In January, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can spend unlimited $$ in our elections. In July, Target gave $150,000 to the anti-gay, anti-worker candidate for Gov. of MN. Last week, a quarter million people pledged to boycott Target.

Yesterday . . .

Learn more — Take Action — Sign the Petition at www.targetboycott.org

Lego Hello World, by horseattack

thanks Erin, via nerdist & likecool

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Ramsey Bros. Pictures pays tribute to Hollywood’s Golden Age. The Glitz. The Glamor. The Grammar.

thanks Erin

Urban fox hunt video was hoax aimed at the media, say film-makers
by Paul Lewis
Guardian.co.uk
6 August 2010

Chris Atkins explains how he hoaxed the press into printing stories about urban fox hunters.

It was the internet video that sparked a media outcry: grainy footage that seemed to show four masked men drugging a fox and later beating it to death with cricket bats in a London park that was posted on YouTube and Facebook earlier this week.

But the Guardian can reveal that the new sport of “urban foxhunting” was an elaborate hoax. The film-makers, Chris Atkins and Johnny Howorth, said no real foxes were harmed in the film, which was intended as a satirical swipe at “media hysteria” over the danger of urban foxes.

Animal rights campaigners had expressed fury over the “bloodthirsty” huntsmen, eliciting the support of MPs on Twitter and prompting an inquiry by the Metropolitan police’s wildlife crime unit.

YouTube and Facebook removed the footage and the controversy was covered in news outlets including the Guardian, the Times, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail. The BBC was also duped, sending a reporter to Victoria Park, Hackney – the supposed scene of the crime. Amid a growing furore, the animal welfare group League Against Cruel Sports launched a campaign against urban foxhunting, while the RSPCA said it was investigating.

In today’s London Evening Standard, columnist Sebastian Shakespeare went so far as to celebrate urban foxhunting as the first and best example of David Cameron’s “big society” in action.

In fact, the dead animal in the footage was played by a stuffed fox, the film-makers told the Guardian, while the live fox was played by a pet dog, Monty, with a bushy tail taped to its hindquarters.

The pair said they made their film “deliberately Pythonesque” in a bid to lampoon the media hysteria over urban foxes, and were surprised when the video was so widely assumed to be authentic.

But Atkins and Howorth conceded their stunt had got out of hand. Reports of urban fox hunting in London had spread to India and the Netherlands, while in Hackney, leaflets were being handed around seeking to identify the supposed huntsman.

John Bryant, who offers a “human deterrence” service for wild animals, announced he would offer a £1,000 reward for anyone who identified the “monsters”. The bounty was matched within hours by the Fox Project, a sanctuary in Kent.

Online, more extremist elements were posting death threats against the makers of the video.

Atkins, 34, and Howorth, 27, both from east London, said they meant no harm by the stunt. Both said they were staunchly against foxhunting. Atkins said he attended hunt saboteur events in his teens, and hoped public revulsion over the notion of urban fox-baiting would discourage the coalition government from repealing the hunting ban.

“The film shows what actually happens when foxes are hunted, in contrast to the romanticised image of sprightly gents on horseback carrying out a noble tradition,” he said.

The pair provided the Guardian with footage of their filming expedition in the park, which showed them giggling as they chased what was clearly a pet dog across a park.

Although the footage included shots of real foxes eating dog food and, separately, men lacing dog food with the sedative Xanax, the poisoned bait was not fed to any live animals.

“We are very sorry for troubling the RSPCA, the police and well-meaning animal lovers, but hope they understand that this was done to illustrate the idiotic nature of reporting on foxes, and remind the public how sick and cruel fox hunting really is,” they said.

Concern over fox attacks soared in June, when two baby twins were attacked by a suspected fox near to Victoria Park. Nine-month-old Isabella and Lola Koupparis suffered serious injuries during the attack, and the case was covered extensively in the media – with some sensationalist reporting, which culminated in a one-hour special BBC documentary entitled The Fox Attack Twins.

Experts say fox attacks on humans are exceptionally rare, but the case of the twins sparked an avalanche of scare stories about urban foxes.

