Huaka'i pō

Wiki:

In Hawaiian legend, Nightmarchers (huaka'i pō or "Spirit Ranks," 'oi'o) are the ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors. On the nights of Kane, Ku, Lono, Akua, or on the nights of Kaloa they are said to come forth from their burial sites to march out to past battles or to other sacred places. They march at sunset and just before the sun rises. Anyone living near their path may hear chanting and marching, and must go inside to avoid notice. They might appear during the day if coming to escort a dying relative to the spirit world. Anyone looking upon or seen by the marchers will die unless a relative is within the marcher's ranks- some people maintain that if you lie face down on the ground they will not see you. Others say that this only works if you are naked. However, if you have time to get out of the way it is best to do that. Still others say that you should be naked, lie face up and feign sleep. Placing leaves of the ti (Cordyline sp.) around one's home is said to keep away all evil spirits, and will cause the huaka'i pō to avoid the area. There is one story of a young boy being protected by a mysterious playmate. That mysterious playmate turned out to be the spirit of a dead man, whose bones were in the room of the child. The source of that story is found in Glen Grant's Chicken Skin Tales 49 Favorite Ghost Stories from Hawai`i. The book is written by Glen Grant. Copyright 1998 by Mutual Publishing.

A march greatly depends on who is in it. Say, in his life, a chief was fond of sound. The march would have much drumming an chanting. If the chief enjoyed the opposite, the march would have no noise except for the snapping of branches and other sounds that may accompany them. If a chief did not like to walk around much, he would be carried in a sling. In old Hawaii, laws declared parts of a chief to be sacred, and not seen. The punishment for looking at these parts was death. If a chief's face was not supposed to be seen, he would lead. If his back was not to be looked upon, he would be in the back. However, for some chiefs, there was no part of them that was forbidden to look at. This chief would march among the other warriors in the group. There are gods in some marches. The torches are a lot brighter than the torches in other marches. The biggest torches are carried at the front, back, and still three within the rest of the group. Five was a special number for Hawaiians. In the march of gods, there are six gods in a row, three male and the others female. A very important god is in the march, and she is called Hi`iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele. The marches are indeed very different

Captain Future ... Is Amazing!

We've raved about our pal David Guivant's film work before ("Tony Stark is Just 'Spam in a Can.' Here's a Real Iron Man Genius") but it looks like he's really going to outdo himself with his new project: Captain Future. Here's a quick taste:

One of Our Favorite Paintings: "Europe After the Rain" By Max Ernst

I'm So Sorry -

Jackie Gleason : "You're in the Picture"
Uploaded by werquin

Wiki:

You're in the Picture was an American television game show that aired on CBS for only one true episode on Friday, January 20, 1961.

Considered by many to be one of the largest flops in television history, the show was an attempt to mirror the success that Groucho Marx had enjoyed for many years with You Bet Your Life. Lending the comedic touch as host was TV star Jackie Gleason, joined by Johnny Olson as announcer and Dennis James doing live commercials for sponsor Kellogg's.

A four-member celebrity panel would stick their heads into a life-sized illustration of a famous scene or song lyric and then take turns asking yes/no questions to Gleason to try to figure out what scene they were a part of. If they were able to figure out the scene, 100 CARE Packages were donated in their name; if they were stumped, the packages were donated in Gleason's name.

The celebrity panel on the Premiere consisted of Pat Harrington, Jr., Pat Carroll, Jan Sterling, and Arthur Treacher. Johnny Carson stated that he was on the program in a 1980's Tonight Show interview with Gleason; surviving clips do not show him involved, however.

The first episode of You're in the Picture received negative reviews across the board.

The following Friday (January 27), instead of the game the entire second episode consisted of Gleason sitting in a chair on the now-bare stage and apologizing for the previous week's show. Saying that the show failed because of "the intangibles of show business", Gleason also noted that more than 300 years' worth of show business experience had been involved in the production.

He commented that the program "laid, without a doubt, the biggest bomb in history... This would make the H-Bomb look like a two-inch salute." Acknowledging the critics, he also stated that "you don't have to be Alexander Graham Bell to pick up a telephone and know it's dead."

He also told stories of his other flops (adding at one point "I wish I didn't know so much about these things"), and had one of the illustrations brought out to show what the format was for those "fortunate enough not to see last week's show". He also noted that nobody complimented on how the show itself was after it finished airing, instead mentioning how good the commercials were and that the show went off the air at the right time.

This comical half-hour apology got much better reviews than the game show, and Gleason finished out his series commitment by renaming the program The Jackie Gleason Show and turning it into a talk show.

Movies You Haven't Seen But Should: Silent Running

Wiki:

Silent Running is a 1972 ecologically-themed science fiction film directed by Douglas Trumbull which depicts a future in which all plant life on Earth has been made extinct, except for a few specimens preserved in space in greenhouse domes. When orders come from Earth to jettison and destroy the domes, the ship's botanist (Bruce Dern) opts instead to send the last dome into deep space to save the remaining plants and animals. In addition to Dern, the film starred Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin and Jesse Vint.

The three "drones" were played by four double-amputees, an idea inspired by Johnny Eck. The 20 pound (9 kg) "drone suits" were custom tailored for the different actors. The suits still exist, and are in Douglas Trumbull's personal collection.

