shrapnel

Fun painting by ATLbladerunner. See also Zombie Last Supper and Popeye vs. Anime.

I love Tessa Farmer’s nasty little faeries:

Tessa Farmer’s miniscule sculptures reinvigorate a belief in fairies: not the sweet Tinkerbell image in popular conscience, but a biological, entomological, macabre species translating pastoral fable into nightmarish lore. Constructed from bits of organic material, such as roots, leaves, and dead insects, each of Farmer’s figures stand barely 1 cm tall, their painstakingly intricate detail visible only through a magnifying glass.

Hovering with rarefied, jewel-like beauty, Farmer’s tiny spectacles resound with a theurgist exotica: their specimen forms borrow from Victorian occultism to evolve as something alien and futuristic. Playing out apocalyptic narratives of a microscopic underworld, Farmer’s manikin wonders rule with baneful fervour: harnessing mayflies, battling honey bees, attacking spindly spiders. Presented as wee preternatural discoveries, Farmer’s sculptures conjure a superstitious premise, dismantling the mythos of fantasia with evidence of something much more gothic, sinister, and bewitching.

More here.

I’d love to see the movie.

Kink.com breaks down what they pay per sex act (NSFW). Via Metafilter.

The ramen spa.

My Space for spies.

Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America’s intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space”, an internal communications tool modelled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

(Via BoingBoing.)

The Times reports on the home renovations of the uber-rich in London:

Want to keep fit? Why not install an underground squash court – there are several under the streets of west London – or put in a climbing wall? How about a tennis court? One multimillionaire is believed to be considering building one. Fancy a swim? The latest must-have feature is an adjustable-height swimming pool. At the flick of a button – because everything is remote-controlled – the bottom can be raised or lowered by a giant hydraulic jack, forming a deep swimming pool for the heavyweight millionaire or a toddler-friendly paddling pool for his offspring. Optional extras include a retractable glass roof or a discreet cover that will slide over the pool, creating a ballroom or banqueting hall. It doesn’t have to be modern or minimal – one house in Mayfair has a Roman-style pool, complete with wonky columns.

You have to blow Danny DeVito — it’s in the contract (NSFW).

No, really, I’m stuffed.

Anthony Bourdain suffered quietly as he dined on wart hog — encrusted with sand, fur and fecal bacteria — in the African country of Namibia.

Bourdain, host of the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations,” finished the meal knowing he would become terribly ill. But who was he to complain as a VIP guest of the same arid landscape where Angelina Jolie delivered Brad Pitt’s baby?

Spitting out nasty bits of wart hog would be rude to the locals he was dining with.

Ballistic bookbags are popular sellers. Adam Johnson’s “Trauma Plate” has come to life:

I only rented one vest yesterday, and doubtful I’ll rent another today, await its safe return. There aren’t many customers like Mrs. Espers anymore. She’s a widow and only rents vests to attend a support group that meets near the airport. The airpark’s only a medium on threat potential, but I always send her out armed with my best: thirty-six-layer Kevlar, German made, with lace side panels and a removable titanium trauma plate that slides into a Velcro pocket over the heart the size of a love letter. The Kevlar will field a .45 hit, but it’s the trauma plate that will knock down a twelve-gauge slug and leave it sizzling in your pant cuff. I wear a lighter, two-panel model, while Jane goes for the Cadillac — a fourteen-hundred-dollar field vest with over-shoulders and a combat collar. It’s like a daylong bear hug, she says. It feels that safe. She hasn’t worn a bra in three years.

Can you tell the difference?

Most olive-oil frauds are easy to detect using chemical tests. In February, 2005, the N.A.S. Carabinieri broke up a criminal ring operating in several regions of Italy, and confiscated a hundred thousand litres of fake olive oil, with a street value of six million euros (about eight million dollars). The ring, which allegedly sold its products in northern Italy and in Germany, is accused of coloring low-grade soy oil and canola oil with industrial chlorophyll, flavoring it with beta-carotene, and packaging it as extra-virgin olive oil in tins and bottles emblazoned with pictures of Italian flags or Mt. Vesuvius, and with folksy names of imaginary producers—the Farmhouse, the Ancient Millstones.

  

Now you can rock your kids to sleep with Metallica, Radiohead and many more — including Tool! They’ll thank you when they’re older.

Pixellated stained glass by Gerhard Richter.

Woman marries sex doll made to look like her.

AMBER HAWK SWANSON met Amber Doll on January 25 and the two were married the next day in matching rented gowns at the Aladdin Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Swanson noted a few gawkers as she wheeled her bride through the casino and into the chapel, “but people who are in Vegas are already ready to sort of have something wild come at them,” she says. “I only got one real look of disgust.” Swanson, a video and performance artist, had ordered her bride online: Amber Doll, a lifelike sex doll, was specially made to look just like her.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Even better than the real thing. (Via BoingBoing.)

The Homicide Map, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times (click on the names for details).

Young stormtroopers in love.

And Office Snapshots has the photos to prove it. (Shown here: Pixar “cubicles.”)

It’s all about the marketplace.

The book. The blog. The excerpt.

Many media-savvy organizations take advantage of the fact that poop makes news. Organizers of the World Toilet Summit know that “The World Public Sanitary Health Summit” wouldn’t get nearly as much press; they must feel the publicity the name generates is worth the tone by which it’s delivered. The First Church of God in Pendleton, Oregon, lit up the AP Wire in January 2006 with the news that it was raising money for a mission to Costa Rica by selling Angel Soft toilet paper. And in September 2005, two Norwegian politicians used poop to get their names and pictures all over the world. Norway’s Oppdal party member Joakim Lund bet his colleague HÃ¥vard Holden that he would “shower in shit” if Holden’s Center Party won more than six percent of a particular vote. When the Center Party did indeed achieve that milestone, Lund honored his end of the bargain by standing under a manure pump on a Norwegian farm wearing only snorkeling gear and a swimsuit — a disgusting fate, but earning worldwide media attention.

Geek is the new barbed wire. (Link via Metafilter.)

Every day, millionaires trudge off to work in “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” hoping to one day have enough money to be financially secure.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — By almost any definition — except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley — Hal Steger has made it.

Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.

Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.

I’ve given up on watching television, largely because I’ve already bought everything in the infomercials, but also because of the quality of the short films being released online. Giant Nazi robot attacks Pearl Harbour! Some futuristic big-game hunters chase a robot dragon! Two aristocrats duel over a woman — in giant robots! Hell, these are better than most movies these days.

“Night photography of the abandoned west.”

The New Yorker traces the origins of spam and looks at the “losing war on junk e-mail”:

Spam’s growth has been metastatic, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of all mail. In 2001, spam accounted for about five per cent of the traffic on the Internet; by 2004, that figure had risen to more than seventy per cent. This year, in some regions, it has edged above ninety per cent—more than a hundred billion unsolicited messages clogging the arterial passages of the world’s computer networks every day. The flow of spam is often seasonal. It slows in the spring, and then, in the month that technology specialists call “black September”—when hundreds of thousands of students return to college, many armed with new computers and access to fast Internet connections—the levels rise sharply.

When you grow tired of ink tattoos and body piercings, you can always move on to scarification — cutting designs into your body. (Don’t click the link if you’re squeamish.)