nerdgasm: the making of Thunderbirds!

We all have our touchstones; the photograph of a child, a stone from the beach on which we fell in love, the first dollar we ever earned, a hard-won diploma, high school trophies wrapped in tissue paper and fond memories…

Supermarionation

Here’s an ancient video Rosetta Stone from the previous century which purports to be the very first time the Thunderbirds were recorded on film. The premise that the ‘birds were merely puppets is, of course, the kind of elaborate conceit for which the French intellectuals of the mid-Twentieth Century were so well known. As we are all aware, the Thunderbirds were every bit as real as the constant threat of Communist invasion.

Who’s with me? Team Thunderbird: Operation GenX initiated! F.A.B.!!!

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the zoology of Japanese movie monsters

Rodan, dissected 

Here’s another great pass-along from DefrostIndoors, who surely should be making better use of her time than feeding increasingly bizarre and amusing fodder to the ol’ raincoaster blog. I mean, you’d think, right?

But she’s not and for that we give thanks.

So here, without another moment’s delay, is an interesting page dedicated to a study of the biology of Kaiju, Japanese movie monsters. Truly, unlocking Godzilla‘s energy-generation secrets could fill the Earth’s power needs in an ecosensitive and holistic way, wiping from the face of the planet the abomination that is open pit mining, eliminating the latent threat of nuclear waste, and preventing the emission of greenhouse gasses.

Yes, Godzilla Power is in accordance with the Kyoto Protocols.

Kaiju-biology (“kaiju” is japanese for “monster”) is simply the study of large monsters that seem to attack Japan with startling regularity. Although the first giant monster to attack Japan did so in 1954 (Godzilla), it was disintegrated by Dr. Serizawa’s Oxygen Destroyer weapon leaving no tissue samples to study. Since that time, however, the field of Kaiju-Biology has grown from being a bunch of nutty old professors making up crazy theories just to publish papers and justify their funding into a fully-fledged interdisciplinary science bringing together top researchers in biology, nuclear science, theoretical physics, and robotics. Advances in Kaiju-Biology not only have the immediate applicability of defending against Godzilla raids but also help lay the technological basis for many great Japanese gizmos! (now you know why Japan leads the world in electronics!)

It would be impossible to list all the great advances made in Kaiju-Biology over the last 10 years on this WWW page, but hopefully this will give you a flavor of this unique field of research. Employment opportunities in Kaiju-Biology are expected to continue their current increase into the near future so study hard and someday you may be Godzilla’s greatest enemy!

I dunno about you, but I’m on a job search. This is one field that has my name on it; what’s Japanese for “Frankenstein“?

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technical difficulties: please do not adjust the ol’ raincoaster blog, please just learn to deal with it and move on

Sorry folks, our standard operating procedures here at the ol’ raincoaster blog, wherein our armies of tiny elf reporters surf the farthest tubes of the internets in search of edutainment of suitable refinement for your rarified sensibilities, have had something of a critical collapse in the past 24 hours.

Normal service will be restored shortly. Oh who am I kidding: we’ve never been normal!

Hamlet, Prince of YouTube!

We like to take credit where credit is due, and sometimes where it isn’t, but we at the ol’ raincoaster blog do think we were on this Shakespearean meme first. Still, we welcome the appearance of more classically-trained bloggers.

In related news:

Blogging, Act III, Scene 1

Shakespeare is a Virus

The Most Improbable Meme in the World Soldiers On

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don’t copy that floppy!

Don’t even THINK about it. Or you’ll be pwned by this cheezy, early Nineties Arsenio Hall impersonator and his ridonkulous DRM rap.

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