Artist and writer, or writer and artist. Sometimes other things, too.
Tag: Absurdity
Over the past few days many bloggers and even newspapers have gushed that Hello Kitty is apparently a “girl” and not a cat, although for no adequately explained reason she has a cat head. Maybe I’m sheltered, but I don’t know any girls who love to bake and have cat heads. She’s officially and canonically got no mouth, so why or perhaps more cogently how is she so enthusiastic about baked goods anyway?
What none of them have done is behave like a real journalist and really look into Hello Kitty’s background. And while we’re on the subject, newspapers and so-called professional journalists, WTF? This blog here is explicitly dedicated to silly stuff, and I don’t get paid for doing it. Hello Kitty possibly not being a cat isn’t current affairs or headline news by any stretch of the most overcaffeinated imagination. Nor is the Great British Bake Off. Stop…
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Just two more images I scanned from the old British boys’ magazine/comic Eagle, posted here very belatedly purely because I just found them on an old HD and I don’t know why they never got published.
Coincidentally, the “colour-reflex conditioning” to which Mike is being subjected (above) looks very much like the Zoom ice lolly being advertised below. It’s like he’s being frontally aggravated by the business end of a massive Zoom lolly, which can happen when you’re tripping your tits off like young Michael here. Mike Lane = Migraine?
Perhaps some of those special sugar cubes on the coffee table made their way into the Lyons Maid factory. It might explain where they got the idea that being Commander in Chief of the Galaxy Patrol would be fab. Only Zoom fans are in it, baby. Fab was (and I think it still is, in Britain) another…
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Found on an old hard drive. In 1903 a gentleman named Joseph Karwowski (“a subject of the Czar of Russia, residing at Herkimer”, New York) took out a patent on “certain new and useful Improvements in Methods of Preserving the Dead”, to wit encasing them in cubes of glass. He claimed that excluding the air would preserve them “for an indefinite period in a perfect and life-like condition.” The process would involve encasing the body in a layer of sodium silicate which was dry heated to solidify it, then further surrounded by a cube or cylinder of molten glass. Evidently a man of thrifty instincts, he also allowed for the cheaper and less labour-intensive possibility of preserving just the head “if preferred”, Futurama style.
Not that I or anybody else in their right mind is considering actually carrying out this operation, but…
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If you ever watched horror films in the 1980s or 1990s and thought to yourself “Freddy Krueger’s OK, but what this keloid-deformed, ultraviolent, serial killing child molester really needs is fishnet stockings and a massive rack”, then today you have finally hit the jackpot, my friend. A Japanese company is now offering this bishoujo Freddy statue, or “stuatue” as they have it on their site. I know by now it almost goes without saying that if we discover a highly inappropriate item has been sexualised, then somebody Japanese will probably be responsible. I take a glass-half-full attitude towards this fact, though. These figures are very, very wrong but bless your filthy, weird, perverted Japanese minds.
Bishoujo or bishōjo (美少女)means “beautiful young girl”, and is usually taken to mean a woman younger than university age. Given the obvious intent behind this item, it’s reasonable to translate the figure’s…
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The best things in life are free / But you can give them to the birds and the bees / I want Ban Ki-money.
A few weeks ago the United Nations held a special meeting to award me $950,000. I know it may seem random and all too much to take in. Why would they do such a thing? Believe me, I felt the same way, but the email was sent straight from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s personal Yahoo account so it must be legit. The UN has decided to “introduced this programmed” so as to abolish my poverty, and all I need to do is correspond with an African gentleman via his Japanese Yahoo account. Mr Emefiele uses a Japanese one because Ban Ki-moon is Korean, same difference… right? Also, boo to scammers. Mr Ban and his friend Mr Emefiele hate those guys.
Ki-moon really is making the…
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(Customary wow, somehow it’s been nearly two months since I posted anything apologetic preamble.)
Tanpakushitsu ga tarinai no ne / Isn’t your intake of protein sufficient?
Our Japanese cousins– specifically the Japan National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations– have again excelled themselves in applying the kawaii aesthetic to a wholly inappropriate subject. Why are you so “gloomy”, as demonstrated by the girl in this clip? It’s because you don’t get enough “domestic meat” inside you. Yes, the first few lines of this video are “Kokusan no oniku / kokusan no oniku/ Nikku niku”… “Domestic meat / domestic meat / Meat, meat” and in case you were wondering, the subtle message is that you should eat lots of domestic meat. Domestic meat appears to be laced with a combination of Ecstacy and LSD, but this is BONUS SUPAA NIHON CANDY FLIPPU FEATURE and not a defect. Luckily the protein-starved girl receives…
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The Golden Bough (James Frazer, 1922) proves that where the relationship between China and Tibet is concerned, plus ça chose, plus c’est la même chose.
