A Polish beekeeper was nearly buried alive recently. Stung by his one of his charges, Josef Guzy looked dead enough to be sent into the buril process. Until:
He was placed in a coffin by undertaker Darius Wysluchato until Mr Guzy's wife, Ludmilla, asked him to retrieve her late husband's necklace before closing the lid. As Mr Wysluchato fiddled with the watch chain he happened to touch Mr Guzy's neck and detected a pulse.
Several nice details to this story:
He said: 'I touched around the neck artery and suddenly realised he asn't dead after all. I checked again and shouted, "It's a pulse!" 'I had a friend check and he noticed the man was breathing. God, it was a miracle!"
Always so embarrassing when that happens... And, speaking of embarassing,
Doctors have concluded that it was a case of suspended animation. The doctor who falsely diagnosed him as dead has apologised.
The fortunate man has a nice sense of localvore-themed irony and kindness:
Mr Guzy added, “The undertaker saved my life. The first thing I did when I got out of hospital was take him a pot of honey.”
The opposing candidate, Dwight McKenna, "didn't want to talk about his 1992 conviction on federal tax charges for underreporting his income by $367,000. He served nine months in prison.
"The coroner thinks the spot is actually helping him. "People are coming up to me and saying it's atrocious," he said."
What if a movie studio's logo terrified generations of children? "The S from Hell" is a fun mockumentary short, using found footage (mostly) to create a backstory for the Screen Gems logo over time.
An underappreciated aspect of our shared Web life is the reliable association of Web content with addresses, or URLs*. So when we click on a link and get something wrong, the experience can be disorienting. Depending on the resulting contents, it can even be scary.
A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers' accounts with full access to troves of private information.
There are many ways online information — from mundane data to dark secrets — can go awry.
Note that this involves not computers, but cell phones. And note, too, AT+T continuing to look bad in public.
This is perhaps too technical, too geeky to hit the cultural mainstream. But we'll keep an eye on it. Here at Infocult, we're all about the internet that isn't the internet you think it is.
(thanks to Paul Davis!)
*URL: yes, "URI" is a better term. I agree. Let me know when it's used widely?
one of China’s most feared public health hazards... The camp’s brochure claimed that an estimated 80 percent of Chinese youth suffered from it. Fifteen-year-old Deng Senshan seemed to be among them. He was once a top student, but his grades had plummeted over the past couple of years, and he had stopped exercising almost completely. He spent most of his time playing games like World of Warcraft at Internet cafés or on his desktop computer. The Chinese news media was filled with terrifying stories of WOW-crazed kids dropping dead or killing their parents, and Deng Fei and Zhou Juan worried that they might lose their only son to a technological demon they barely understood.
The meme might be fed by the state:
The Net was not just a public-health hazard but a national-security risk. In 2006, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League openly fretted about a “severe social problem that could threaten the nation’s future” and called Internet cafés “hotbeds of juvenile crime and depravity.” Official figures claimed that the Internet was responsible for up to 80 percent of high school and college dropouts and most juvenile crimes. A show on state-run television described the fight against Internet addiction as the Third Opium War.
Does anyone have good info on this meme in China? We've been focusing on American culture here, primarily.
Marble Hornets is a Gothic tale told Web 2.0 style. It's still going on, and is well worth exploring.
Most of the content can be found in the Marble Hornets YouTube channel. The conceit is that an amateur filmmaker, Jay, is going through a videotape collection assembled by another video creator. That other filmmaker, Andy, was shooting his first movie, the eponymous Marble Hornets, when something strange started happening in his life, and he began documenting it.
Some notes on features: it's very low-low-low-budget stuff. Actors are amateur, locations are mostly outdoors, and post-production is all doable with freeware. This should be good news to anyone exploring such storytelling strategies, from educators to kids. Come up with an idea, get or borrow a Flip camera, get access to a decent computer, and go!
Yes, it clearly owes a lot to Blair Witch, from the documentary style to the problematic survival of the video archive. If #22 is the end, as it could well be, there's also a nod to that film's Gothic house finale (the high point, I maintain).
The Web 2.0 storytelling is based partly on the story's location in YouTube. It's a series of short videos, and our experience is mediated through that Web services's tools: channels, recommendations, "in response to" links, and comments. But Marble Hornets is also Web 2.0 narrative by being distributed in several other locations:
A Twitter feed exists, which seems to be from Jay's point of view: "I don't like the fact that it says "us" in the video", "I've been trying to sleep for a while. No luck."
The appearance of a second YouTube channel, apparently maintained by a spooky new character, totheark. He/they/it gets mentioned in some of the MH clips, and apparently appears (the guy in white makeup or wearing a mask). These videos are shorter than the main ones, more abstract, and more cryptic.
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