Psychedelic Coffee Commercial.

Odd as hell, but I love it.

Dellis makes the world better: #3 - Soylent Green should be people

First, a confession: I just watched all of season two of Wildboyz, the MTV show featuring Steve-O and Chris Pontius from Jackass travelling the world, harassing and being harassed by all manner of dangerous animals. I’ve watched them lure a wild leopard into a tree with a chicken breast on a fishing rod, I’ve seen them get bitten by numerous snakes, and seen Steve-O attach more stinging/biting/pinching things to his arse and nipples than I ever thought possible, and all on the same day that a new trailer for Jackass 2 was released. And now for the eagerly awaited confession! Wildboyz is dangerous, it’s stupid, and I could not stop laughing.

At the start of each show there’s a disclaimer, warning you not to try anything you see at home, and that all stunts are performed by or in the presence of trained professionals. Ok, this is a standard freedom-of-liability disclaimer that saves MTV’s arse in case any more kids try and replicate what they see (for instance the kids who set themselves alight, broke limbs etc.)

All of this is well and good, but you know some people are just meant to die, and you certainly know plenty who should not breed under any circumstance.

I don’t mean that in a horrible way, but honestly the more children are mollycoddled and protected these days, the more we’re heading for a generation of mentally and genetically inferior dullards.

These days kids are protected from evils with baby-aspirin, the overuse of antibiotics, and most importantly and worst of all: the super-armour of Mummy and Daddy’s litigation-happy lawyer.

When little Patrick eats a few fistfuls of ants and dirt at school because he didn’t know better, it’s now the teacher’s fault for not keeping a closer eye on him. Back in the day, it would have been the fault of the parents, and even now with Science! we can point to either their genes, his upbringing, or combination of both for the production of this little genetic proto-tard.

Medical science has a lot to answer to for keeping the human genepool green and murky, but I look forward to the day when we return to good old values:

“Yes, I am a Doct--what have we got here! I haven’t seen this before. What? Oh, he did this on purpose? I see. Well, he has to go to the back of the line, while we treat people who have had genuine accidents. Yes, I am serious, now if you’ll excu--Ma’am, stop yelling. Stop yelling. Yes, I see your point, it probably is going to kill him and yes Ma’am, I can see that pencil jammed up his nostril, and yes, it is my medical opinion that it is buried deep in his frontal lobe and probably is scratching the inside of the top of his skull…but Ma’am, here’s the thing -- he put it there. I’m afraid here at Beagle II Hospital we treat accidents first, stupidity last. May I suggest you settle yourself down there with a nice cup of coffee for the wait, and Ma’am, you might like to read this helpful pamphlet on hysterectomies while you’re waiting.”

Darwinism as a system of separating the wheat from the chaff is amazingly good. As George Carlin once put it so eloquently: the kid who swallowed all the marbles does not get to grow up and have children of his own.

I keep thinking back to those kids who nearly immolated themselves on film, emulating a Jackass stunt. It was almost as if they had no concept of fire, what it did and why setting yourself alight may not be the greatest of ideas.

“Say Jimmy, check out how my skin first bubbles, then blackens, then…how would you describe that Jimmy?”

“Why Peter, I would describe that action as your skin sloughing off.”

“Interesting. And this is ‘fire’, you say?”

“Yes, it goes by many names, and fire is merely one of them.”

“It’s pretty.”

“That is is, that it is. Say Peter, are you in any form of pain?”

“Pain, huh? Is that that sensation where something’s happening and no matter what you just want it to stop?”

“I think so. Remember when I swallowed those thumbtacks? I think that was pain then.”

“Then yes, Jimmy, I would consider myself in some pain.”

“Who would have thought?”

“Ooh, look, my arm meat is cooking with gas!”

“Fire, Peter.”

“My fire is cooking with gas!”

“Peter, what say we put that fire out by jumping into the pool.”

“What’s a pool, Jimmy?”

“It’s that watery wobbly thing over there.”

“Let’s do. By the way, is one of your neighbours having a barbeque? I smell steaks.”

I’ve done some amazingly stupid shit in my time, and I mean amazingly mind-bogglingly stupid things, but somehow without medical or parental intervention I pulled through. It’s quite obvious that Darwin (or Jesus, god, God, Allah, Budda, L. Ron Hubbard, and Cthulu) have plans for me as they’ve been keeping me alive all this time, so once I start spreading my clearly evolutionary desirable seed around look out!.

Checkmate, ladies. Checkmate.

Dellis makes the world better: #2 - Moths

I can’t say it’s such a problem in Singapore, but back in Australia at night you’d always end up with moths flying around the light bulbs, casting ghastly shadows around the room and setting up this tiny orchestra of *tink* *tink* *tink* noises as they futilely bashed their little heads against the light’s bulb.

I always thought that was a silly thing to do considering the white-hot nature of light bulbs, but oh no, not for the stupid moth with its stupid pre-programmed biological imperative to invade my lounge room while I’m trying to watch TV. Stoopid moths.

Years later I read somewhere that moths astronavigate using the moon as a focal point, along the lines of keep the moon to the left and keep going ahead.

This obviously worked wonders for millions of years, that is until the electric light bulb was invented. Now moths have billions of little moons to astronavigate by and it’s truly killed any and all sense of direction the little blighters might have had. This also explains why you see clouds of moths around street lamps at night, and why you see them endlessly circumnavigating single bulbs -- they're keeping the "moon" to the left.

Now, you'd best sit down because here’s the genius part of my plan:

One night, when the moon is full and bright, everyone everywhere turns off all lights, and the moths fly to the moon.

