Occasionally in design, things just go wrong without you even knowing. Here’s a silly example I found in Québec city a few years ago—an ad for a video rental store. The content is a classy message about film being an art form, but for an english speaker, there is a decent chance they’ll mainly see the word “Fart”.
See also, the now-defunct Creatifart (which sounds just fine in French).
One of the most bizarre tourist attractions in Lithuania’s capital of Vilnius, a city which, under its skin, has a lot of off-key humour already, is their statue of Frank Zappa. There is no link between the musician and the city. The statue was basically a joke, the product of a somewhat ironic Zappa fan club, which reportedly put together exhibitions of documents about his apparent love of Lithuania before they finally built the statue.
But there was never any relationship between Zappa and Lithuania, it was all basically a big joke. A very elaborate joke, taken very far.
Sean from Said the Gramophone has a neat little piece in the Guardian about a copy of the statue moving back to Baltimore—Zappa’s home.
Here’s a silly post for late on a Sunday afternoon. I was playing a borrowed copy of the recent DS game Kirby Squeek Squad (Hey, I like my old-school side scrollers), when I ran across this accidental bit of cartoon obscenity:
For those of you wondering, that’s actually his belly-button. An outie. A really outie. A so-outie it looks like something altogether more obscene. This has not been modified in any way.
I was understandably shocked. This character is like this for the entire mini-game. It’s something straight out of The Accidental Video Game Porn Archive. I just have to wonder how many people neglected to catch this during the development process.
This is the poster for the Czech version of Ghostbusters. There are lots more here.
Songsmith is a piece of software made by Microsoft which helps those of us without any musical talent make music, sort of. You sing into a microphone, the software runs it through its algorithms, and spits out a new version with accompanying background music. For those of us with roughly the musical ability of a two-year old banging on a pot with a wooden spoon, this is actually has some appeal.
Some people realized that you could feed in the vocal tracks from some popular songs, and you’d get out whole new version of the song.
I never thought I’d ever post something by Rush on the blog, but here’s Songsmith’s version of Tom Sawyer:
See also: Eye of the Tiger, Buddy Holly, Creep, Notorious B.I.G., and Sgt. Pepper.
Doesn’t look like anyone has tried putting in Bohemian Rhapsody, but someone should.
Via Vorg.
Science news recently published a report which claims that the un-sticking of sticky tape produces small amounts of x-rays. In their test they quickly unroll a roll of standard tape next to a plate of x-ray film (similar to something found in a dentist’s office). Unbelievably, it captures an image, and also registers on a geiger-counter.
Unrolling anything from regular sticky tape to duct tape produces a glow that, although faint, is easy to see in a completely dark room. The fact that X-rays, which are thousands of times more energetic than ordinary visible-light photons, can also be produced was first hinted at in a 1953 Russian experiment but seems to have been little-known.
There is apparently no explanation for this.
Originally reported in Nature, but a good summary can be read on Science News.
Dave Soldier and Komar & Melamid are the producers of The People’s Choice Music, an EP of sorts created based on an internet survey in order to create a song which would statistically appeal to the most number of people. On the flip side, they also produced a song which would appeal to the least number of people possible.
The favourite song “comprises a moderately sized group (three to ten instruments) consisting of guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, cello, synthesizer, with low male and female vocals singing in rock/r&b style”. Not that surprising, considering what appears on top40 radio.
Much better is the least wanted song. At 26 minutes, it features “accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer”.
“An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and ‘elevator’ music, and a children’s choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays”
Visit the project page.
Stream the Most Wanted and Least Wanted.
Via This American Life.
This is the time of year where we start seeing innumerable year-end best-of lists. Sean of Said the Gramophone, who kindly did some guest posts here this week, has one of the best: his 50 Best Songs of the Year. They’re in MP3 form and ready for downloading. It’s a great way to learn about new music you may not usually hear.
This is also following fellow Gramophone writer Dan Beirne’s Top 10 Albums of 2008.