Thre's Big And Then There's Globus Cassus

Wiki:

Globus Cassus is an art project and book by Swiss architect and artist Christian Waldvogel presenting a conceptual transformation of Planet Earth into a much bigger, hollow, artificial world with an ecosphere on its inner surface. It was the Swiss contribution to the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale and was awarded the Gold Medal for the "best designed books from all over the World" at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2005. It consists of a meticulous description of the transformation process, a narrative of its construction, and suggestions on the organizational workings on Globus Cassus.

Being the Earth/World's antipode in many aspects, Globus Cassus acts as a philosophical model for the opposite-based description of the Earth/World and as a tool to understand the World's real functioning processes.

Waldvogel describes it as an "open source" art project and states that anyone can contribute designs and narratives to it on the project wiki.

The proposed megastructure would incorporate all of Earth's matter. Sunlight would enter through two large windows, and gravity would be provided by centrifugal force. Humans would live on two vast regions that face each other and that are connected through the empty center. The hydrosphere and atmosphere would be retained on its inside. The ecosphere would be restricted to the equatorial zones, while at the low-gravity tropic zones a thin atmosphere would allow only for plantations. The polar regions would have neither gravity nor atmosphere and would therefore be used for storage of raw materials and microgravity production processes.

Dark Roasted Weirdsville

Here we go again: another article for the always-great Dark Roasted Blend. This time it's on really skinny buildings. Enjoy!


In Robert A. Heinlein's short story “—And He Built a Crooked House—” rogue architect Quintus Teal builds a cross-shaped house that, because of a classic Los Angeles earthquake collapses not into 3 dimensional rubble but instead into a four-dimensional tesseract.

While we've yet to see any buildings with extra-rooms that cross space and time there are plenty of other houses out there that certainly look like they do.

The designers and builders have had a myriad of reasons for their creations' remarkable lack of the dimension we call width -- not a lot of room, not a lot of money, not a lot of sanity -- but the one thing all these crazy houses have in common (beyond a lack of closet space) is their eye-catching just-plain-weirdness.

Tokyo, particularly, has a long tradition of squeezing as much as possible into as little space as available. A lot only a few dozen feet wide but fifty or so long left to go fallow? Not in Japan.

Just take a look at these exceptionally lovely, and surrealistically, narrow buildings. Some of them, sure, look like they were shoehorned into whatever empty space was available -- but others look less like seizing every opportunity, and inch of land, and more like jewels of design and elegance ... if a bit too thin.

One of my favorites - and what I hear is the world's narrowest -- is Helenita Queiroz Grave Minho's place. If you ever happen to find yourself in Brazil you should definitely walk by and check it out. But be careful, at only six feet wide you just might miss it. What's remarkable about her creation isn't just the bizarre dimensions but how she's worked real magic into making it an actual, functional, and quite elegant home -- truly the sign of a great architect if ever there was one.


Across the globe, in London, there's another slip of a real estate: at about nine feet wide in front it's almost a mansion compared with Helenita Queiroz Grave Minho house in Brazil. But the place at 75 1/2 Bedford Street isn't nine feet everywhere: at it's triangular narrowest it goes down to an impossible two feet -- which is just about enough room for a pair of boots ... well, okay, one boot.

If we're globe-trotting we have to swing by the city of Long Beach in California. Sure, the place at 708 Gladys Avenue might be more than two feet, or two meters, but it's still a remarkably skinny house. In fact it's acknowledged by the Guinness World Record folks as the thinnest house in the United States at a little less than ten feet wide.

Not that Europe has somehow escaped the race to slim-down their real estate. If you travel to the wonderful city of Amsterdam, for instance, you'll see almost a plethora of narrow apartments and houses. The why being like that in Tokyo: without a lot of usage land the canal-hugging Amsterdam residents had to cram as many people into what little space they had ... even if they have to step outside to change their minds.

Across the channel and up into the cold gray loveliness of Great Cumbrae, Scotland is what is considered to be the thinnest house in Great Britain with an face just shy of 47 inches. 'Cozy' and 'intimate' would best describe the place -- and 'claustrophobic' and 'confining' being the worst.

As the world's population grows and land becomes more and more scarce, though, perhaps it's time to look at these wonders of design and architecture, of clever construction and imaginative creation not as 'oh, look at the freaky narrow houses' but instead as blueprints for the future of the world.

