H. P. Lovecraft died 75 years ago today. His stories are strange, cold and full of cosmic hopelessness. Sci-fi and horror fiction owes him a huge debt. Many of his tales have been adapted for the big screen and often with great effect but, to my mind, none of them have ever quite bottled the peculiar eldritch lightning that is Lovecraft. I hope that Del Toro might get his version of At The Mountains of Madness off the ground one day but in the mean time, keep an ear out for the radio adaptation read by Richard Coyle, my personal favourite Lovecraft adaptation......

JUST IN TIME FOR THE LONDON OLYMPICS

The World Pizza Games Freestyle Pizza Dough Acrobatics Competition

Bronze medal winner Simone Ingrosso

Louis Cuyno

what the hell is up in florida? Shoot and kill a unarmed 17 yr old and then go home and sleep in your own bed?

Million Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin under way in NYC

A large crowd of protesters, between 2,000 and 5,000 by various estimates, are marching through the streets of New York right now to draw attention to the killing of Trayvon Martin. The Florida teen was shot to death last month, in a case that has generated widespread outrage online.
Tim Pool has been running a live video stream of the march.
Here's a quick link to the relevant Twitter hashtag (#millionhoodiemarch), to follow tweets from people who are there. Seems like a lot of youth are present at this one, perhaps more so than at recent Occupy marches in New York. People are wearing hoodies, carrying bottles of iced tea and throwing Skittles in the air: Trayvon was wearing one, and holding that candy and beverage when he was shot. So far, police presence is high, but interactions are peaceful, and the crowd is doing its thing without much NYPD aggression. That could change before the night is through.
The parents of the slain teen are present, and addressed the crowd earlier

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

Grilled Cheese Doughnut

 

At the Tom + Chee “grilled cheese and tomato soup” cafes in Cincinatti, Ohio, grilled cheese doughnut sandwiches are on the

dig it....

"I'm proud of you," deaf man signs to Obama in ASL. "Thank you," president signs back.

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someone please explain to me how this "church" continues to excist and have influence?

Dutch Roman Catholic Church Castrated Boys As 'Treatment' For Homosexuality

The Huffington Post  |  By Laura Hibbard Posted: 03/19/2012 8:06 pm Updated: 03/20/2012 12:45 pm

Henk Heithuis

Shocking reports have surfaced that reveal at least ten teenage boys were castrated in the 1950s by the Dutch Roman Catholic Church as a "treatment" for homosexuality, the Telegraph reports.

Dutch journalist Joep Dohmen, reporting for the NRC Handelsblad uncovered ten cases of the castrations, one of which was suffered by Henk Heithuis, who was castrated as a minor for reporting to police sexual abuse by a priest that he endured while in the boarding home.

Although the priests were convicted of the abuses, Heithuis was still transported to a Catholic hospital, and underwent a surgical castration as a treatment for homosexuality and, according to the report, a punishment for tattling on the clergy.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports that the new information wasn't included in the large Deetman Commission report published three months ago on sexual abuses in the church -- and furthermore -- that the commission received a complaint about the castrations last year, but claimed there was a "lack of sufficient leads" to warrant an investigation.

The reports also uncovered minutes of official meetings held in the 1950s, which revealed directors of the Catholic institutions deciding parents did not need to be involved in decisions -- even with minors, Dutch News reports. They also proved government officials were present in meetings where the castrations were discussed.

The Deetman Commission, led by Wim Deetman, was founded by the Catholic church in 2010 following widespread reports of sexual abuse in the church. In their report, the commission found the number of victims who grew up in church institutions to be between 10,000 and 20,000.

Photos of Henk Heithuis, curtesy of the Family Rogge, originally posted in a Omroep Brabant report.

PHOTO:

Henk Heithuis, second from left.

luv it.....

Russian Pizza Plate Roulette

The Plate Roulette is a porcelain plate designed to look like a side-cut barrel of a revolver with one cylinder “loaded” to determine who is buying the pizza (or whatever food placed on it) à la Russian roulette style

The best f**kin, goddamn book ever written!!!!! (me twentyfive years ago, but still a great book)

Required summer reading: Neuromancer turns 25

Most of us have probably read Neuromancer, the canonical work by William Gibson, the loose basis for the Matrix movies, and, arguable, the first major book of the cyberpunk genre. Can you tell I’m a fan?

