Here's a good one, to file away as a rediculous thing that you saw happening "back when"...

A rash of SUV owners burning their vehicals to avoid loan payments!

As promised. Let me know if this doesn't work, and what browser/OS you're using. It looks great in Camino and Safari.

Mad props to whoever gets this one first.

So deets came out on the Play Station 3 today. Apparently, it will be a device that gets plugged into your television and allows interactive adventures with animated friends. I'm excited for the both of us. Anyway, a lot of people are unhappy about the price tag and a few missing features. Here's a clip from the comments board at Engadget. I'm sure you'll all agree that #4, "jdb," has won the day.

Check it out, actual, real, no shit pirates. Caught off the coast of Somalia this weekend.

I'm of the belief that they chopped off the superstructure so as to give the ship a smaller profile. And that they did it with hacksaws, diabolically, in a ravenous fit. Don't ruin my fantasy. Also, they're Reavers.

Ok, y'all absolutely have to check this out. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Don't let the URL scare you off:

METAL!

So last week's post about Russian Futurists got Eli thinking about Russian Super-heros. Basically, the line of thought was that since so much Russian art has been about transforming humans into something more than human, who are capable of freeing themselves of the constraints of the past, they must have some pretty rad super hero types.

Unfortunately, the data gathered to test that hypothesis doesn't look good. Using this as the only source of information, it seems like super-heros, and comics in general for that matter, had a hard time developing in Russia. Reasons include:

Getting the business end of two world wars meant there wasn't enough paper.
The concept of comics and graphic novels was deemed to be anti-Soviet.
Nobody wants to read comics when you could be reading Das Kapital for the 70th time, paid for by the People.

The page (which you really should look at if only for the Pulitzer Prize-winning wallpaper) concludes with "All the efforts to establish comic culture in Russia are in vain...". It should be noted that this was written by one of the largest comic distributers in Moscow. Back to wrestling bears in abandoned steel mills for that guy, I guess.

On a brighter note, here's a couple pictures that Eli found while researching this:

I was pretty sure this is just Captain America with different, more Russian, colors. But then I looked at his eyes (see enlargement), and I knew from that look of despair that our man had to be pure Rusky. He dreams of freedom from his mob debts.


And here's a cartoon train that came up on Google Image Search:

So on Friday, mere hours after the Russian Futurists post went up, Eli was gabbing along in the comments about looking up some stuff on Russian super-heros (if you haven't read the comments on that post, you should. Having that kind of stuff on here makes me proud.). Anyway, I've known Eli for a long time, and, well, let's just say I've missed a lot of important games of pinball while waiting for him to find his way down to the library lobby 45 minutes late.

Well, on Sunday night, Eli actually sent me stuff about Russian super-heros. Has Eli turned a new leaf? Is being on track to having a gar-rabbin' master's changing the old boy? Should I loan him $500 as a test? In any case, he wins the prize for the week. Sorry, I know that's not really a fair way to give out prizes, but, well...shit.

Man so I've been listening to this Canadian guy who records under the name Russian Futurists, and I got thinking about Russian Futurism.
I mean really, these guys were great. They had essentially decided that the world was changing so fast and getting so crazy that the only thing to do was to embrace it within their art, and in doing so they could help speed up the rolling ball. Like, Monet and Seurat on one side of the table saying "we got to fight it!" and the futurists on the other side going "no way, let's just get way into it". It's an interesting response.

And I guess they really did think that a new era of human consciousness was on the rise, which would be a pretty intense thing to be convinced of. But then again, don't most people think that at most points in the last 200 years? But I guess we've gotten pretty jaded to the whole futurism thing. Our best art about the future is stuff like The Diamond Age and Firefly, which are about the fact that people never really change, just the stuff we build around us, la de da. If only Frida hadn't let them kill Trotsky, that guy was serious about changing humanity:
“More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonised, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”