Internet is really great. How you can take a topic, or an article and dig in it for as much time as you want is wonderful.
Yesterday I read the “Open the Archive” on how archives need to both be protected and be cosulted. And how Microsoft bought Corbis and now it is conserving the huge image archive by sinking it in 220 meters of limestone (out of time and out of reach), while Rick Prelinger is making his archive accessible for everybody at http://www.archive.org.
I already knew about archive.org as it is the house of the wayback machine, the archive that stores old internet pages. What I ignored was that it contained also open source movies, footage, music pieces and so on. A real gold mine. So here was I, passing the afternoon downloading old footage from the USA government. In particular Duck and Cover (parody) from 1951 who teached to kids how to behave in case of a nuclear attack. Each footage included a comment section, and sometimes the comments were more interesting than the footage itself. Some people took Duck and Cover as a propaganda tool trying (and probably suceeding) in keeping the population psycologically duck (submitted) and covered (blind). Others just ridicularised the idea that a simple newspaper could be of any cover help in case of a nuclear attack, while others still remind how survivors from Hiroshima showed signs of worse burns where the kimono was black as dark colors absorb more radiations. Quite interesting. I remember having seen the movie the first time in a French curse in 1987. Why they would show such a movie ina french course I don’t remember, but I always wanted to see it again. Personally I feel that the greates danger was not in Nuclear War, but in breeding a generation of paranoid person who feel that ‘war can come at any time’. And we have no responsability or possibility to act on it.
Along the same line came “Boys Beware“. Another paranoid movie on what could happen to you if a stanger gave you a lift. It equated Homosexuality with Child Molestation. And described the first as: “a sickness of the mind that can be transmitted”.
While the two movies where quite instructive in thinking how much road have we travelled from that time, it also inspire to think what other lies or unnecessary paranoia are we believing and buying. From “Terrorists can strike at any time, and we have no responsability over it” to “don’t look at the sun or you will turn blind”, “don’t masturbate or you will turn blind also”, “don’t look at the sun while masturbating, or you will turn blind on both eyes”, “don’t eat raw eggs/meat/milk”, “Pedophiles are all child molesters”, “someone having sex with a teenager is a pedophile”, “man are all rapers”, female sex abusers do not exist”, and so on.
The mood was then raised by an old cartoon of Popey Making an advertisment for the Oldmobile (automobile, car):In My Merry Oldsmobile. The advertisment also includes an older song from 1905. I laughed out loud at the cartoon and clapped (although I was alone in the room!) at the end of it. I also liked the song so much that I had to look for the lyrics and had to resist the urge to phone all my female friends to sing to them:
Come away with me, Lucille
In my merry Oldsmobile
Down the road of life we’ll fly
Automobubbling, you and I
And don’t trust when they say that at the time people were so virtuous: 
…They love to “spark” in the dark old park
As they go flying along
She says she knows why the motor goes
The “sparker” is awfully strong …
Then today, Sunday, I promised myself I would not spend too much time in front of the internet, so I went for a ride with my oldsmobile but then the raw milk had to be brought to the fridge so here I am. Just in time to discover the ‘OPEN LETTER TO KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD‘ which raises the important issue: in Intelligent Design should be taugh in school why not other creationist theories, in particular the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) theory. That teaches that the whole universe was created by the FSM with his noodly appendage.
I read the whole letter, the answers from the K.S. School Board, most of the mails, until the one from Chris who explains that ” Although not a believer in He Who’s Name Cannot be Pronounced Because it has No Bloody Vowels, I try not to piss him off, just in case. ” Made me laugh too hard to be able to continue. Most of the mails are from scientist who very creatively see how they always got it wrong and now they started believeing in the flying spaghetty monster.
The new religion is getting much pubblicity, being present in Wikipedia,
The Guardian, Uncyclopedia, BoingBoing, and a number of other blogs, and news around.
Great Quotes:
“We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.”
and
” I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.”
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