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.
Let’s face facts: the ability to camouflage one’s self by changing color is played out amongst cephalopods. In order to stand out, today’s hip, young head-feet have to look beyond hue and pattern. In this regard the Indonesian Mimic Octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) — officially discovered in 1998 — is far ahead of the curve; for not only does it possess the ability to change its markings and colorings but it can also mimic the shape and behavior of up to 15 different species of animal, including sea snakes, lionfish, flatfish, brittle stars, giant crabs, stingrays, jellyfish, sea anemones, and mantis shrimp. It is an astounding creature and seeing it in action lets one see just how effective its mimicry is. We’ll see if that crab ever tries that shit again.
Even the ignominy of begging for forgiveness after last week’s Saturday Morning Cartoons debacle couldn’t bring us this week’s SMC on time. I have no one to blame but myself, a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism and a cheap floozy down at My Honey Fitz. Still, better late than never, so behold, Ectodrooglings: the thirty-first edition of Saturday Morning Cartoons!
• “Valse Triste” from Allegro Non Troppo — Thanks to reader Katie, we begin SMC off on a melancholy note, following a nostalgic cat through the post-apocalytpic ruins of its cherished home. The clip comes from Bruno Bozzetto’s 1977 parody of Fantasia, which is well worth scrounging up on DVD.
• Inhumanoids: The Evil That Lies Within: Hasbro’s surprisingly well-animated attempt to adapt the Cthulhu mythos into a successful line of children’s toys without paying the Lovecraft estate a dime. This is the 90 minute pilot movie in its entirety. The plot? Cyborg warriors versus Elder Things. ‘Nuff said, except for this: the action figures for Inhumanoids were incredible at the time, and are still pretty awesome by modern standards.
• Purple and Brown — The wacky adventures of two amorphous Claymated blobs.
• Ward Kimball’s Mars and Beyond: A visionary retro-futurist extrapolates the flora and fauna of Mars from the symbolic depths of his imagination.
• Read or Die — Because Julian begged, the first episode of a fan-translated anime taking place in an alternate world where the British Empire has remained a superpower.
• The Venture Brothers in “Shadowman 9: In The Cradle of Destiny” — To celebrate the triumphant premiere of The Venture Brothers’ Season 3, episode 03×01, so fresh on YouTube even I haven’t watched it yet.
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?
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.