“The Buddhist Tartars believe in a great number of living Buddhas, who officiate as Grand Lamas at the head of the most imporatant monasteries. When one of these Grand Lamas dies his disciples do not sorrow, for they know that he will soon reappear, being born in the form of an infant. Their only anxiety is to discover the place of his birth… wherever he is born, the trees and plants put forth green leaves; at his bidding flowers bloom and springs of water rise; and his presence diffuses heavenly blessings.”
…
“A register of all the incarnate gods in the Chinese empire is kept in the Li fan yüan of Colonial Office at Peking. The number of gods who have thus taken out a…
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Attentive viewers may notice some subtle Christian imagery in this clip from early 1970s Japanese TV show Ultraman Ace.
Only joking. It’s about as subtle as a man throwing a rubber kaiju through a ten storey building. Either the makers of this series had absolutely no idea what blasphemy is, or they understood it perfectly well.
Anyone who’s unfortunate enough to have seen the relentlessly grim Nolanised fun vacuum that was Man of Steel may also get flashbacks to it when they witness the gay abandon with which Ultraman blithely annihilates huge swathes of the city and (although unseen) presumably also thousands of the citizens he’s ostensibly protecting. In Ultraman’s version of reality it must pay off big time if you have shares in construction, emergency services and infrastructure companies.
As research for something I’m writing, I recently re-read Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun (1952), which is a very thorough, sardonic account of the 1630s outbreak of mass nymphomaniac diabolical hysteria instigated by a bunch of “possessed” nuns to get back at an unpopular local clergyman. I hate it when that happens. Nowadays the book is primarily known as the source material for Ken Russell’s salacious 1970s nunsploitation version with Oliver Reed, The Devils. Why this pertains to what I’m writing is not important to relate right now, but among the excellent background material about France in the 17th century is the following section about the general filthiness of things:
“The most grotesque of avoidable mishaps would mar the most solemn occasions. Consider, for example, the case of La Grande Mademoiselle*, that pathetic figure of fun who was Louis XIV’s first cousin. After death, according to…
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HALLO, THERE! This is the 200th post on Adoxoblog. Choosing to celebrate that milestone with call backs to the ten least read articles on the site is not as perverse as it might seem. Many posts have tens of thousands of views– which I think is pretty good for a blog that isn’t really about anything in particular, never has cat GIFs on it and almost never mentions tits– but some pages have almost no views, and there are hundreds of other things to read here as well besides the greatest hits. So may I present to you the top ten least wanted on this blog in the hope that you’ll be encouraged to seek out some of Adoxoblog’s less frequented areas.
Mushuda I and Mushuda II. Almost no text here, which is probably why hardly anybody ever finds these pages. However, if you read this blog regularly then…
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… but please don’t make them into lamps after poking their eyes out with scissors. Especially on a children’s TV show in Sweden, unless you want to cause a storm in a teacup. Via Metafilter, a Norwegian site reports (do I detect a hint of anti-Swedish glee?) that “Swedish children’s TV channel is forced to remove clip of doll murder.“
Luckily (for them) Sweden is so utopian that some people have nothing better to worry about than dolls being mutilated on a TV show for children, Philofix, complaining vociferously that it was “perverse”, “macabre” and “crazy”, and that the presenter should be dismissed. Clearly these people have never met a real child or they’re a very long way from their own childhoods, because otherwise they’d know that many children adore this kind of business and need no encouragement or instruction whatsoever in play-sadism with any vaguely…
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“Anime personifications” of random things are unfortunately an established phenomenon in Asia, via (of course) Japan. They’re rarely sane and often pervy. Now Microsoft has come along to smear the anime personification scene with their own unique stink of creepy and slightly out of touch trying too hard uncle-ness. This goggle-eyed, barely legal character in the orthodox moe style– who apparently also needs to wear a compression garment on her arm to manage the excruciating pain of her RSI… nice touch, lucky nobody at Microsoft noticed– is Inori Aizawa (藍澤 祈) and she has a Facebook page where she talks as if she’s a real person:
Hey everyone! My name is Inori and you can think of me as a personification of Internet Explorer. When I was younger, I used to be a clumsy, slow and awkward girl. However, just like the story of ugly duckling, people told me that…
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Of course there’s no nation on Earth with a monopoly on baffling, pointless, annoying, off-putting and inept advertising. The advertising industry as a whole is one of the things that the planet would be better off without, the unscrupulous deceiving the unwary. In my experience, though, there’s no inexplicably bad advert like an inexplicably bad Asian advert. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s often because the product being advertised is a solution to a problem that nobody in their right mind thinks is a problem. That’s the case in the following advertisement, for the “Unchoken Lucky Dog” money box. Tortured puns are quite common in Japanese product naming. This one doubles up on kanji for “lucky saving dog” and “unko” (poo). Yes, basically the dog eats your coins and then craps them out into a hole. I’m not sure where we’re meant to understand the luck coming into play. Is…
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The standard story is that the carnivorous Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) plant’s name refers to the Roman goddess of love, without going into too much detail. Muscipula actually means mousetrap, not flytrap, but that’s not important right now (to quote Airplane! for no apparent reason).
