The season of giving can be an unseemly time for nonprofits. As New Year’s approaches, every charitable institution down in Charitable Institutionville must bang its tar-tinker and blow its hoo-hoover, in hope of donations.
No doubt they’re all deserving, but the onslaught of requests can leave supporters feeling a bit Grinchy. When that happens, I recommend the video above, which documents a hoax of Borat-like proportions. The perpetrator is the Mimi Foundation, a Belgium-based group that offers psychological counseling, beauty treatments, and hairstyle tips to people with cancer.
The unsuspecting victims? Twenty cancer patients who took it on good faith that they were being treated to standard makeovers, the sort of professional artistry that creates an illusion of health, what many think passes for normalcy. All the Mimi Foundation asked for in return was that the recipients keep their eyes closed as the magic was being worked.
Meanwhile, photographer Vincent Dixon crouched behind a one-way mirror, poised to capture each sitters’ reaction to his or her transformation.
One doesn’t want to say too much. The end results are not what you think, unless you were thinking of one of those over-the-top bizarre America’s Next Top Model photo challenges.
Dixon’s images record the shock and involuntary spontaneity. The video, called “If Only for a Second, shows those initial responses blossoming into …well, let’s just say the Mimi Foundation, assisted by a phalanx of stylists, achieved their goal.
How have you been sharpening your pencils? Regardless of your answer, rest assured that you’re doing it wrong.
Lest there be any doubt that I’m geographically situated smack dab in the middle of former cartoonist’s David Rees’ target demographic, I almost didn’t click on the link to the pitch perfect send up above because I believed it was real.
Here in non-Caribbean, non-Southeast-Asian, non-Russian, non-Mexican Brooklyn—think Girls, the Jonathans Ames and Letham, brownstone-dwelling movie stars and the very latest in n’est plus ultrastrollers—it’s entirely plausible that a humorless young artisan might take to the Internet to teach us regular schlubs How to Sharpen Pencils.
Just wait ’til he brings out his leather strop. (Misplaced yours? Look in your basement, or your grandfather’s tomb.)
Please note that though the video may be satirical, Rees makes actual money sharpening—and authenticating—customers’ Number Two pencils, using the same techniques demonstrated in the video. (Sorry, holiday shoppers, as per his website, he won’t be taking orders for his live pencil sharpening services until the New Year, but he does have a book out.)
Like you need any more excuse to whip out your knife, place it in your dominant hand, and start carving.
In 1992, the Health Education Authority (HEA) began running a series of ads on British television starring the Monty Python comedian and ex-smoker, John Cleese. Smoking remained the #1 cause of premature death in the UK, and the HEA wanted to see if a media campaign could make a dent in the epidemic. As part of a controlled experiment (all detailed here), ads starring Cleese were shown in certain parts of the UK (but not others), and they used morbid humor and macabre scenarios “first to engage the viewers’ curiosity,” and then to “highlight the dangers of smoking, show[ing] the ridiculousness of the smoking habit.” Finally, viewers were given a phone number to call where they could get more information on how to quit.
So what were the results? During the campaign (which ran from 1992 to 1994), the “quitline” received around 20,000 calls overall. Data crunchers later found that the control groups exposed to the ads quit smoking at a higher rate than groups that hadn’t seen the commercials. Plus the relapse rates of the control group were lower than the norm. All of this led the government to conclude that “anti-smoking TV advertising should be undertaken routinely as an essential component of any population smoking reduction strategy.” In this post, we’ve highlighted three of the better preserved ads in the campaign.
You know what I say when someone tells me they “can’t” draw?
Pshaw.
Even those who’ve yet to discover the transformative effects of Lynda Barry’s wonderfully corrective Picture This know how to draw something. Very few children make it to adulthood without picking up some simple geometric formula by which a series of ovals, rectangles and lines can be configured to resemble a doggie head or a brave astride his cantering pony.
