A Super-8 camera bearing a supposed snuff film accidentally floated away on some balloons (used as a cheap crane effect), was found and watched by a farmer, who freaked and gave it to the authorities, who tried to solve the case for a year before acting on a tip from an art student and discovering that it was the popular heavy metal rock act Nine Inch Nails. In the Smithsonian of Novel Ways to Promote Music, this Pretty Hate Machine-era stunt, accidental or not, is, when compared to what Reznor would do later, something akin to finding the Wright Brothers' first popsicle-stick airplane model. Here's the whole story, from the flabbergasted folks at c.1990 Hard Copy (via):


One other fun thing: the producers' idea of a stock "art student" (around 5:05) is a fey, bereted jester-type lustily painting what looks like an out-of-work Cinemax softcore actress. I'm more afraid of him than anything that might have been on Reznor's film.

If you have a Facebook profile, you're already sick of this, but: Finally, a website that remembers the lessons taught us by Richard David James can be used to make things as irresistably creepy as me, below. Back-combing was a bitch.

"All David Hayes meant to do was cast for his granddaughter. Instead he wound up landing a 21-pound channel catfish — a North Carolina state record — on her Barbie fishing pole."

3. Michael Phelps
2. Usain Bolt
1. David Hayes

"A trilogy as sexy, silly, and inscrutable as it was a quarter-century ago, these videos play out on the same early-'80s barren Texas landscape that No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh traversed, though the proceedings here are decidedly more Penthouse Forum than Cormac McCarthy. In each successive video, a car mechanic, valet, and short-order cook suffer abuse heaped on all sides by bosses, bikers, slick-haired queers, and lard-assed oil-rich Houstonians. Under such pressure, these blue-collar boys encounter their fairy godfathers, ZZ Top (who appear like a mirage in the Texas Panhandle landscape), via a set of magical car keys with the ZZ logo and 'The Eliminator' herself, a customized two-door, cherry-red 1933 Ford coupe. Attended by a triumvirate of hotties decked out in halter tops, fishnets, leather minis, studded belts, and red pumps, these modern-day Fates arrive just in time for the makeovers (seriously, in the intervening decades, how did no one at Spike TV conceive of Skank Eye for the Straight Guy?) and triumph."

Andy Beta, "Remembering ZZ Top's Inconceivable 1980s Makeover"

One little indie rock addendum to this Dial M post about a trove of Blue Note album cover scans (which seems to be offline at the moment?), particularly their note at the bottom about Yesterday's New Quintet's visual homage to Ornette!:

Like you, I couldn't watch enough replays of Usain Bolt winning the 100 on Saturday night, especially because he pretty much did the Soulja Boy dance backwards for the last 20 meters. I don't mind cockiness as long as it's earned and not overly performative, but holy shit is this guy fast. Has there ever been a record that we take seriously broken so incredibly easily? Like, a guy in a pie-eating contest taking the last minute to re-enact with his fist a bit of dialogue from My Dinner with Andre? One of those radio DJs staying up for like 175 hours doing the last 10 with his eyes closed? I don't think so.

But as with virtually all amazing things that athletes do, with Bolt, there's a shoe company in the mix (maybe):

You see, the reason Usain Bolt didn't push through and finish in 9.60 seconds instead of 9.69 is -- as the rumor goes -- because he's smart. He didn't want to kill his gravy train.

Runners often get six figure bonuses for doing things like breaking world records and if you study the previous four times the 100 meter has been broken over the last three years, it's never been by more than .03 seconds. Asafa Powell (9.77) broke Maurice Greene's record (9.79). Justin Gatlin (9.76) broke the record of Powell, who broke it back a little more than a year later (9.74). That stood until Bolt broke the record (9.72) in May.

So, the conspiracy theory goes, that Bolt knew before the race that he had to win the race and take the gold, but not push it too much, otherwise he'd kill his opportunity at future bonuses.

Change is on the cards, but this time it will be hard

"When I am online I am perpetually aware of open-endedness, of potentiality, and psychologically I am fragmented. I make my way forward through whatever text is in front of me factoring in not just the indeterminacy of whatever is next on the page, I am also alert, even if subliminally, to the idea of the whole, the adjacency of all information. However determined I am to focus on the task at hand, I am haunted by this idea of the whole. Which is different than what I might experience sitting in a library chair knowing that I’m in the midst of three floors of stacks. The difference has to do with permeability, with the imminence of linkage, and it is decisive.
...
when Nicholas Carr talks about how it gets harder and harder to stay with a book—and there is an avalanche of this sort of testimony—I see it as evidence that exposure to the intransitive genius of cyberspace does begin to affect our responses, our cognition, when we are not online. That we are being modified.

