Christie’s, the auction house dealing almost exclusively in amazing things that I will never be able to afford, will be offering up a mouthwatering prize for the Victorian-era enthusiast striving for the ultimate in authentic furnishings for their study; namely the desk once owned by Charles Dickens on which he wrote Great Expectations The proceeds of the auction, to be held in June, will be going to the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which the desk was gifted to by Jeanne–Marie Dickens, Countess Wenckheim. The desk is expected to fetch between £50,000-£80,000, or eight hundred billion American dollars.
Certainly such a price is a trifle when one imagines the value in being able to sit snug in their meticulously reconstructed office, taking nib in hand to inscribe intricately constructed sentences overflowing with poetic prose, running on and on — seemingly forever — a vast torrent of elegant, meandering descriptors, strung together with a delicate chain of commas and semicolons wending their way through a variety of subjects and encompassing the expansive gulf of human emotion in its brilliant and contradictory entirety and in doing so, laying out a map of the societal landscape, a grid work of people’s interactions with other people and the effects of these interpersonal relationships in regards to society especially in terms of the class system which, regardless of how much man has progressed, has yet to be exorcised completely — and indeed in some ways has become even worse — the gully between the wealthy and poor becoming akin to an awesome canyon; a canyon filled with a deep morass of misery and despair from which the destitute can only struggle helplessly glancing upwards on occasion to see the rich, the masters of this brave, new, industrialized world looking down upon them, greedy sneers curling their lips as they watch the less fortunate desperately try to raise themselves up, while only pushing others down further into the muck until they themselves become worn-out, weary, and weak and the next struggling body comes along to begin the whole process again; a twisted and deliberate cycle perpetrated by those on high, licking their lips at the spectacle laid out before them, a spectacle from which only they reap the rewards but at the cost of their eternal souls.
Higher education is not an area that we at Ectomo spend much time dwelling on with, perhaps, the exception of Brownlee whose Ivy League education requires a certain amount of sneering condescension every month. I, as previously mentioned, attended art school, which is a bit like paying an absurd amount of money to attend four years of kindergarten, albeit with more drug use and more opportunities for sexual encounters featuring multiple participants. On the other hand Eliza, when questioned about her education, responded with “the streets” which I take to mean that she was part of a Dickensian pack of pickpocketing urchins or that she attended a school run by hobos out of refrigerator cartons. Qais’s Bedouin lifestyle, of course, did not afford him the luxury of college. However, those years spent traipsing about the desert did imbue him with various, real world abilities such as hunting rabbits with dogs and navigating by the stars. He can also tell you where the nearest well is in relation to your current whereabouts.
As such, we are not apt to recommend a particular college or university, nor should our readers turn to us for such advice. That said, if one were inclined to pick a school based on its support of the Follicular Arts one could do a lot worse than the University of Chicago which, on February 27th, is resurrecting its Great Mustache Race after an apparent sixty-eight year hiatus. It is an auspicious occasion, marred only slightly, by the pedestrian spelling of “moustache”. Such pedantic trifles must be put aside, however. The school must be applauded for contributing to, hopefully, a resurgence in facial hair education as well as being progressive enough to allow women to participate. For too long have women been denied the ability to partake in the sport of hirsute facial appendages. We await the outcome of this contest with great anticipation and look forward to it spreading to other schools.
My father and I have long maintained a correspondence of epic intellectual proportions. Usually these take the form of discussions on science and science fiction, Rick Gauger being an award-winning science fiction author, and all-around life of the party.
Recently I sent him a link to a collection of cartoons on the fashion wars of the early 1800s, which were as vicious as they were short-lived. Men and women abandoned the stiff, straight-laced wardrobes of the 1700s and briefly adopted a more modern, flowy, comfortable look. This was the famous Regency era, in which Jane Austen lived and wrote. Unfortunately for fashion, it was quickly destroyed by the severe repression of the Victorian age’s corsets, high heels, and silly hats. Dad, armchair fashion historian, elaborates [with my notes appended, thusly]:
Yes, I’ve always thought it odd that women went out of, and back into corsets in the early 19th Century. In our own time, the 60s got over in a hurry, as women went back to makeup and hairdos in the early 70s. In my century [Dad is 64], I think that the corporations panicked as they saw hair styles, makeup and tailored clothing apparently becoming obsolete, and they put on a major propaganda offensive. The majority of people (including women) never understood the 60s anyway, so they were ready to buy into it. We had a last hurrah of big cars, just at the moment when we should’ve been changing our ways.
Another reason for the quick loss of those styles was that a woman really has to be very good-looking [such as my mother, 54, who to this day refuses to learn how to use an eyelash curler, probably because she’s too busy beating men away from her door with a stout stick] to be able to go without makeup and tailoring. There were a couple of girls among the grad students of 1965 that made me froth at the mouth; most others, however smart and sweet they might be, just didn’t have what it took. One of them was the girl who welcomed me back from my first tour in Vietnam. She came out in a nightie that made her look like a joke. I would have rather died than hurt her feelings at that moment.