Dionaea means “daughter of Dione”, i.e. Aphrodite, Venus’ Greek counterpart. This fixation on love goddesses gives some clue as to the real reason for the name; the filthy minds and sniggering schoolboy humour of 18th century naturalists. To them it was equally salient that it trapped and digested unsuspecting visitors (hence, flytrap) and that it had two touch sensitive, reddish lobes surrounded by hair… i.e. it reminded them of female genitalia. That link isn’t at all obscene, by the way, it just gives some more background information on the perpetrators of this Linnean lewdness.
I admit that I’m no gynaecologist, but I…
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See the first post about Japanese kamishibai (paper theatre) in the 1930s and the previous post about WWII kamishibai for more information and commentary about the origins and context of these images.
See the first post about Japanese kamishibai (paper theatre) for more information and commentary about the origins and context of these images.
Here we move into the 1940s, WWII and the dodgy, overly-positive world of propaganda. Propaganda is almost by definition absurd and deceptive; if it wasn’t so cognitively dissonant and detached from observed reality then we’d just call it informative or documentarian. But there’s still something particularly disturbing about the hijacking of a medium intended mainly for children. The slides shown here are from How to Build a Home Air Raid Shelter and from Kintaro the Paratrooper. The latter is a militaristic rewrite of the traditional story about Momotoro the Peach Boy, who joined up with animal friends to defend Japan from invading demons. You can see what they did there, obviously.
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An endorsement by His Holiness the Pope from Graphic, 1899, for Mariani Wine. Leo XIII was Pope from 1878 until 1903 and he had a ticket to ride on the white line highway. The product was pretty much just coca leaves steeped in ethanol, with about six or seven milligrams of cocaine content per fluid ounce. So when the advertisement says Mariani Wine “fortifies, strengthens, stimulates and refreshes” they’re probably right, albeit in a not strictly medicinal Studio 54 style. Other celebrity Mariani space cadets included H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen and Thomas Edison.
As funny as it seems now, until after the First World War substances such as cocaine, Heroin, laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) and Chlorodyne (laudanum, cannabis and chloroform) were widely available to all and sundry, children included. There were ads recommending Heroin as a cough medicine, and laudanum as a remedy for a baby’s teething…
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Newspaper clipping from 1903, reporting that the entire village of Saint-Etienne des Gres regarded the telephone as Satanic and refused to have anything to do with it. “… the inhabitants determined to oppose its entry and resolved to arm themselves with their agricultural implements and to make a fight for it.” Hollywood style villagers with pitchforks, for real!
And this is how angry they were before any of them could possibly have needed to phone an Indian call centre. Those really are the work of the Evil One.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden answering* some of the “unmerrrrkan, traytor!” accusations that have been flying around in the usual reckless, unsupported, contra-factual and rabble-rousing way in the US media:
“This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk “RED CHINA!” reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”
What a conspiracy revelation. The US military-industrial-entertainment complex knows phoenixes are real and there’s a massive Sino-American phoenix-petting race that they don’t want the public to know about.
But seriously, if you’ve been obtaining any of your knowledge about Snowden and the US government appointing itself Big Brother from some American Ken and…
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Alistair Gentry 