A stunning short film by the trio of South African artists known as The Blackheart Gang, The Tale of How is the story of a giant octopus who consumes the kiwi bird-like denizens of a tiny island. One of them places messages in a bottle, in the hope that someone will come to rescue them. But who?
It’s a truly beautiful piece of animation and they even have a book/DVD set and an upcoming series of prints available in their shop.
Woe is the giant monster movie. In recent years it has fallen by the wayside, its corpse bludgeoned by the likes of Matthew Broderick and shaky-cam footage. For the giant monster movie enthusiast, the film landscape is a wasteland, populated by the picked over bones of long forgotten titans. Luckily there are those that remember fondly the heady days of Godzilla and Gamera.
The Asylum are a group of such like-minded people and do they have the perfect film for you, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Even the title lets you know that they are not fucking around. There will be no philosophical exposition here about, say, man’s impact on the environment. No, this movie is about a shark that can eat the Golden Gate bridge and an octopus that can crush a submarine with one arm going head to head to see just who is the most bad-ass imaginary monster in the world. Period. End of story.
What, you need more? How about Lorenzo Lamas and Deborah Gibson? Yeah, you read that correctly. Go ahead, picture it in your mind: A silhouette of a man on steel wheels rises over the hill, a blood red sky to his back. Suddenly, a voice!
He was an octopus cop, and good at his job. But he committed the ultimate sin, and testified against other octopus cops gone bad. Octopus cops that tried to kill him, but got the shark he loved instead. Framed for murder, now he prowls the badlands. An outlaw hunting outlaws, a bounty hunter, a Renegade.
Then, BAM, right into “Foolish Beat”. Then a giant shark jumps out of the water and eats a goddamn jumbo jet.
Having documented the battles betwixt warring cephalopods in Feudal Japan, and having failed to convince the denizens of Threadless of the hipster coolness of his t-shirt design, Phineas X. Jones does what he should have done all along and put out another spectacular print with which he shall drain your bank account.
For the cephalophile looking to fill the gaping hole in their collection of extremely gaudy jewelry Chuck Clemency presents this octopodal ring, from his Gem Treasures collection, for your consideration. Crafted from 14K gold it is bristling with 67 precious stones, 62 of which are diamonds. A must have for grandmothers or aspiring hip-hop artists hoping to encase themselves in pimpin’ ice.
Kure Kure Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus) is a children’s television show that aired in Japan from 1973 to 1974, running for 260, two minute and forty-one second episodes. It featured a cast of characters led by Kure Kure Takora an octopus who has a propensity for exclaiming “Kure! Kure!” (”I want it! I want it!”) and who —along with the rest of the cast— is enamored of the pink walrus Munro. The show is delightfully bizarre in a way that only the Japanese have managed to perfect, in the sense that each episode feels like a horrible NyQuil induced hallucination featuring characters inspired by a sushi menu. All 260 episodes can be found at the link below.
Since 2000, over 2000 scientists from 82 nations have been hard at work, going door to door, clipboard in hand conducting the first Census of Marine Life. Eight years into it, fascinating new discoveries have been made, one of which focuses on this little fellow, Megaleledone setebos, which lives in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and can grow up to one meter in length.
This particular cephalopod is now thought to be the common ancestor of the first deep-sea octopuses. Dr Jan Strugnell, a biologist at Queen’s University Belfast recently headed a study which compared the genes of various octopuses and incorporated fossil records finally concluding that the first divergence from Megaleledone occurred roughly 30 million years ago.
The census continues even as I write this, and is scheduled to be completed by 2010, more than enough time to find R’lyeh.
Electricians at the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany were confounded by a series of mysterious blackouts affecting the aquarium of one Otto, an octopus. After staking it out one night they discovered that the cause was Otto himself who, seemingly annoyed by the 2000 watt spotlight above his tank, had figured out he could extinguish the offending light source by climbing onto the rim of his tank and squirting a jet of water in its direction.
This is not the first time the aquarium has had a problem with Otto, says Director Elfriede Kummer:
“Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants.”
Kummer supposes that the octopus is merely bored or perhaps attention starved although, considering his behavior, I’m inclined to theorize that Otto might have a little problem with the drink.
Joseph Wu details the evolution of his origami octopus design, which includes hunting and swimming poses. I’m always amazed by what people can do just by folding paper, my forays into the hobby ultimately proving to be futile. I can make an excellent paper boulder though.
Now here is a simple, classic looking beverage container. 15 ounce stoneware cups, with an octopus silhouette in bas-relief. A worthwhile addition to any cephalopod-centric dining experience.
A young lady models the work of one of the sixty artists who attended the fifth International Bodypainting Festival in Mainz, Germany. I really like how they have the extra arms connected with wires so that she can make them move. The effect in motion must have been surreal.
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.
