No fat chicks.

Now this is real nice.



This ad is massively offensive, mainly in that it entirely equates 'the wrong woman' with 'the wrong-sized woman' (not to mention that, judging by the wedding photo in the ad, the wife LOOKED LIKE THAT WHEN HE MARRIED HER).

But let's talk about the website - ashleymadison.com, which describes itself as the world’s #1 Married Dating service specifically for ATTACHED men and women who are looking to have an Extra-marital Affair. Ummmmm... ick.

At the end of the day, I am a believer in live and let live when it comes to consenting adults. It just strikes me that the time and energy spent 'winking' at sexy marrieds on this site could be much better spent either:

a) talking to/shagging one's spouse
b) filing for divorce

The site's excellent press room features a ton of articles in support of the site, and while I certainly am not surprised this Canadian venture has become moderately successful (from 50,000 to 350,000 users over the last 5 years) it kind of seems like the refuge for the pathetic.

What happened to hotel bars, anyway?

Beckstar reviews animated gifs of dragons

So I was reminiscing on one of my most popular posts - reviews of animated gifs of cats, and was inspired to log a similar entry. This time dragons.

This was an interesting project, because it highlighted a clear lack of understanding in our culture of what exactly a dragon is. Let's start with

Dragons are:

Yes. Dragons are flying, fire-breathing badasses. If this gif included some burning villagers, it would be pretty much perfect.

Dragons are not:

Turds with faces.

Sexy alligators.

Interested in world events, sports, editorials or comics. In fact, I'm pretty sure that dragons can't read. Period.

Bats with pants.

Now that we're on the topic, can we talk about cartoons and animals in pants?

I get that illustrators don't really want to draw the creepy loin region of these asexual subjects, and thus just toss on an oversized t-shirt or a pair of tight jeans. But for the viewers, this just begs the question of what exactly lives under these garments, which is infinitely more disturbing.

This is a gyrating freak show.

Not only does the creator of this gif imagine dragons to be obese, overly friendly try-hards, but the left hand is perpetually locked in a moment of obscene self-gratification. Can you imagine if this dragon was wearing pants?

My guess is that the dragon in this case is a thinly-veiled metaphor for the creator's "Fun Uncle Touch-a-lot". Sometimes the subconscious comes out in unexpected ways.

And then we have my personal favourite. Again... WTF?

Recent polls have shown...

... a fifty-first of Miss Teen USA 2007 delegates is jawdroppingly stupid.



This is either a moment of nerves taking over a brain, or an amazing insight into the world view of the extreme idiot.

You know, I always found the whole 'pageants are about academic scholarship' angle a bit dubious...

No, I don't get it either...

But this is insanely viral right now, and I thought, out of service to my readers, you should be ahead of the curve on this madness:



If someone says 'Youtube? Isn't that all just autistic kids with keyboards these days?', you'll know to what they refer.

Philip K. Droid

Now this project is dead and gone, but I keep meaning to blog about it anyways.

Philip K. Dick (1928 -1982), as many of you know, wrote dark, paranoid science fiction that's been the source for many of your favourite sci-fi movies [Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly], and possibly some of your favourite sci-fi literature as well [The Three Stigmata of Palmer Elddrich, Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, Flow my Tears the Policeman Said, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?].

One thing I love about his work is its handling of robots and computers. Deeply concerned with the nature of consciousness, PKD's world is one where manipulation of memories, moods and personalities, and androids exhibiting emotion, inspiration and free will, blur the lines between man and machine.

So what better tribute to Philip K. than an android in his likeness?


Aw, don't you just want to go cuddle up and discuss the nature of reality?


Android head with stoned-looking kid.

From the FedEx Institute of Technology, Hanson Robotics, and the Automation and Robotics Research Institute, the project seems to have been pretty active back in 2005, but now has died out. No news as to why.

Here is the PKD android interacting with someone at 2005 NextFest in Chicago:



And here are some more links if you want to learn more about Philip K. Dick. Hey! Check out my major blogger journalistic diligence!

