Thursday, December 13, 2012

You'll Believe A Dragon Can Fly

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Okay, this is, on the face of it, an astonishing hack.  This is not wire work and not CGI.  The dragon is really flying.  But how?  pause for a minute and try to figure it out.  I'll confess I had to look it up, though once the trick is revealed it seems obvious.

Here's a tip:  The flight took place at night.

Gizmodo has the explanation.  Click here to find out.


And long ago and near away . . .

In 1976, four individuals convened for a conversation on ARPANET.  They were, implausibly enough, puppeteer Jim Henson, painter Sidney Nolan, conceptual artist Yoko Ono, and philosopher Ayn Rand.

You can find this unlikely and unintentionally hilarious dialogue here.

UPDATE:  Alerted by one of this blog's readers (see below), I discovered that the above conversation was a hoax -- or, as its creators would have it, an art installation -- by Bassam El Baroni, Jeremy Beaudry and Nav Haq.

I apologize for helping to spread misinformation.  And shame on me for falling for it.

*

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6 comments:

  1. MarkDecember 13, 2012 at 2:30 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. FredDecember 13, 2012 at 5:49 AM

    Those ARPAnet dialogues are part of an art installation; they are fictional.

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  3. UnknownDecember 13, 2012 at 6:54 AM

    This whole blog post just made my week.

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  4. Michael SwanwickDecember 13, 2012 at 7:42 AM

    Thanks for wising me up, Fred. I've updated the post above.

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  5. rastronomicalsDecember 14, 2012 at 6:52 PM

    I don't believe Henson would have made the error "altar ego." And as contrasted to the tempered idealism he shows in the ARPANET installation or whatever, he had something of an existentialist's appreciation of the meaningless of it all, and specifically the difficulty of truly connecting. You should check out hist short film "Time Piece" to get a sense of this.

    'Course I'm nitpicking, coming to the "conversation" knowing it was a spoof. I doubt I would have picked up on it without being told, but now that I know . . . .

    Also, I quite liked the one with Ronald Reagan and Edward Said. It reminded me of Silverberg's short story "Enter A Soldier. Later: Enter Another," where Pizarro gives Socrates a solid hangs with.

    Thanks for the link.

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  6. FredDecember 14, 2012 at 7:20 PM

    Don't feel bad for falling for those ARPAnet dialogues -- they're very well done, and there's no obvious reason to doubt them. I fell for them too, and I've seen them linked to many places as authentic. They've been posted *twice* on Boing Boing as authentic.

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