AdamSmith

We will withhold observation on the intersect between the foregoing and MsGuy's marvelous mischievous moppet mania.

Babies With Intelligent Observations About Their Mother’s Cigarette Addiction Really, lady? Your smoking habit has escalated to the point that your non-sentient infant can’t help but comment on it, and you respond as if you’re just talking to an adult, articulating the merits of this particular brand of cigarette? Well now what the hell is going on here? Does this kid work for Marlboro? Where did he learn to pull manipulative shit like this? Let’s just list the facts here: 1) This mother has a smoking addiction 2) She also beats her baby sometimes 3) The baby knows both #1 and #2, and has actually learned to outsmart this horrible woman by knowing her patterns well enough to use her addiction to mitigate the abuse. Let’s move on. Impossibly Annoying-Looking Redheaded Boys Excited To Put Food In Their Shit-Eating Mouths I can barely look at this picture it annoys me so much. A somewhat self-aware kid might not appreciate such an obvious and derogatory nickname. But Ginger here is so ragingly giddy to drink this soda that no other thought can enter his brain. This kid looks rowdy as fuck. Good thing he took a break from egging the neighbors’ houses to climax over a glass of orange juice. Yeah I bet you do “wish you had a million oreos.” You know why? Cause you’re a creepy 50s ad kid who is outrageously into food. Let’s also note that this isn’t a photo, it’s a drawing—and they still chose to make him a red head. I’ll never understand the 1950s fetish with prepubescent redheaded boys. Murderous Nightmare-Inducing Children This is some kind of judgment by Pears’ Soap. They had an ad team and a budget. They had time. And at the end of it all, they decided to go with a drowning baby trying to claw itself from the jaws of death. Oh you know, just a murderous little girl covered in blood-colored dye. Zero remorse in her sociopathic facial expression. Okay here we get to the kid that is going to haunt my sleep for the next few weeks. This is not a human child. All I can picture is being his parent and walking into his room at night to check on him, and when I’m standing over him, suddenly his eyes open wide in that smile, and his head starts spinning around and I’m in the shit trying to escape. Here he is again. When he’s not knifing his parents to death, he keeps busy with his ad modeling career. He’s not even trying to be non-sinister here. Somehow, the ad team at Karo cooking products looked at this ad and decided it was ready to go to the presses. Incredibly Racist Children “Why doesn’t your mamma wash you with fairy soap?” What a braggy little bitch. Also worth noting is the first class ire going on on the black girl’s face. This girl just fully goes for it. Full-force bigotry. Two other questions—why is the boy wearing a dress, and why is the girl wearing shoes in the ocean? Another gem from Pears’ Soap. Their claim is that black people are actually just really dirty white people. See? This nice white girl gives him the first bath of his life, and—voila! He’s white! The dude looks as shocked about it as I am. And of course, if washing doesn’t work, well, you can always use paint! Some kind of time you grew up in, 55-110 year olds. Roly-Poly Rosey-Cheeked Rapey-Looking Four-Year-Old Boys Smugly Eating Something Sloppily I really don’t know what else to say about this prominent genre of ad in the 40s. Let’s just meet at the bottom. I think I’ve made my point. 55-110 year olds—any explanation for yourself?

A few repeats from last time but many new creepazoids too. Creepy Kids in Creepy Vintage Ads By Tim Urban [Originally posted August 2013. Updated June 2014.] Message to every American currently between the ages of 55 and 110: I know your secret. You had an incredibly weird childhood. Here you are, living in 2014, pretending like your lives are normal, when as it turns out, your formative years were anything but normal. They were bizarre. And so were you. That’s the only way to put it. I know this because I just spent all day looking at disturbing ads from the 1900s, 10s, 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, all featuring children, and forgive me if I need a few days before I want to be around you again. Denials will be useless, as I’ve carefully compiled ample evidence below. Let’s take a tour, category by category: Girls Who Are a Weird Level of Hungry This little girl needs to just settle down. That manic expression and those eager little hands are completely over-the-top. It’s just some white bread with jelly. Okay yes, those slabs of low-grade ice cream look pretty delicious. But they don’t warrant total captivation. Let go of the bars and get ahold of yourself. I get it, it’s a big plate of meat and you’re hungry, but again, just rein it in a notch. You’re not a dog. Speaking of which, this girl is behaving like an uncivilized animal. You can want the Cocoanut and still act dignified. Kids With Old Faces That’s way too many eye wrinkles for a 6-year-old. Okay both people in this ad need to get a fucking grip. I would reprimand the kid, but we can all see where he learned to act like a psycho. In any case, he should probably spend less time lusting over a glass of V-8 and more time worrying about the fact that both his face and hairstyle look like a 75-year-old Republican. Aren’t you a little young to get someone’s attention with an 85-year-old person word like “say”? And why are you drinking so much soda—you’re like 7 months old. Oh well this is a great life path. So apparently the kid in the previous ad decided to make a career out of his little act and actually got a job with Hires’ Rootbeer. All the soda has taken its toll, as he now looks 50. We might as well explore this phenomenon, now that we’re here— More Infants Drinking Soda The Soda Pop Board of America was just like, “So let’s write down the things we want to be true and then make that the ad.” Pure pleasure! Yes, you’ve really achieved something here by giving a fizzy, sugary drink to someone who has been alive for 50 days and getting a positive reaction. That’s it. Shove it down the newborn’s throat. Segues nicely into: Parenting At Its Finest Modern parents give their 2-month-old a pacifier. Maybe a blanky. In 1905? They handed the baby a razor and told it to start shaving. Sun deprivation is the least of this baby’s problems, considering that he’s locked in the bathroom. This is literally a product for parents who are incubating their child in the gross, dark corner of the bathroom, never letting them see or know about the outside world. On the sad little girl’s chest, it says, “Papa says it won’t hurt us!” So papa’s reasoning is, “I got a gun that has a child lock on it—now my 2-year-old daughter can finally sleep with a gun.” “You see so many good things in Du Pont Cellophane.” Like, apparently, babies being murdered via suffocation. No comment. http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/creepy-kids-in-creepy-vintage-ads.html

