Jorg Rødsjø

From UK Vogue, "Tales of the Unexpected," starring Tim Burton, Helena Bonham Carter, assorted models, and various others in a strange, surreal reenactment of some of Roald Dahl's greatest hits, James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory among them. Shot by Tim Walker, the set includes eyeball play, interspecial love, and a crazy lift. (Via NOTCOT.)

Fifty-five years ago today, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died of an alcohol overdose. Even if the name of the hard-drinking poet doesn’t ring a bell to you, I’m sure you’ve heard of one of his most famous poems, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Dylan wrote the poem watching his father, formely in the Army, grow weak and frail with old age:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The Academy of American Poets has a recording of the reading of the poem: Link | If the words from the poem sound vaguely familiar to you, it may be because you’ve ran across its many pop culture references (as listed in Wikipedia )

More photos and information about the project: Improv Everywhere welcomes strangers arriving at JFK airport

There's a defusing aspect to email management: as emails pile up, it becomes less and less likely that you'll actually read or respond to them all, until a critical mass is achieved, guaranteeing that you'll just say "fuck it" and not read or respond to any of them. The object of email management is always to defuse it before that point.

This email clock attempts to help you manage your email by gauging it on an analog dial corresponding to kilobytes. It's neat, but if you get a lot of attachments in your email, the hands of this clock are going to spin fast enough to convert a digit into pureed slurry.

Make an email clock [MAKE]

We often listen to Billie Holiday albums on slow-moving Sunday mornings. This version of "Strange Fruit" is remarkable and haunting to watch.

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Sir David Attenborough gets a lot of hate mail because he doesn't give credit to God in his documentaries.

In an interview with this week's Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance."

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

Here's a fun tour through author Roald Dahl's cramped and -- let's admit it, filthy -- writing hut. Interesting to see where all the magic happened.

My favorite Dahl story is Parson's Pleasure, which I read in his Tales of the Unexpected short story anthology.

Sound recordings still available to us go back as far as 1878. In this collection at Listverse, you’ll find historical recordings of Florence Nightingale, Pope Leo XIII, and other audio firsts.

One of the strangest ones is the recording of castrato Alessandro Moreschi, a man castrated as a boy to keep his singing voice from changing during puberty (featured previously at Neatorama).

Other recordings listed in the article include an exorcism, the recording of the 1978 killings in Jonestown, and even the Sounds of Hell (yes, it’s a hoax, but quite interesting).

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by mrsmojorisin.

Behold: The saddest Yoda Cat in the world. Video Link

(Thanks, Tara McGinley)

From The Ant Room:

This is one of my favorite things about ants — the ant death spiral. Actually, it’s a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die.

Deep South Peanut Pie

An assortment of 1970s cover scans from the motorcycle magazine Easyriders.

Articles included: "How to Get Rid of Your Woman," "Trouble With Twats," "Why Men Wear Beards," and then: "Positive Prison Reform Plan."

Above, the cover art for an issue which contained a feature article titled "How to Select a Good Ol' Lady." Apparently, the courtship ritual involves strangling her. Then, meth!

Some of the images on the aforelinked link are not work-safe.

(Submitterated by MikeOliveri)

Look at this squid's eye. Just look at it. See anything eerily familiar?

Squid, along with the rest of the family Cephalopoda, haven't shared a common ancestor with us vertebrates in some 500 million years—long before the evolution of our camera-like eyes. And yet, there the cephalopods are, flagrantly swimming about with eyes that use a lens to project an image onto a retina. Call it Squid Eye for the Vertebrate Guy. So, how's it work?

Convergent evolution, my friends. Convergent evolution. We happened to hit on similar solutions to the same problem of sight, even though the eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods evolved separately, in very different ways, at different times. Today, we can see that legacy in cephalopod and vertebrate fetal development. With vertebrates, the eyes grow on stalks, reaching out from the brain. In cephalopods, the eyes start as a clumping of cells on the surface of the skin and reach backwards, into the head, to make brain contact. Similar destinations. Very different road maps.

This lovely illustration—featuring dissections of the head, funnel, mantle and eye of a Thaumatolampas diadema—comes from The Cephalopoda Part I: Oegopsida and Part II: Myopsida, Octopoda Atlas written in 1910 by zoologist Carl Chun following a German expedition to the Indian, Atlantic and Great Southern oceans.

You can see more of Chun's detailed, passionate illustrations at the BibliOdyssey blog.

Why all beverage bottles aren't shaped like pigs is beyond explanation. (Thanks, Rob!)

1930 Art Deco Henderson (Thanks, Littledragon!)