A woolly mammoth has reportedly been seen and videotaped in Siberia, offering irrefutable proof that the giant hairy prehistoric elephants — believed to have gone extinct thousands of years ago — still exist.

That is, of course, if this new video shows an actual mammoth crossing a Siberian river. According to The Sun, a government engineer, conducting a survey for a potential new road last summer, saw the beast in question in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia.

He supposedly filmed the creature. And here is where so many questions come to mind:

– Why is the original video just 10 seconds long? Is that the only amount of time the videographer had left on his battery? Why couldn’t he have kept shooting to see what the animal would do when it reached the other side of the river?

– Also, as pointed out by Kecia Stewart in The Fayetteville Observer, if you look closely at the full screen version of the video, the river wake appears to follow the animal’s legs, rather than moving briskly downstream.

– If this video was shot last summer, why is it only now being revealed?

– And how is it possible that, once again, a remarkable “smoking gun”-type video is presented to the world by the new P.T. Barnum of the modern era: Paranormal writer Michael Cohen, who claims the copyright on this mammoth video.

The All News Web impresario is not new to presenting incredible out-of-this world videos to an eager audience, hungry to believe in things that are, at best, dubious.

In 2011, Cohen offered “smoking gun” videos of aliens and spaceships.

And now, according to Cohen, people shouldn’t be surprised that there might still be living mammoths.

“Rumours of a handful of mammoths still kicking around in the vast wilderness of Siberia have been circulating for decades and occasionally sightings by locals have occurred,” he’s quoted in The Sun.

“Siberia is an enormous territory and much of it remains completely unexplored and untouched by humans,” he added.

While that may be true, so far the Internet is brimming with commenters who think this mammoth story is a mammoth joke.

“A bear with a fish in its mouth.”
“A fish with a bear in its mouth.”
“It’s funny how videos like these are produced with a very blurry lens.”
“An elephant that fled from a circus!”
“Chuck Norris’ dog.”
“Chupacabra.”

Only one cautionary piece of advice needs mentioning here: Don’t believe everything you see, hear or are told until all the facts are in.

For 32 years, a portrait of a serene Mary Todd Lincoln hung in the governor’s mansion in Springfield, Ill., signed by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, a celebrated painter who lived at the White House for six months in 1864.

The story behind the picture was compelling: Mrs. Lincoln had Mr. Carpenter secretly paint her portrait as a surprise for the president, but he was assassinated before she had a chance to present it to him.

Now it turns out that both the portrait and the touching tale accompanying it are false.

The canvas, which was purchased by Abraham Lincoln’s descendants before being donated to the state’s historical library in the 1970s, was discovered to be a hoax when it was sent to a conservator for cleaning, said James M. Cornelius, the curator of the Lincoln library and museum in Springfield. The museum is planning to present its findings at a lecture on April 26.

“It was a scam to defraud the Lincoln family,” Mr. Cornelius said.

The Lincolns were not the only ones fooled. Ever since The New York Times announced the portrait’s discovery in 1929, on Feb. 12, Lincoln’s birthday, historians and the public have assumed it depicted Mary Todd Lincoln. It was reproduced in The Chicago Tribune and National Geographic, and versions of it still illustrate at least two biographies, including the latest paperback edition of Carl Sandburg’s 1932 “Mary Lincoln – Wife And Widow.”

In reality, the painting depicts an unknown woman and was created by an anonymous 19th-century artist, said Barry Bauman, the independent conservator who uncovered the fraud. The con, however, dates to the late 1920s, when the portrait was recast as that of Mrs. Lincoln, he said.

Mr. Bauman identifies the culprit behind the scam as Ludwig Pflum, who rechristened himself Lew Bloom and was given to the kind of self-invention that America became famous for during the industrial era. He worked as a jockey, circus clown, boxer and vaudevillian before settling on art collecting.

When he died less than a year after the painting’s public unveiling, an obituary in a Reading, Pa., newspaper noted that he “dabbled in oil paintings.” Apparently he dabbled more than anyone at the time realized.

Mr. Bauman, who offers his services pro bono to museums and nonprofit groups, said he believed that Mr. Bloom altered the subject’s facial features; painted over some accessories, including a necklace with a cross; and added a brooch with the president’s picture.

Mr. Bloom concocted a story to accompany his handiwork, saying that Mrs. Lincoln surreptitiously approached Mr. Carpenter while he was at the White House working on his 15-by-9-foot painting, “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation,” which hangs in the Capitol. She had planned a party, he said, where she would give the portrait as a surprise to her husband.

