27 December 2010

Lord Vader on Vacation

When you are a Dark Lord of the Sith sometimes you have to take time out – after all, ruthlessly controlling a galaxy far far away is a tiring and thankless task. Occasionally you need to remember what (or who) you once were. What better way to do so than to take a vacation and relive some of the joyous activities of your adolescence?

OK, so the movies don’t exactly show Anakin Skywalker as a surfer dude but, let’s be frank, it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to picture the young Jedi surfing the waves. Yet the power of the dark side is such that even when Lord Vader takes to the sea once again, he cannot quite shake off the shackles of his current life.

There is little doubt why psychiatrists have often considered Vader a useful example to explain borderline personality disorder to medical students. Given these photographs the proof is self evident. What kind of imagination it took to come up with this is another issue entirely. The marvelous figure of Vader on vacation is the creation of abell.

It is certainly a twist on the any number of traditional figures of Vader that you can get your hands on – and we love the humor and creativity involved here. It is the brainchild of Indonesian based toymaker Abell Octovan. We would like to thank him in his guise as Flickr user abell for giving us permission to reproduce the pictures of his creation here. Please visit his photostream for more pictures and information.

Ifyou would like to see another of Abell's fantastic toys, take a look at his barking gun, which is something else!

If you are interested in having the Lord on Vacation in your own home you can drop Abell a line at jellyokky@yahoo.com or if you prefer, send a message on their Facebook page.

9 September 2010

Justin Bieber – Mister Three Percent


Most people outside his demographic (and especially those without daughters) have never heard of him, but young popster Justin Bieber rules the ether so it seems.  It isn’t so much a case of pop eating itself but the internet instead.  The statistics are staggering.

It doesn’t sound like much in black and white – in fact Mister Three Percent might (just might) be construed as a slight insult (but we’re not talking inches or centimeters or smaller units of measurement even, so perhaps not) but Beiber Fever has struck Twitter to such an extent that 3 percent of its infrastructure is working around the youthful Canadian at any one moment.  That is a lot of infrastructure.

At its busiest, Bieber is mentioned on Twitter once a second.  That is quite a frightening statistic for a (some might say) second rate RnB singer.  If you search Twitter for results from the apparently countless (more legion than the Orc) Daydream Beliebers you get hundreds of results in the short space of five minutes.

Take the figure at, say, 100 per minute (albeit a peak time number) and that is a total of 144,000 new tweets about Bieber in the space of the day – a figure which (alarmingly) dismisses the idea of any replies or retweets.  Do the math.  Plus when the boy tweets himself he has one or two people who sit up and pay attention.  As of my two finger typing of this piece, Bieber had 5,110,998 followers.  In the space of typing out this sentence he had increased that to 5,111,015.

But that is not all.  His song Baby Feat. Ludacris from his one and only album My World 2.0 (hmm, rubbish title but scarily true) has outdone even the seemingly unconquerable Lady GaGa to become the YouTube video with the most ever views 317,637,966 (at time of writing). 

Although one might suspect that this is partly due to the determination of his fans to get him to the number one spot, this is an almighty feat which will be very difficult to beat – unless PoTUS is assassinated and the act is caught on film.  Only something like that might overtake this amount of hits.  And then I doubt it.

Those of you who have not put your foot in the Bieber water (as such) this is what the fuss is all about.



Having sat through it myself I realise I have heard it on the radio before (not such a Bieber virgin then!)  – but I thought it was sung by a girl. Sorry, girls. Oh and sorry if you are reading this because you typed is Justin Bieber a virgin (probably without the question mark because seriously, is that a question?) in to your search engine.

As one who remembers the seventies heyday of the likes of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy I can only say that I find the Bieber statistics somewhat depressing (not only because this site gets a tiny percentage of B's hits in terms of number).  So many (mostly) girls are reaching uberhysteria over this pint sized popster that it is like history repeating itself.

It is almost as if the laws of evolution no longer apply to humanity (now there’s a surprise) – perhaps if Osmond and Cassidy fans had not been allowed to breed it would have been alright.  Personally, I am considering reading up on creationism or building a nuclear fallout shelter in my basement. 

My World 2.1.

As a postscript, a few seconds before the publish button was pressed, Justin Bieber's Twitter followers increased by 344 since the first word of this article was written.

Strewth.  Resubscribe to your internet security software – this kid isn’t so much a pop star as a virus.

Image Credits

Bieber on Phone