Discriminating Weirdos

Yeti, Bigfoot, and Nessie

I found a fun shop today that I want to share.  Usually, I am the sort that focuses on an item rather than a whole shop, but today things are going to be different.  I can't seem to find one or two single items in this shop that I can easily call my favorite, because I absolutely love just about everything PearsonMaron has to offer.

Magnets, sculptures, pins, and various other handmade objects are up for sale, and most of them are based on folk monsters like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Chupacabra, among others.  Heck, even Paul Bunyon and Babe make appearances.

If I were forced to choose a favorite, I'd probably choose the Loch Ness Monster sculpture pictured here.  But like I said, I 'm hard-pressed to pick one item over another.  Take some time to look through PearsonMaron.  There's a lot to see, and if you're a fan of Morlocks, you owe it to yourself to get there ASAP!  (ADAM)

Aural Weirdness

If you're anything like me (and I'm sorry if you are) then you grew up with an avid love of novelty recordings.  I started collecting strange recordings and lyrics the second I first heard Shaving Cream by Benny Bell on the radio when I was about six years old.

Once I discovered that Dr. Demento ran on Sunday nights on KQDS in Duluth, I was gone.  The world was simply full of recordings that should probably never have been recorded.  Songs like Can I Pawn My Teeth to You? and Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth (I'm Kissing You Goodbye) seemed to make life a little bit more interesting when I was a teen, and finding recordings o some of the stranger things I'd heard became a sort of hobby.

Garage sales and second-hand stores, church basements and estate sales.  I've been to several of them, and my collection includes many records that, in all honesty, may not even exist outside of my closet. I found Mrs. Miller at an impressionable age, got a copy of The Brothers Four Sing Songs of Lennon and McCartney, and purchased every piece of vanity vinyl I could get my hands on.

So I've got a large collection of what my wife calls "unlistenable crap taking up space" taking up space in our condo.

Earlier this year, however, I stumbled upon the 365 Days Project, a collection of rare, bizarre, and extremely fascinating MP3s collected and stored on the Web.  The project gathered the strangest, coolest recordings from over 200 contributors and put them all in one place for posterity and your listening enjoyment.

I can't even begin to tell you all of the cool things you'll find if you go dumpster diving in this collection -- everything from corporate promotional recordings and how-to records to ill-advised music and crazy vanity recordings.

And actually, this project was done twice, once in 2003 and once in 2007, so there are two crazy years to choose from.  Take some time.  Explore.  Listen.  It's so bad that it's good. (ADAM)

What would you say to a nice cup of tea?

  花茶 (Vol.2) Flower Tea 
  Originally uploaded by Eat-My-Heart-Out 你吃,我看

-Okakura Kakuzo, 1906
"Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday
existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order."

It's a cold and wet April day in Chicago.  My kick ass umbrella from Umbrella Heaven is coming in quite handy for letting the dog out.  Still, the cold and wetness seems to be getting into everything. 

It's the kind of day for another cup of tea.  Always another cup of tea. 

I read an absolutely wonderful blog this morning that happened to be about tea.  heysusy writes with great clarity and intelligence on a number of subjects.  She's a very recent addiction of mine.  This morning's post inspired me.  I was, in fact, having my morning cup at the time.  Now I'm having my second cup.  I'm pretty sure that there are a lot more of them on the way. 

  Yixing teapot 
  Originally uploaded by horses and tigers

 

We love and adore our local Chinese tea shop: Dream About Tea.  They take care of us very well there, supplying us with a very high grade Keemun for me, a dark and scary Lapsong Souchong for Adam (referred to in our house as tobacco juice).  We have special treats there when we go.  I'm very fond of the Hong Kong Milk Tea.  I have no idea what it is, and I don't care.  It's lovely.  They also make an unbelievable iced lavender tea in the summer.... soon it will be time for iced tea!

I'm a big fan of the tea traditions of the world.  I love how formal it all is, and how it seems that tea drinkers everywhere have their own ceremonies about it.  This kind of mysticism is rare with coffee.

  matcha, type of green tea 
  Originally uploaded by michenv

I love the tea ceremonies in Japan.  This was my introduction, actually, to tea culture and aesthetics.  I was an exchange student in Japan in high school.  I was mad for the ceremony, and have two absolutely beautiful tea bowls.

Of course, the British created their own ceremony of sorts, bless 'em.  I used to spend my Sunday afternoons with tea with milk and sugar out of a porcelen cup, writing letters with a quill, fantasizing about Emma Woodhouse.

Springtime Blossoms tea from TeaForAllReasons available on Etsy

As a milliner, I've gotta also love the Mad Hatter phenomenon.  Although I'm actually quite frightened by Alice in Wonderland in general, I love that people feel compelled to wear crazy hats and drink tea. If they require Lewis Carroll to inspire them, well that's ok by me.  We should all wear more hats and drink more tea!

