Brought to You by the Proliferation of Digital Cameras

Livejournal’s blogging software might not be that good as far as I am concerned, but they still have some of the best communities ever. Take, for instance, found_objects”>. It’s a community dedicated to pictures of interesting random crap, very much in the style of Found magazine. Of course, many livejournalers are not familiar with the concepts of “interesting”, “resizing pictures” and “editorial selection”, but overall besides the huge blurry pictures of absolutely uninteresting stuff (what, the community is called “found objects”, I found this) there’s much, much outstanding stuff. Here’s my selection for your lesurely browsing:

  • Primer II: Evacipation Now is wrapping up principal photography. Once again no expense was spared for props and special effects.
  • NSA’s version of McGruff the Crime Dog (NSA stands for “No Such Agency”). NSA is scary, and their mascot is scary too.
  • The three laws of robotics. In bench form.
  • DSL-Shmesl.
  • Cooooooooomeee on down to Ocean City, Maryland. But to get that suit you need to name the actual retail price without going over.
  • What is the great Russian poet doing here?
  • Um, I say this is a torture device.
  • Totoro was here.
  • That’s a great chair. For me to poop on!
  • Now, this is great art. Period.
  • The moving company with the most unfortunate url.
  • Lipton ad executives have been smoking stuff.
  • Now this is a chick magnet!
  • Happy times!
  • CDR art / Biohazard.
  • The vast right wing conspiracy in bookstores.
  • To the dump to the dump to the dump-pum-pum.
  • Now, that’s a noble profession.
  • The magical mystery bus.
  • The magical mystery buckle.
  • The magical mystery soda.
  • Soviet Voodoo

    Oooof. Finally fixed a rather nasty bug that was depressing me most of last week. This and a nice little poem by reminded me about a few superstitions of my childhood.

    There was no subway in Odessa, but we had buses, trolley buses and trams. Poorly printed pieces of bad quality paper served as tickets. The system was somewhat interesting: the driver wouldn’t check the tickets. You had to board with your own ticket and perforate it in a weird looking wall mounted press inside. If during a spot check you didn’t have a perforated ticket, you’d theoretically be fined. In reality everybody except the few unlucky loosers would perforate their ticket in the nick of time.

    So, back to superstitions and luck bringing rituals. Every ticket had a serial number. A lucky ticket was considered to be one, in which the sum of the first three numbers of the serial would be equal to the sum of the last there. If you found a lucky ticket, to gain some good luck, germ or no germs, you had to eat it. Here’s what one (actually this is an even more special palindromic lucky ticket.) would like:


    (image from http://iagsoft.nm.ru/ticket/chel2001.jpg)

    Then there was the “Chicken God”. That was a name for a beach pebble with a hole in it. The hole was supposed to be of a natural origin. A chicken god could be worn on a necklace. To wish on it, you would look through the hole at the sun (getting half blind in the process) and speak your wish.

    Update: tells me that they are called “Holey Stones” in the US and the tradition is somewhat similar.


    (picture from http://www.thegodsgrove.com)

    Oh, and the black Volga. In the Soviet Union a black Volga GAZ 24 was a car of choice for various party functionaries and other important people. A kid who’d spot one would usually mutter a little rhyme “black Volga my luck, which nobody can pluck” (“чернаÑ? Волга, моÑ? удача, никому не передача”). Hey, I am no poet.


    (image from http://autonavigator.ru/autocatalog/gaz/24-10.shtml)