In this Oscar-Nominated short, Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty, directed by Nicky Phelan and produced by Darragh O’Connell, old Granny tells a tale that goes a bit off the rails as all good stories should do.  It’s hilarious.  It’s got a maniacally angry ‘elderly fairy’ who crashes the fairy tale party and spreads her bile around the joint in a most amusing tirade.

Anti-Defamation League - Fighting Anti-Semitism, Bigotry and Extremism - Yeah, unless you're a Muslim.

The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that ostensibly stands up for religious freedom and tolerance in the United States has shocked and disgusted many people, including me, by announcing their opposition to the construction of a mosque in the vicinity of the World Trade Center site.

In the vicinity! We’re not talking about on top of Ground Zero. We’re talking about nearby, somewhere in the general neighborhood in New York City.

The Anti-Defamation League appears, as a result of this bizarre proclamation, to be an organized group of bigots pretending to support tolerance.

Muslims have every right to build a mosque near the World Trade Center site.  There’s nothing inappropriate or wrong about it.  In fact, I think it shows a concerted effort to be a thriving part of the New York community.  It’s healthy to build this mosque.  It’s a better decision than building the ever-stalled ‘Freedom Tower’ which never gets an inch off the ground.  Why not rename it ‘Freedom Hole.’  These people who have been protesting, including some of the relatives of 9/11 victims, are nothing more than the worst form of bigot.  They couch their hatred in ‘protecting the emotional well-being of families and victims.’  By their logic we should cordon off every site of a plane crash and forbid construction by people who are of the same religious beliefs as the pilots.  We should ascertain the religion of every person who commits a murder and prevent people of that religion from ever constructing churches near the murder sites.  Insane.  Hateful.  Nonsense.

Muslims are not terrorists.  Muslims are simply people who worship in a particular way.  Associating Muslims with terrorism is bigotry by definition.  I think someone should build a mosque on top of the Anti-Defamation League.

Here is what the Anti-Defamation League says:

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

So don’t build your mosque because it’ll make a bunch of backwoods idiot bigots feel bad.  Wow!  I’m just blown away.  You know, I never give money to organized bigots.  But I’ll certainly contribute to the mosque-building fund if there is one.

This insidious and creeping connection of Islam to terrorism is becoming very dangerous.  It’s getting worse quickly.  It’s spreading all over the U.S. and Europe.  If the Anti-Defamation League feels that is can say something like this then we are in very bad shape indeed.

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This is the first John Carter of Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan books. It was his first novel, published in 1917 and it’s a work of rip-roaring science fiction that has inspired many of the great writers in the genre.

Chapter 20: John Carter, on the edge of starvation finds himself as an unwanted guest in a vast atmosphere generator.

You can find all the previous chapters of the book here.

You’ll find regular podcasts of all the chapters over the next couple of months. Subscribe to our feed.

Duration: 00:19:17
Read by Alessandro Cima

All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved.

Look at this astonishing music video from a Japanese breakbeat duo called Hifana. It explodes.

Pink Tentacle has an amazing collection of freakishly bizarre Japanese children’s book illustrations by Gojin Ishihara from the 1970s.  His marvelously comforting work features various humans being eaten, strangled, decapitated, tortured and generally threatened by every sort of demonic beast possible to imagine.

Well worth your time.

Visit the macabre collection of sweet children’s pictures.

A fantastic low-budget retro science fiction military training film for our brave UFO-fighting squads! Electro-Magnetic Flight And You! was made by Angus Lyne in 2006.

A great old film noir from 1955 starring Cornel Wilde. The Big Combo, directed by Joseph H. Lewis is about a tormented detective, Leonard Diamond, who becomes obsessed with taking down a nasty gangster called Mr. Brown. There’s a woman stuck in the middle and Diamond wants to save her.

The film is loaded with superb noir imagery and maintains a good level of tension all the way through. There are also lots of choice tough-guy lines.

The great American filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, has made a new film called Missoni. He shot it for the Italian fashion house Missoni as part of their Fall 2010 advertising campaign.  The film includes members of the Missoni family engaged in dance-like movement and poses. Can advertising be art? Yes, when it’s done by an artist.

Anger has made another beautiful and mysteriously layered film. Apparently, he has gone digital, using something called a RED digital camera. It has some characteristics in common with 35mm cameras. Anger appears to be using it as freely as he used 16mm cameras.