The Relationship Between Humans and Machines: Through the Eyes of Philip K. Dick - An analysis by Eli Eisenberger.

Official Site - if for no other reason alone, visit to see the cover art gallery, including the Japanese 'Do Androids Dream...' cover on the right.

The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet - a Rolling Stone article from 1975, this was the first major article about the author.

An inspirational moment...

Because seriously - if these guys can do... going out in public wearing really bad homemade Star Wars costumes, you can obviously do whatever it is is you secretly dream about.


Just look at the helmet on the right. What kind of person makes this? My suspicion: a blind woman with delusions of artistic competence, obsessed with her ballad-singing stalker.


"a pic of Orvie and friend (who appears to be a bear with a lipstick belt!)"
- Room of Doom website, source for all these amazing photos.


I want to meet this kid!

Room of Doom , from their website:

StarWarsHelmets.com features the VERY BEST helmets and costumes that have ever been created - from all over the World. However where there is Light, there is Dark. Wherever there is Beauty............
..There is sheer unadulterated pain, flatulence and ugliness!!!

Blog be Ballin!

You know, the blog's first birthday on Monday, and I am just beaming with maternal pride. It's no longer breastfeeding although its sleep cycle is still erratic, it weighs a healthy 202 posts, and it is growing robustly.

How can a glowing mommy not gaze on her rosy-cheeked cherub and reminisce about how far we've come? And what better proof than the following email, which I received this morning?

Dear blog author:

We recently came across your site, beccatronic.blogspot.com , while searching for bloggers who blog about Lamborghini issues.

A small group of us have started a new site called Lamborghini Bloggers . Our intent is to bring Lamborghini bloggers closer together, and make a positive contribution to the Internet community.

Would you be interested in joining Lamborghini Bloggers ? Please take a few minutes to have a look at what we are trying to do, and if you are interested, there is a sign up page to get the ball rolling. We would greatly appreciate your support in this endeavour.

If you do not feel that your blog would be a good fit for Lamborghini Bloggers , but enjoy this subject area, come visit us and one of our member bloggers. You can also check our FAQ Section to learn more about Lamborghini Bloggers .

We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you on Lamborghini Bloggers.

Their site is down at the moment, but I'm sure it's a compendium of hot wheels.

TRAGIC NEWS UPDATE!!! There is no lamborghini-bloggers.com. I repeat - there is no lamborghini bloggging group! The "site" is live and it is a spam blog used to exploit Google Adsense and gullible Lamborghini afficionados. Won't someone please think about the Lamborghini people for once?!?

Canada is the new Estonia...

So you know how people are always saying that beef is the new chicken, white bras are the new tank tops and yeast infections are the new irritable bowel syndrome?

Yup, it's an annoying little phrasing that is so overused it's pretty much meaningless, but which we're all guilty of using once or twice.

You've got to love Leisure Art's contribution to The Diagram magazine, where they mapped every occurance of the phrase in various sources over the course of 2005. The resulting diagram is funny, nostalgic, and a good illustration of how an idiom reaches critical mass and becomes meaningless (see 'bling' circa 2003).


Check the full diagram here

My personal favourites? Space travel is the new HIV; cheese is the new morphine; and thug shooting is the new lovemaking.

Clearly.

BOTTLED WATER!!! SOS!!!

Okay, so you know you are living in a pampered first world nation when a mere boil-water advisory can induce fistfights among grown adults.

It's so ridiculous. I fear the day when we face a real emergency.

Although, I must say that the slob in me is greatly enjoying the 'guess we can't do dishes or laundry' perk of the whole situation.


Bottle on right: filtered and fresh. Bottle on left: EBOLA! HIV! MALARIA! PLAGUE! TYPHOID FEVER!


Guess which bottle is the demented homocidal maniac!


I'll do it! You can't stop me! I'll totally ingest 1/800000th of a lethal dose of contaminants!