But, as the story went, after John Wilkes Booth shot the president at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, the distraught and impoverished first lady asked Mr. Carpenter to dispose of it. Mr. Carpenter, Mr. Bloom claimed, sold it to a wealthy Philadelphia family, the Neafies, who in turn gave it to Mr. Bloom’s sister Susan, in thanks for her nursing a relative through a long illness.

Mr. Bloom attached a notarized affidavit attesting to this fabricated history on the back of the painting before exhibiting it as a “never-before-seen-portrait” in 1929 at Milch Galleries in Manhattan. “Bloom knew he could get away with it, for all of the individuals mentioned in the affidavit were dead,” Mr. Bauman said. “The smoking gun,” he explained, was that Mr. Bloom’s sister had been only 5 when the Neafie relative died.

Mr. Cornelius explained that the Lincoln family was an easy mark at the time. The president’s only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, had died in 1926. Robert’s widow, Mary Harlan Lincoln, was still trying to stifle negative publicity about the Lincolns and even paid to squelch a series of articles about Robert’s institutionalizing his mentally unstable mother against her will in 1875. So Mr. Bloom most likely assumed that something that presented Mrs. Lincoln in a sympathetic light would appeal to the family, Mr. Cornelius said. Robert’s daughter, Jessie, bought the painting for $2,000 to $3,000.

It remained in the family’s hands until 1976, when Lincoln’s last living descendant, his great-grandson, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, gave the portrait to the Illinois State Historical Library (since renamed the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum).

The portrait was then sent to the Art Institute of Chicago, where conservators quickly realized that significant parts of the canvas had been retouched.

The underlying portrait, they found, was of a different, plainer woman and painted in a different style. She was wearing a cross, which would have been a bit odd for Mary, a Protestant. They also recognized that a brooch featuring the president’s picture that Mrs. Lincoln wore in the retouched painting had been added later.

Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar, said that Mrs. Lincoln always hated the 1857 photograph on which the brooch’s likeness of the president was based, complaining about “the disordered condition of his hair.”

“If Frank Carpenter had ever produced a picture with that image, Mary would have broken it over his head,” Mr. Holzer said.

But if the Art Institute conservators suspected fraud, there is nothing in their correspondence to indicate it, Mr. Cornelius said. In letters from 1977 and 1978, they suggest that the changes were the result of “heavy-handed” restorers who had preceded them. As for the lack of resemblance to Mrs. Lincoln, a conservator wrote that “many an artist idealizes their sitter.”

The state historian at the time, William Alderfer, instructed the conservators to leave in both the Lincoln brooch and the cross, and the reworked painting was then hung in the governor’s mansion.

As it turns out, Mr. Bauman remembers the painting’s being worked on when he was an assistant curator at the Art Institute in 1977 and 1978. Although there is no mention of the artist’s signature in the letters, he said his predecessors must have noticed that “F. B. Carpenter” had been added later, because it clearly had been placed atop the original varnish.

Musing on why they did not delve deeper into the inconsistencies, Mr. Bauman said that conservators often considered the objects they worked on like foster children. “We didn’t create them, but somehow they become part of our lives, and we want to see them succeed,” he said.

Last May Mr. Cornelius visited Mr. Bauman’s studio, and the two men discussed what Mr. Bauman had found. They stared at the portrait for a long while, Mr. Bauman recalled; then Mr. Cornelius declared, “It’s not Mary Lincoln.”

Mr. Bauman replied, “Not only is it not Mary Lincoln, it’s not Francis Carpenter.”

The restored portrait will not be returned to the governor’s mansion, Mr. Cornelius said. The original painting of the now unknown woman may be hung in the Lincoln library. It has lost most of its value (it is insured for $400,000), he said, but it still comes with an intriguing story.

And this one has the benefit of being true.

One of the oldest former members of the infamous Cambridge Night Climbers has died, aged 94.

Nares Craig, who studied at Trinity in the 1930s, was well-known for his activity in the elusive Night Climbers.

This small and select group of daredevils ran, jumped and swang over the rooftops of Cambridge under the cover of darkness, just for kicks.

Back in the day, Nares made his name by climbing King’s Chapel to hang an effigy of King George VI just before his coronation.

Writing in his memoirs, Nares remembered ‘a rash of bunting and union jacks’ appearing all over Cambridge.

‘It prompted me,’ he said, ‘to think of some appropriate way of mocking the whole pantomime of royalty.’