What’s really interesting about this whole project is its reason for existing.  I think the Missoni advertising angle is just an excuse.  I think they just wanted to be in a film by Kenneth Anger.

Here’s a gallery of photographs made by pinhole cameras.  This image is by Noriko Ohba.

Making a pinhole camera is pretty simple.  In some cases you can simply take the lens off of a camera and replace it with some tape that has a hole in it.  Here are some instructions.

Via Submitterator

I’ve seen some great puzzles on the Web and I’ve enjoyed being destroyed by them. Here’s a puzzle for you… if you’re clever and want to figure it out. Remember: everything’s a clue and there’s no such thing as a mistake.

So, there’s a solution.  You must figure out what it is.  It is something shared by two towering artistic achievements of the Twentieth Century.  It connects the written page to the cinema.  The clues that follow will give some players the evidence they need to search far and wide, connecting themselves to ideas that they never suspected the existence of.  For a few players, the clues will work unconsciously to give them a solution without really trying.  Some of your solutions will be better than the actual solution.  We all work differently.  Obsession is for most of us the best answer.  Moreover, one’s lunatic obsessing consumes hours.  So that’s it.  Take a break from work.  Obsess until you get it.  The first person to post the answer in a comment and clearly declare it to be their answer wins.

I will withhold some clues and drop them in when I think they are needed.  Just use the comments to leave your thoughts, guesses, suspicions, speculations, and theories.  I’ll leave the puzzle going until I decide enough is enough, even if someone gets it early.  It’s perfectly fair to let other people play for a while.  If nobody plays at all I’ll just put it off to the side somewhere and move on.

I have whittled the clues down to a smaller group that should work pretty well.

Here are the clues:

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As the 2010 Tour de France bike race winds its way through the French Pyrenees mountains, cyclists and fans everywhere are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first time a stage of the race went up the Pyrenees. The range is rugged and steep, presenting the riders with a greater challenge than the more gradual ascents of the Alps. In 1910, riders first hazarded the devastating climbs. Now, bike clothing manufacturer Rapha has produced this beautiful film about four riders celebrating the Tour’s Pyrenees anniversary by riding up a mountain called the Col du Tourmalet. That’s the mountain that the current Tour de France race is on at the moment. These four riders pay their respects to the 1910 racers and their equipment by enjoying every hardship presented to them by the mountain and the wet weather.

I do a lot of mountain road riding in California and I can appreciate the difficulty of this incredible Col du Tourmalet climb.  I’d love to do it myself.  Equipping yourself with water, food and repair items to set out over remote slopes is a very focused and exciting thing to do.  I recommend it to anyone.

The real problem with feeding the world properly is the production of meat. Meat is a very destructive product because it is a huge polluter and uses land inefficiently. Denis van Waerebeke made this instructive short film about world hunger.

A nice little love couple enjoying a simple meal together with plenty of food and knives and forks to throw. A messy relationship. Strong table required. Israeli filmmaker Dafna Axel made this as her graduation project film.

Apparently, I write like somebody named David Foster Wallace. I know… it’s weird. Who would have thought? Who is David Foster Wallace? I think he’s kind of high literary serious-minded and wild sort of college professor type stuff. I should just do a Wikipedia on him, but I don’t really want to know who this person is that I supposedly write like. Below, you can see my official badge that proves the Wallace connection:

I got my writing-like-David-Foster-Wallace badge from I Write Like. It could not have been easier. I simply pasted several of my very opinionated and slightly acidic blog posts into the I Write Like form and then pressed the button. Each time, this David Foster Wallace guy popped up. One blog post that I dribbled out because I had nothing of interest to say on that day came up as Dan Brown. No surprise there because Dan Brown is so numbingly uninteresting that his brain should be transplanted into the body of Tom Hanks where it would dwell very contentedly for some time I would suppose.

I Write Like is really loads of fun. I could paste entries into it all day long and feel that I had spent my time well. That’s what I’m doing today. For the entire rest of the day I’m going to sit here dropping my blog posts into this machine to find out if maybe I really am David Foster Wallace.  I may even start to make stuff up just for this writing machine and eventually maybe I’ll see my own name pop up: I write like…