Sven Bikerts "Reading in the Open-ended Information Zone Called Cyberspace"

I made a brief reference to Carr's Atlantic article in my own minor staring-at-the-object rumination last Friday, but obviously that venue (nor Atlantic Monthly, even) isn't the place for the sort of research-driven understanding of the way in which we not only create, but receive information online (obviously, in Girl Talk's case as in so many others, those two things are very much intertwined). This sort of thing fascinates me, and there will be more said by me as I find ways to say it. For starters, I appreciate Bikerts' anecdotal addendum (I've helpfully highlighted my favorite sentences); his opening paragraph reminds me of that longstanding philosophical question pondered by those who study technology (and I'm paraphrasing): "where exactly are you when you're talking on the phone?"

I also like Dr. Murdoch's take on the subject:

"I wanted some Olympics, and having no cable, I searched the interweb until I came upon the official NBC website for the olympics...I was able to get a video of the entire US vs. Spain men's Basketball game. Sans commentary. Seriously. All you can hear are squeaks of sneakers, gasps from the audience, foul protesting in Spanish, and serious cuss words from Team Redeemable.
(...)
the best part of watching was the ability to hear how serious these guys are taking it. They scream out defensive assignments and yell at each other to let the ticky-tack foul calls go. My favorite moment was between Kobe and Melo, and no it didn't involve a discussion of the Zagat guide ratings for hotels in Colorado. After Dwight Howard customarily missed the first of two free throws and the ball landed in the hands of a hapless amigo, Melo chided Kobe for not boxing out. Kobe cursed back at Melo and bet him that he will get the next miss before Melo. Which led to Kobe skying for a rebound on a made free throw and somehow all of this made me feel proud to be an American."

This sounds heavenly, and I've been recommending for the past few years that someone at the major sports conferences, or a network, cable provider, someone somewhere, should invest in dual-audio channels for sports games, like on a DVD or something. It doesn't seem technologically too hard, and the ambience of well-mic'd playcalling and trash-talking, as James mentions above, can be endlessly more entertaining than hack play-by-play guys and ex-jock commentators. King Kaufman wrote a bit about this happening in Canada a few years ago, pessimistic about the chance of us ever losing the booth chatter. But what if there were just an option for us to lose the play-by-play?:

"As much as we all love to talk about who should be the announcer for this or that broadcast and how good or bad various announcers are, I've long maintained that announcers don't mean much to fans.

We're used to having them there, so not having them is something that would take some getting used to. A game with stadium or arena noise and no announcers just sounds kind of awkward to ears trained to either listen to or selectively tune out the omnipresent chatter that's accompanied action since the medium was new.

And make no mistake: We'll never have the chance to get used to such a thing. Announcers aren't there to provide insight and analysis or to identify players and describe action. They're required to do all those things, and we judge them on how well they do them.

But their primary purpose is to read promos. The networks and sponsors aren't giving that up. We're stuck with announcers for as long as we're stuck with money."

"What’s notable here is the starting point of the discussion: an “individual.” The individual citizen posited by the court is defined as prior to his or her sexual orientation. He or she exists as a person before he or she exists as straight or gay. And the right under discussion is defined as “the opportunity of an individual” to choose another “person” to “establish a family” in which reproduction and children are not necessary. And so the distinction between gay and straight is essentially abolished. For all the debate about the law in this decision, the debate about the terms under discussion has been close to nonexistent. And yet in many ways, these terms are at the core of the decision, and are the reason why it is such a watershed. The ruling, and the language it uses, represents the removal of the premise of the last generation in favor of a premise accepted as a given by the next."

Andrew Sullivan, "My Big Fat Straight Wedding"

On February 14, 2003, Gen and Jackie, who'd gone on to change her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, lay on twin hospital gurneys, hand in hand. Having married nearly a decade before, they'd recently come up with a plan to take their relationship to the next level.

The idea behind pandrogeny, as they called it, was for two people to literally become each other—or to come as close as possible. At first, it was a matter of simply dressing alike, going in for the same hairstyle, getting Jaye a set of contact lenses to match Gen's eyes. But that wasn't enough. The Valentine's Day operation gave them matching breast implants, size C. Later, Jaye had her eyes and nose done, and got a chin implant, to resemble Gen. Gen received cheek enhancements and a lip job. At one point, they looked into the idea of smoothing over their belly buttons, like angels.

Aaron Gell "Strange Love"