Freeman Lowell: [after jettisoning the last dome with Dewey] You know when I was a kid, I put a note into a bottle and it had my name and address on it. And then I threw the bottle into the ocean. And I never knew if anybody ever found it [presses button on nuclear charge, destroying his ship]

Silent Running on the IMDB

You Just Lost The Game

Wiki:

The Game is an ongoing mind game, the objective of which is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which, according to the rules of The Game, must then be announced. While one can avoid losing The Game by not currently thinking about it, one can never actually "win" The Game.

As of 2008, The Game is played by millions worldwide.

There are three main rules to The Game:

1. Everyone in the world is playing The Game. (Sometimes narrowed to: "Everybody in the world who knows about The Game is playing The Game," or alternatively, "You are always playing The Game.")
2. Whenever one thinks about The Game, one loses.
3. Losses must be announced (a statement such as "I lost The Game" is often used).

Variations of The Game exist. For instance, some players allow a grace period after they have lost once, during which a player cannot lose The Game again or is not obliged to announce a loss. This can range from just a few seconds to half an hour. Some people claim that The Game ends when the British Prime Minister announces this on television. No established sanctions exist for players breaking the rules of The Game.

Some players have developed strategies for making other people lose, such as writing about The Game on hidden notes, as graffiti, and on banknotes. The Game has been described both as pointless and infuriating, and as a challenging game that is fun to play. Other strategies involve distracting oneself so as to forget, and also to learn "I lost" in another language.

The origins of The Game are uncertain. One theory is that when two men missed their last train and had to spend the whole night on a platform, they tried not to think about their situation and whoever did first, lost. Another is that it was invented in London in 1996 "to annoy people". The reported earliest reference on the Internet is from 2002. The Game is an example of ironic processing, also known as the White Bear Phenomenon, in which attempts to avoid certain thoughts make those thoughts more persistent. A classic example of ironic processing is Dostoevsky's quote: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

Take A Seat In That Tub Of Warm Yogurt And We’ll Be Right With You ...

Wiki:

The Bureau of Surrealist Research, also known as the Centrale Surréaliste, was a Paris-based office in which a loosely affiliated group of Surrealist writers and artists gathered to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews with the goal of investigating speech under trance. Located at 15 Rue de Grenelle, it opened in October of 1924 under the direction of Antonin Artaud, almost simultaneously with the publication of the first Surrealist Manifesto.

One of the more significant contributions of the Bureau was its implicit idea that Surrealism was not to be contained under the category of the aesthetic. An assumption of the Bureau was that Surrealism could be a mode of research, and could produce knowledge on a par with the knowledge produced by scientific researchers.

Hot Stuff

"It was as if an occult hand had…"

Wiki:

The Order of the Occult Hand is a whimsical secret society of journalists who have used the phrase "It was as if an occult hand had…" in print as a sort of inside joke. Since the introduction of the phrase in 1965, the "Order" has been widely exposed in the media. Paul Greenberg reports that as of 2006, the Order has chosen a new secret phrase and is back in operation.

The Doctor Will See You Now: Dr. Josiah Stinkney Carberry

Wiki:

Josiah Stinkney Carberry is a fictional professor, created as a joke. He is said to have taught at Brown University, and to be known for his work in "psychoceramics," the supposed study of "cracked pots."

The joke originated when John W. Spaeth posted a false notice for a Carberry lecture on a bulletin board at Brown in 1929. The lecture, on "Archaic Greek Architectural Revetments in Connection with Ionian Philology" was, of course, never given, and when asked, John Spaeth obligingly provided false details about the professor's (fictional) family and (non-existent) academic interests. The joke has been embraced since that time, at least at Brown, and Carberry has traditionally been scheduled to lecture every Friday the 13th and February 29th (he of course "misses" all of them), and a general mythology has grown around him and his family. Jars, many of them cracked pots, are placed in many of the administrative buildings as well as the libraries and students can donate change to Professor Carberry on these days. Students have taken great delight in inserting references to him in otherwise serious journals, as any such reference which fails to point out his non-existence seriously undercuts the reputation of those works. The prominent legal philosopher Joel Feinberg, whose teaching career began with a two-year stint at Brown, carried on a long and apparently furious feud with Carberry in the acknowledgement sections of his many books. Carberry was also known at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut from about 1930, when Spaeth moved from Brown University to join the Wesleyan faculty. Carberry's career there closely paralleled the Brown experience, which continued in Providence, raising the suspicion that Carberry had mastered the art of bilocation.

Each Friday the 13th is "Josiah Carberry Day" at Brown. Often lectures are scheduled where Carberry fails to show up, and cracked pots are put outside the libraries for donations to the Josiah S. Carberry Fund, which Carberry set up for the purchase of books "of which I might or might not approve". Books in the Brown library collections purchased by this fund have a special bookplate identifying them with the Latin phrase "Dulce et Decorum Est Desipere in Loco" (It is pleasant and proper to be foolish once in a while.)"

Those "in" on the joke, however, also enjoy the use of his name: a snack bar at Brown (Josiah's or Jo's for short) and the library's card catalog (Josiah) are named for him. Professor Carberry also writes letters to the Brown Daily Herald, Brown's student newspaper, that are published annually on April Fool's Day. A Brown-affiliated student housing cooperative (Carberry House) also shared his name from 1970 until its closure in 1998. Professor Carberry also appeared in an American Express commercial in the 1980s. Additionally, the documentation for logging into password-protected areas of the Brown University website often uses "jcarberr" as the example username.

On October 3, 1991, at the First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, Carberry was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for Interdisciplinary Research, making him one of only three fictional people to have won the award. He was commended as "bold explorer and eclectic seeker of knowledge, for his pioneering work in the field of psychoceramics, the study of cracked pots."