After all, either intimately thin or ridiculously enormous, having a place to call your own is a very special thing when many have nothing but the dirt between their toes and the storm clouds up above.

What On Earth!

A Small Post About Being Brobdingnagian

Wiki:

Brobdingnag is a fictional land in Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels occupied by giants. Lemuel Gulliver visits the land after the ship on which he is travelling is blown off course and he is separated from a party exploring the unknown land. More plot details can be found under A Voyage to Brobdingnag. The adjective Brobdingnagian has come to describe anything of colossal size.

The map printed as part of Part II of Gulliver's Travels appears to indicate that Brobdingnag is located on the northwest coast of California. In the book Gulliver describes how the ship reached a latitude of five degrees south latitude, northward of Madagascar before it is blown by strong winds "a little to the east of the Molucca Islands, and about three degrees northwards of the line [equator]". From there the ship is driven by a storm "about five hundred leagues to the east". This would place the ship in Micronesia. Lemuel Gulliver claims to have discovered the land in 1703.

Brobdingnag is claimed to be a continent-sized peninsula six thousand miles long and three thousand miles wide, which based on the latitude and longitude given by Gulliver just before he shipwrecks there, would suggests it covers all of Alaska, the Yukon, the Bering Sea, and a small section of eastern Siberia. Further, it is claimed that a range of volcanoes up to 30 miles (48 km) high separates the country from unknown land to the northeast, and the people have never been able to develop ocean-going ships. Lorbrulgrud is claimed to be the capital with the king having a seaside palace at Flanflasnic.

Swift was highly skeptical about the reliability of travel writings and the unlikely geographic descriptions parody many unreliable travel books published at the time which Percy Adams describes as "travel lies" . The drawings in Gulliver's travels are clearly based on cartographer Herman Moll's New Correct Map of the Whole World.

Though some historians site Northern California as the likely setting for Brobdingnag the Western coastline of the contiguous United States is geographically smooth and it isn’t until one arrives at the Southwest corner of Canada that any geographical features matching Herman Moll’s New Correct Map of the Whole World are found. Using Herman Moll’s map as a guide, Vancouver Island seems a more likely location for Brobdingnag with the large river delta to the south likely the effluence of the Columbia River in Northern Oregon. Vancouver Island’s trees rival the size of California’s and British Columbia is the legendary home of giants such as the Sasquatch and Dzunukwa.

The people of Brobdingnag are described as giants who are as tall as a church steeple and whose stride is ten yards. All of the other animals and plants, and even natural features such as rivers and even hail, are in proportion. The rats are the size of large dogs and the flies are the size of birds, for example. This also means that the country is far more dangerous for people of our size, as evidenced by Gulliver using his sword far more often here—namely, on attacking vermin—than in any other of the strange countries he visited; fortunately for Gulliver, the people are civilized. A splacknuck is an animal about 6 feet (1.8 m) long, to which Gulliver is compared in size, although it is never explained which animal it corresponds to (probably a rodent of some sort). Fossil records are claimed to show that the ancestors of the Brobdingnagians were once even larger. The King of Brobdingnag argues that the race has deteriorated.

Gulliver relates that, in the past, there were battles between the monarchy, nobility and people resulting in a number of civil wars ending in a treaty. The monarchy is based on reason. The King of Brobdingnag finds European institutions and behaviour wanting in comparison with his country's. Based on Gulliver's descriptions of their behaviour, the King describes Europeans as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." Swift intended the moral relationship between Europeans and Brobdingnagians to be as disproportionate as the physical relationship. The King of Brobdingnag is considered to be based on Sir William Steele, a statesman and writer, whom Swift worked for early in his career.

The army of Brobdingnag is claimed to be large with 207,000 troops including 32,000 cavalry although the society has no known enemies. The local nobility commands the forces; firearms and gunpowder are unknown to them. The King castigates Gulliver when he tries to interest the statesman in the use of gunpowder.

The laws of Brobdingnag are simple and easy to follow. There is little civil litigation. Murderers are beheaded.

Brobdingnagian culture consists of history, poetry, mathematics and ethics; mathematics being a particular strength. Printing has been long known but libraries are relatively small. The king has the largest library, which contains a thousand volumes. The Brobdingnagians favour a clear literary style.