A national newspaper reported last week that an urban fox had launched an “audacious raid” on the home of Dudley Thomas, a retired judge from Bristol, mauling his shoe.

Atkins said: “We wanted to create something that would be so ridiculous that in any other area it would be immediately dismissed as a spoof, but that news outlets desperate to continue the media narrative against foxes would leap on without any thought as to its authenticity.”

Atkins is a Bafta-nominated director, who last year released Starsuckers, a feature-length documentary critiquing the media in which he planted a number of fake stories about celebrities in the tabloid newspapers.

His latest ruse was hatched amid the furore over urban foxes in July. After filming the video over two nights last month, Atkins and Howorth set up a fake online blog, Urban Foxhunters, and describing themselves as “a collective from Victoria Park who hate foxes”.

Using the online moniker Lone Horseman, Atkins railed against urban foxes and, once the footage had received notoriety, gloated about their extensive media coverage.

The comments, he said, were deliberately inane. “I haven’t laughed so much since my brother fell off that roof,” said one post.

“We will not be intimidated by the crazies,” he wrote in another. “We are performing a public service which is a bit unpleasant but it has to be done to keep our streets safe. I have kids and I don’t want them being bitten by a diseased vermin scum, what’s wrong with that?”

Reykjavik Mayor gives Rudy Giuliani a run for his money…

Reykjavik mayor opens gay pride festival in drag
BBC News
6 August 2010

The mayor of Reykjavik has dressed up in drag to mark the opening of the Icelandic capital’s gay pride festival.

Jon Gnarr, a top comedian who became mayor in June, appeared on stage on Thursday night in a floral-print dress, blonde wig and bright red lipstick.

“The mayor unfortunately could not attend himself,” he told the crowd.

Mr Gnarr’s Best Party won the council elections after running on a platform that included free towels in swimming pools and a polar bear for the zoo.

Promising “sustainable transparency”, its campaign videos featured candidates singing to the tune of Tina Turner’s “Simply The Best”.

Mr Gnarr said at the time that the victory signalled the mass discontent with politicians for their role in the country’s economic crisis in 2008.

Addressing the opening ceremony of the gay pride festival on Thursday, his buxom alter ego said the mayor could not make it because he “was busy, even though he promised to be here”.

“What might he be up to? Maybe he is visiting Moomin Valley,” Mr Gnarr said, referring to the fictional setting of a series of Finnish children’s stories that feature a family of white hippopotamus-like trolls.

“This is what we get for voting for a clown in elections,” he added.

In 2009, Iceland became the first country with an openly gay head of government, when Johanna Sigurdardottir became prime minister.

photos: Gnarr, by AFP; Giuliani, by Spencer A. Burnett via Ablogination

thanks Linda

He was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo – but when officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday, they uncovered mummified skeletal remains lying in his bed.

Mr. Kato may have been dead for 30 years according to Japanese authorities.

They grew suspicious when they went to honour Mr Kato at his address in Adachi ward, but his granddaughter told them he “doesn’t want to see anybody”.

Police are now investigating the family on possible fraud charges.

‘Living Buddha’

Welfare officials had tried to meet Mr Kato since early this year. But when they went to visit, family members repeatedly chased them away, according to Tomoko Iwamatsu, an Adachi ward official.

Authorities grew suspicious and sought an investigation by police, who forced their way into the house on Wednesday.

They discovered a mummified body, believed to be Kato, lying in his bed, wearing underwear and pyjamas, covered with a blanket.

Mr Kato’s relatives told police that he had “confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha,” according to a report by Jiji Press.

But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower’s pension payments via Mr Kato’s bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.

The pension fund had long been unable to contact Mr Kato.

“His family must have known he has been dead all these years and acted as if nothing happened. It’s so eerie,” said Yutaka Muroi, a Tokyo metropolitan welfare official.

Jane Austen’s Fight Club

Directed by Emily Janice Card & Keith Paugh, written by Emily Janice Card. © 2010 Relatively Badarse Productions

thanks Erin

John Callahan, a quadriplegic, alcoholic cartoonist whose work in newspapers and magazines made irreverent, impolitic sport of both people with disabilities and diseases and those who would pity and condescend to them, died Saturday in Portland, Ore. He was 59 and lived in Portland.