A couple thousand renderings later, such magic still satisfies, but you might want to consider branching out. May I recommend the teachings of artist and visual storyteller,Karl Gude? This laid-back former Director of Information Graphics at Newsweek can — and will! — teach you how to draw “great butts” with just five lines.
Gude’s command of posterior essentials is downright heady. (I say this as a former artist’s model whose rear end has been misrepresented on paper more times than I’d care to mention.) Who knew that capturing this part of human anatomy could prove so simple? Gude’s easygoing online instruction style may be traceable to some sort of adult beverage (I’m not casting stones…), but his methods are easy enough for a child to master.
Speaking of which, if you want to make a friend for life, share the above video with an actual child, preferably one who claims he or she “can’t” draw. Put a Sharpie in his or her paw, and within five minutes, Gude will have the little twerp cranking out butts of all shapes and sizes. After which, pride of accomplishment may well lead to some of Gude’s more advanced tutorials, like the detailed human eye seen below.
If that proves too challenging, there’s no shame in sticking with the glutes. To my way of thinking, the mindset that allows the artist to keep going when his pencil snaps mid-demonstration is lesson enough.
“At this post holiday season, the refrigerators of the nation are overstuffed with large masses of turkey, the sight of which is calculated to give an adult an attack of dizziness. It seems, therefore, an appropriate time to give the owners the benefit of my experience as an old gourmet, in using this surplus material.” There writes no less a legend of American letters than F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night (both available in our Free eBooks collection). His words quoted here, from “Turkey Remains and How to Inter Them with Numerous Scarce Recipes,” a column found in the Fitzgerald miscellany collection The Crack-Up, hold just as true this day-after-Thanksgiving as they did during those his lifetime. Lists of Note offers the full piece, which itself offers thirteen potential uses for your leftover bird, some of which, Fitzgerald writes, “have been in my family for generations”:
1. Turkey Cocktail: To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.
2. Turkey à la Francais: Take a large ripe turkey, prepare as for basting and stuff with old watches and chains and monkey meat. Proceed as with cottage pudding.
3. Turkey and Water: Take one turkey and one pan of water. Heat the latter to the boiling point and then put in the refrigerator. When it has jelled, drown the turkey in it. Eat. In preparing this recipe it is best to have a few ham sandwiches around in case things go wrong.
4. Turkey Mongole: Take three butts of salami and a large turkey skeleton, from which the feathers and natural stuffing have been removed. Lay them out on the table and call up some Mongole in the neighborhood to tell you how to proceed from there.
5. Turkey Mousse: Seed a large prone turkey, being careful to remove the bones, flesh, fins, gravy, etc. Blow up with a bicycle pump. Mount in becoming style and hang in the front hall.
6. Stolen Turkey: Walk quickly from the market, and, if accosted, remark with a laugh that it had just flown into your arms and you hadn’t noticed it. Then drop the turkey with the white of one egg—well, anyhow, beat it.
7. Turkey à la Crême: Prepare the crême a day in advance. Deluge the turkey with it and cook for six days over a blast furnace. Wrap in fly paper and serve.
8. Turkey Hash: This is the delight of all connoisseurs of the holiday beast, but few understand how really to prepare it. Like a lobster, it must be plunged alive into boiling water, until it becomes bright red or purple or something, and then before the color fades, placed quickly in a washing machine and allowed to stew in its own gore as it is whirled around. Only then is it ready for hash. To hash, take a large sharp tool like a nail-file or, if none is handy, a bayonet will serve the purpose—and then get at it! Hash it well! Bind the remains with dental floss and serve.
9. Feathered Turkey: To prepare this, a turkey is necessary and a one pounder cannon to compel anyone to eat it. Broil the feathers and stuff with sage-brush, old clothes, almost anything you can dig up. Then sit down and simmer. The feathers are to be eaten like artichokes (and this is not to be confused with the old Roman custom of tickling the throat.)