Movies You Haven't Seen But Should: The Last Wave

Wiki:

The Last Wave is a 1977 Australian film directed by Peter Weir about a white Australian lawyer whose seemingly normal life is turned upside-down when he takes on a murder case and discovers that he shares a strange and unexplained mystical connection to the small group of local Australian aboriginals accused of the crime.

[The Last Wave on the IMDB]

"I Would Like Another Peanut"

Wiki:

Batyr (1969-1993) was an Asian Elephant claimed to be able to use a large amount of meaningful human speech. Living in a zoo in Kazakhstan, Batyr was widely published as having a vocabulary of more than 20 phrases. A recording of Batyr saying "Batyr is good","Batyr is hungry" and using words such as "drink" and "give" was played on Kazakh state radio in 1980.

Like all cases of talking animals, claims are subject to the observer-expectancy effect - may be a meaningless form of mimicry, and are subject to fabrication for many reasons.

Born on July 23, 1969, he lived his entire life in the Karaganda Zoo in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. He died in 1993 having never seen or heard another elephant. Batyr was the offspring of once-wild Indian Elephants (a subspecies of the Asian Elephant). Batyr's mother "Palm" and father "Dubas" had been presented to Kazakhstan's Almaty Zoo by Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Batyr, whose name is a Turkic word meaning The Dashing Equestrian, The Man of Courage or The Athlete, was first alleged to speak just before New Year's Day in the winter of 1977. Zoo employees were the first to notice his "speech", but he soon delighted zoo-goers at large by appearing to ask his attendants for water and regularly praising (or, infrequently chastising) himself. By 1979, his fame as the "Speaking Elephant" had spread in the wake of various mass-media stories about his abilities. (Many of these contained considerable fabrication and wild conjecture.) Batyr's case was also included in several books on animal behaviour, and in the proceedings of several scientific conferences. These developments drew a spate of zoo visitors, and brought the offer of an exchange—Batyr for a rare Bonobo—from the Czechoslovak Circus; the offer was rejected by the zoo's employees.

A. N. Pogrebnoj-Aleksandroff, the doctor of sciences who studied Batyr's abilities and wrote many publications about him, said of the elephant:

«Batyr, on the level of natural blares, said the words (including a human slang) by manipulating a trunk. Having put the trunk in a mouth, pressing a tip of the trunk by the bottom of jaw and manipulating of tongue, said words. Besides, being in a corner of the cage (quite often at the nights) with the hanging down and weakened his trunk the elephant said words very silently — that sound is comparable with a sound of ultrasonic devices against mosquitoes or as peep of the mosquitoes, which human hearing well hears to approximately 40-year-old age. During pronouncing of words, only the tip of the trunk of the elephant has been clamped inside and Batyr made insignificant movements by a finger-shaped shoot on the trunk tip».

Various audiovisual recordings were made during Pogrebnoj-Aleksandroff's studies of Batyr;some of these have been transferred to Russia's Moscow State University for further study.

Batyr died in 1993 when zookeepers accidentally gave him an overdose of soporific drugs.

Jesus: Our Edible Messiah

Just had to share this bit (or would that be ‘bite’?) of sacrilegiously delicious weirdness my brother, s.a., and I stumbled across in a Long’s Drugs in Hayward, CA.

Do they have a raspberry filled one as well?

Musical Interlude: "Party At Ground Zero" By Fishbone

One of Our Favorite Heroes: Trashman

Wiki:

Trashman is a fictional character, a superhero created and drawn by Spain (a.k.a. Manuel Rodriguez) who appeared regularly in underground comix and magazines from 1968 through 1985. Trashman's first appearance was as a full page serial comic strip in the New York City underground newspaper the East Village Other. After moving from New York City to San Francisco in 1970, Spain teamed up with fellow underground comix artists R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton and others as contributers to Zap Comix, published by Last Gasp Publishing. Three full length Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International stories were published under the Subvert Comics title by "Saving Grace, a Division of Keith Green Industrial Reality", a Rip Off Press spin-off, from 1970 to 1976.

Since 1976, Trashman has appeared in such publications as High Times, Heavy Metal, Weirdo, San Francisco and the Fantagraphics anthology Zero Zero #2.

Trashman is a hero of the working classes and champion of the radical left causes. The Trashman stories are set in a dystopian near-future America, which has become a fascist police state.