Now the real question here is why is my new digital camera being used for these ridiculous 2am photo shoots, and not shooting events like Friday night's off-the-hook partystravaganza, with moments like Joni dancing on stage with Kool Keith in one of the $5 bras he threw into the crowd while chanting 'Bra Adjustment'?

In the realms of the fun-real.

So during a delightful little jaunt down to Seattle, I managed (despite the best efforts of Quick Shuttle - grrrrrrrr) to catch the last day of the Henry Darger Folk Art Museum touring show at the Frye Gallery. Which is a great (and free!) space by the way.


Mommy, why do the little girls have boy parts?



Never mock a janitor - he could be making beautiful things like this.



If I remember correctly, this is a good guy. One of the few adult protagonists.

Henry Darger intrests the hell out of me for a few reasons.

First, his story is captivating. A reclusive janitor, he died at 81, leaving behind a massive amount of artwork, including a 15,000 page illustrated novel of considerable weirdness, called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. His life is summarized pretty well on his wikipedia page, and excellently in the amazing movie made of his life - In the Realms of the Unreal.

Secondly, his stuff is almost more psychology than art. The Story of the Vivian Girls is an incredibly rich system of symbols which stand so clearly for his own internal issues. The same themes he struggled with at 15 - oppression and totalitarianism within the asylum in which he was institutionalized at 13; a conflicted and intense relationship with the Catholic church etc. - are replayed and explored as he writes the book over 65 years. It gets really meta at points too - where he writes himself into the stories, and

Thirdly, whether he intends to or not, he asks some pretty challenging questions around media and culture. The faces and images he's blatantly traced and re-used from advertising and other sources take on an entirely different tone in his surreal environments. At the same time, they're inherently contextless. They're no less connected to Darger's bizarre epic than they are to their original 'sources' - the happy beach scene in the Coppertone ads etc.


This is the trailer - but it hangs a bit at the beginning. Come for the outsider artist - stay for the Dakota Fanning narration.

Okay, I'm babbling. Moral of the story? His work is fascinating, and I'm really glad I got a chance to see it in person.

Digital time capsule project.

Okay, so in that last post I forgot to mention the project that turned me on to Jonathan Harris in the first place: Yahoo! Time Capsule.

He worked with Yahoo! (How annoying is that exclamation point? Very.) to build a site where users can submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature, based on a few general themes: You; Love; Anger; Fun; Sorrow; Faith; Beauty; Past; Now; Hope.

The cool part? The contributions will be digitalized and beamed with a laser into space on Oct. 25 from the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, now an archeological site near Mexico City.

I'm probably going to submit something... not sure what yet. Probably, I don't know, some quick video I put together chronicling the greatest achievements in the history of mankind or something.


The site - minimalist, responsive, intuitive.

Here is a random selection of the stuff soon to be beamed into space. And please - don't panic. The extraterrestrials will find out about unicorns.


Sorrow: Picture 8373. From a female in CA, United States.
The unicorn has been spotted and will soon succumb to the senseless wrath of ignorant man.


You: Drawing 10260. From a male in his 20's in KL, Malaysia.
I Hope that this fiction will be reality in the future, and modern Holy Grails such as Intellienge Aliens, Time Travels, Anti Gravity Cars will be discovered by then.


Fun: Picture 10265. From a female in Phillipines.
Fun is one lazy afternoon spent talking and laughing with my sisters.


Hope: Words 8653. From someone.
I am from China, now here in UK.

And the best thing, in my opinion, we'll be telling these otherworldly beings?...

Fun: Picture 9881. From someone.
dance. you'll feel so much better.

Wait... huh? Adopt a what?

Rael with his model spacecraft, spreading his message of scientific-creationism, humanitarianism and... oh yeah... orgies.

Now some of you may know of my love for Raeliens, and so will not be surprised to find a post on their latest unbelievable project.

