Summer's Almost Gone

Built in 1881 by James Vincent de Paul Lafferty Jr, Lucy the Elephant was intended to attract buyers to the building lots Lafferty was offering for sale in the area. It's reported to have cost $25,000 to construct. After falling into financial trouble, Lafferty sold the Elephant and other property to Anton Gertzen in 1887. Lucy is 6 stories tall, weighs 90 tons, and is covered with 12,000 square feet of sheet tin.
In 1902 an English doctor and his family leased the Elephant as a summer home. They moved into Lucy's ample interior and converted the main hall into four bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen and parlor. A bathroom was outfitted in one of the small front shoulder closets using a miniature bathtub.

Text via Historic Structures. Learn more about Lucy at her website.

Stubby: America's First War Dog

America's first war dog, Stubby, served 18 months 'over there' and participated in seventeen battles on the Western Front. He saved his regiment from surprise mustard gas attacks, located and comforted the wounded, and even once caught a German spy by the seat of his pants. Images and text via Wikipedia. There's also an excellent profile of Stubby by Robb Fritz over at McSweeney's.

Poorly worded headline? Perhaps. I think "GOP Puts Women & Latinos in their Crosshairs," might've been better.

Beer/shot glass combo. This idea is so elegantly simple. It's beautiful! For sale at Cool Material.

Charts Tumblr

I started a tumblr for my charts. CHARTS CHARTS CHARTS.

Tom Hanks is cool.

via Superpunch

I've decided it's book week! And also take a lesbian to lunch day. GO AHEAD I DARE YOU.

Charley Harper

Still shot from the set of Time Enough at Last, one of the best Twilight Zone episodes. via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.

Ben Shahn

The AV Club channels Arnold Schwarzenegger

Sean O'Neal at the AV Club imagines Arnold Schwarzenegger's commentary on this first leaked photo from his new movie, The Tomb. Here's an excerpt:

In this scene we are looking at something. I have my arms crossed, like, “No, I don’t care what it is we are looking at, I am in prison and am very comfortable here. These things you are showing me don’t surprise me.” Sylvester has his hands in his pockets, because he is less comfortable, but maybe pretending to be comfortable.

Read the whole thing, it's awesome.

Mitt Romney's fake Twitter followers

Due to the current public discussions about Mitt Romney´s Twitter account and his fake followers, Barracuda Labs took the opportunity to analyze them. This led to several interesting findings:

• Nearly all accounts of Mitt Romney´s followers are new: More than 80 percent of all followers are less than three months old and 25 percent of them are not even three weeks old.
• The number of his followers went up 17 percent in just one day (July 21, 2012).
• One in four of Mitt Romney´s new Twitter accounts have never sent a single tweet.
• 10 percent of these new accounts already have been suspended by Twitter.

The results of the analysis closely fit the “fake user” profile and allow the assumption that most of these recent followers of Mitt Romney are not from a general Twitter population but most likely from a paid Twitter follower service.

Excerpt from Net Security

This is some Aesop's Fable shit fo real.

Upstairs at Johnny Brenda's, slinging giggles and shaving pineapples.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I'm drawing my favorite authors. Today, Robert Louis Stevenson.

"But one man of her crew alive.
What put to sea with seventy-five."

–from Treasure Island

Gonna go Beck in time

This is great. Beck’s releasing his new album as elaborately packaged sheet music. So if you want to hear the songs, you have to play them yourself. Or trick someone else into playing them. Or wait for someone to sing one on The Voice. Or go on YouTube.

Anyhow, it's a great example of swimming against the tide. Since nobody buys music anymore, the music companies are trying to make music cheaper, more accessible, and have less packaging. Beck is going back to basics—like, a hundred years back—and will definitely stand out more because of it. Whether or not he’ll make more money because of it, I don’t know, but I think at this stage of his career it’s worth losing a little money to remind everyone that he’s still creative and artistically relevant.

Batman illustrated by Thomas Ehretsmann

David Borgenicht

Drawing my favorite authors. Today, Quirk founder David Borgenicht.

"When a life is imperiled or a dire situation is at hand, safe alternatives may not exist."