So with a mate and a model of the future King, he scaled the Chapel but was unfortunately stopped by porters, hearing the squeaking pulleys hoisting the effigy. Nares and his friend were rusticated for the rest of the term.

This original prankster’s legacy lives on today – the Night Climbers made headlines in December 2009 for planting 25 Christmas Hats on Cambridge’s dreaming spires.

Nowadays they’re tough to track down, but many Cantabs have seen them running off into the night.

David Wilson, a second year at Clare remembers how he once saw a climber running over the top of Trinity.

‘I was utterly gobsmacked at seeing someone running along the rooftops,’ says David. ‘It’s sad that such a daring former Night Climber has passed away, but he’s gone down in history as Cambridge legend.’

Grand Central Art Center is exploring one of America’s most playful fringe organizations in ‘The Cacophony Society – Zone Show.’

Multi-colored fliers line the walls outside Grand Central Art Center’s Main Gallery. A blue banner hangs from the ceiling and reads, “Welcome Homeland Security.”

A red, black and white sign just inside the Main Gallery mysteriously states: “You may already be a member.” Further inside, chaos and mayhem ensue.

“The Cacophony Society – Zone Show” is the newest exhibition at Santa Ana’s Grand Central Art Center. It opened Feb. 4 with a massive reception attended by thousands crowding the Artists Village, and continues through April 15.

The show looks back at a series of events, pranks and performances by Cacophony Societies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, New York and, before them, the original Suicide Club of San Francisco.

For the uninitiated, the Cacophony Society – created in 1986 – is a loosely organized collective of guerrilla artists, Dada pranksters and oddball eccentrics seeking “experiences beyond the mainstream.” The society grew out of the ashes of the Suicide Club, founded in San Francisco in 1977.

Cacophony Society members have a taste for surrealist sabotage, gluing toasters to light posts, infiltrating cults, and filling teddy bears with cement and placing them on actual store shelves.

The society’s best-known activities have been the Burning Man festival at Black Rock Desert in Nevada, and Santa Claus rampages that have occurred in cities around the world. One society member, Chuck Palahniuk, penned a Cacophony-inspired novel titled “Fight Club,” which became a major 1999 motion picture starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.

The Grand Central exhibit was organized by Cal State Fullerton professor and gallery director Mike McGee and members of the Los Angeles Cacophony Society, namely Al Ridenour, Jon Alloway and Albert Cuellar. The show is filled with fliers, posters, photographs, costumes, installations, gag products and original art overhead – none of which is labeled.

“The style of Cacophony is madhouse,” said Ridenour, founder of the L.A. Cacophony Society. “It’s dense, with lots of angles. The show consists of old props from events, photos, videos and loops. There’s footage from events. It’s meant to be an immersive experience.”

Without a doubt, there’s a lot of clowning going on in the Cacophony Society. Members have often dressed up in clown costumes and acted accordingly.
But members have also worn dog costumes and crashed a Beverly Hills dog show. They’ve put on bandages, fake blood and zombie makeup and attended political conventions, holding signs that scream, “Zombies for Gore.” And, of course, they’ve donned the red and white Santa outfits and careened through downtown districts with drunken abandon, prompting the city of Portland to respond with police in full riot gear in 1996.

“Their whole thing is really about nihilism, and about a celebration of the individual,” McGee said. “It’s the individual over corporate mentality. They’re always trying to do things that get people to look at things differently.”

A Created Controversy?

Before it even opened, the Santa Ana exhibition caused some controversy, though much of it was self-generated. When organizers of the exhibit and the reception outside were in the process of obtaining permits, their plans fell under the scrutiny of Downtown Incorporated of Santa Ana, which produces street fairs and Santa Ana’s monthly Art Walk, and a police officer in charge of issuing permits for the city.

Mike McCoy, who works for the Santa Ana Police Department’s Division of Homeland Security, raised concerns about initial aims to set objects on fire with a barbecue propellant. He voiced those concerns to Vicky Baxter, executive director of Downtown Inc., who subsequently asked the exhibit’s organizers for details on the opening night activities.

Here’s where things got a little screwy. Either intentionally or accidentally, members of the L.A. Cacophony Society saw “Homeland Security” and immediately set off the alarms to their constituents. On its website, cacophony.org, and through press releases, the Cacophony Society warned that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was getting involved in a peaceful domestic assembly, inquiring in Big Brother fashion about the activities planned for the Feb. 4 opening.

