Sideshow Bobs

File this under cultural studies: great collection of photos from old-timey sideshows. Link.

This is another great site I found out about first on Boing Boing. They troll the Internet for fun crap so you don't have to.

The Genius of the Internet Archive

If you haven't done so already, get your asses on over to the Internet Archive. It is an excellent repository of old-time films, live audio recordings, extinct websites, and all things glorious and public-domain.

The Poetry of Spam

Shovelware has a nice little something-something about the poetry created by the random-words found in your spam email headers.

Link

For those interested in things like James Frey . . .

Interesting story in the LA Weekly about the Navajo memoirist Nadjii, who is in fact a Scandavian-American writer of gay erotica from Michigan. This outfreys Million Little Pieces. First The Education of Little Tree [and that Forrest Carter guy seems like a total douche] was a fake, now this.

Link

See also:

News & Observer article

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

UC Santa Barbara project containing thousands of MP3s of turn-of-the-last-century cylinder recordings. Priceless. Very easy to lose a few hours of your life going through these. Link.

Batgirl Fan Art

File under fan fiction. Link

Thanks again to the lovely folks at Boing Boing.

Ape Men of the Congo

Apparently the US government is withholding a videotape of the Central African kalanoro, a four-and-a-half-foot tall three-toed apeman. From the great site Cryptomundo.

More links on the kalanoro.

The Indigo Children

Somehow this New Age movement has slipped under my radar. A number of years ago a new color aura was discovered: indigo. People with this aura color are intelligent, hyperactive and overbearing. Gee, that kind ain't got ADD, he's not disturbing the class, he has an indigo aura! Personally, I hate this sort of hoo-ha. But, I think the new age movement is a legitimate expression of folk belief, even if most of it is founded on craptacularly misguided books (rather than being disseminated by word-of-mouth, ritual and tradition). BUt it fills in gaps of knowledge that science and official religion have trouble explaining. (Or, in other terms, the folk imagination takes over where official explanations end).

Article from the New York Times is archived here . To view you do need to subscribe to the online service, but, hey, don't worry, it's free.

Again, thank you Boing Boing for another great link.

Cryptozoological News from Africa

The mokèlé-mbèmbé is a dinosaur-like creature from Central Africa. An expidition has recently been launched to find this creature. Read about it here.

Wikipedia article on the creature here.

If you haven't boing boinged yet, you should. They're chock full of interesting stories.

Mouse on Fire

This story could be a developing Urban Legend: Link

Hey look, a quick check on Snopes reveals that maybe, just maybe this is a legend.

Crackpot Book-of-the-week

This weeks crackpot book is the classic 1970 John M. Allegro screed The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross: Fertility Cults and the Origins of Judaism and Christianity. What a doozie! Allegro posits that many of the rituals and beliefs of the early Christians were based on magic mushroom ingestion.

Sample prose,
If rain in the desert lands was the source of life, then the moisture from heaven must be only a more abundant kind of spermatazoa. If the male organ ejaculated this precious fluid and made life in the woman, then above the skies the source of nature's semen must be a mighty penis, as the earth which bore its offspring was the womb. It followed therefore that to induce the heavenly phallus to complete its orgasm, man must stimulate it by sexual means, by singing, dancing, orgiastic displays and, above all, by the performance of the copulatory act itsel.

Oh yeah, I likey.

Crackpot Websites to Check Out

jesus christ virgin mary last supper born again son of god

Aminita Muscaria Mushrooms and Religion Research Page

Sacred Mushroom of the Cross

Paradigm Magazine INterview w/ Terrence McKenna

Folk Monopoly

One of my favorite areas of study is the intersections of popular and folk culture. Fan fiction, children's games based on tv and movie re-enactments, tv drinking games, etc. Here's a site devoted to folk-developed rules for Monopoly. I think this is an instance of where folk imagination fills in the gaps left by the official rules.

Link

Santarchy!

It was Santarchy all over the world.

Link

If you're keeping track of these things, you might have noticed that I am three weeks behind in my posts! Viva holiday lag.

German New Year's Television Tradition

Jude Stewart in Slate describes how an obscure British skit is broadcast every year on New Year's Eve in Germany. This reminds me of the Russians watching the comedy "Ironiia sud'by (The Irony of Fate)" on New Year's Eve.

Stewart describes the possible reasons for the development of this televisual tradition:

But the biggest reason for Dinner for One's popularity, I suspect, is the magic of repetition. The skit is mildly funny, sure, but much more important is that it has the mysterious quality of something that could get very funny after years of drunken viewing. The script itself, so laden with repetition, lodges in the brain and accretes in-jokes easily. (Like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Showgirls, which have achieved bad-is-good popularity through repetition, Dinner for One has a bad little kernel of a story and a crass creepiness.) And in a modern Germany many feel is teetering into economic free fall, a comfortable old-time ritual has an almost religious attraction.

Link

More On RPG and Economics

IN keeping with posting about real-world results from on-line gaming, here is an article in Legal Affairs about possible taxation issues from income generated in an online world. Link

Online Gaming and Economics

This is sort of old hat by now, but here is a BBC article about the economics of online gaming. Link.

One day you can ask me about folklore and Computer Mediated Communication.

Is This Video Folklore? Discuss.

Here's the video: Link.

Now, I would argue that this is folklore. Why? Oh, many reasons. None of which probably make any sense.

Let me list some reasons:
1) It is passed along through non-traditional means (viral video, even though quickly co-opted by marketeers and advertisers is still a folk medium in my book).

2) It is a folk reaction to something from popular culture (like mashups, "Sonic Outlaws"-type art, and and fan fiction.

Some reasons why this is not folklore:

1) It's not passed on orally. (Oh stop being such a fuddy-duddy).

2) There is a stated author to the video.

It's too late at night right now to get into this any further.

Katrina Legends

Article in Reason magazine discussing role rumours played in Katrina coverage. I believe the author might be conlating rumour with urban legend, but the article still resonates. Link

Books of Human Skin!

Don't know what this has to do with folklore, but here's an interesting article about books being bound in human skin. Link.

Oh yeah, I guess we're back again.