Isegoria

You simply have to love Calvin’s Snowman Art.

Wikipedia includes a list of unusual deaths. An excerpt:

1920: Baseball player Ray Chapman was killed when he was hit in the head by a pitch. He remains the only Major League Baseball player to date to have been killed in a game.

1923: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

1925: Zishe (Siegmund) Breitbart, a circus strongman and Jewish folklore hero died during a demonstration in which he drove a spike through five one-inch thick oak boards using only his bare hands when his knee was accidentally pierced. The spike was rusted and caused an infection which led to fatal blood poisoning. He was the subject of the Werner Herzog film, Invincible.

Truth In Advertising is a not-safe-for-work spoof of the world of marketing, directed by Tim Hamilton, from the Cannes Film Festival, 2001.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel: Laguna Biotch. “There’s so much drama on the couch. It’s like a drama couch!”

(Hat tip to a certain dancing penguin fan.)

Japanese marine park captures rare shark on film — before it dies:

A species of shark rarely seen alive because its natural habitat is 600 meters (2,000 ft) or more under the sea was captured on film by staff at a Japanese marine park this week.

The Awashima Marine Park in Shizuoka, south of Tokyo, was alerted by a fisherman at a nearby port on Sunday that he had spotted an odd-looking eel-like creature with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth.

Marine park staff caught the 1.6 meter (5 ft) long creature, which they identified as a female frilled shark, sometimes referred to as a “living fossil” because it is a primitive species that has changed little since prehistoric times.

The shark appeared to be in poor condition when park staff moved it to a seawater pool where they filmed it swimming and opening its jaws.

“We believe moving pictures of a live specimen are extremely rare,” said an official at the park. “They live between 600 and 1,000 meters under the water, which is deeper than humans can go.”

“We think it may have come close to the surface because it was sick, or else it was weakened because it was in shallow waters,” the official said.

The shark died a few hours after being caught.

Frilled sharks, which feed on other sharks and sea creatures, are sometimes caught in the nets of trawlers but are rarely seen alive.

Watch the trailer for We Are the Strange. I don’t know what to make of it, but I take it as a good sign that someone is out there experimenting with the medium. From Strange DIY Film Hits Sundance:

The handmade quality makes We Are the Strange like no other animation you’ve seen. Strange’s influences include Japanese Kabuki theater, Lajos Egri’s book The Art of Dramatic Writing and Tecmo’s early Ninja Gaiden games.

Kimberly Brown examines the challenge of distilling Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” into a two-hour Hollywood movie:

Back in the 1970s, Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of “The Godfather,” first approached Ayn Rand to make a movie of her novel “Atlas Shrugged.” But Rand, who had fled the Soviet Union and gone on to inspire capitalists and egoists everywhere, worried aloud, apparently in all seriousness, that the Soviets might try to take over Paramount to block the project.

“I told her, ‘The Russians aren’t that desperate to wreck your book,’” Ruddy recalled in a recent interview.

Rand’s paranoia, as Ruddy remembers it, seems laughable. But perhaps it was merely misplaced. For so many people have tried and failed to turn the book she considered her masterpiece into a movie that it could easily strike a suspicious person as evidence of a nefarious collectivist conspiracy.

(I’ve written about an Atlas Shrugged movie before.)

In From Pen to Sword, National Review writer John Miller celebrates 100 years of Conan:

Since 2003, Del Rey has issued definitive texts on each of these heroes, based on Howard’s own manuscripts rather than the edited and bowdlerized versions that have appeared elsewhere. Three of these collections contain everything Howard ever wrote on Conan, including previously unpublished story fragments. With October’s release of Kull: Exile of Atlantis, the sixth in the series, Del Rey says it has put out more than 200,000 of these books.

A small industry of armchair scholars has made it possible. “We’ve gone pro,” says Leo Grin, the editor of a journal and blog called “The Cimmerian.” Yet they’ve also had to battle for respectability. “The comics and the movies have brought in fans, but they’ve also been an albatross,” says Rusty Burke, an editor of the Del Rey books. “We’re maybe 10 or 20 years behind H.P. Lovecraft.”

Last year, Lovecraft, another 1930s pulp writer, slithered his way into the literary canon when the Library of America issued a definitive book of his influential horror fiction. Howard is not nearly as cerebral as Lovecraft, but Lovecraft never seized the Zeitgeist with a character like Conan.

The albatross may grow heavier before it grows lighter: Dark Horse Comics calls Conan one of its best-selling titles, Funcom will launch a highly anticipated online game next year, and Warner Bros. reportedly wants to make a new flick. All of this will expand Howard’s growing fan base.

One thing seems certain: After Arnold Schwarzenegger and the rest of us are long gone, Conan will still be wandering, sword in hand and ready to excite ever more readers.