In reality, the federal Department of Homeland Security was never involved. It was just McCoy, the officer who works for the Santa Ana Police’s Division of Homeland Security, and for a few days, a handful of people managed to create a firestorm out of mere kindling.

McCoy declined comment, but Cpl. Anthony Bertagna, spokesman for the Santa Ana Police Department, said, “They’ve got the wrong Homeland Security. Part of (McCoy’s) regular duties are to work with city staff to approve and review city permits.”

“The whole brouhaha is kind of funny,” McGee said at the time. “The Cacophony Society wanted to burn piñatas but they can’t. ‘Homeland Security’ is a red herring. It’s just Mike (McCoy’s) title.”

The made-up controversy did attract attention, however, and between 3,500 and 4,000 people showed up to the opening reception, held on the promenade outside Grand Central in conjunction with Santa Ana’s monthly Art Walk. A bevy of art cars, zany performances and musical acts were part of the festivities. Even a Homeland Security Hospitality Station was set up, offering free coffee and donuts.

Into and Out of the Zone

Though the Feb. 4 opening was a well-attended event, Cacophony Societies (or lodges) in Los Angeles and other cities slowed down their activities by 2003 or so. The aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and America’s heightened sense of security have had something to do with it, says Alloway, a Cacophony member and director of the documentary, “Into the Zone: The Story of the Cacophony Society.”

“It was a really, really great thing in its time,” said Alloway, who describes himself as “terminally 39″ years old. “It did a lot for me, it did a lot for a lot for a lot of people, but it was a very temporal experience, and that time has passed. It never had any grander aspirations whatsoever. It was just doing stuff for fun.”

Over the years, Alloway attended many Cacophony events, and he filmed a number of them. He assembled the footage, plus interviews with Palahniuk and other Cacophony members, into his documentary, which he screened to a sold-out audience at Santa Ana’s Yost Theatre on Feb. 4.

Alloway is still putting finishing touches on his film. He hopes to show it at different events across the country, including art car gatherings, and in Europe. You can learn more about the documentary at intothezonemovie.com.

As for L.A. founder Ridenour, he’s thinking about writing a book about the Cacophony experience.

“It’s important because it tells people that you can go further,” said Ridenour, who happens to be married to comedian and actress Margaret Cho.

“There are circumscribed limits you have on your life. You don’t need to stay within those. You can go beyond those. There are experiences that you can have in the middle of the night in abandoned buildings. … It’s out there, and there are groups that have done it. You needn’t feel alone, if that’s something that’s exciting to you, if your life has become repetitive or boring or meaningless. It’s that kind of stimulation of breaking some rules.”

Related link:

A Stealthy Inmate Added a Pig to the Vermont State Troopers’ Squad Cars
by Emma Carmichael
Gawker
February 2, 2012

The prisoners working out of a St. Albans, Vt. shop that produces car decals and license plates successfully sneaked a small outline of a pig onto the official crest that adorns every trooper car in the state. The heifer now has a pig as a spot.

No, this is not some leaked plot line to the Super Troopers sequel that will never happen; this is real life, and it is brilliant. Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn told the Burlington Free Press that “about three dozen” of the redesigned decals are now on trooper cars and—this being Vermont, my dear home state—no one is even remotely mad about it:

The disclosure brought chuckles to both Flynn and Senate President Pro Tempore John Campbell, D-Windsor, who are both former police officers.

“This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago. We can see the humor,” Flynn said.

But there’s always room for some stern moralizing from the system, isn’t there?

“If that person had used some of that creativeness,” Flynn added, “he or she would not have ended up inside.”

Tongan luger Bruno Banani exposed as a German marketing hoax
by Helen Pidd in Berlin
The Guardian
31 January 2012

Story of winter Olympics hopeful who bore same name as German underwear firm too good to be true

They say if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. So when news surfaced in Germany of a promising young luger from the tropical islands of Tonga who bore the same name as a racy German underwear firm with a dream of sledding to victory at the Olympics, scepticism might well have been warranted.

But the story was too delicious. Bruno Banani, 24, ostensibly the son of a coconut farmer from the South Pacific nation, was aiming to be Tonga’s first ever competitor at a winter Olympic games. In doing so, went the story, he was fulfilling the wish of the Tongan Princess Royal, Salote Mafile’o Pilolevu Tuita, whose life’s ambition was to see a citizen from her sun-drenched isles triumph among the ice and snow of the world’s premier cold weather sporting contest.

