Perhaps the most famous victim of the Holocaust, Anne Frank is best known by her diary, published as The Diary of a Young Girl and a few, iconic photographs. Recently, however, the Anne Frank Museum uploaded this amazing clip onto YouTube, the only known film footage of Miss Frank. Taken on July 22, 1941, the clip shows the young girl looking out the window of her apartment to get a better look at the wedding of a girl who lived in the next building over. I love clips like this, as all too often these people, well known as they may be, seem to have never actually existed beyond the confines of a photograph; my mind unable to conceive of them moving, speaking, and just, well, living.
Let me say right from the start that I am a huge Sarah Vowell fan. Her book Assassination Vacation, from which this is excerpted, was the first by her that I read and from there I’ve devoured everything she has written. Her work, part history part travelogue, are made that much better by dint of the fact that she has an extraordinary ability to convey her enthusiasm for her subjects. The history of presidential assassination my seem compelling but the reader is all the more interested because Miss Vowell is interested.
Susan Chien, also a fan, animates one of those many moments from Vowell’s journeys, detailing the complicated and terrifying traditions of a New England bed and breakfast namely being forced to take one’s morning sustenance with total strangers in another stranger’s house.
A hypnotizing collection of film clips detailing various strange, doomed gadgets and vehicles. The thing that struck me while watching this was the imagination it took for these people — who possessed, no doubt, a limited understanding of aerodynamics and physics — to create some incredibly complex mechanical failures.
Daito Manabe’s newest art piece uses a machine which turns music into electrical pulses. By slapping electrodes on his face these pulses cause the muscles to twitch and jerk in a painful looking dance of contorted expressions. I’m not sure what the goal is here, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t find it fascinating to watch.
A team comprised of British and Japanese researchers has released the first footage of hadal snailfish, taken nearly 5 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific ocean. There are various species of snailfish, some of which can be found in shallower waters, but the hadal is found almost exclusively in depths exceeding 6000 meters, where they feed on small shrimp who scavenge the carcasses of dead marine life.
Not much is known about snailfish. They are scaleless with a thin, gelatinous skin though some species have spines. Breeding habits of different species vary; the abysmal snailfish (Careproctus ovigerum) has been known to practice “mouth breeding”, in which the male carries the eggs in its mouth while they develop and other members of this same genus lay their eggs in the gill cavities of king crabs. Some species live out their entire existence inside other animals:
“The diminutive inquiline snailfish (Liparis inquilinus) of the northwestern Atlantic is known to live out its life inside the mantle cavity of the scallop Placopecten magellanicus.”
It is fascinating footage, but it must be pointed out that deeper fish have been found. On January 23, 1960 Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the U.S. Navy piloted the bathyscaph Trieste to the sea floor of the deepest area of the Marianas Trench, known as Challenger Deep, a depth of 35,800 feet, nearly 7 miles. Here’s what Piccard described:
“…. And as we were settling this final fathom, I saw a wonderful thing. Lying on the bottom just beneath us was some type of flatfish, resembling a sole, about 1 foot long and 6 inches across. Even as I saw him, his two round eyes on top of his head spied us – a monster of steel – invading his silent realm. Eyes? Why should he have eyes? Merely to see phosphorescence? The floodlight that bathed him was the first real light ever to enter this hadal realm. Here, in an instant, was the answer that biologists had asked for the decades. Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? It could! And not only that, here apparently, was a true, bony teleost fish, not a primitive ray or elasmobranch. Yes, a highly evolved vertebrate, in time’s arrow very close to man himself. Slowly, extremely slowly, this flatfish swam away. Moving along the bottom, partly in the ooze and partly in the water, he disappeared into his night. Slowly too – perhaps everything is slow at the bottom of the sea – Walsh and I shook hands.”
A goblin shark attempts to ward off a scuba diver. Having never seen one of these in motion, the Alien style jaw protrusion came as a bit of a surprise. The translucent skin appears so gauze-like, I half expected them to separate from the shark completely.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