I bring this up because this is the book’s 25th anniversary. MacWorld took a fun look at what Gibson correctly predicted, what’s still a long ways off, and what matters from a techie point of view in the book. Most importantly, as the article points out,

The prognostication in Neuromancer that rings most true today is the novel’s idea of a World Wide Web. The concept of an Internet already existed when Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984: In the early eighties, several universities had strung together various systems of servers via a telecom link. What Gibson introduced was the idea of a global network of millions of computers, which he described in astonishing detail–though the World Wide Web, as we know it today, was still more than a decade away. Imagine the novelty of that idea in 1984 when the personal computer was still a fairly new idea. Of course, things start getting really interesting only in the nineties, when technology linked all of those computers together.

My suggestion? If you haven’t read it (and the remainder of the so-called “Sprawl Trilogy”, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), then read them. Otherwise, this is one heck of a summer reading project for high schoolers. The themes, the predictive value, and the relevance in what has largely become a hyper-connected society are hard to deny.
Happy Summer Reading

oh boy.......

It will star Charlize Theron and Noomi Rapace and while the director has remained mostly quiet regarding its plot and connection to the aforementioned classic, he did premiere the full length Prometheus trailer at WonderCon yesterday.
The movie - which also features Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba and Guy Pearce - follows a team of explorers as they jet off on a journey to the deepest ends of space, investigating a clue about the origins of mankind. Watch the extended preview now:

Prometheus Movie Trailer

kick-ass summer sci-fi film.

But Prometheus will hit theaters during a very crowded summer

great.......

Abortion Bill: Arizona GOP Legislator Says Women Should Witness Abortions

Rep. Terri Proud

A Republican state legislator in Arizona reportedly wrote an email to a constituent saying that women should witness an abortion before having an abortion.

The email published on a political blog on the Arizona Republic's website Tuesday is apparently from State Rep. Terri Proud (R-Tucson) and appears to have been sent from a state email, the paper said.

The email was in response to a constituent who said she emailed Proud and fellow lawmakers to let them know she opposed the bill pending in the Legislature that would ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. The site reports that the email is unedited.

"Personally I'd like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a "surgical procedure". If it's not a life it shouldn't matter, if it doesn't harm a woman then she shouldn't care, and don't we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else. Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain - I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living - I will be voting YES."

Terminator, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters Collide in Animated Short Film

One Tiny Hand Added to Images of Famous People

One Tiny Hand is a Tumblr site created by Zach Vitale who photo-manipulates one tiny hand onto images of famous people.

ONE TINY STEP FOR HANDS, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.

holy crap....

Romney and the Right-Wing Shakedown

Santorum for AG? Newt at the UN? John Bolton for State? The far right has presented mealy-mouthed Mitt with a stunningly long list of demands.

The Washington Post ran a story over the weekend describing the Romney campaign’s efforts to advance the notion of Mitt’s inevitability and get the forces of the right on board the train. It contained a tantalizing and thought-provoking little paragraph that raised the question of what kinds of demands those on the hard right are going to make of Romney, should he become the nominee. There is also the related question of how far he might go to assuage them. Such is their mistrust, and such (so far) is his pliability, that it’s worth pondering the potentially unprecedented dance of demand and acquiescence that we might witness this fall.

Mitt Romney campaigning in Ill. this week, Steven Senne / AP Photos

The paragraph in question describes a recent conversation that Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, a big cheese in the evangelical universe, says he had with Romney advisers. The money quote: “Land said he recently told [Romney advisers] that Romney could win over recalcitrant conservatives by picking Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) as his vice-presidential running mate and previewing a few Cabinet selections: Santorum as attorney general, Gingrich as ambassador to the United Nations, and John Bolton as secretary of state

sieg heine....

Hitler toilet-paper wants you to add the mustache

DrawTheShitler sells rolls of toilet roll printed with a caricature of a mustache-less Hitler. You supply the mustache when you wipe.

matrix precurser

word that.....

very cool....

Eerie Shadow Projection Trash Sculptures

Dueling Banjos on Tesla coils

What better use for a pair of musical Tesla coils than FONentertainment's rousing 2010 chorous of "Dueling Banjos?"

Officer Vader suit for your riot-control needs

 

If you're feeling alone and vulnerable in a big, troubled world, Amazon has this "Damascus FX1 FlexForce Modular Hard Shell Full Body Crowd Control System," which will provide you with the physical protection and the emotional distance necessary to beat, gas, and detain your fellow human beings. All for a mere $545.95!