Mad Hatter Tea Party print available from vusova on Etsy.

It's all just so very lovely!  And warms the soul on a cold spring day! I better go make another cup!  (Emily)

The Short and Meaningful Career of Maila Nurmi

I don't know if anyone out there knows who I'm talking about when I say that Maila Nurmi has died.  She passed away on January 10th, but while this little mention may be a bit late, it is heartfelt.

Maila Nurmi was the actress / model behind the tight, black dress of Vampira, the first late-night horror host.  In 1953, she attended a costume ball in Los Angeles as the unnamed ghoul woman from Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons.  Her look caught the eye of a local television producer who took five months to track her down.  Once her found her, he offered her a job hosting late-night horror films for KABC-TV in LA, a job she took.  In April of 1954, she hit the air.

It was a pretty short run, as the series was canceled in 1955, and she moved the show to a rival station for a bit after that, but Maila Nurmi created a culture that can still be found today.  Cities all over the US created their own horror hosts in the 50s and 60s, and the trend continues today with Rich Koz (better known as Svengoolie) right here in Chicago.  As far as I know, Svengoolie is the only horror host still on the air at a major network, so the trend has really trickled off.

There are hosts around, though.  From Public Access cable stations to video podcasts, people are still dressing up, showing really bad horror films, and performing pun-filled skits and song before commercial breaks.  In one way or another, the trend continues.

But Vampira started it all in 1954.  In her short career, she was nominated for an Emmy, was once fired by a jealous Mae West, and worked with Bela Lugosi (who was actually dead at the time) in Plan 9 From Outer Space.  She was, and is, a cult goddess.

May she and her pet spider, Rollo, rest in peace. (ADAM)

Of Ukuleles and Fiddles

As I've undoubtedly mentioned before, I like to play music.  My instruments of choice are the fiddle and the
ukulele, so I often find myself surfing around the Web looking at photos of violins, pricing new ukes, and
searching for any art that features either instrument.  Yep, that's my life.  Epic, right?

Anyway... today's featured Etsy shop was a jackpot for me. It's called Fiddlebones, and the prints for sale there are right up my alley.

Not only is there a ukulele, but it's being played by a frog!  And a fiddling skeleton in a hillbilly hat?  I think a certain print artist in Seattle has been reading my diary!

Check out Fiddlebones HERE, and feast your eyes on all of the delicious, delicious fiddles and ukes.  And there's a guitar, too, if you're into that sort of thing. (ADAM)

Clever Human Award: Bobby Henderson

  01162 Noodly Master 
  Originally uploaded by nickhall

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, while having existed in secrecy for hundreds of years, only recently came into the mainstream when this letter was published in May 2005.

With millions, if not thousands, of devout worshippers, the Church of the FSM is widely considered a legitimate religion, even by its opponents - mostly fundamentalist Christians, who have accepted that our God has larger balls than theirs.

Some claim that the church is purely a thought experiment, satire, illustrating that Intelligent Design is not science, but rather a pseudoscience manufactured by Christians to push Creationism into public schools. These people are mistaken. The Church of FSM is real, totally legit, and backed by hard science. Anything that comes across as humor or satire is purely coincidental.

--from the official website of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

I StumbledUpon the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster a month or so ago.  Since then, I find myself thinking about it and it's amazing ability to completely satirize organized religion in the most perfect way. And bringing together two of my favorite things: pirates and pasta. 

Bobby Henderson has actually, and at long last, made adsurdism relevant again. 

In reading about the Pastafarians, I'm brought back to college.  Drinking too much coffee at Perkins, staying too long at the caf, talking like we were changing the world by poking fun at it.  God we were ineffective and full of ourselves.  We didn't know it then, but we really wished that we were Bobby Henderson. 

Yesterday, I went to my favorite independent bookstore to order The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in hope that if it passes through their hands, they will get copies of their own and put them on the shelves.  So I haven't read it yet, but someone at the Scientific American has, and they say:

An elaborate spoof on Intelligent Design, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is neither too elaborate nor too spoofy to succeed in nailing the fallacies of ID. It's even wackier than Jonathan Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to keep them from being a burden, and it may offend just as many people, but Henderson, described elsewhere as a 25-year-old "out-of-work physics major," puts satire to the same serious use that Swift did. Oh, yes, it is very funny.

Eventually the Book Cellar will get me the book.  I told them I was willing to wait. It was going to take a while since it wasn't available through normal routes.  Once I have read it, I'll let you all know how great it is.  In the meantime,

Yar.  May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. (Emily)