For those of you that don't know of this pseudo-religion, Raeliens follow the message of Rael, who was a low-rent French sports journalist until a fated, life-altering event:

On the 13th of December 1973, French journalist Rael was contacted by a visitor from another planet, and asked to establish an Embassy to welcome these people back to Earth.

The extra-terrestrial human being was a little over four feet tall, had long dark hair, almond shaped eyes, olive skin, and exuded harmony and humor. Rael recently described him by saying quite simply, "If he were to walk down a street in Japan, he would not even be noticed." In other words, they look like us, and we look like them. In fact, we were created "in their image" as explained in the Bible.

Already awesome. What is missing from the message above is the way that it plays out in practice. Because the philosophy basically means exalting science and promoting hedonism, it boils down to being a futuristic sex cult in the best sense - erotic massage meetings, secret attempts at human cloning, and talk of building an alien embassy.

I went to an outstanding presentation by the Raeliens when I was at UBC. The leader of the talk wore tight white pants, and spoke the lines 'why does your God want you to believe sex is bad? Sex is goooooood', while aggressively rubbing his thighs. The woman they had on call as a 'science expert' couldn't figure out how to orient her slide on the overhead projector. It ruled.

Okay, so back to present tense. Now the Raeliens have embarked on a new project, called, no kidding, Clitoraid, which purports to restore a sense of pleasure by somehow surgically reversing female circumcision. They invite the public to 'adopt a clitoris'.

Obviously it's a given that removing/mutilating a woman's clitoris is abhorrent, evil and a crime against humanity. But wtf are the Raeliens going to do about it? How exactly does one surgically restore a clitoris anyway? How creepy is this photo of Rael with one of the success stories?



Plus, they call the facility they're building a Pleasure Hospital. Yikes. Thanks Clitoraid. Now these poor, tortured African women can get screwed again at the hands of some cro magnon dudes. Quite literally.

Obakemonorama!

You could get lost in this website for hours. The Obakemono Project comes from Japan, and is a catalog-in-progress of the strange creatures/spirits that populate Japan's tradition of folk monsters, one of the richest collections of craziness there is. If you've seen the brilliant Miyazaki film Spirited Away, you've seen a few of them in action.

In Japanese, O is a prefix denoting respect, and bakemono literally means a changed thing - something perverted and altered and moved beyond its natural state - a monster,' the website says. Here are three of the over 80 collected on the site:

Tsukumo-gami
In the animistic tradition of Shintō all living and natural things are born or hatched or sprouted or formed with souls, and even an artificial object can obtain a spirit of its own under the right conditions. While some special objects such as swords are created animate, most instruments and utensils must live, be used, and accrue virtue for a hundred years in order to obtain a soul. Once this happens, if they have not been treated well, these objects can become vengeful bakemono. Called tsukumo-gami, these haunted utensils can partially take on the forms of monstrous humans, animals, and combinations thereof, and storm about the countryside tormenting people.

Neko-mata
In some places when an old cat becomes a bake-neko, its tail is said to split in two, then it is called a neko-mata or "forked cat". Like most bake-neko, neko-mata are unusually large cats, reportedly a meter and a half long minus the bifurcated tail, and often walk about comfortably on their hind feet. They are said to dance and manipulate the dead like puppets, and are associated with strange fires and other unexplainable occurances. Sometimes the tails of kittens were cut off as a precaution, as it was thought that if its tail couldn't fork, a cat could not become a bakemono.

Bake-zori
In a house where footwear is treated improperly, this old zōri sandal comes to life at night and emerges from the storeroom where it has been discarded. As it runs through the house, it can be heard chanting, "kararin, kororin, kankororin! Eyes three, Eyes three and teeth two!" Perhaps it says this in honor of its kin the geta sandal, which does indeed make such sounds and does have three eyes (the holes drilled for its straps) and two teeth (the wooden platforms on its base).

I wish I could find the name of the artist who did the illustrations for the site. They don't name him/her, but do point to another really cool Bakemono artist - Shigeru Mizuki [or go here for a page in English].