A clip from the 1930 film The Dogway Melody which was a twenty minute spoof of The Broadway Melody in which all the parts were played by dogs. In this scene an ebony, four-legged gentleman bestows a few glittering rocks on young Queenie. However, when she refuses to put out he’s left with only one choice: groping of the non-consensual variety. Lucky for Queenie though, there is a telepathic drunk in the next room ready to dash to her rescue.
When I was young, my brother and I had a cheap, very basic slot car set — either Hot Wheels or Matchbox branded I think, although I can’t remember which — that we used incessantly. The visceral experience of making miniature cars hurtle at top speed around a plastic track without careening off into oblivion was almost overshadowed, however, by the act of populating the area surrounding the track with any manner of detritus — cardboard boxes, coffee cans, LEGO structures, Godzilla toys; meant to represent building, bridges, Godzilla, etc. — that characterized the vast metropolis that was the stage for our death-defying motorsport.
This came back to me while watching this video of a far more elaborate set-up being filmed mostly at track level with a camera mounted on one of the cars. The only thing that could make this better is if they had someone making the noise of the car’s engines with their voice instead of real car recordings. I wonder what that cardboard and plastic city would look like to me now.
Some webcam footage of the defrosting process being conducted on the half ton colossal squid caught in Antarctic waters in February 2007, and currently housed in a New Zealand lab. The entire process will take up to two day to complete in order to not damage the specimen, as thawing it too fast would mean that the outside would being to rot before the internal organs had fully thawed. Researchers will only have a short time to examine the corpse before it is placed in a preservative, during which time they hope to, among other things, determine the squid’s sex; although the apparent lack of a six and a half foot penis leads them to speculate that it is female. It seems like a logical conclusion. They will also be live webcasts spanning the entire project. After the examination is concluded the squid will be put on display at Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand’s national museum in Wellington.
It’s Tuesday, the bastard child of the week; not far enough removed from Monday to escape the scorn that wells up from the return to work and not close enough to the next weekend to elicit the joy of a journey’s last leg. In an effort to improve your Tuesday Ectomo presents you with the exuberant gesticulations of this corpulent man. May his child-like jiggling serve you well.
I don’t think it surprises anyone that the horror, the loneliness and ennui of the post-modern age is best summarized through the artful manipulation of the most cynically stupid and mass produced cartoon strip of the last thirty years. But who knew it could perfectly capture the spirit of Moustache Monday as well?
What you have here is psychiatry’s first patented device to deal with the onset of ADHD in hyperactive children. Is your child bouncing around, dizzy and quivering from head to toe, their circulatory system pumping what, under a microscope, appears to be a hemoglobulous mixture of lemonade and pixy sticks? Do you just need a break? Then slap a Transogram Swing Wing on his bean and watch him head-bang until he passes out in an alarmingly expanding nose bleed.
Lileks suggests it also might be a “a mutant-detection program the government ran in the late 60s to identify children whose brains could resist high levels of stress; they were carefully groomed to become astronauts and fighter pilots.” He goes on to note that “Reader’s Digest did an expose on the toys, asking once again “Why Can’t Johnny Read?” with the sensible answer that Johnny had a series of small but cumulatively disabling cerebral hemorrhages.”
As regular readers are doubtlessly aware, Eliza and I have a bit of an Andrew W.K. fixation… in particular, his career defining anthem to partying, “Party Hard.” We love the energy of the song, its absolutely fanatical devotion to the concept of not-just-partying, but partying until you sneeze brains. Its like partying is some sort of abstract state, the ultimate opposite of Zen.
But at the same time, we have to admit, we don’t follow the immortal wisdom of Andrew W.K. We don’t party hard. Not really. Not all the time. Only sometimes, and as the years pass, the periods between parties grow like tapeworms feeding off of our lives.
What the hell happened to us, guys? Like us, you, well… we know you work all night, and when you work you don’t feel all right. But we keep doing it. What went wrong in our lives? When did we forget how to party?