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER A WAY TO TURN POOP INTO ELECTRICITY! Engineers at Stanford University have devised a new way to generate electricity from sewage using naturally-occurring "wired microbes" as mini power plants, producing electricity as they digest plant and animal waste. Right now, their prototype while small, is very promising. The experiment right now is about the size of a D-Cell battery with two electrodes (One positive, and one Negative) plunged into a bottle of waste water. "We call it fishing for electrons," said Criddle, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Inside the vial of poopy water, there is an unusual type of bacteria connected to the bottom of the negative electrode. This bacteria feasts on particles of organic waste and produce electricity which is captured by the battery's positive electrode. Their hope is that as this technology evolves, it can be used in water treatment facilities to generate power from human waste in all of the cities. The potential energy from human waste albeit is small, but does have the potential to offset the electrical cost of the water treatment in the first place. There is also the consideration that our current level of technology allows for only about 30% efficiency of how much electricity we can generate from the waste water. This is about the same level of efficiency modern solar cells have in receiving energy from the sun. If we can continue to look to nature for support in how to make these technologies possible, we can see upwards of 100% efficiency rating. By copying photosynthesis, we can truly harness the power of the sun, and by watching how things decay to create energy for the next thing to spring up, we can learn to harness electricity anywhere we need it. http://thespiritscience.net/2014/03/13/scientists-discover-a-way-to-turn-poop-into-electricity/

Once again you got way ahead of me. Is there a skeleton key?

Really worth its own thread but nonetheless apropos here to note the surprising best-seller status attained by the recent Capital in the Twenty-First Century. "...The central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital ( r ) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century

Spawn of Sharknado! Looks like they should bring back MST3K just for this.

That's why I liked this: other than 'murder of crows' the list was not the usual suspects.

Likewise, many thanks. I'll watch this online. Of the numerous bios, I recently really enjoyed H.W. Brands's Traitor to his Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/history/features/past-features/brands09.php http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103003678.html

TV reporter uses F-word as she quits to fight for marijuana legalisation Alaskan station apologises after reporter says 'fuck it', resigns on air and reveals herself as owner of medical marijuana club http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/sep/22/tv-reporter-f-word-marijuana-legalisation-ktva-charlo-greene

Ig Nobels: British researchers take coveted science humour prize UK researchers reveal people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, manipulative and psychopathic http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/19/ig-nobel-prize-british-researchers-win ...The entire Italian government won the economics prize for being the first European nation to increase its economy by factoring in revenues from prostitution, smuggling and the sale of illegal drugs.

That would have been his ne'er-do-well nephew Karl.

In 1924, Helen Keller wrote this to the New York Philharmonic, describing her experience of "hearing" their radio broadcast of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. Dear Friends: I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I do not mean to say that I heard the music in the sense that other people heard it; and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy. Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roil of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still. The women's voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorus throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth an ocean of heavenly vibration and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes. Of course this was not hearing, but I do know that the tones and harmonies conveyed to me moods of great beauty and majesty. I also sense, or thought I did, the tender sounds of nature that sing into my hand-swaying reeds and winds and the murmur of streams. I have never been so enraptured before by a multitude of tone-vibrations. As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marvelled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine. - Helen Keller, 1924 http://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/guides/helen-keller-symphony-9/

Much better discussion/analysis of the 9th than such things usually are: http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/sep/09/symphony-guide-beethoven-ninth-choral-tom-service

Undecided voters will note the opportunity to profit from a last-minute bidding war. They may also, should it please them, observe the Right Honorable Gentleman from Mississippi straining after original effect.

I somehow always gravitate to the lower floors.

Well, the site I linked above selects pretty much on awfulness. It deliberately omits many if not most 'cult' films that are recognized as good. Another one I can think of is IMDB's Bottom 100: http://m.imdb.com/chart/bottom/

Heightens the drama all over again. (Article is from 2010; I just now discovered it.) Apollo 11 Moon landing film has sound restored A British filmmaker has painstakingly synchronised footage recorded during the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 with its corresponding audio. Video link here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-video/7900351/Apollo-11-Moon-landing-film-has-sound-restored.html This split screen montage combines footage from four different cameras used by Nasa to capture the moment Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon on July 20 1969. While the images captured 41 years ago have regularly been seen, they have almost always lacked a synchronised soundtrack. Now filmmaker Stephen Slater, working with archive film company Footagevault, has united the visual material with recordings of the original mission audio. This video shows the moment the Lunar Module, called Eagle, separated from the Command Module, Columbia, to make its descent to the lunar surface. As the landing began, Armstrong reported they were "running long". Eagle was four seconds further along its descent trajectory than planned, and would land miles west of the intended site. Armstrong's first words after landing were: "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed." Video courtesy of Footagevault