The causes were complications of quadriplegia and respiratory problems, said his brother Tom.

Like his friend Gary Larson, the creator of “The Far Side,” Mr. Callahan made drawings with a gleeful appreciation of the macabre as it exists in everyday life. He was, however, a man who lived his whole life with disadvantages, some of them self-wrought, and he viewed the world through a dark and wicked lens.

“This is John, I’m a little too depressed to take your call today,” the message on his answering machine said. “Please leave your message at the gunshot.”

Bemused by the culture of confession and self-help fostered by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera and others, he was uninclined, in his work, to be outwardly sympathetic to the afflicted or to respect the boundaries of racial and ethnic stereotyping, and his cartoons were often polarizing: some found them outrageously funny, others outrageously offensive.

There was the drawing of a restaurant, the Anorexic Cafe, with a sign in the window saying “Now Closed 24 Hours a Day.” There was the drawing of the confused-looking square dancers unable to respond to the caller’s instruction to “return to the girl that you just left,” with a headline reading, “The Alzheimer Hoedown.”

There was the drawing of a blind black man begging in the street, wearing a sign that read: “Please help me. I am blind and black, but not musical.”

There was the drawing of a bartender refusing to serve a man who had prosthetic hooks for hands. “Sorry, Sam,” the bartender says. “You can’t hold your liquor.”

There was the drawing of an aerobics class for quadriplegics, with the instructor saying, “O.K., let’s get those eyeballs moving.” There was the drawing of a sheriff’s posse on horseback surrounding an empty wheelchair. The caption gave him the title of his 1990 autobiography: “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.”

When a car accident in 1972 severed his spine, Mr. Callahan was already a self-destructive alcoholic, having been a heavy drinker from the age of 12. He wasn’t driving, but the driver, whom he barely knew, was drunk when he smashed Mr. Callahan’s Volkswagen into a utility pole at 90 miles per hour. He was paralyzed from the diaphragm down and lost the use of many of his upper-body muscles, though he could extend his fingers and, eventually, after therapy, hold a pen in his right hand. To draw, he guided his right hand slowly across a page with his left, producing rudimentary, even childish, comic-book-like images.

Mr. Callahan often defended his work with a shrug, saying simply that he thought it was funny. But he also said people who were genuinely afflicted tended to be his fans.

“My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands,” he said in an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 1992. “Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and the patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.”

“Ironically, the crash may have saved his life,” Mr. Mullane said.

Actually, Mr. Callahan continued to drink for several years until he joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1978. Eventually he earned a B.A. from Portland State University. At the time of his death he was enrolled in the university’s master’s program in counseling.

Mr. Callahan’s cartoons are collected in a number of volumes, including “What Kind of a God Would Allow a Thing Like This to Happen?!!” and “Do What He Says!: He’s Crazy!!!” He also wrote a second memoir, “Will the Real John Callahan Please Stand Up?” His work was adapted for two animated television series featuring disabled characters: “Pelswick,” a family-appropriate show about a boy in a wheelchair determined to live a normal life, and “John Callahan’s Quads,” an envelope-pushing adult show featuring a menagerie of characters with different disabilities, foul mouths and bad attitudes.

In addition to his brother Tom, Mr. Callahan is survived by his mother, Rosemary; two other brothers, Kevin, known as Kip, and Richard; and two sisters, Mary Callahan, known as Murph, and Teri Duffy. All live in the Portland area.

“Even as a teenager, he’d sense things in other people, the way an impersonator would,” Tom Callahan said in an interview Tuesday. “He’d make fun of his friends, his teachers, in cartoons, so I don’t think the accident was really responsible for his humor. I think it allowed him literary license, though, to get away with things he might not otherwise have.”

Cardiff-by the-Sea – Encinitas city workers removed an artist’s addition to the city’s famed surfer statue Tuesday.

A bronze surfer statue has been the target of many gags.