Brilliant, huh?

Now, before you start to argue I’ll have you know that my Science Kung-Fu is strong.

Consider the following:

For millions of years moths never flew to the moon. Why, you might ask? Well, because they never bothered to. Sure some early Neolithic moth tried, and failed, and no moth ever tried again. But since the invention of the electric light (the moth’s moon) it has been shown that moths can indeed reach that celestial goal. They do it all the time when I’m watching TV, and they’ve been doing it for successive generations now.

It’s been inculcated in them by the experience of hitting light bulbs that the moon is attainable.

Now, you and I know that moths will never actually reach the moon, but the moths don’t know that. Of course their little wings can’t get them that far, but I reckon they might be able to get so high up that they’ll just orbit the Earth.

This plan is foolproof and simply cannot fail. In fact the only problem I can foresee is that the Space Shuttles will need windscreen wipers as they orbit through the moth-thickened mesosphere layer.

I’m a genius.

That's the spirit!

Dellis makes the world better: #1 - Sleep Safe

Was at the pub the other night, and since the World Cup’s on the place is festooned with flags of different nations. We had a hell of a time working out whose flag a certain one was as we’d never seen it before, and were intrigued by the complexity of the design, which included shields, castles and more.

Turns out it was the Portuguese flag (thankyou Blackberry and teh Intarwebs!), which was a far cry from our African-based guesses.

Anyway, to conserve precious wall-space the flags are being hung like banners, which led one friend to remark that in some cases that may actually be illegal, at which point my other friend interjected that in some cities it’s illegal to hang sheets as curtains.

My first thought was, there’s laws against that?!?

Then my flag-defending friend made the very good point that it’s actually a fire hazard, as sheets flare quickly and vertically whereas curtains are by design supposed to be more flame retardant.

I instantly blurted out that if you smoke in bed, why not sleep under curtains instead of sheets, preventing you from burning down your house when you nod off.

That’s right, friend, I just saved your life!

Singapore's Public Disgrace!
(as originally posted on the Nature Photo Society)

I was doing some macro shooting at the Botanical Gardens this morning when I came across something that truly sickened me. It was a couple, engaged in an act so primal, and in such plain view that …well, I have never been so shocked, horrified and disgusted as I was when my gaze fell upon them.

There were school children about, and yet this randy couple just did not care.

They. Just. Kept. Rutting.

Shamelessly.

Isn’t the Singapore government there to protect our innocent eyes from this corruptible filth?!?

I was so stunned by their shameless and flagrant display of carnal hunger that the only thing I could do was turn my camera on, turn my flash on, position the tripod, set the flash, focus the lens, check the aperture settings, plamp the branch and snap off a few shots. How I managed to repeat this from a different angle I’ll never know.

Anyway, here are the photos. It’s what you came for you dirty perverts!

1) Double-Decker Happiness
300D, T180, 580EX, ISO100, f8, 1.3secs

2) Yeehaw!
300D, T180, 580EX, ISO100, f8, 2.5secs

When real is too real.

I watched Over the Hedge the other day, and must confess to having rather enjoyed it, but it made me wonder when we’re going to see a proper animation along the lines of Final Fantasy: Spirits of Every Good SciFi Movie Plot. Over the Hedge is chock full of anthropomorphic animals cracking wise, pulling goofy faces and getting into all manner of hijinks. Much like the Toy Story series, Shrek, Chicken Little, Monsters Inc, Antz, Shark Tale, Robots, In the Wild/Madagascar, Bug’s Life, Ice Age and so on. Soon we’ll also have anthropomorphic cars in Cars, and even more animals in Open Season. And if Shrek 1&2 hadn’t raped fairytales enough for you, please don’t fret as the necrophiliac Hoodwinked is coming along to roger what’s left of that corpse. Hooray!

Hoodwinked: We Couldn't Be Bothered With Decent Looking Animation

How good would it be though to have a people-based animation from Dreamworks, Pixar or Disney, but one with realism. Sure Sully was blue and purple, but his fur looked and moved like hair. And shit, it was years ago when Final Fantasy: We Rip Off Plots But It’s Animated So That’s Ok first came out. The Incredibles did a great job, but the animation in that movie was kept unrealistic on purpose. There are no faults in The Incredibles. Move along.

What I would like though is all that awesome rendering power to make a movie that’s animated but with human characters in it. Just for once, you know, to give us a break from cutesy fucking animals and such.

Only, there’s a problem with introducing too much reality into a completely rendered or manufactured person, and it’s called the Uncanny Valley.

While the Uncanny Valley sounds like the nickname some incomplete gender reassignment transvestite from Singapore’s famous clap trap The Orchard Towers gives his vagina, it actually refers to the tipping point where a human-like android with realistic facial expression and movement becomes so real that the figure turns from something that is no longer lovingly anthropomorphic but into something terrifyingly inhuman and ungodly.

This still sounds like the trannies at the Four Floors of Whores, but with the Uncanny Valley the more realistic the creation the greater the repulsion felt. Transgender vagina jokes aside, the Uncanny Valley it seems, is frighteningly deep.

Animated animals are easier to mess about with, as fur overlaid on the model’s skin hides a multitude of sins, much like my hair hides my 666 birthmark. Seriously though, deformation of an animated human model can often stretch the skin texture making for stretched moles or scars. Humans, it seems, are extremely difficult to render properly. And the more proper they are rendered, the more improper our reaction to them becomes.

Which is really sad, because shows like Battlestar Galactica have shown me a possible and glorious future, filled with sex-bots. Or something.

The future