When Banani, whose catchphrase was “coconut powered”, was unveiled to the German media, he was naturally sponsored by Bruno Banani, a purveyor of knickers and bras from the east German city of Chemnitz.

But he seemed legit. After all, he had been invited to train with the world-beating German luge team. They had apparently taken pity on the Tongan, whose upbringing on the resolutely snowless islands had not best prepared him for a lifetime of hurtling feet-first down a treacherously slippery track at 80mph. It was like the film Cool Runnings which was about Jamaica’s first bobsled team trying to make it to the Olympics. But now an investigation by Der Spiegel magazine has revealed that the plucky luger really was too good to be true – not in fact christened Bruno Banani by his mother, but by some mischief-making opportunists at a marketing company in Leipzig.

According to Spiegel, certain elements of the Banani story are true. He is indeed 24 and until his move to Germany was one of the 106,000 inhabitants of Tonga. He did attend a “casting” session on the islands in 2008, hosted by the German luge champion Isabel Barschinski. And yes, the Princess Royal did actually dream of getting a Tongan to the Winter Olympics.

But it’s here that the Banani myth starts to become detached from reality. It seems that the young IT student who was picked for luge success was actually called Fuahea Semi and was not the son of a man who farmed coconuts, but cassava. At this point a marketing firm called Makai came into play, according to Der Spiegel. At the final selection round in Tonga, it intervened and somehow arranged for a passport to be issued for Semi in the name of Bruno Banani.

And, presumably reasoning that most people hadn’t heard of cassava, it rewrote his father’s history so that he farmed coconuts instead.

The Guardian contacted Mathias Ihle, the boss of Makai Europe, to see if everything Spiegel reported was true, and ask for an interview with Banani/Semi. In an emailed response, Ihle thanked us for our interest and said that with regret, his client would not be available for an interview.

“Bruno is about to compete at the luge world championships [held in Altenberg, east Germany, from 6 February] and we are trying to make things as calm as possible around him, especially after the [Spiegel] article. Unfortunately I cannot help you further,” wrote Ihle. Norbert Loch, the trainer of the German national luge squad, did not respond to inquiries. Whether the International Olympic Committee, which has very strict rules about sponsorship, allows Banani to compete at the 2014 Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi remains to be seen. Although it may not come to that: when Banani tried to qualify for the 2010 Vancouver games, he crashed out and ended up in hospital with concussion.

More on this story:

SOMarts presents:

I Am Crime: Art on the Edge of Law is an exhibition of more than 20 artists and collectives who challenge, question or circumvent the law through their work. Curated by Justin Hoover, I Am Crime touches on issues of equity—who gets to break the law, when, and why. “True Crime,” a collaborative installation conceived by Critical Art Ensemble, preserves equity by inviting any visitor to become part of the exhibition – click here for details.

In I Am Crime some artists’ criminal trespasses are virtual or accidental, while others contribute documentation of carefully planned civil disobedience. Still others exhibit the residue of artworks which have actually been intervened upon by the United States legal system.

Dreamers Adrift, a group founded by Jesus Iñiguez and Julio Salgado, approach illegality from a different angle. “Undocumented and Awkward,” a series of skits on video created by and for undocumented youth, highlights social inequalities faced by American immigrants.

Non-anonymous exhibiting artists include: 4Gentlemen, Miguel Arzabe, Ray Beldner, Oscar Brett, Lisa K. Blatt, Mike Bonanno, Danny Buskirk, Susie Cagle, Critical Art Ensemble, Dreamers Adrift, John Craig Freeman, Molly Hankwitz, Jesus Iñiguez, Lily & Honglei, Stewart Long, Mark McCloud, Ann Messner, Guy Overfelt, Mark Pauline/Survival Research Labs, PLOTS, Favianna Rodriguez, Julio Salgado, Zefrey Throwell, Hans Winkler, The Yes Men, Michael Zheng

photo: Bess Adler, courtesy of The Yes Men

Almost immediately people began anonymously altering the ads:

Garth Johnston of Gothamist issued a challenge to anyone wishing to have their way with the ads. The contest is now closed, and here are some of multitudes of submissions (some are real and some are altered on computers):

More examples:

Efforts to create the Haight-Ashbury Museum of Psychedelic Art and History are underway.

