The Bear that Was on the New York Times Op-Ed Page

Something I'm pretty sure I didn't expect to see when I flipped through today's New York Times op-ed page: a detailed plot summary of an op-ed writer's "favorite children's book" by Frank Tashlin, who has a strong cult following among both fans of his live-action movies and animation buffs who know him for his relatively brief but influential period working on the Looney Tunes (and the book in question was later adapted into a cartoon at MGM, not Warner Bros., but made by Termite Terrace alumni Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble):

The situation reminded me of my favorite children's book — "The Bear That Wasn’t," by Frank Tashlin — in which a factory is built around a bear while he is hibernating. When the bear wakes up, no one believes that he is a bear; everyone is certain that he is a malingering factory worker "who needs a shave and wears a fur coat." The bear keeps protesting, "But I am a bear." Ultimately, his confidence in his own identity as a bear is shattered.

I'm on Twitter

Well, I'm still figuring out how to use it, but at the beginning of the new year I finally stopped holding out and got an account.

dorkbot-nyc 10th anniversary meeting & party this Wednesday

This Wednesday, December 1, dorkbot-nyc is having its 10th anniversary meeting with a special extra party:

The 37.8.4-th dorkbot-nyc meeting and 10th ANNIVERSARY PARTY will take place from 7-10pm on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at Location One in SoHo.

THIS IS OUR 10TH ANNIVERSARY! COME HELP US CELEBRATE!

Wear a homemade suit! Wear a crazy dress! Wear your jeans and a t-shirt! DOESN'T MATTER! Come hear three old-timey dorkbot pals rant and rave! Eat some pizza and drink some beer. Bring a cake?!? Bring some blinky lights! Just bring yourself?!? WHATEVER YOU WANT!

It'll be a semi-normal dorkbot meeting that morphs into a casual party/celebration of 10 years of world-wide dorkbot nerd-on-geek action. Meeting starts at 7pm, party continues until 10pm.

The Realist Archive Project is complete

Ethan Persoff has just announced the completion of The Realist Archive Project, in which the complete run of Paul Krassner's legendary and rare satire/freethought/conspiracy underground magazine has been scanned and posted online. Jesse Walker describes "the lost bridge between Mad and Wikipedia" (with a bonus find of a letter to the editor from a then-conservative Karl Hess):

In 1958 Paul Krassner set out to create a Mad magazine for adults. He was well-qualified for the task, being both a former Mad contributor and, in fact if not always in spirit, an adult. The result was The Realist, a journal whose great innovation was to refuse to label which articles were journalism and which were satire, and sometimes to add just enough truth to a piece of fiction that readers would be left completely befuddled as to what, if anything, they should believe. Some call it a prelude to the underground press. I call it a prelude to the Internet.

Over a three year period, a quartet of issues was posted monthly; the most (in)famous stuff — "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book", the Disneyland Memorial Orgy, the Fuck Communism! poster — was posted early on, but there are plenty of goodies in the later updates; the highlight of the penultimate update was an interview with Albert Ellis by Krassner and Robert Anton Wilson, and the final update is topped off with Krassner's "My Acid Trip with Groucho Marx" (which was already online, but this is a different edition with original page scans and without an eyeball-searing background color).

When "no possessions" meets "his own"

I couldn't resist combining Google's John Lennon birthday doodle with another famous line drawing portrait:

modern school reunion announcement 2010

The announcement for the 38th annual reunion of Friends of the Modern School, coming up this Saturday at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been posted. The Friends is an alumni association for people associated with an anarchist school and colony which was at Stelton, New Jersey (near current-day Piscataway), and the reunions are open to interested members of the general public.

I'm back

Well, it's been a while, but after a hiatus, I'm back to blogging! I'm currently doing some long overdue housecleaning, and expect to get back on a semi-regular posting schedule.

dorkbot-nyc kicks off its 10th season

This Wednesday, dorkbot-nyc is starting the first meeting of its 10th season; as I described it in my post about its 5th anniversary, "its motto, 'People doing strange things with electricity', gives the impression of what to (un)expect. Its dorky arena includes almost anything within the wide bounds of electronics, including both hardware and software, with a square emphasis on low-budget, do-it-yourself, personal projects. The results are geeky, goofy, technical, off-beat, and as wacky as the presenters' personal interests". This promises to be an exciting season; the previous one saw the introduction of a Vimeo account that has videos of some of the presentations.