10. Turkey à la Maryland: Take a plump turkey to a barber’s and have him shaved, or if a female bird, given a facial and a water wave. Then, before killing him, stuff with old newspapers and put him to roost. He can then be served hot or raw, usually with a thick gravy of mineral oil and rubbing alcohol. (Note: This recipe was given me by an old black mammy.)
11. Turkey Remnant: This is one of the most useful recipes for, though not, “chic,” it tells what to do with the turkey after the holiday, and how to extract the most value from it. Take the remants, or, if they have been consumed, take the various plates on which the turkey or its parts have rested and stew them for two hours in milk of magnesia. Stuff with moth-balls.
12. Turkey with Whiskey Sauce: This recipe is for a party of four. Obtain a gallon of whiskey, and allow it to age for several hours. Then serve, allowing one quart for each guest. The next day the turkey should be added, little by little, constantly stirring and basting.
13. For Weddings or Funerals: Obtain a gross of small white boxes such as are used for bride’s cake. Cut the turkey into small squares, roast, stuff, kill, boil, bake and allow to skewer. Now we are ready to begin. Fill each box with a quantity of soup stock and pile in a handy place. As the liquid elapses, the prepared turkey is added until the guests arrive. The boxes delicately tied with white ribbons are then placed in the handbags of the ladies, or in the men’s side pockets.
What, you expected recipes more… followable than these? And perhaps recipes with less alcohol involved? These all make much more sense if you bear in mind Fitzgerald’s formidable creativity, his even more formidable penchant for the drink, and his mordant sense of humor about it all. “I guess that’s enough turkey talk,” concludes this literary icon of my Thanksgiving-celebrating nation. “I hope I’ll never see or hear of another until—well, until next year.” If you haven’t had enough, and indeed feel like getting the jump on next year, see also the Airship’s list of twelve Thanksgiving recipes from favorite authors, including Jonathan Franzen’s pasta with kale, Alice Munro’s rosemary bread pudding, and Ralph Ellison’s sweet yams.
The first of two videos circulating on the internet, “Girls Who Read” by UK poet and “Rogue Teacher” Mark Grist (above) hits back at the lad culture that objectifies women according to certain “bits” named above in some mildly NSFW language. In his video performance piece above, Grist, asked which bits he prefers by a lad in a pub, and faced with a looming cadre of both male and female peers putting on the pressure, answers haltingly, “I like a girl… who … reads.” Then, his confidence up, he elaborates:
I like a girl who reads,
Who needs the written word
And who uses the added vocabulary
She gleans from novels and poetry
To hold lively conversation
In a range of social situations
The ideal girl close to Grist’s heart “ties back her hair as she’s reading Jane Eyre” and “feeds her addiction for fiction with unusual poems and plays.” In his infectious slam cadences, Grist’s impassioned paean to female readers offers a charming alternative to the ladmag gaze, though one might argue that he still does a little bit of projecting his fantasies onto an unsuspecting lone female at the bar (who turns out to be not so alone). Maybe “Girl Who Reads” is a trope, like “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” an idealization that says more about Grist’s desires than about any particular, actual girl, but it’s still a refreshing challenge to the leering of his pubmates, one that communicates to girls that there are men out there, even in the pubs, who value women for their minds.
The video above, for a new line of toys called GoldiBlox, designed by Stanford-educated engineer Debbie Sterling, upends another adolescent male cultural touchstone—this time a by-now classic American one—the Beastie Boys gleefully misogynistic anthem “Girls.” While the original still likely scores many a frat party, it now must compete with the rewrite performed by “Raven.” The re-appropriated “Girls” plays over video of a trio of young girls, bored to death with stereotypical pink tea sets and the like, who build a complicated Rube Goldberg machine from Goldiblox, which resemble plastic tinker toys. I foresee snippets of the updated lyrics (below) making their way onto playgrounds around the country. Hear the original Beastie Boys song, with lyrics, below.
