Godzilla Haiku - Monster Wisdom

Allow myself to point your focus to the marvellous Godzilla Haikus of Samurai Frog over at Tumblr. See my favorite examples of the many, many haikus found there. Not only are they funny, sometimes they are even wise.

Haikus aren’t easy
And sometimes they even make sense.
Godzilla!

Historical Esoterism & The Revigator: Irradiate Yourself!

It is not an uncommon idea that water has healing powers. In fact people dying of thirst can extend their life expectancy dramatically by consuming water. Everyone knows that water from the spring in Lourdes has healing powers and even the water in Bath, England or Bad Gastein, Germany has a rejuvenating effect. “Levitating” water is another modern concept for fixing all the nasty diseases our unhealthy lifestyle brought into this world. Weren’t those stone age men some lucky bastards?

In 1912 R.W. Thomas invented the “Revigator”. This is a ceramic water dispenser who is lined with uranium ore on the inside. This radioactive substance emits radon gas as a decay product. Because radon is also found in the water in certain natural springs.

The idea is simple: Put water in the jar overnight and drink as much radioactive water as you need the next day. All the evil in your body gets killed by radiation and you get younger every day. Easy.

But let’s hear from the “Revigator Water Jar Company” – Revigator Building, Sutter at Taylor Street, San Francisco – themselves:

“Restoring of Water’s Lost Element: The newest miracle of modern science of vital interest to everyone because:

1) The most important thing in life is health. We cannot continue to live healthfully unless we live with some respect to the laws of Nature. Life is but cellular building – and cellular elimination. This lost element of water is radio-activity, which both creates vellular energy and removes cellular poisons.
2) Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, the great English physician says “Most diseases are directly traceable to bad drainage in the body” – to the accumulation of clogging waste matter of poisons at vital organs.
3) For centuries, the world has recognized the value of health springs and medical officers now attribute the value of many of the famous health springs to the natural radio-activity of their waters. This radio-activity is one of Nature’s ways of dissolving and eliminating these health-destroying poisons and building healthy cells and tissues.
4) It is now possible for everyone, sick and well, to have, perpetually and at reasonable cost, the splendid benefits of a genuine radio-active health spring right in the home through this invention – the REVIGATOR water jar.

The water treated such was supposed to relieve arthritis, flatulence and senility – and anything else you could have come up with .The Revigator was a huge success and hundreds of thousands were sold for about $ 30, which was a lot of money in the Twenties. (Ca. $ 400 in modern dollars)

It was not before the thirties – Marie Curie died 1935 from “aplastic anemia” contracted from her long-term exposure to radium – that the business went down the drain for the Revigator Company. Michael Epstein, an analytical chemist from Mount St. Mary’s Universitiy proved that the surviving revigators still produce quite an impressive amount of radiation here. In addition to this they still heavily poison the water with arsenic and lead.

Find the brochure mentioned above – 24 pages that will finally convince you – as a PDF at the homepage of Theodore Gray, Director of User Interface Technology at Wolfram Research. (Once there you could check out this beautiful periodic table, too) And then you could read this article about “levitating” water: Does it remind you of something?

Mash-Up: "The Uncanny X-Men" by Hergé

For everyone not into comic books:
1) Hergé invented “Tintin”. This hero was very successfull when printed on paper. Now he is rather successfull in cinemas. (As of today “The Adventures of Tintin” grossed over $ 300,000 worldwide!) And…
2) “The X-Men”. Well, if you haven’t heard of them you may have landed on the wrong kind of blog here.

But what I really wanted is to showcase the works of French artist “Yop!”, who did some very nice mash-ups. And shares them with us on his website “Mooloozone”.

“L’Affaire Magneto” mixes the X-Men and the famous drawing style of Hergé called “Ligne claire”. I’m a huge fan of this exact, articulate kind of comic books and somehow it even works with the X-Men! But it changes the pace from action to storytelling.

Yop! was so kind to translate this comic into English, you can download the full five pages as an PDF here.

If you are speaking French, there are two other really great pieces:

A mash-up of Conan and “Little Nemo in Slumberland” – Brilliant! Here.

And “The Smurfs” mixed up with “Sin City”! Now that would have made the movie a lot more interesting. Imagine Bruce Willis instead of Neil Patrick Harris! There.