Mild mannered Harry Barnes was chosen by the mysterious and elusive "Sixth International", an underground anarcho-marxist organization, and was trained as a master of the "para-sciences". He is typically cast as the defender of the working-class masses against the tyranny of fascist police/military forces, agents of governmental oppression, and the plots of the rich and powerful to oppress the common people.

He is depicted as a strong, rugged, black-clad militant figure, with dark hair and beard and eyes always in shadow, who wields conventional military weapons such as machine guns, pistols, daggers and explosives in addition to his super powers.

"Harry Barnes, known to the world as Trashman, trained by the elusive Sixth International as a master of the para-sciences, is able to change his molecular structure or decipher a crack in the sidewalk." (quote from Trashman's first comic strip in the East Village Other.)

Trashman's powers include superhuman strength, stamina, speed, agility, reflexes, equilibrium and durability. He is not invulnerable to harm, but his powers usually enable him to avoid being wounded or killed by conventional weapons. He also has the ability to "shape-shift", or alter his shape and molecular structure to any desired form, including non-organic ones. (For example, he once shifted himself into the shape of a copy of the East Village Other.) He retains his mental abilities even while shifted, and can change back to human form at will. Trashman also has a power called "Random Alert Factor", a kind of synchronicity-based precognition, which allows him to intuitively derive information about the world around him by making seemingly unrelated observations of reality. For example, on the inside back cover artwork of Subvert Comics #1, Trashman "hears" a crack in the sidewalk "speak" to him, warning him of an attack from behind.

The Trashman series is one of the very few super hero stories depicted in the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly as a recurring character. Trashman's post-apocalyptic setting and Marxist-anarchist overtones expressed Spain's own social and political beliefs, as well as the sensibilities of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the underground counter-culture of the era. Like many underground comix, the Trashman stories are replete with graphic depictions of violence, sex and profanity, which were all but unknown in super hero comics of the past.

There are also many times that the characters break the "fourth wall" boundary between the fiction and the reader, typical of post-modern art. In one exchange with another character, Trashman "admits" he is a comic book character: "You heard Dr. Kranker. It was all figured out thru numantics. It's just odds and fixed points and all that stuff." "Fuck you! Do you expect me to believe that shit?" "Shhh! Don't blow it man. There's all those readers out there watching."

The style and setting of the Trashman comics are similar to many of the post-apocalyptic graphic novels and films that followed it years later, such as the Blade Runner and Road Warrior films, the Dark Night series of Batman graphic novels, and the V For Vendetta graphic novel and film. In an interview with John Ascher, Spain claims no direct influence on these later works, but concedes, "These ideas are out there. The artist pursues a cultural thread, and there are other people pursuing that cultural thread as well, so you exchange these ideas, they’re thrown back and forth, amplified, then the cultural thread goes underground, then it pops up again, often."

... And Jeremy Clarkson Has Hooked One Up To A V8 Engine ...

Wiki:

The Turboencabulator or turbo-encabulator is a fictional machine whose alleged existence became an in-joke and subject of professional humor among electrical engineers.

In 1946 one of the earliest references to the turbo-encabulator appeared in Time on, April 15, 1946 by Bernard Salwen, a New York lawyer working in Washington, DC. Part of Salwen's job was to review technical manuscripts. He was amused by the jargon and wrote the classic description of a non-existent turboencabulator.

In 1955 the turboencabulator was supposedly described by a "J.H. Quick" in "The Institution of Electrical Engineers, Students Quarterly Journal" 25 (London), p184 in 1955. (Other sources give vol 15 no. 58 p. 22, December 1944.)

In 1962 a turboencabulator data sheet was created by engineers at General Electric's Instrument Department, in West Lynn, Massachusetts. It quoted much of the above sources and was inserted into the General Electric Handbook. Perhaps to make the hoax more believable, the turboencabulator data sheet had the same format as the other pages in the G.E. Handbook. The engineers added "Shure Stat" in "Technical Features", which was peculiar only to the Instrument Department, and included the first known graphic representation of a "manufactured" turboencabulator using parts made at the Instrument Department.

Circa 1988 the former Chrysler Corporation "manufactured" the Turbocabulator in a video spoof. See external link in the bottom of this article.

Circa 1997 Rockwell Automation "manufactured" the renamed Retro-Encabulator in another video spoof. See external link in the bottom of this article.

The technical descriptions of all these turboencabulators remain remarkably similar over the years.