Get Cynical

Here is a great gallery of classic pulp fiction covers. I am curious about the book pictured above. What do the eyes do that is so scary? Stare at you? Damn, Amazon doesn’t have a review of this book.
(via Waving at Myself)

Cool prank for turning a landmark into a gigantic Rubik’s Cube.

For decades, mankind has longed to be deaf. Jet engines, auto horns, the dullification of modern popular music – any one of these things alone might be worth the price of admission to a wholly silent world. So how does one sign up? Reproduced for the first time since its initial printing in 1972, we are proud to present its revised, expanded, fully up-to-date illustrated manual of contemporary American sign language, sometimes referred to as “finger spelling”

Phrenology was a science of character divination, faculty psychology, theory of brain and what the 19th-century phrenologists called “the only true science of mind.” Phrenology came from the theories of the idiosyncratic Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828).

So it was believed that by examining the shape and unevenness of a head or skull, one could discover the development of the particular cerebral “organs” responsible for different intellectual aptitudes and character traits. For example, a prominent protuberance in the forehead at the position attributed to the organ of Benevolence was meant to indicate that the individual had a “well developed” organ of Benevolence and would therefore be expected to exhibit benevolent behaviour.

Balderdash!

“Irene Allen, co-owner of Little Professor, said she thinks the appeal of the books is the character’s Walter Mittyish transformation from an underdog to a skillful wizard.’ ” [Ibid] Thus, the first thing we know about Harry Potter is that he is an 11-year-old “skillful wizard” [practicing witch]. Not only do you NOT want to read these books to your children, you surely do NOT want Public School teachers assigning these books as required reading; but, Satan surely wants to condition your precious children to accept his values, his religion, and his worldview

Wasn’t it Harper Lee who said “A bible in one man’s hand is more dangerous than a gun in another’s.”

The Untitled Project is a series of photographs of urban settings accompanied by a graphical text layout. The photographs have been digitally stripped of all traces of textual information. The text pieces show the removed text in the approximate location and font as it was found in the photograph.

Check out the following onion article from January 18, 2001 titled Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over’

It starts out like this:

“My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us.”

It goes on from there. Someone took that article and put up hyperlinks to real news stories and you get something that makes the Onion look more like the Oracle. Take a look.

A lot of people have discovered that they can make a little extra money by auctioning off on the internet those extra knick-knacks they have lying around. After all, as the saying goes, one person’s trash is another’s treasure.

But sometimes, trash is just trash.

This site is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, like the infamous human kidney, but truly tacky stuff that people really, honestly, believed that someone would (and in some cases did) buy.

Pictured above is a Ram’s Head Snuff Muff.

If you can’t see the number 29 in the picture above, you may be color blind.

These are some of the results from a study of 75 fruit fly fights staged at a neurobiology laboratory at Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston, Mass. USA. The researchers videotaped and analyzed the fights to learn more about aggression. Future studies in the lab will use genetic mutations to investigate the neurobiology of aggression and also explore the gene expression consequences of winners and losers.

(via Boing Boing)