Girls.
You think you know what we want, girls.
Pink and pretty it’s girls.
Just like the 50’s it’s girls.
You like to buy us pink toys
and everything else is for boys
and you can always get us dolls
and we’ll grow up like them… false.
It’s time to change.
We deserve to see a range.
‘Cause all our toys look just the same
and we would like to use our brains.
We are all more than princess maids.
Girls to build the spaceship, Girls to code the new app, Girls to grow up knowing they can engineer that.
Girls.
That’s all we really need is Girls. To bring us up to speed it’s Girls. Our opportunity is Girls. Don’t underestimate Girls.
As with all kids advertising, this is aimed as much at parents—who remember the Beastie Boys’ song—as their kids, who couldn’t possibly. And unlike Grist’s video, which only sells, perhaps, himself, the Goldiblox video aims to get kids hooked on plastic toys as much as any of the ads for products it displaces. Nonetheless, I’ll play it for my daughter in a few years, because lines like “we are all more than princess maids” constitute the perfect retort to the seemingly endless cultural slotting of girls into ridiculously subservient and fantasy roles.
Hemingway once said that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Twain, however, was not only a master of subtlety and humor in fiction, but also a piercingly funny and sometimes scathing essayist whose pen ranged from politics to literary criticism. Despite publishing many biting essays, many of Twain’s best barbs never reached their targets. Instead they remained within the marginalia of his books. In a series of documents made public by the New York Times, Twain’s ire at sloppy writing makes itself known. Some comments, like this one regarding his friend, Rudyard Kipling, are fairly innocuous:
While Kipling got off lightly, John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives seems to have hit a nerve, causing Twain to change the inscription to “translated from the Greek into rotten English by John Dryden; the whole carefully revised and corrected by an ass.” (Up top)
Notes in the margins of Landon D. Melville’s Saratoga in 1901 show that it fared no better. Twain, it appears, renamed the volume, dubbing it “Saratoga in 1891, or The Droolings of An Idiot.”
He also deemed some of the writings to be the “Wailings of an Idiot.”
And, just so there wasn’t any ambiguity about what he thought, Twain labeled Melville a “little minded person.”
On a Thursday afternoon in November of 1863, Edward Everett took to the stage in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to deliver the main address at the Consecration Ceremony of the National Cemetery. Everett was a politician who had served as both a classics professor and president of Harvard University, and was also a renowned orator. His address to the 15,000-strong crowd began on the following grandiloquent note, which Everett proceeded to hold for two hours:
“Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed; grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy.”
Despite this wave of lofty sentiment, Everett’s speech was overshadowed by the 278-word formulation that would forever commemorate that day, delivered by Abraham Lincoln.
Unlike Everett’s remarks, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (whose five versions can be found here) has shown little wear since its delivery on November 19, exactly 150 years ago. While there is some evidence to suggest that the audience was initially nonplussed by the speech’s simple language and striking brevity, today Lincoln’s words are considered to be among the most finely wrought rhetoric in the Western canon: they remain accessible to all, yet seamlessly entwine the thread of equality that ran so clearly through the Declaration of Independence with the idea of the war being essential to the preservation of the Union. One cannot help but suspect that honest Abe failed to grasp the impact that his pithy oration would have; Everett’s subsequent comments to the President, however, prefigured the speech’s historical arc:
“I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
In honor of the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg address, documentarian Ken Burns has embarked on a project called Learn The Address in an attempt to get Americans to record their recitations of the speech. In the mashup below, Burns provides footage of politicians, entertainers, and journalists giving their renditions. We’ve also included some of our favorites, including Stephen Colbert’s highly comical monologue (top) and Jerry Seinfeld explaining the significance of the address to Louis CK, right above.
For more versions of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, including those by President Obama, Conan O’Brien, and Bill O’Reilly, head to Ken Burn’s Learn The Address site.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
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