From the IndieGogo fundraising website:

The Haight-Ashbury movement left an undeniable impact upon the world and the reverberations of the psychedelic sixties are still being felt today. Strangely there is no museum dedicated to keeping the history alive and relevant for the millions of visitors who come to San Francisco searching for inspiration and authenticity. A non-profit community supported museum will permanently cement San Francisco as the home of psychedelia. Our intention is for the museum to become an attraction in and of itself that will educate and inspire visitors for generations to come to reinvent the world according to how they want to live.

Watch the video narrated by Peter Coyote…

For more information: Haight Ashbury Museum of Psychedelic Art and History or send an email to info @ haightashburymuseum.com.

PUBLIC transport users are literally being thrown off their seats in bus shelters as part of a bizarre protest against the Brisbane City Council’s apparent response to homelessness.

An “unofficial” public artwork in William St, the city, features a bench that tilts forward when used – tipping people off.

A spokesman for the artists’ group, who wanted to remain anonymous, said the so-called “bitter bench” was installed without council permission on the site of a recently removed bus shelter popular among Brisbane’s homeless.

“We installed the artwork to draw attention to a side of the city being airbrushed away in the interests of commercial priorities,” the spokesman said.

“It seems the more business-friendly Brisbane becomes, the more the city’s most vulnerable are targeted for harassment and contempt.”

Joe Hurley, of the West End Community Centre, said most of the seats in bus shelters had been removed in the past few years, at the request of local businesses.

“It has the effect of moving on homeless people to spaces that are much less public and much less visible,” Mr Hurley said.

“It also impacts seniors, who get quite perturbed that the bus seats are missing.”

A spokesman for Lord Mayor Graham Quirk denied the council made a decision to deliberately remove seats from shelters.

But Cr Helen Abrahams said a stocktake of public seats around West End found eight of 15 seats installed by the Soorley administration had been pulled out.

A subversive spotlight
by Karen Michelmore
abc.net.au
3 February, 2012

Sacred cows make the best hamburgers, says the activist who defaced an Australian icon.

It’s been eight years since David Burgess scaled up to the top of Sydney’s gleaming white Opera House and lashed it with bright red paint.

It took three coats before the act was complete. NO WAR screamed the sign.

The highly-visible protest against the looming Iraq war split the Australian community between those who were shocked at the wonton vandalism of the national icon, and those who applauded the message.

Ultimately, it landed Mr Burgess and his activist peer Will Saunders in jail for nine months’ weekend detention for malicious damage.

“I won’t say there were days I didn’t wake up feeling utterly miserable, but you couldn’t really regret what we’d done,” Burgess says.

“A lot of people said it gave them a little bit of happiness or hope on what was otherwise a very awful day.

“I think if we’d had the idea and then not gone through with it we would have wondered or thought we should have done that.

“A punishment is meant to make you think about what you did and they certainly succeeded in doing that, but I don’t regret it.”

The protest was an act of “culture-jamming”, a strategy that political psychologist Emma Thomas says often polarises communities.

Culture jamming is the subject of a controversial new exhibition to be unveiled at the Museum of Sydney next week (February 11).

“The more sensational something is, the more it is potentially polarising so it’s got this double-edged sword element to it,” says Dr Thomas, of Murdoch University.

“On one hand you do gain media attention for your cause…but on the downside it does also polarise public attention.

“It can certainly turn a lot of people against you.

“If people don’t agree with your means then they will often not identify with your cause as well.”

Dr Thomas says culture jamming is a form of social protest, often employed by smaller groups to effect social change, to raise awareness and influence the public and political process.

“If you are trying to create a baseline awareness of an issue you really need to do something a lot more dramatic and that is where culture jamming and other …more radical strategies really come in,” she says.

The Museum of Sydney exhibition features the work of award-winning photojournalist Dean Sewell who followed a small group of Sydney-based culture jammers known as The Lonely Station for four years.

The handful of activists were responsible for up to two dozen culture jamming events across the city, between 2003 and 2007 including unfurling a banner on the maiden journey of a tourist ship from Sydney to Tasmania which said “Woodchipping – the Spirit of Tasmania”.

Museum of Sydney Curator Inara Walden says some people consider culture jamming to be illegal graffiti, while others believe it is a legitimate form of social commentary.

“I think that one of the things that we believe at the Museum of Sydney is that museums can be safe places for difficult subjects to be discussed,” Ms Walden says.

“I think that something like culture jamming, while it might be controversial and some people might see it as illegal activity, or something that is wrong, there will always be other people who will say well what culture jammers do is in fact legitimate political comment.

