According to Boingboing, this is a sign warning people of peril. Why do I feel that this is a sign beckoning me to rush on and jump in the water?
According to Boingboing, this is a sign warning people of peril. Why do I feel that this is a sign beckoning me to rush on and jump in the water?
I have a DVD of The Horror Express, starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Telly Savalas. There’s a short clip of a conversation I’d like to extract as an mpeg or quicktime movie—even extracting just the audio would be nice.
It’s a classic. Christopher Lee is explaining his discovery of an ancient fossil to a beautiful woman:
Lee: That box of bones, madam, could have solved many of the riddles of science. If the theory of evolution is confirmed, if the science of biology is revolutionized, if the very origin of man is determined…
Beautiful woman: I have heard of evolution. It is immoral.
Lee: It is a fact. And there is no morality in a fact.
It’s intercut, by the way, with scenes of Peter Cushing doing an autopsy on one of the victims of the fossil (it’s a horror movie, of course—the fossil comes to life and wanders about a train in pre-revolution Siberia, sucking the minds out of people with its red glowing eyes. There are also zombie cossacks), sawing open a dead guy’s skull to expose his brain.
They just don’t make movies like that anymore.
Anyway, if anyone can tell me how to pull out this very short (less than a minute) segment on a Mac OS X machine, I’ll put it on the web. You know you all want to hear Saruman/Count Dooku/Dracula endorsing evolution.
Your suggestions worked, and I’ve now got the movie converted and edited out the part I wanted. It did take hours for the decoding to finish, but I just let it run in the background, so it wasn’t too painful.
Now, if you want, you can listen to Christopher Lee declare that evolution is a fact, and there is no morality in a fact (250K .mov audio file).
I succumbed to the tempting link Corrente waved around, and clicked through to see Connie Chung’s farewell to some cable show I never heard of before. I suffered horribly, so it’s only fair that you share my pain.
Perhaps Lindsay doesn’t realize it, but she has data that pinpoint the date of the Singularity. Or the Rapture. Whatevs.
Today is 6/6/06, that ominous numerological signifier of the fundies, much beloved by conspiracy theorists, and full of interesting numerical properties (but is there ever such a thing as an uninteresting number?). It’s also the date that Ann Coulter’s new book, Godless, is being released.
Everyone is missing the most portentous aspect of the number, though…
Some days, I just have to get the cephalopod obsession out of my system with a quick purge of links from the mailbag.
Robot tentacles (via Amygdala)
Ancient octopus cartoon (via Holbo)
I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news for Clara Jean Brown.
Worried about the safety of her family during a stormy Memorial Day trip to the beach, Clara Jean Brown stood in her kitchen and prayed for their safe return as a strong thunderstorm rumbled through Baldwin County, Alabama.
But while she prayed, lightning suddenly exploded, blowing through the linoleum and leaving a blackened area on the concrete. Brown wound up on the floor, dazed and disoriented by the blast but otherwise uninjured.
She said ‘Amen’ and the room was engulfed in a huge ball of fire. The 65-year-old Brown said she is blessed to be alive.
The bad news is that God hates her and is trying to kill her. The good news is that he’s gotten incompetent in his dotage. I mean, lightning and a fireball? And both missed? Hey, God, here’s a suggestion: next time, use Magic Missile. It doesn’t do as much damage, but it never misses, and heck, she’s a little old lady—she probably doesn’t have much in the way of hit points.
(via Phil)
Call me perverse, but my first thought on seeing this kid was that I desperately want to see an x-ray of the pectoral girdle. It looks to me from this one picture that the lower arm must lack a scapula or a clavicle, or at best have fragments with screwy and probably nonfunctional connections. I don’t understand why the doctors are even arguing about which arm could be more functional, if the article is correct. Or why they’re even considering it important to lop one off: if there aren’t circulatory defects or it isn’t impairing the function of the ‘best’ arm, why take a knife to him?
Poor kid. It does look like a very weird and fascinating developmental aberration, though, and it sounds like there are other internal asymmetries that are going to make life rough for him.
Lots of people have been sending me the link to the Vintage Octopus Pulp Covers site. It’s very cool.
It makes me wonder why so many people are infatuated with cephalopods, though. Weirdos.