–from the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook

"The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It’s not something that committees can do. It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world."
–Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

Bobby Fischer, striking a super douchey pose. You can watch a great play-by-play analysis of his Game of the Century, played when he was 13, here on YouTube.
"I like the moment when I break a man's ego."
–Bobby Fischer

Against Enthusiasm

The epidemic of niceness in online book culture

Whereas critics once performed one role in print and another in life—Rebecca West could savage someone's book in the morning and dine with him in the evening—social media has collapsed these barriers. Moreover, social media's centrifugal forces of approbation—retweets, likes, favorites, and the self-consciousness that accompanies each public utterance—make any critique stick out sorely.
Not to share in the lit world's online slumber party can seem strange and mark a person as unlikable or (a worse offense in this age) unfollowable.

via Slate, illustration by Sean Ford

Death Race 2000, alternative cover by Ulises Farinas

Alien vs. Predator, via Yimmy's Yayo

Iron

It was too hot in the office. Abe couldn't think. He loosened his collar and squinted at the photo in his hand for the hundredth time. The photo was a giant steel statue that was supposed to represent an iron crystal, although to Abe it just looked like a pile of junk with weird knobs hanging off it. The massive sculpture was supposed to serve as the central focal point of the Brussels World Fair, and it was Abe's job to give the sculpture a suitably epic name.

Well, technically his job had a wider scope than that, but he had narrowed his duties so he could focus on the iron sculpture naming.

A lot of people said the only reason Abe had been named Deputy Representative of the Brussels World Fair was because he was married to the daughter of the Prime Minister. He heard their whispers. A lot of people thought that, as Deputy Representative, he should supervise and manage the entire World's Fair, but he had told them that he was too busy naming the Iron Crystal.

He had seen their sideways glances. He knew they thought he wasn’t qualified.

Why was it so damn hot in this office? Abe tried to open the window, but it was stuck. He strained and the sill’s handle broke off in his hand.

Abe had been given three years to name the Iron Crystal—three long years during which over 15,000 workers had built the Chinese Pavilion, the world's largest artificial swan lake, a five story scale model of a whale heart, and more and more and more—the largest world's fair in the history of mankind. And he still hadn't come up with a name for the sculpture.

It was midnight, and the World Fair commencement ceremony was tomorrow morning.

Unexpectedly Abe found himself tearing the photo in half. He watched his arms knock over the sculpture’s quarter scale model and scatter the papers from his desk. Then he was running down the hallway, blind with panic.

He turned the corner and ran into the first room he saw. It was dark. A single spotlight illuminated a shrouded figure on a platform. Abe didn't know where he was. He didn't care. He couldn’t go back to his stuffy office and clean up the mess just yet. Out of idle curiosity he pulled the sheet off the figure, revealing a robot.

"I am the Dance-o-Tron 5000," the robot told him.

"I'm Abe Rosen," Abe replied. "I'm the Deputy Representative for the Fair, why haven't I heard about you?

"Because I don't work," the robot said. "I can't dance. I'll be de-commissioned in the morning, after the fair's opening ceremonies."

"Aren't you smart enough to figure out how to dance?" Abe asked.

"I am smarter than over 5000 horses," Dance-o-Tron replied. "But I can't dance."

"Gee, that's too bad," Abe said absently. Suddenly he realized something. "Hey, if you're so smart, can you tell me the perfect name to give to a giant sculpture of an iron atom?"

"Yes," the robot said, "The Atomium."

Abe thought about it—it wasn't easy, he had a small hard headache and thinking aggravated it, so he just gave up and said, "That's the perfect name!"

"Of course," the robot said. "I'm perfect."

"Look, I feel bad for you. Would you like me to teach you to dance?"

"No thanks," the robot said. "I don't fear the abyss. I have no emotions."

"Must be nice," Abe said, turning the lights off as he left the room.

HOW DO YOU STOP A PSYCHOPATH WHO HAS NOTHING TO LOSE?

Goin' where the weather suits my clothes.

There's a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline.

Brad Holland, magician

Illustrations by Brad Holland

We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings.
—Stephen King

Nixon + Coffee = Whatwhonow? I know Nixon was an a-hole, and I probably would've hated him if I had been alive while he was president, but after the fact he's very interesting. And that face. THAT FACE! via Manystuff