Link Love: Heidi & Rose

These two young comedians are the self described Anne Franks of comedy. I met Heidi at the comedy club recently and she charmed the whiskers off me. You might consider visiting their site, or even attending their brand new show, if you're in the area. It's called 'A Guide to the Uncool'.

http://heidiandrose.wordpress.com/

On Our National Flag

Some people have been in touch wondering whether I would ever get around to uploading my ideas for the redesign of the New Zealand flag. Not many, but some. It's a very graphics-heavy story, so difficult to place on my primitive website, but if you would like to see it, then please send an email and I will send you a sumptuous PDF file, in lurid technicolor, free of charge. It is my gift to you.

On the Term: 'Mind Fuck'

Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary:

English

Noun

mind fuck (plural mind fucks)

1. (psychology) a situation which calls into question the way your mind currently sees a certain idea or the world in general

1973, Kathryn Watterson, Women in Prison, University of Michigan/Doubleday, page 322,

"One day there was a big cockroach on the wall and a woman hit it with her shoe and it screamed. I swear it screamed. That was about it for me. It was really a mind fuck."

Or, an audio-visual example:

To The Stockholders

With the new financial year arriving it's time to deliver my annual report to the stockholders. I like to think I have been a strong, decisive CEO. I have been compared to Captain James Cook, (and not just because I got beaten up on a trip to Hawaii.) Yet sheer brilliance is sometimes not enough. It is true that many experts failed to foresee the impact of speculation in mortgage-backed derivatives and its effect on the banking system. I was one who did, and as proof I’d like to point you towards my 2003 white-paper: Speculation in Mortgage-backed Derivatives: How It Will Make Us Rich As Popes. The bare fact is that a million economists working for a million years on a million stock-screens could not have predicted the terrifying chain-reaction that would result from granting an Appalachian racoon farmer a loan to buy his first relaxin’-shack.

Here is my report:

http://suddainfeatures.blogspot.com/2009/05/annual-report-200809.html

On the Coming End

2009 is going to be a very big year. There’ll be famine, zombie hordes, nuclear hellfire, all-singing-all-dancing tween-legions, Necro-Mutants, an outbreak of weaponised smallpox—and that’s just what’s happening in the cinemas. Of course there’ll be non-fictional challenges too: The global economy is poised delicately on the edge of the abyss, mother earth palavers in agony, even the pigs have turned on us, and the price of cheese is simply outrageous.

This is my magazine feature on all the other times the world was supposed to end.

http://suddainfeatures.blogspot.com/2009/05/dear-jesus-did-not-come-and-other-days.html

On The Iconography of the Human Skull

Imagine you’re sitting down to brainstorm a brand identity for the entire human species. What images would make your list? Bleeding Heart? Flaming sword? Chimp with an Uzi? Those are all excellent suggestions, but if you want an icon that captures the hopeless thrill of existence, the fact that we rise from dust, return to dust, and do a lot of dusting in between, you’d struggle to find a better insignia than the human skull (or possibly the chimp.)

The skull icon holds a unique place in human culture. Other symbols evoke “Power,” or “Glory,” but few can capture the terrifying duality of human life. “Behold!” it says, “I drink mead from the skull of my enemy whilst riding in my boat—which is also made entirely from skulls—am I not a total bad-ass?” But it also says: “Is life not fleeting? I am so depressed. More mead!” The skull anchors us within the mortal realm, reminds us that life is but a blink, yet consoles us with the fact that while we’re here we can wreak havoc.

Here's a short essay I wrote on the skull icon:

http://suddainfeatures.blogspot.com/2009/05/skull-filled-with-joy.html

On Becoming a Tribe of Desensitised Gore-chimps

It’s clear that violent games, films, and television shows are turning our young into a bunch of orifice-desensitised gore-chimps. It's fun to gaze whimsically over our shoulder at the programs we watched when we were kids: shows about genies and witches and space-Martians, and pre-historic citizens who used living creatures as household appliances; shows about the plight of captured soldiers in a Nazi prison camp during the Second World War; comedies about the antics of bitter, battle-fatigued, alcoholic surgeons forced to perform horrifying surgical procedures with rusty instruments on adolescent soldiers in a makeshift hospital during the vicious and blood-soaked Korean war. They were gentler times. And the games! Sweet mercy. Today it’s all jacking cars and murdering prostitutes. We had simple games about a giant mouth who swallowed endless pills while being pursued through a labyrinth by a horde of ghosts. That’s just the difference between today and the good old days, I guess.

Here is a vintage cartoon about a starving duck who goes on a murderous axe rampage. Lovely.