As a Monday morning reminder of what every day or every week is supposed to be like, Ectomo is proud to present this educational film: The Night of Hardest Partying. Two brave college freshmen — a dork and a Jewfro, sober as birds — begin partying so hard that it quickly snowballs into seventeen.
Guys, this is what pure, unapologetic, unremitting fun looks like when the tumors of snark and cynicism have been amputated and cauterized. If you can’t just go out and have fun like this, your life is missing something. I know mine is.
Freakazoid in “Candle Jack”: Broadcast in patented Scream-O-Vision for the first time in network history, I just want to point out that the first kid’s idea of the scariest thing in the world is pretty terrifying. All the air in the world, turning to wood simultaneously? One day, you’re just respirating with all the swagger of a carbon-based-lifeform, just showing off your lungs, not a care in the world. The next thing you know? You are encased in a wooden sarcophagus on all sides, enormous logs crammed down your throat and up your bowels, your lungs tearing themselves apart as they try to breathe splinters. Terrifying indeed. Thanks, Professor Robot!
The Wonder Twins in “Drag Race”: Despite their godlike transformation powers, the Justice League’s most useless members are incapable of stopping a typical teenage drag race. “An eagle? Carrying a monkey? *Crash*”
A Random Car Chase Scene from Mind Game: Though both physics and plausibility defying, perhaps the best animated car chase in cartoon history. Thanks, clevetheripper!
If you were to wander into ectochat most days, what you’d discover is a foul-mouthed Algonquin Round Table of smug, self-satisfied musical transgressives, complimenting one another on their Last.fm profiles with the most sublime and perfect bon mot image macro 4Chan has to offer. I hate these assholes.
It’s not really their fault: I hate Last.fm too. It’s basically a dynamically updated blackmail document open to everyone who wants to browbeat me about my listening habits. For example, my profile page on Last.fm indicates that I have listened to Gwen Stefani’s “What U Waitin’ For” almost a hundred times since I joined. Oh, sure, I have an excuse: my computer was muted and I didn’t realize I had iTunes on repeat. But the damage was done: I will never, ever be able to listen to another song enough times to topple Gwen Stefani from my number on spot.
My iTunes collection contains eight thousand, five hundred and eighty tracks, dammit! I am a musicological supertaster, effortlessly skipping from obscure sub-genre to sub-genre, with a profundity of appreciation only match by the synesthetic splendor of my aural genius. But every time Qais sees me, he leans over and whispers “Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock” in my ear, and no matter how many of his shattered teeth get crammed down his pale slender throat by my fist, he just won’t stop.
Still, I feel slightly less guilty about my second most played track on Last.fm, Local H’s “California Songs.” It’s delightfully meta: what Local H have accomplished here in their angry manifesto against California is, ironically, the most rocking song written about California since Brian Wilson ballooned to five hundred pounds and started stirring cocaine into his mayonnaise.
I still remember coming downstairs for school in the morning as a boy, hungry for Apple Jacks, and to discover that my parents had slopped a ladleful of Cream of Wheat into my breakfast bowl instead. “Great,” I’d say, choking back my prolapsing gastric tract and fixing my parents with a hateful glare. “Semen.” And that’s when the beatings would start.
Apparently, I’m not the only person who has equated the texture of Cream of Wheat with lumpy, grainy ejaculate over the years. In fact, apparently, there was a fetish for Cream of Wheat going as far back as the early 80’s, as used-up, bouffant-ed porn stars eagerly fellated prancing coke heads dressed in cardboard Cream of Wheat boxes.
This is work safe: it was also my worst nightmare when I was ten. Stay until the end, for the violent jactitations of a man dressed only in a pair of sunglasses and a foam-rubber costume resembling a piece of toast. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
Ren and Stimpy in Mad Dog Hoek: Due to the endless legal prowling of both John Kricafalusi and Nickelodeon, Ren and Stimpy episodes don’t last long on YouTube, and the ones I want like Space Madness are never there. It doesn’t matter: seasons 1 and 2 of Ren and Stimpy were unmitigated brilliance as a whole. It’s a shame that John K. has become the Harlan Ellison of the cartooning world: an undeniably talented artist but so utterly cantankerous and up-his-own-ass that all he does is spend all day raving about those talentless kids of today who can’t wait to sell out.