“It’s a comment on corporate behaviour and often bad corporate behaviour.”
The first culture jamming in Australia happened long before The Lonely Station, and even Mr Burgess’ infamous protest on top of the Opera House.

Ms Walden says the BUGAUP – pronounced bugger-up – was a group of protestors who scrawled anti-tobacco messages on billboards across Australia during the 1970s and 1980s.

Peter Vogel, now 57, was in his early 20s when he took part in the Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGAUP) campaign.

The movement “refaced” tobacco, alcohol and other billboards deemed harmful to health, adjusting messages like Sterling cigarettes’ “what a Sterling idea”, to “what a stinking idea”, or changing “Marlboro” to “Macho”.

“It was a group of activists who in the 70s were particularly incensed about cigarettes,” Mr Vogel says.

“We decided that we would use the billboards against themselves by turning them into humorous messages that would draw attention to what they were really saying.

“I was driving along and I saw a billboard that someone already had refaced and it just completely captured my imagination and I thought, ‘this is a fantastic way to use the medium against itself and I just immediately took to it like a duck to water.”

The billboard offensive raised public awareness about the extent of tobacco advertising at the time, and gradually led to tighter restrictions placed on cigarette advertising, Mr Vogel says.

Mr Vogel says it was a different environment in Australia back then, well before September 11, when people were more laid back and access to buildings was easier.

“It was a protest that people supported because it was light-hearted and entertaining and people just had to agree with our message more than the advertiser’s message,” he says.

“It was generally not as high risk as it is today.”
Opera House protestor Dave Burgess says safety was paramount during their 2003 act.

“There would be only one thing more embarrassing than being prosecuted for it, (that) would be not even making it in the first place and being injured at the bottom and showing a complete foolhardiness and incompetence,” he says.

“Once we got up…I think we did three paint jobs, sort of rough, neat and very neat, and once I think the second coat of paint was going on and I realised the message had got up there, we were feeling quite emotional I suppose.

“It was deathly quiet up there, the roar of the city was well away and it was exceedingly peaceful on one of those beautiful Sydney days.

“Strangely enough when the police rescue squad got to us we talked about how nice it was up there, and all took a moment to look around before we came down.”

He says even years later, people remain divided.

“Some people utterly supported it while others would argue that the ABC shouldn’t even be giving me the time of day,” he says.

“The first thing I’d say is that it was cleaned up. The second thing I would say is that sacred cows make the best hamburgers.

“We wanted that message to be seen overseas and for people to know that …70 odd per cent of Australians were polling against the war in Iraq.

“A friend of mine who’d been in Iraq at the time, she’d been in a cafe and the television came on with the image on it and she said the whole place cheered.
“And that essentially is exactly what I wanted to achieve out of defacing an Australian icon.”

by freddiew: Just some cool dudes making sweet vids with rad FX!

via: GeeksAreSexy.net

The World’s Weirdest Restaurants
by Justine Sterling
Food & Wine
January 28, 2012

A380 In-Flight Kitchen; Taipei, Taiwan

This Taipei spot replicates the in-flight experience with an interior designed to look like an airplane cabin with servers dressed like flight attendants who wheel around food and beverage carts.

Fortezza Medicea Restaurant; Volterra, Italy

In Italy, one of the toughest restaurants to get into is this oddly situated one, set inside a prison and staffed almost entirely by inmates (don’t worry, the cutlery is plastic). One reason for the waits of up to two months is that it’s hugely popular; the other is that every diner needs to be screened by Rome’s Ministry of Justice.

Modern Toilet; Taipei, Taiwan

The original toilet-themed restaurant in Taipei has been so wildly successful that a dozen branches have opened across Taiwan. At all of them, diners are seated on standard-sized toilets and eat out of miniature ones. Drinks, though, are served in tiny urinals.

Clinic; Singapore

At this Singaporean hospital-themed restaurant and club, the rooms are pill-shaped, and the seating is on golden wheelchairs and metal hospital beds that have been converted into banquettes.

To see more, visit Slate.com

Joseph Maturo Jr. In Serious Damage Control Mode Following Jest Gone Awry

EAST HAVEN, Conn. (CBSNewYork/AP) — The office of East Haven’s mayor was blasted with prank phone calls and a delivery of hundreds of tacos Thursday after his now-famous quip that he would address accusations of anti-Latino bias by eating tacos, a remark that left emotions raw in the town’s large Hispanic community.

Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. has apologized several times but resisted calls for his resignation over remarks he made to a television reporter following Tuesday’s arrests of four town police officers, men described by one FBI official as “bullies with badges.”

