Mixed media assemblage: Ungawa!

By Jack Brummet

[22" x36" on interlocking cedar planks with acrylic, pen and ink, an old reusted saw blade, a red cross sticker, two acrylic door pulls, a lightning bolt car ornament, a metal "owner will maintain" sign, a bolt and locking washer, instructions from a Vietnamese ammunition pouch, and a "boneless" meat package sticker]

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Painting: the lines by Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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Bobby Kennedy lays down the truth in his April 1968 speech on "the mindless menace of violence"

Like many of Senator Kennedy's speeches those last months, this is just beautiful and heartfelt, I wish they had not used music or some of the partisan images, but this is well worth listening to, as almost all his speeches from that spring are. . . [posted by Jack]

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I had a dream last night about a strange bar in Portland

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The world's tallest man meets the world's shortest man

A few years ago, the world's tallest man met the world's shortest man.  As it happens, they both live in the same region of China's Inner Mongolia.  The world's tallest man, Bao Xishun met He Pingping who claims to be Earth's shortest.  Bao Xishin stands 7 feet, nine inches tall, and He Pingping is two feet, four inches.


Read the original story in the Mail Online here.

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Alien Lore No. 197 - An interactive map of 15 years of UFO sightings.

By Jack Brummet, Paranormal & Unexplained Phenomena Editor

A few months ago, Slate published an interactive map detailing fifteen years of UFO sightings as collected by the National UFO Reporting Center.  NUFORC was located in Seattle, but has now moved to a former Intercontinental Ballistic Missile base in eastern Washington. The article includes some fascinating data and maps.  NUFORC has, over the years, collected accounts of of over 30,000 close and not so close encounters with, well, something. Read the article from Slate here.

Recent Alien Lore articles on All This Is That:

Alien Lore No. 196 - The Nation of Island and UFOs
Alien Lore No. 195 - The Krill Papers & the tenth planet, or some other armada

Alien Lore No. 194 - The first UFO visit, and the first UFO crash 114 years ago?
Alien Lore No. 193 - Poem: When Aliens Land, Or, The Return Of The King

Alien Lore No. 192 - UFOs over Jerusalem
Alien Lore No. 191 - Four UFO sightings in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood

Alien Lore No. 190 - A new Wikileak that reveals a U.S. v. UFO war near Antarctica
 

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Julian Assange: I pitch, I don't catch

By Mona Goldwater, European Affairs Editor

In his first formal public appearance since being arrested on rape charges, Julian Assange told reporters that he planned to sue the Guardian--for libel!--over a book two of their writers published. The book quoted Assange as saying that if informers were killed due to his WikiLeaks disclosures, well, then, "they had it coming to them."

It's fascinating to see this champion of open-ness in government and the press now resorting to using the libel laws to go after his detractors.  There are a lot of things you can say about this, like "If you can't take the heat..." or "Beware when you spit in the wind, because the wind blows it back," or probably most accurately, borrowing a phrase from Tennessee Williams, "I pitch, I don't catch."

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List: How to lose friends and irritate people

By Jack Brummet, Editor at Large

This is another one of those lists that has been circulating the internets since the early days.  It's impossible to tell who actually originated it, or how pristine it is.  I suspect it's been fiddled with and diddled with many times over the last few years.  But nonetheless, it's pretty good. 

• Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%, extra dark, 17 inch paper, 99 copies.
• In the memo field of all your checks, write "for sexual favors."
• Specify that your drive-through order is "TO-GO."
• If you have a glass eye, tap on it occasionally with your pen while talking to others.
• Stomp on little plastic ketchup packets.
• Insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions "to keep them tuned up."
• Reply to everything someone says with "that's what you think."
• Practice making fax and modem noises.
• Highlight irrelevant information in scientific papers and "cc" them to your boss.
• Make beeping noises when a large person backs up.
• Finish all your sentences with the words "in accordance with prophesy."
• Signal that a conversation is over by clamping your hands over your ears and grimacing.
• Disassemble your pen and "accidentally" flip the ink cartridge across the room.
• Holler random numbers while someone is counting.
• Adjust the tint on your TV so that all the people are green, and insist to others that you "like it that way."
• Staple pages in the middle of the page.
• Publicly investigate just how slowly you can make a croaking noise.
• Honk and wave to strangers.
• Decline to be seated at a restaurant, and simply eat their complimentary mints at the cash register.
• TYPE IN UPPERCASE.
• type only in lowercase.
• dont use any punctuation either
• Buy a large quantity of orange traffic cones and reroute whole streets.
• Repeat the following conversation a dozen times.
• "DO YOU HEAR THAT?"  "What?"  "Never mind, it's gone now."
• As much as possible, skip rather than walk.
• Try playing the William Tell Overture by tapping on the bottom of your chin. When nearly done, announce "No, wait, I messed it up," and repeat.
• Ask people what gender they are.
• While making presentations, occasionally bob your head like a parakeet.
• Sit in your front yard pointing a hair dryer at passing cars to see if they slow down.
• Sing along at the opera.
• Go to a poetry reading and ask why each poem doesn't rhyme.
• Ask your co-workers mysterious questions and then scribble their answers in a notebook. Mutter something about "psychological profiles."

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The Crypt of Civilization

By Jack Brummet
Paranormal and Unexplained Phenomena Editor

The Crypt of Civilization is an airtight chamber situated at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.  The chamber is filled with artifacts specially preserved for the long haul.  It is "scheduled" to be opened in the year 8113.  The 1990 Guinness Book of World Records calls the crypt the "first successful attempt to bury a record of this culture for any future inhabitants or visitors to the planet Earth."  They even included generators, power sources, and various media players in order for the discoverers to be able to dig right in. 

That's probably true, although we did send off the Voyager into deep space with some of the same sorts of artifacts, in hopes they might be discovered many many centuries from now.  We sent a golden "record" and a player that contained all sorts of photographic and audio information about us, and how we live.  You can read an article on the golden record on All This Is That that we published six years ago.

The Crypt of Civilization chamber sits on Appalachian granite bedrock located in the foundation of Phoebe Hearst Memorial Hall at Oglethorpe University.  The room was converted from a swimming pool from 1937 to 1940 and the walls were lined with enamel plates.

The crypt contains airtight receptacles with microfilm on cellulose acetate film with 800 classic works of literature, including the Bible, the Koran, Homer's Iliad, and Dante's Inferno. There are approximately 640,000 pages included, as well as audio recordings and other cultural bits and pieces.  The Crypt room is 20 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide  under a stone roof seven feet thick and over a two-foot stone floor.   It is sealed with a stainless steel door welded in place.

Wow.

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Drawing/painting: 16 heads on the brink

By Jack Brummet
[pen and ink on 24 x 24" muslin drawcloth; digitized and manipulated in Photoshop]

click to enlarge

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John Updike: what is a "she-male?"

Marc Alan DiMartino posted this funny letter from John Updike to the manager of the (now defunct) Gotham Book Mart (which was one of my favorite bookstores in NYC).  The manager has sent Updike a copy of a book wrapped up in a piece of the Village Voice personals section. . .

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Bird - Painting by Jack Brummet

[acrylic, pen and ink on 12x12" canvas]

click to enlarge

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