The Human Torch Raps from The Fantastic Four: This is totally for real. From the 1990s Fox Saturday Morning series.
Spongebob Squarepants in Sailor Mouth: I have to apologize for this one. This episode in which Spongebob and Patrick learn how to swear is absolutely hysterical in its original incarnation, with all obscenities bleeped out by the braying sounds of dolphins. It’s perfect. Unfortunately, no one will upload that version: the only versions that are available are ten thousand re-dubs in which some anacephalic mouth breather moistly shouts “FUCK! SHIT! PUSSY!” into his mike whenever Spongebob and Patrick utter an expletive, or the version I’ve chosen to use here, where the dolphin noises are replaced with network-style bleeps. Hopefully the cartoon will still work for you if you haven’t seen it.
Droopy Dog in Droopy Dumb-Hounded: The single, perfect example of the surrealist Hollywood cartoon chase, in which one character begins to fray around the edges as he tries to escape a slow, lumbering but utterly inexorable pursuer. Directed by Tex Avery, natch; this is also the first appearance of Droopy.
Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers: Not the whole thing, just the chase scene at the end. I worry that not enough people saw this in the theater when it came out: this one scene had every single person in the audience standing up and cheering when they saw it. It’s unfortunate that Wallace and Gromit, while always sublime, never managed to top this.
Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot in Patriotic Games: Another episode of Geof Darrow and Frank Miller’s curiously overlooked cartoon series. After an accident test piloting a prototype time machine sucks Big Guy into a vortex into the past, Rusty and Lieutenant Dwayne Hunter return to a future in which humanity is ruled by cephalopodic squid creatures and every American speaks with a British accent. The twist in this episode is great.
Aeon Flux in A Last Time For Everything: The Aeon Flux half-hour episodes were never up to the standard of the sublime Liquid Television shorts, this is one of the better episodes. Trevor develops a method for creating human duplicates. After Trevor copies Æon, the real Æon conspires with her doppelganger and switches places with her, but finds her loyalty to Monica challenged; meanwhile, the copied Æon prepares to kill the original. Dig the Russian assassin with the hands for feet.
Kenshiro Kasumi in Fist of the North Star: Just a little palate cleanser, as Ken explodes some post-apocalyptic mutant’s heads through the lightning-quick jabbing of certain key pressure points.
O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill: A lecherous pedophile yakuza boss is taken down by a young, almond-eyed Lolita.
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we have just made a shocking discovery: Ross Rosenberg, erstwhile Ectomo blogger, is a Jew.
DON’T PANIC. While this is pretty much the worst thing Eliza and I could have possibly imagined when we began the hiring process for part-timers, there is a contingency plan in place. But slathering all planar surfaces in raw bacon takes time. In the meantime, I’m sure you’re all wondering what you can do to prevent Ross from stealing your babies in the night and selling them for a profit on the Hassidic black market… a profit which will undoubtedly be used for the procurement of the most decadent and kosher of snortable nostrums. And I’m sorry to say, the bottom line is we just don’t know.
So we turn to Hamas in our hour of vulnerability. Like a vast army of Buffy the Vampire Slayers, Hamas knows a thing or two about fighting Jews, and through their avatar — an anthropomorphical rabbit named Assud with a jones for Mohammed — we can learn how to beat the Armies of Zion at their own game. After all, Assud’s got a point: Ross can’t eat us if we eat him first.
Paramount Studios released a series of shorts between 1932 and 1934 under the umbrella title of Hollywood on Parade in which they exhibited nearly every star they had in their stables singing, dancing, or playacting. In this particular clip, from 1933, Mae Questel gives a rare on screen performance as Betty Boop, the animated minx she voiced for eight years. She’s set do a song routine with a couple of mannequins but Béla Lugosi, revisting his role as Dracula, cuts the performance a bit short, proclaiming, “Betty, you have booped your last boop.”
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.
