Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Long before Paris and Nicky Hilton, there were Daisy and Violet Hilton, San Antonio’s Siamese Twins. According to rattsfreakshow.com the Hilton sisters were pygopagus twins – conjoined at the hips and buttocks. They shared blood circulation and were fused at the pelvis but shared no major organs. In 1932 the twins appeared as themselves in the movie Freaks, which dared to pose the question of whether or not conjoined twins can have a love life. In the case of the Hilton sisters, the answer was yes – they were notorious for their many affairs and allegedly had a strong desire to outdo one another in the area of dating.

If you are a glutton for more Hilton Sisters photos, past and present, go to the jedimaster.

Congratulations to Participant Productions on reviving the spirit of conscience and meaning in filmmaking with two recent releases: Good Night, And Good Luck and North Country. Thanks to the wall of right wing noise, the past few years have seen a mighty counter surge of intelligent, truth seeking documentaries and fact-based motion pictures, such as The Corporation, The Fog of War, and of course the work of Michael Moore.

Good Night, and Good Luck covers Edward R. Murrow’s confrontations with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Government sponsored investigations and accusations of Communist activities, a Red scare witch hunt that inspired Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. Incredibly, to those of us who truly believed the American psyche had evolved above and beyond those dark days, we now have the likes of Ann Coulter and right wing robot mouths reviving the glories of McCarthy’s delusional deeds. Has she no shame?

Participant Productions was founded in 2004 by eBay philanthropist Jeff Skoll. It is heartening to see capital success put to good use this way. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Keep on fighting the good fight.

P.S. You should definitely support these films by going out and seeing them!

Happy Halloween! This Tom Delay guy really is scary! Hot Tub Tom!

I’m glad it’s over! Especially the Houston games. The post-season baseball games TV broadcast from Houston were oddly distracting with the ever present snowball white hair of Bulldog Barbara Bush constantly behind home plate. I have to give her credit for sitting through game 3 like a vigilant animated George Washington painting for 11 or 12 innings, the longest world series game in history, 5 hours and 41 minutes. Now I know where her son W gets his stubborn tenacity.

I know that I am not alone in this obvious observation because other bloggers are venting also:

Barbara Bush’s shining white mane continues to infiltrate my HIGH-DEF

I am pulling for them not only because half my family is from Chicago, but because George H.W. and Barbara “Let Them Eat Cake” Bush are seated behind home plate at the former Enron Park (now Minute Maid Park, because who doesn’t like orange juice?), both clad in Astros jackets. Last night (game 3) Babs was accompanied by Neil Bush of Silverado S&L scandal fame.

As the Chicago Sun-Times Mark Brown noted, Mrs. Bush’s seat was so close to home plate “you can see her head during every pitch of every at-bat.”

Some interesting buzz in the news today about Google reaching into eBay, craigslist and classified advertising territory with their search technology. Here is the screenshot of Google Base.

That’s the hazy future, but for now I’m bummed that I was not invited to Google’s Zeitgeist forum. This is the kind of smart brainstorming contact high cluster f*ck that temporarily raises my IQ to rare sub-genius levels. Dear Google, please invite me next time. I promise I will not blog about it. Thank you.

Here at Media Spin we are compulsive collectors of media. Digital archiving started over 20 years ago, and recently we uncovered a huge stash of rare old gems. There are many unusual finds, such as the above cover of an early girly mag test run by a struggling Hugh Hefner.

Here’s a good one. How cool would it be to have a job making up good intelligence, news stories and “strategic communications” for the U.S. Government to feed the unwary public? That’s what The Rendon Group does, and you can too! They’ve helped sell us rubes on the last couple of Gulf Wars and that’s only the beginning.

Hers’ a stunning find… Martha Stewart’s lesser known sister, Celeste. Her dedication to office work kept her out of the kitchen and out of Martha’s way. There are many more of these that still are being sorted out. Sorry, still no early Oprah photos.

Hands down Mati Klarwein pushed my early painting efforts furthest. Take Gustav Klimt, Salvador Dali, James Rosenquist, throw them in a vat of peyote buttons and psilocybin, and you get Abdul Mati.

As a painter, looking at Klarwein’s work is intimidating, and I was never able to match the intense religious attention and power he devoted to his compositions. These are epic mindscapes that one must live with and merge into.

His incredible photo-realistic detail presaged the ease of use Photoshopping of collage imagery and computer graphic imagery. Klarwein is probably best known for the publishing of his paintings on album covers by Miles Davis, Santana and Jerry Garcia… but there is so much more than that!

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All the recent natural disasters, compounded with ongoing International terror strikes and American leadership errors, are giving me a bad case of the Doomsday Blues. Let’s face it, with rampant population and its resulting poverty, global warming and its resulting catastrophes, and WMDs and their resulting mass destruction, it seems like without a whole lot of peace, love and understanding… we’re fucked!

I’ve been writing about the blending of media and politics, and it seems as though some really wealthy, powerful guys are thinking, “Hey, we didn’t amass a big fortune just to have the world blow up in my face!” So, wouldn’t it be great if Bill Gates and Paul Allen used their massive wealth to steer America back on track by the next big election? OK, we should also add Bill Joy, Steve Jobs and their companies to pitch in to redesign a smarter, better Operating System for the USA.

Meanwhile, a group of philanthropic statesmen are really doing something. They’ve organized NTI, The Nuclear Threat Initiative and produced a docudrama Last Best Chance which imagines the results of al Qaeda operatives striking with nuclear weapons. It gives some hope that successful influential people are working on solving hard problems.