Maturo held regular meetings Thursday as Connecticut’s Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission called on him to resign.

“The Latino community is upset and deeply wounded in what should have been a day of redemption for them,” the commission’s acting executive director, Werner Oyandel, said in a written statement, calling the comment “unprofessional and given in poor taste.”

Watch Maturo’s ‘Taco’ interview below (YouTube)

An immigration rights group, Reform Immigration for America, delivered 400 tacos to his Town Hall office in protest, though Maturo had left shortly beforehand for a meeting. A soup kitchen picked up the tacos, but one was left symbolically for the mayor.

The group had asked the public to text TACO to 69866 all this week and said they would send an actual taco for every text they received.

In a statement released by his office, Maturo said the abundance of tacos highlights the need for healing in the town.

“The events of the past few days have focused our Town, and my administration, on the need to deal sensitively and compassionately with the challenges currently facing our Town,” he said.

His office fielded a steady flow of calls, some with prank comments about tacos and others from supporters who want him to stay in his job.

Maturo has been mayor off and on since 1997 in this predominantly white, blue-collar town on the shore of Long Island Sound where Latino residents comprise about 10 percent of its population of 29,000. East Haven has been under federal scrutiny since the U.S. Justice Department launched a civil rights probe in 2009 that found discrimination and biased policing against Latinos.

A federal indictment accuses the four police officers of assaulting people while they were handcuffed, unlawfully searching Latino businesses, and harassing and intimidating people, including advocates, witnesses and other officers who tried to investigate or report misconduct or abuse.

The taco flap came after a reporter asked Maturo on Tuesday, “What are you doing for the Latino community today?”

Maturo’s response: “I might have tacos when I go home; I’m not quite sure yet.”

Maturo, who is of Italian heritage, then said he might have spaghetti or any other kind of ethnic food, growing increasingly angry as he told Diaz to “go for it, take your best shot” to make the “taco” comment seem to imply something he did not intend.

He has called himself a “jerk” for the comment, which he called an off-the-cuff quip made at the end of a long, stressful day of interviews.

The video of Maturo’s comments has spread across the Internet on social networks and media websites. It led Connecticut’s largest paper, The Hartford Courant, to call for his resignation in an editorial that declared: “The Mayor is an Idiot.” A Facebook page demanding Maturo’s resignation had more than 750 supporters Thursday afternoon.

The town’s Democratic Party is demanding the resignation of Maturo, a Republican, and he has fielded criticism from state and local officials including Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who said on a conference call Thursday from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Maturo’s remarks were “pretty bone-headed.”

Many residents were still angry Thursday in East Haven, where 38-year-old Jose Tapia, a cook originally from Ecuador, joked, “We’ve got tacos!” as he left a bakery with a bag of bread.

“I took it as a joke, but deep inside, it’s the true version of racist, that comment,” he said.

Pedro Gutierrez, the owner of the Guti’z Bakery, said the comment showed the mayor is out of touch because many Latinos in East Haven are from Ecuador, where tacos are not a part of cuisine, as they are in Mexico. But he said it also shows disrespect for all Hispanics.

“He clearly thinks of us as a third-class people,” he said.

Others were more forgiving, saying they viewed the comment as a misstep, but not something that should end Maturo’s political career.

Others in East Haven said people are being too sensitive.

Paul Esposito, 70, a lifelong resident, made a special trip Thursday to East Haven Town Hall to express his support, telling Maturo’s receptionists, “I don’t want him to resign. People make mistakes all the time.”

Those who know Maturo say that he’s not an idiot or a bigot, but that if the taco comment was meant to be a joke, it was clearly a misstep they think he genuinely regrets.

“It’s baloney. They’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” said Michael Liso, 65, who said he worked as a firefighter with Maturo and has known him for 40 years. “That’s why you put erasers on pencils. — It’s over and done with. Now let’s move forward.”

Maturo, 60, asked East Haven residents in a written apology Wednesday to “have faith in me” and the town. Whether he can make peace soon with Latino residents upset by his taco comment remains to be seen.

Marcia Chacon, a native of Ecuador and co-owner of My Country Store, said the one remark by Maturo destroyed some of the goodwill he had earned in the community by hosting a recent open house with the police department.

“We realized that he is a racist person,” she said. “We realized it is worse than we thought.”

Maturo has said he will no longer publicly discuss the quip. Messages left for several of his political allies at the state and local levels were not immediately returned Wednesday and Thursday.