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Dear Puffin,
I’m normally not a fan of College Humor. It’s juvenile and usually pretty horrible. But they do occasionally hit one right out of the park, like these travel posters for the lazy, very much in the style of the Steve Thomas work I’ve featured before.
Well done College Humor. Well done.
Love
MacGuffin
Other poster posts:
Poster roundup: Pixar Posters, Minimal Fairy Tales and Captain Sam the Extremely American Eagle
Art Nouveau Slave Leia, sinful Disney princesses, and more
Dear Puffin
I know you are a big fan of urban exploration, so I think you’ll get a big kick out of this book, which was written by an urban explorer, as well as the making-of video that the author made. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children incorporates vintage photos, not just as illustration, but as integral elements of the plot. How does this tie into urban exploration, you ask? Well, like all the best children’s books, the story involves a huge ramshackle house on an island on the other side of the world. And the author, being a conscientious sort of fellow, went to Belgium to find just the right house. Incidentally the author’s name is Ransom Riggs, which may just be the perfect name for a children’s book author.
A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children who once lived here—one of whom was his own grandfather—were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a desolate island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.
Mr Riggs seems to be quite the urban explorer. There are a bunch of smashing pictures (see them all over at Mental Floss) of his trip to Poveglia in the Venice Lagoon, which has at various times been a quarantine and burial site for victims of the Bubonic Plague, leading to claims that the soil is 50% human ash, and more recently an institution which was either a mental hospital run by a mad butcher who went insane from guilt and threw himself off the roof, or a perfectly nice rest home for the elderly. Stories differ. Here are a few of my favorite shots, but I recommend reading the whole article, the story is worth it.
Heres another collection, this time of Bombay Beach in California:
Bombay Beach may be the most famously depressing place in California; the poster child for the post-apocalypse. On the edge of the dying Salton Sea, an enormous body of water half the size of Rhode Island and so salty and polluted that by 2030 no fish will be able to survive in it, there is a town. There are several towns, actually, along the Salton’s 70+ miles of rancid coastline, but the most intact, the most iconically awful, is Bombay Beach.
He even made a video about it, which Roger Ebert gave a thumbs up to. It’s freaking creepy.
Here are some pictures of the Mojave Air and Spaceport. (It’s a spaceport! A real spaceport!!!)
The Mojave Air and Spaceport, as it’s officially known, isn’t just a graveyard for inactive planes. It’s an active airport, home to one of the nation’s only civilian test pilot schools, and most famously the place where Space Ship One was developed and performed the first privately-funded human spaceflight in 2004. But it also functions as a giant parking lot for hundreds of jets owned by dozens of different entities, from major airlines to private individuals. If an airline doesn’t anticipate needing some of its planes for an extended period of time, it’s much cheaper for them to park those planes in the desert and have maintenance crews check them out once every few weeks than to keep them active.
I hope these will tide you over till we can launch an adventure of our own.
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin
These days some of us cannot jet off to foreign lands, so armchair traveling must suffice. Although urban exploration is also a good option. I make quite a habit of armchair traveling. In fact I may or may not actually purchase travel books for places I will never ever go.
Today’s armchair journey is to Iceland, and the Blue Lagoon spa and resort. I’ve been lusting over this place for ages. It’s technically a clinic for people with skin disorders, because the natural seawater and the silica in the stone do something beneficial to skin. Or something. But anyone can stay there and I mean….. look at it….
On the website they describe it thusly:
The heart of Blue Lagoon’s operation is at the Blue Lagoon, Iceland’s most unique and popular attraction. Guests enjoy bathing and relaxing in Blue Lagoon geothermal seawater, known for its positive effects on the skin. A visit to the spa promotes harmony between body, mind and spirit, and enables one to soak away the stresses of modern life. The spa’s guests rekindle their relationship with nature, soak up the scenic beauty and enjoy breathing the clean, fresh air.
I don’t give a damn about the wishy washy harmony of body and spirit stuff. I just want to go swimming in this thing.
See the rest behind the cut
Dear Puffin
So the State Dept. is considering a new protocol for people applying for passports and, well, I’m stunned and part of me remains convinced that this is an elaborate hoax. You can see the new Biographical Questionnaire here in PDF format, but I am also attaching screenshots because this is frankly so bizarre that it might just evaporate in a puff of insanity at any moment. Or, which is less likely, the State Dept might come to their senses and try to hide this under the governmental carpet, which is capacious, but getting quite crowded.