Unknown predawn pranksters on Saturday surrounded the roadside statue in Cardiff-by-the-Sea with a papier mache model of a great white shark that appeared to be swallowing it whole.

Crowds of gawkers and photographers gathered around the 16-foot creation after the sun rose.

San Diego County sheriff’s Lt. Tony Ray said no criminal report was filed because there was no damage to the statue.

The $120,000 sculpture called “Magic Carpet Ride” was commissioned by the Cardiff Botanical Society in 2007.

The statue has been bedecked with bras, skirts and witch hats so many times that locals have come to call it “The Cardiff Kook.”

City workers showed up shortly before 8:00 Tuesday morning and started tearing down the shark addition.

photo: Chromotive

You don’t need special glasses to view the 3D street art in the gallery below, but you do need to approach it from just the right vantage point to see or photograph the full effect.

The mind-bending images are inspired by anamorphism, a centuries-old technique used in frescoes and other drawings to create the illusion of height and width (as such, 3D street painting is sometimes called anamorphic or illusionistic).

Scroll through the pictures to view vivid imagery that turns 2D asphalt into amazing 3D art. Sadly, you won’t be able to step up to these ephemeral works in person–most have long since been washed away by the rain.

Related link:

thanks Marsha

For Fourth of July weekend fireworks, even Macy’s couldn’t top the spittle-spangled eruptions of Mel Gibson. The clandestine recordings of his serial audio assaults on his gal pal were instant Web and cable-TV sensations — at once a worthy rival to Hollywood’s official holiday releases and a compelling sequel to his fabled anti- Semitic rant of 2006. A true showman, Gibson offered vitriol for nearly all tastes, aiming his profane fusillade at women, blacks and Latinos alike. The invective was tied together by a domestic violence subplot worthy of “Lethal Weapon.” There was even a surprise comic coda, courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who, alone among Gibson’s showbiz peers, used her television platform on “The View” to defend her buddy’s good character.

The Gibson tapes — in plain English and not requiring the subtitles of some of the star’s recent spectacles — are a particularly American form of schadenfreude. There’s little we enjoy more than watching a pampered zillionaire icon (Gibson’s production company is actually named Icon) brought low. The story would end there — just another tidy morality tale in the profuse annals of Hollywood self-destruction from Fatty Arbuckle to Lindsay Lohan — were it not for Gibson’s unique back story.

Six years ago he was not merely an A-list movie star with a penchant for drinking and boorish behavior but also a powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism. That he has reached rock bottom tells us nothing new about Gibson. He was the same talented, nasty, bigoted blowhard then that he is today. But his fall says a lot about the changes in our country over the past six years. We shouldn’t take those changes for granted. We should take stock — and celebrate. They are good news.

Read the rest of this Op-Ed piece here.

thanks Linda

Twitter Communiques From Fake French Foreign Ministry on Haiti Hoax
by Robert Mackey
The Lede Blog, NY Times
July 16, 2010

A group calling itself The Committee for the Immediate Reimbursement of Funds Taken From Haiti took credit on Friday for an elaborate hoax carried out this week in which an actor pretending to be a spokesperson for the French government announced that France would reimburse Haiti money it was forced to pay in exchange for its independence in the nineteenth century.

As The Lede explained on Thursday, the fake announcement was posted on a near replica of the French foreign ministry’s Web site on Wednesday in both video and text form.

In an update posted on a Twitter feed established this week, in the guise of France’s foreign ministry, the group, using the French form of its name, announced:

The French news agency AFP, which reported on Thursday that a real spokesman for France’s foreign ministry had denounced the hoax, and the fake Web site it was posted on, was initially taken in by the stunt, reporting the announcement as real news on Wednesday.

In another update posted on the @DiplomatieFR Twitter feed, the group denied that the stunt was the work of anti-corporate pranksters known as the Yes Men in response to that suggestion from another Twitter user, Pooja Bhatia, a former Wall Street Journal reporter now working in Haiti.

For their part, the Yes Men posted a link to an article about the hoax on their Twitter feed, with the message:

Hey somebody is stealing our schtick! Off with their heads!

thanks Kimberly