song.
Sadly, he has not received the recognition he deserves from UFO enthusiasts, some of whom regard him as a 'crackpot' and a 'proponent of the weird theory that UFOs are not at all extraterrestrial spacecraft' who is bringing the whole field into disrepute.