Air Krakens!

Kites, that is. From The Berkeley Kite Festival, which set a record for the number of giant octopus kites flown simultaneously.

Berkley Kite Festival 2010 by amadne [Youtube]
Berkeley Kite Festival

Abstract: The recovery of an ancient gold headdress illuminates a manifestation of the poorly understood “Cthulhu” archetype in ancient Peruvian cosmovision.

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A relatively new podcast by Joe Fulgham, Kevin Leeson, and Toren Atkinson (who has been featured on Ectoplasmosis before). Each week, the crew gathers to rap about the science, history, myths, and pop culture surrounding some horrible but fascinating topic. Today, I listened to the episodes about cannibalism, volcanoes, and black holes. While I did pick out a few errors here and there on topics I’m more familiar with, over all it’s fun stuff and worth a listen. And I’m just not brave enough to listen to the episode about parasites.

I was going to post this today either way, so their episode this week (Tentacles) is purely coincidental.

Notice, a fair dose of the material is graphic and not for the squeamish. I was surprised by the lack of punches pulled in the cannibalism episode.

Caustic Soda

Not an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear,” but a hybrid pastiche/homage to Lovecraft and Buster Keaton, with a hint of Indiana Jones in a few places

Part 1

Part 2

The Lurking Fear by Eric Koenig [Youtube]

Had something else lined up for this week, but this hit teh internets as a breaking item of Yogsothothery a couple of days ago. And as Great Cthulhu is the Patron God of the Internet, who would deny it? And definitely check out the back.

If you are going to mod an instrument to look like the embodiment of humanity’s inevitable destiny to be an index fossil, you could do worse than to choose the ukulele. Like the dread lord, it emerges from the Pacific, and its call really hit the big time in the 1920s. Plus that whole Tiptoe through the Tulips thing seems right at home in a musical production of The King in Yellow.

Cthukhelele by Robin Stevenson [Twitter] via Neil Gaiman [Twitter] via Cory Doctorow [BoingBoing]

Lovecraft-inspired music is nothing new, and it is usually subtler than this. But there’s clearly some love on display here. You can listen to their similarly-themed “Children of Dagon” at their Myspace. And I really like the revival bit, which works both with the message and the 1930′s HPL at home frame. Though the idea of Howard, having transitioned from his earlier fallen patrician attitudes to his New Deal-era quasi-socialism, listening to a southern fried revival is a little jarring.

On the other hand, while the study is stocked with modern Cthuliana, having a bunch of odd art and idols is not inaccurate in spirit. HPL did indeed collect and enumerate in his letters various artifacts and weird art in his possession, virtually all gifts from more financially stable friends. These items included some sort of two Maya or Mexican “eikons,” an African flint tool, an Egyptian ushabti funerary figure, a carved wooden Balinese monkey sculpture, a Japanese idol, a Chinese vase, and an Asian bird statue carved from black horn that Lovecraft dubbed the “Bird of Space.”

Cockfight Club – H. P. Lovecraft [via Youtube]

The Frost Kraken [Venison Arts | Etsy]