Yesterday I took a nice long walk around my corner of Brooklyn. It was a beautiful day. I was walking through the area around the Gowanus Canal, a very “industrial wasteland” type area where you seldom see anyone other than truckers barreling past and the odd cab driver. There’s lots of garbage and rust and erosion. Great area to take pictures. Anyhow, amidst all the decay I noticed this bottle of Pepsi. It caught my eye because the soda itself looked different. I took a closer look and saw that, unbeknownst to me, the soda giant has evidently launched a brand new flavor called Pepsi Gold. It surprised me, cause, well, you know how these beverage companies are with their marketing blitzes. I checked the deli on my corner later but couldn’t find any. Must have been sold out. I wonder what it tastes like?

Dated: 05.31  Comments: 2   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

What do you get when you mix the the cultural archetype of the “sexually avialable” woman, semantic field relationships, charts, 1970’s feminist fervor, metonymic and metaphoric qualifiers, arrows, John Barth’s Sot-Weed Factor, an x-y axis of cost vs. length of contact, rounded rectangles, dysphemism and euphemistic evasion of disdain, a notation system parsing “method of payment,” 17 males ages 20-42, and an expansive list of terms for women which runs the gamut from unfortunately common to regional to archaic to fictional? You get the most head-scratchingly strange diagram you’re likely to see all day. That’s what.

(Part of the paper The Prostitute: Paradigmatic Woman by Julia P. Stanley, ca 1977)

Dated: 05.31  Comments: 1   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

Quote: It is difficult to appreciate how vast a number of birds, beasts and insects inhabit the fields and woods, and we may well ask ourselves the question “What becomes of their dead?” In a day’s search we may not find among all the teaming wild population a single stiffened body, or one bright eye glazed in death. Here in a clearing we may have chanced upon some blood-stained grass, and a few scattered feathers, which gave evidence of the hawk or carrion crow, but this is very far from accounting for anything like the greater proportion of the short-lived race.

Has Nature, then, her undertaker? Certainly she has. He is appropriately known as the Necrophorus mortuorum, or more popularly as the sexton beetle, for he is equipped with spade and all that is necessary for “undertaking.”
-Bertram S. Puckle, 1926

Dated: 05.30  Comments: 1   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

I know by now everyone has seen the photos of the “lost” tribe recently photographed in the Amazon, somewhere on the border between Peru and Brazil, but I wanted to post them here anyway just so I can look at them everyday until they fall off the front page. Wow.

Quote: Brazil’s National Indian Foundation has discovered an Indian tribe in the Amazon that hasn’t had contact with civilization in a rare sighting of the few remaining original inhabitants of the area. Funai, as the foundation is known, spotted a group of Indians, six huts and a large planted area near the Envira River, close to the Peruvian border in the Brazilian state of Acre in the western Amazon rainforest. There are more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, with more than half living in Brazil or Peru. -Bloomberg.com

 

Dated: 05.30  Comments: 5   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

Poison. New to the Nonist Shop is this attractive design guaranteed to wow not only theater majors, drama club members, lovers of the classics, and Literature professors, but 80’s R&B aficionados as well! Yes, that’s right, here we have what might just possibly be the one and only Shakespeare / Bell Biv DeVoe mash-up on the market, and what is, without question, the finest Claudius tee you’ll see all year! This tee features a full color illustration and grey text incorporating transparency (see below for a larger version). It should look good on all apparel colors. Impress literate people at parties! Be the hit of the library scene! Stick it to the nobility! Take a stand against Flouncy usurpers! Act now!!

Check out all of your options for this Tee here, or see all the Nonist’s products here.

Dated: 05.30  Comments: 0   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

The Rocky Mountain News is reporting that a fellow by the name of Jeff Peckman (pictured above) has an interesting bit of video to share with the rest of the world tomorrow.

Quote: A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver. It shows an extraterrestrial’s head popping up outside of a window at night, looking in the window, that’s visible through an infrared camera. The alien is about 4 feet tall and can be seen blinking.

Indeed? Where was the video shot? By whom? How old is it? How did Mr. Peckman get his hand on it? Was it shot by Peckman himself? The news story offers precious little detail. Now although I have utter faith that this video will turn out to be real incontrovertible proof of alien existence, I mean what rational person would doubt it if it’s on video? Be that as it may something seems a little fishy about it all! So let me just ask you this- why is Peckman obviously trying so hard not to blink in that picture? And more to the point…

Dated: 05.29  Comments: 4   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

Designers out there who cut their teeth (or got their first furtive design hard-ons) in the 90’s surely look back, remembering Ray Gun, Speak, Emigre Magazine, etc, and have some mixed emotions. I know I do. I remember the excitement that ethos fostered, the “cool factor” and emotional punch, but 7 times out of 10, upon review, I actually find myself cringing at the designs themselves. A flip through my ragged copy of The End of Print actually gives me a headache. A look at some pieces aping the Carson style, which were many and bad even then, can actually trigger sudden hemorrhagic blindness today.

Dated: 05.29  Comments: 3   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

Quote: Dinner With Henry (1979) is a rare, 30 minute documentary about Henry Miller. It is exactly what the title implies: footage of Henry having dinner. With him at the table is the film crew, and actress/model Brenda Venus, to whom Henry was enamoured in the final years of life. Henry -at age 87- spends the majority of his time speaking on a number of subjects… Occasionally, he complains about the food. That is all. It may not be of much interest to a general audience, but is a curious “slice of life” for any Miller fan who likes to imagine being at the table with him. -UBU

 

Dated: 05.29  Comments: 0   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

For about the last 70 years the most active you were likely to see a tasmanian tiger was pacing the 12 inches back and forth from a Aussie’s mouth to a bar-top. That’s because though the thylacine continues to grace the label (and commercials) of Cascade Premium Lager the last living specimen died in captivity in 1936. Alas the tasmanian tiger was hunted to extinction, never to stretch its weirdly gigantic maw again. Or so humanity thought (cue the flash pots and castle thunder) until now!

Dated: 05.28  Comments: 1   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »

Fucitol. C6H14O5, a molecule derived from the sugar Fucose, is better known (and by “better” I mean “if at all”) by its common name- Fucitol. Yes Fucitol indeed. Now, with this handsome C6H14O5 molecular model tee from the Nonist, you can brazenly display your cynicism, disgust, apathy, aimless anger, or total nihilism in a manner that wont upset your dear old granny, require immediate sedation, or set off alarm bells in the HR department. This design (see below for larger image) ought to look good on most apparel colors, light and dark.

Check out all of your options for this Tee here, or see all the Nonist’s products here.

Dated: 05.28  Comments: 2   Permanent link to this post:   Email this post: »