And I Am Not Lying, For Real: Happy Friday: The Hell Fruit

Friday, March 23, 2007

Happy Friday: The Hell Fruit

The Hell Fruit
Originally uploaded by Gems from the Collection.

Life is good, but hadn't a damn thing worth writing about happened in a little while. Here's a batch of links to tide you over and make that workday whistle right by ...

When people talk about art as a religious experience, they invariably invoke Michelangelo, Da Vinci, or Greek statuary, as though God stopped speaking to people hundreds of years ago and this art are well-read love letters from a long-dead romance. Fuck that. When I look at great sci-fi art I feel the earth slip away and get chills that radiate from the back of my skull all the way down my arms.

See if you can look at this incredible gallery from British pulp-mag artist Ron Turner without calling a tattoo shop.

Robotics engineers have invented a robot that can not only perceive rhythm but dance to it. From an article in the New Scientist:

Psychologists have shown that people are more engaging when they synchronise their movement to their voice or to the voice or movement of another person. Michalowski argues that robots will need a sense of rhythm if people are to accept them. "In the future you are going to be talking to some robot and just the ability of the robot to nod to what you are saying will make it easier to interact," he says.

Check out this video of that cute little fluffy robot, dancing to Spoon. If marshmallow peeps could dance like that, they might appeal to our hearts and escape our gnashing jaws each springtime, surviving to populate the entire planet.

Way out, deep in outer space, cosmic bullets are piercing a giant cloud of space gas. There's a cheap joke in there somwhere, but I can't quite find it ... Anyway, from Space.com:

Each bullet [image] is about ten times the size of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun and travels through the clouds at up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second—or about a thousand times faster than the speed of sound ... As the bullets plow through the clouds, they leave behind tubular orange wakes, each about a fifth of a light-year long.

The photo is like, the best Trapper Keeper cover ever.

True dat: 16 things it takes most of us 50 years to learn

According to a number of sources, the I (Heart) Huckabees set was an utter emotional trainwreck. Director David O. Russell is widely reported to be brilliant, demanding and exasperating in equal amounts, and he and Lily Tomlin tangled like hell on the set. Defamer and WFMU's Beware of the Blog have more detailed posts on the matter, both well worth reading. Even if you don't read the posts, plug the headphones in and watch one of the best spontaneous displays of truly rotten behavior that I have ever seen: