Cartography by the People

What getting lost in Eindhoven has to do with a nice pit bull and a shovel.

PEN & PAPER: 1, GPS: 0

It’s no secret we’ve been obsessed with maps for a while now. Which is why we’re all over the Hand Drawn Map Association — a quirky, relentlessly amusing archive of user-submitted maps and other interesting diagrams, all drawn, of course, by hand.

The collection spans anything from convoluted direction maps that we bet did more harm than good, to a weird hybrid diagram of the digestive system and hell, to what appears to be a bizarre and somewhat creepy treasure-hunting map.

And in the ultimate old-school-new-school fashion, the Association has its very own Facebook page, complete with free goodies for anyone who fans it. You can even follow them on Twitter.

Which reminds us of that incessantly awesome Map of Online Communities.

Retro Blast

Saggy superheroes, dance lessons from James Brown, what chickens have to do with the roots of hip hop, how to fix all your marriage troubles, and why Springfield, MO is a nerd hotspot.

SUPERSENIORS

Let’s face it, we’re all headed for the nursing home. Superheroes included. And despite all those “aging gracefully” shenanigans, we don’t think there’s anything particularly super about old age.

Luckily, Italian cartoonist Donald Soffritti is there to put some funny in the grim prospect of it all.

In his line of senior superhero illustrations, he shows Iron Man’s discrediting golf habit, Wonderwoman’s so-not-Madonna arms, and what happens when Aquaman forgets the dentures at home, among other don’t-really-wanna-see-but-can’t-help-looking stuff.

Quick, before you choke on the potent combination of hilarity and gag reflex, rinse your eyes out with the reglorifying stuff of our Superhero Superdose issue.

>>> via Comunicadores

DANCE LIKE A LEGEND

Speaking of cultural legends, life… well, death, really… sure did a number on the one, the only James Brown. We hate seeing a living legend grow old — first arthritis steals the swagger, then before you know it, they stop being, well, living.

So when the Godfather of Soul went down at the Apollo last year, it was an acid rain on our holiday parade. Good thing YouTube was there to lift us out of our mourning by reviving Mr. Dynamite from those most dynamitous days, full of energy and ready to show Soulja Boy who’s who.

Watch the great James Brown teach you some dance moves you won’t see in your Hip Hop Abs fitness class.

Now that’s a blast from the past that puts the present to shame.

>>> via Very Short List

THE ROOTS OF THE ROOTS

But if hip hop really is your thing, you might as well learn a thing or two about the genre’s own heritage and origin — who knew it had to do with chickens. Straight from the source:

Courtesy of the folks at Nokia N-Series. (Remember when we said Nokia was the underdog to keep an eye on?)

FDA SAYS OMG WTF

Speaking of advertising and the past, we’re continually befuddled by the level of idiotic pseudo-PC stuff drowning today’s advertising. (A Snickers commercial pulled off the air for being too “homophobic” springs to mind.) One thing’s for sure: today’s regulatory bodies would have a field day with the ads of yore.

Thanks to Weirdomatic’s Old Creepy Ads collection, we can gawk at sedated elderly people (Senile agitation? Pop gramps some Thorazine.), sedated children (Forget Adderall, Nembutal is the name of the game.), self-butchering pigs, the long-lost cousin of the Geico cavemen, and — divorce lawyers behold — the solution to all marriage problems: a bit of Lysol you-know-where.

The irony: Some of these products, along with the delightfully absurd cheesiness they’re framed in, are all to reminiscent of, say, late-night informercials today. Hey, we’re already plotting bringing back the Beauty Micrometer as an As Seen on TV hit.

>>> via Very Short List

PAC MAN & CO

It’s not like the olden days don’t have their nostalgic appeal. Who doesn’t love nerdy retro games?

And if you happen to love them enough to go out of your way, consider a place that’s just there: Springfield, Missouri. That’s where you’ll find the 1984 Arcade, a wonderland of classic games from Asteroids to Zaxxon.

