Links (10/30/08)

From my regular trolling of the interwebs:

A shocking alleged hate crime by those evil-doers at Fox.

Weird lego men washing up on the shores of Britian. A sure sign of the apocalypse.

Supposed diaries from the Great Depression that prove to be scarily, suspiciously prescient.

Not a link for the psychologically fragile.

Terrible porn movie ideas.

The entire cast from The Wire is campaigning for Obama in North Carolina.

New sexy Halloween costumes for women, including the ever popular Sexy Elephant man costume.

The freakish, apparently true tale of Brian Peppers — internet meme, pedophile, Toledo native.

Christian loonies worship before the golden bull of Wall Street. Literally. Isn’t this the sort of thing that brought plagues of locust in the Bible? [h/t Ted]

Did you know that some Christian dingbat has dubbed today the “Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies?” Well here they are, at the Wall Street bull statue thing, praying to Jesus for money. The dingbat has explained, “We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems.” Don’t they know that God taking over the economic systems would be SOCIALISM from SPACE?

And here’s a super geeky site where some Japanese guy photographed all the locations from Edward Yang‘s masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day.

And finally, a clip from Troll 2. You won’t believe how bad it is.

Existential World Tour: the Complete Series!

Back in 1998, after I graduated from U of Michigan with a Master’s Degree in Japanese Studies that I knew would prove to be worthless, I panicked. I wanted to go back to Japan, but I really did not want to teach English again. I taught it for two years between 1994 and ’96 and I felt my brain softening a little more with each day I worked there. The few job leads that I had in Japan fell through and suddenly I had no clue what I was going to do with my life. The future looked confusing and uncertain and I was overwhelmed. So I did what any red-blooded lad hailing from the stout state of Ohio might: I sold my car and traveled around the world. Along the way, I wrote a series of mass emails detailing my adventures with included climbing Himalayas, getting chased by a Rhino and getting naked with a room full of Russians. I thought of them as a sort of proto-blog though blogs were at that point a good five years away. So now, ten years later, I finally have these missives in a blog format. You can read the first entry here.

I also have pictures from my Existential World Tour to Taiwan, Nepal, Russia, and Berlin.

Existential Panic World Tour Part 1: Taipei

I’m at a bank of computers in the Taipei train station apparently intended for bored weary travelers to kill time cruising the net. Being in a place like this one certainly gets a feeling of future-shock. Soon such places will probably be common place but for the moment there’s still a bit of a William Gibsonsque thrill to the whole thing.

Taipei is, in a word, hot. I spent most of the day hiking from this notably temple to that and by the end of the day I felt as if my shirt were floating on a layer of sweat.

The city itself is dirty and chaotic. The traffic here is downright dangerous–in America there’s always an assumption that drivers won’t run over pedestrians if only to avoid damaging their cars, here, judging from the number of dents and dings in Taipei’s fleet of taxis, I make no such assumptions. Nonetheless, the longer I’m here, this is my second visit, the more I’m finding things like street vendors selling everything from chicken feet to pirated T-shirts more charming than annoying. (At one nightmarket I found a T-shirt that I think was supposed to read “Ice Cream” but instead read “IRL CFPAM”) Moreover, the neighbor in which Emily’s grandmother lives, which has retained much of the older architecture from the Japanese occupation is actually pretty.

Anyway, E is growing impatient so I best be on my sweaty way. I will write again soon, either from here or from Kathmandu.