My personal favorite questions include the following, from the section for people whose birth was not recorded within a year or who were not born in a US medical facility. (I don’t know how many people that might be, but I assume quite a few, especially older folks. And, you know, anyone who deviated even slightly from the stereotype birth plan. Like a home birth, or, hmmm, going into labor unexpectedly? Does that count?) Anyway, these are the questions you might be asked to fill out, if you want a passport:
Did your mother receive pre-natal or post-natal medical care?: Ok….
Name of Doctor: Well that might be difficult to track down but I’m pretty sure I could. My mother, on the other hand, probably has no idea who her mother’s obstetrician was. It was, like, 55 years ago.
Dates of appointments: SERIOUSLY? How anal retentive would you have to be to keep records of the dates of your prenatal appointments? Or conversely, how traumatic would they have to have been for them to be so memorable? And also, guys, I wasn’t there. I was freaking in utero for my mother’s prenatal care. Hence the term prenatal. Was I keeping a diary of her prenatal appointments while I was still in the womb? No, I’m sorry, I was not. Silly of me, I know.
Please describe the circumstances of your birth including the names (as well as address and phone number, if available) of persons present or in attendance at your birth: …………………..
……I…what?……….
…….but………I don’t………
…….pfft…..hehehe……ahahahahaha…..
LOL
Um, how shall I put this, I don’t really have a clear memory of my own birth. And I was not collecting names and contact info from the other people present. I was busy. BEING BORN. I also didn’t pass out party favors or commemorative gift baskets, and I didn’t make a scrapbook page. Martha Stewart has literally been disappointed with me since birth. I mean you’d think I spent all 9 months just developing organs and stuff. That was 9 months wasted. I could have crocheted doilies for the entire nursing staff of whatever hospital I wasn’t born in.
Anyway Puffin, the page snaps are behind the cut. Click to embiggen or go here to see the whole thing in a PDF.
On a more serious note, this strikes me as a twisted version of the birther obsession with the intimacies of the delivery room. Could Obama actually fill this form out? No of course not, no normal person ever could. There is also, of course, potential for abuse here, even for people who were born in hospitals in the normal way. When they are asking for every address you have ever lived in and every employer you haveever had, the chances of being able to complete the form in the best of cases is low. And that effectively gives some beaurocrat in DC the ability to deny you a passport for other reasons and use the guaranteed 3 errors on this form as an excuse. This just seems rife with potential for abuse.
What a weird start to the week Puffin!
Love
MacGuffin (who has no idea who may or may not have been present at her birth)
Dear Puffin
Seeing as my heart has been shattered (shattered!!) by the $15,000 price tag on the NestRest, I am comforting myself by searching out yet more awesome minimal and alternative movie posters.
These amazing Narnia, Wonderland and Oz travel posters are from Etsy seller CedarMyna. I love the simplicity of the lamp post.
These are from Matt Owen at Brickhut (a blog worth following, fwiw)
And is this the best vintage Ghostbusters poster ever? You tell me Puffin.
Oh well. The downside of that hanging nest is that I wouldn’t have been able to hang art in it. So I suppose it’s just as well.
Love
MacGuffin
MacGuffin,
It has come to my attention that you love travel blogs. But after the credit card company cancelled my reward miles, I’ve had to become more creative in the type of traveling I do. In my research I came across a wondrous phenomenon – Urban Exploration. This is somewhat like the old tours we used to take in the 19th century to see the city’s slums for ourselves.
This first picture comes from The Moebius, he claims this is from the old Donner Pass (hardly Urban Exploration, I daresay)
This one, from A Daily Dose of Arhitecture, reminds me of the flat we shared in Paris. I daresay our graffiti was on par with this.
This one, from fotopedia, is even closer to home for you, from the Rochester Subway.
I’m not even sure if this one from Telefunker is even in the country. But I would love to explore it.
Laundelles also has some excellent pictures.
I do hope you’ve enjoyed this pictures. I hope to begin such explorations here.
Yours,
Puffin
You might also like:
Trespassing in Time Capsules: The urban explorations of Ransom Riggs
Redditor Gigaface is setting hipster bear traps in NYC. I love this man and I want to have his babies. Pics here.
Im a terrible sucker for travel blogs and this is one of the best. Light on text, with tons of really really good, high quality pictures. Here.
Apparently they’ve found Atlantis, again. No, for serious this time. Its here.
A cameraman for Al Jazeera has been killed in Libya. RIP Ali Hassan Al Jaber. Story here.
So this here is an eco-super-hero, kind of in the style of the KickAss copycats, except that this guy is actually on payroll for the town of Grenoble, in France. He is tasked with enforcing recycling and other environmental standards. Clearly, this town has their priorities right. Here.
There is a possibility that Larry King may join the Daily Show as a contributing reporter, which would be EPIC. Epic I tell you, EPIC! via TheAtlanticWire.
And finally this. is. genius.