The arcade is particularly famed for its glorious pinball machines, already an endangered species in retroland. You can even book an event there — how’s that for an unforgettable all-you-can-play birthday party for your neo-nerd friend?

So put on your acid-wash high-waist jeans, unleash the big hair, and head over for some nostalgic revival of that era — as far as “best of the 80’s” type of stuff goes, VH1 has nothing on the 1984 Arcade.

Monkey See Monkey Make NBC Look Bad

How rocks stars are making capitalism look really, really, really bad.

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You’ve seen the promos. You’ve heard the promos. You’ve smelled the promos. The 2008 Olympics have been a long time coming, and now they’ve finally come. And while we have high hopes for U.S. Olympic teams, we sure hope the performance of the American teams tooting the horn is no predictor of the nation’s competitive edge over other nations.

Case in point: the BBC promo for the Olympics make NBC look like a bunch of sponsor-grubbing YouTubers.

“Journey to the East” is based on the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West and follows the adventures of Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy as they make their way to the other end of the world using Olympic athleticism to overcome the literal and abstract hurdles.

If this looks and sounds familiar, it should be: the enachanted short film (because we can’t bring ourselves to call it a mere video) is the brainchild of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, the duo behind the pseudo-band Gorillaz. (Albarn is perhaps better known as the frontman of Blur and the mastermind behind The Good, the Bad & the Queen.)

The 3,000-frame animation took 12 weeks to complete and required 12-13 drawings per second of screen time, eating up 50 pencils and over 8,000 sheets of animation paper. If you think that’s quite a production, just wait for the audio: it was recorded on unusual Chinese instruments, 20 of them total, with a choir of 38 Chinese singers studio-dubbed to sound like 76 people. The two parts — the animation and the music — were developed simultaneously over the course of the 4 months so they woud fit together in the most perfect, organic way possible.

…And now it’s back to “This segment brought to you by Exxon-Mobil.“

Blame It on the Weatherman

Why World War II put Al Gore in business, and how Mae West helps keep it 72 and sunny.

WAR, COMICS, WEATHER

Every once in a while, we uncover an utterly unexpected and rather bizarre connection between seemingly random and unrelated elements. That’s exactly what University of Pennsylvania grad student Roger Turner has done with his accidental-discovery-turned-thesis about the link between comic books, military training and weather reporting.

In ‘Toon with the Weather is an audio slideshow revealing the fascinating historical reason for why the 8 o’clock weatherman delivers his spiel the way he does.

It all comes down to the IQ of WWII aviators. Turns out, the military hired pilots for their physical ability, sight and mental endurance, not necessarily for their… erm… cognitive capacity. So when said pilots had to be taught basic weather knowledge from meteorological textbooks, the military had to dodge more blank stares and huh’s than they did Nazi airplanes.

The solution, as usual, was to make things simple — so the military borrowed from the emerging comic book culture and decided to use cartoons to illustrate the weather. The pilots got it, the Nazis got theirs, and the military was happy. A whole culture of weather comics was born, full of weather-based characters (think mean bully-like cumulonimbus clouds), humor, even pop culture references to anyone from FDR to Mae West and other pin-up girls.

After the war, many of those first-generation TV weathermen were ex-military meteorologists who decided to present the weather to the general public in the same style they had used to educate the pilots. They used simple maps and cartoon-like imagery, which we still see today — those sun-behind-cloud graphics, red and blue arrows, and rain illustrations that grace the nightly forecast behind the hot chick who looks nothing like a retired WWII pilot.

Some things stay the same, some things luckily change.

Even as the discussion on climate change gets more and more heated, we see the same iconography and graphics used to illustrate the process — take Al Gore’s latest TED talk, chock-full of those same simple shapes and cartoon-like graphic sensibility.

Watch the slideshow and learn something cool to make you sound all intelligent and well-read at the next dinner party.