Gentleman, don’t let your quest to restore your honour by slaying your wife’s lover be an excuse not to be fashionable. Likewise, ladies, it does one no good to be able to defend your chastity from a groping ruffian if you do not look good doing it. It is therefore imperative that you accessorise with only the most elegant of concealed firearms, whether it be an understated pistol ring or smart watch pistol.
The Blair Godzilla Project is released in theaters today meaning that, hopefully, I will stop being assaulted by viral ads and television commercials. As Nevin reminds us, a big movie release means that Asylum must leap into action with a small budget, direct to DVD release and this is no exception. Behold, the less pretentiously ambiguous Monster!
Arlette has begun the tedious task of sifting through the thousands of photos vomited onto Flickr by the Library of Congress and surfaces with some welding, wartime beauties.
Dr. Zoidberg is not nearly as funny and innocent as first assumed. Thanks, Your Name!
Kevin Nuut and Daniel want you to know that, even though figures based on Mike Mignola and Brian Augustyn’s Victorian-era Batman/Jack the Ripper mash-up Gotham by Gaslight will never be produced, if only to spite you, someone was inspired enough to make some custom Justice League figures to drive the knife in deeper.
The ever excitable Melissa demands that her toilet bowl have a cephalopod decal!
This is not a pizza. It is a heart attack disguised as a pile of greasy, fatty ingredients covering pizza dough. Thanks, Evil Jim.
The antecedent of Google Maps: a map of London, finely wrought in fountain ink on a white lamb skin glove, circa 1851. Followed a century later by a novelty map of Florida, printed on a flaccid condom.
This video (and stupidly enjoyable track) must have cost at least a cool million, but the Backstreet Boys didn’t care. They were riding high on Lou Perlman’s buggery adoration, they had legions of teenage girls at their beck and call, and it was the nineties, so nobody bothered telling them (to their faces) how stupid they looked, acted, and sounded.
When you’re that rich, that vaunted, and that young, what can you do? Why, a Thriller rip-off that will live in infamy for a chosen few, of course. Namely, me and the rest of the malcontents who were impressionable youth during that cursed era.
And by impressionable, I mean we thought backflipping werewolves were pretty much the golden apex of comedy. We still think that.
Why am I posting this on Cthursday? Pay attention to the gangly gentleman in the deceptively intellectual glasses, with the briefcase and the obsession with staring away from the camera at exactly a ninety-degree angle. I assume he’s supposed to be some sort of Jekyll/Hyde manifestation, but his bifurcation is less monstrous than it is piscean. My hypothesis is that some concept artist snuck that one past the board, giggling into his dog-eared copy of the Compleat Works of Lovecraft the while.
But I don’t think backflipping werewolves had to be snuck past anyone.
For the gentleman of good breeding -or woman who wishes to have the experience of wielding a death-dealing phallus in the genteelest way possible- we present this exquisitely engraved example of the MP5K Machinenpistole. This toff firearm comes with a supple, leather attaché case from which it can be fired without having to be removed, especially helpful if taken by surprise by a gang of ruffians and there are no constables in the area vicinity.
Admittedly, T-shirts are not high fashion. However, a little victoriana, moustachery, and tentacles go a long way to make what is an otherwise boring wardrobe staple something worthy of even the lowliest Ectomitic New Scum (Rosenberg). If the inimitable fashionistos of Popsucker deem this fabulous, then fabulous it must be.
The first electric vibrator, invented by a British doctor in the 1880s in order to facilitate vulvular massage, an accepted form of treatment for those diagnosed with hysteria (now referred to as Histrionic Personality Disorder) and neurasthenia. It allowed doctors of the time to facilitate many more patients than had been able when the procedure was performed manually and brought some patients to “hysterical paroxysm” in as little as ten minutes.
In 2007, we have baseball cards: cheap rectangles of cardboard inundated with the soapy stench of glass-like chewing gum that shreds the mouth into a pulsating orifice of oral gashes. The glistening, thyroidic and sinewy apes — their neck arteries bursting with pharmaceutical testoteserone — leer from the faces of the cards, and when combined with the stats on the back of the cards, read like entries from a Dungeons and Dragon Monster Manual.
By comparison, in 1898, trading cards featured Rubenesque house wives reclining in the aftermath of passion in marital beds shared by giant lobsters, a massive bottle of Rex’s Kidney & Liver Bitters poised on the night table as the Viagra of the age. I think you can tell which style of trading card Ectomo prefers.
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.
Christie’s, the auction house dealing almost exclusively in amazing things that I will never be able to afford, will be offering up a mouthwatering prize for the Victorian-era enthusiast striving for the ultimate in authentic furnishings for their study; namely the desk once owned by Charles Dickens on which he wrote Great Expectations The proceeds of the auction, to be held in June, will be going to the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which the desk was gifted to by Jeanne–Marie Dickens, Countess Wenckheim. The desk is expected to fetch between £50,000-£80,000, or eight hundred billion American dollars. 
