Dennis Avner, who chose to go by his Native American (Huron) name “Stalking Cat” and who underwent numerous extreme body modifications to better relate to his feline totem, passed away at his home in Tonopah, NV on November 5, 2012. The cause of death has not been determined, although ModBlog reports that he ended his own life. Avner was a U.S. Navy veteran who supported himself as a programmer and technician, and made the circuit of Ripley’s Believe It or Not events around the world.
I’ve been aware of Mr. Avner’s existence for some time, and all I have ever heard of him – other than the obvious curiosity – was that he was an exceptionally nice individual. My heart goes out to his family and friends, and I can only hope he has found peace.
Barrelmakers. I noted with interest they are using a crate from the F. E. Harding fish company in Boston, at one point a partner in the Boston Fish Pier Company. Date unknown.
El Ensueño [The Daydream], 1931 – Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico’s first significant fine art photographer.
This gelatin silver print was estimated to fetch between £40,000 – £60,000 at auction by Christies’s in 2007. The hammer price was £126,500, or $261,223. Not bad for a black-and-white photo smaller than your average letter-sized sheet of paper.
And these are only two examples of the myriad head-scratchers to come out of Japan. The only fair thing to say about Japanese culture is that it’s really, really different from ours, and given the nature of cultural differences, it’s not our place to judge.
This little gem makes me laugh hard; I wish I had one on my shelf, just because it’s so wonderfully offbeat. Say hello to God Jesus, the fortunetelling robot created by Bandai in the 1980’s.
God Jesus is a plastic robot brandishing a crucifix, a bizarre cross (no pun intended) between The Clapper and a Magic 8 Ball. Think of a question and clap your hands, and God Jesus will either shake his head from side-to-side to indicate “No,” or nod his head to indicate “Yes.”
Want to find out if you’ll be lucky in love? Let God Jesus tell you the answer!
The boy is asking, 彼女はぼくのことを好きなのでしょうか。 どうぞお答えください。(Would she like to be my girlfriend? Please answer me.)
Poor kid… So heartbroken his glasses fell off. This model looks eerily like I did when I was that age. People even told me I looked like Ernie from “My Three Sons.”
The girl is saying 彼はわたしのことを好きなのでしょか。 どうぞお答えください。(I think he would like to be my boyfriend. Please answer me.) God Jesus tells her “Yes,” and she’s happy.
God Jesus needs to get his act together.
The instructions tell you how he operates – the video below shows God Jesus in action.
Now, a lot of people I know would be mightily offended by this and consider it blasphemy, but they don’t understand… It’s Japan. The Japanese live in a society where religion – even their own – plays very little part in their daily lives in terms of driving moral choices; an interesting blend of Shinto, which stresses veneration of ancestors, and the “middle way” of Buddhism. Religion for the Japanese has more to do with tradition and a link to the past than it does with spiritual guidance, except at a very meta-level. Add to this the fact that the average Japanese man or woman knows less about Christianity than the average Evangelical Christian knows about Kimbanguism. It’s just not on their radar, other than to know a large percentage of the world worships a big guy in the sky who can do everything. It is entirely possible that the clapping function may tie in to the Shinto tradition of omairi.
So in that framework, this toy makes perfect sense. It becomes a curiosity, much like our own Charley Weaver bartender toy, or the singing bass.
This example is the best one I have found out there – it shows Charley’s face turning red and smoke coming out of his ears.
Apparently God Jesus is extremely rare, and few working examples are know to exist. A bit of digging turned up an interesting bit of trivia:
“What few people know, though, is that this was a tie-in to God-Jesus and the Cyberama Seven, in which the second coming was a robot, and the cybertronic savior did battle with various flying killer tortoises and huge insects and resurrected dinosaurs, all of whom were trying to plant fossils in the ground to muck with the heads of scientists and make them think the Earth was older than six thousand years. An animated show, it ran only three episodes and aired only once.” (Found at NeedCoffee)
Digitally-altered and throught-provoking architectural photos. Visit Victor Enrich’s gallery for more. An article about Enrich’s photography appears in Dezeen.
