Every once in a while we go through a period of fascination with the seven-hundred-fifty-million car pile-up that is American popular culture. Of all the crashes we’ve seen, this is just about the most bizarre. Reality television star Tila Tequila was pelted with debris—including a beer can that opened a cut on her face—after she flashed her breasts in an attempt to control an unruly audience at the Gathering of the Juggalos music festival last week. The first anyone heard of this disaster was when she sold photos of her bandaged face to TMZ. The comment strings indicated that everyone thought it was a publicity stunt. Well, turns out she really did get hit with abeer can, and here’s the evidence, from the website Driven by Boredom. Apparently, the crowd became enraged due to the utter ineptness of her performance. We don’t know about that, because we didn’t hear it, and you couldn’t pay us to. What we wonder is if maybe the crowd became enraged due to the fact that they’re simply sick and tired of these forays into music by untalented professional celebrity types (Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, et.al.). We’re not condoning the mob behavior of these apes—they staged an impromptu public stoning. Yet the whole catastrophe is impossible to look away from. We think of the circus scene in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian where the drunk cowboy shoots the dancing bear. The bear is mortally wounded, but all it knows is to keep dancing, soit dances faster and faster and roars its dying pain as chaos erupts all around it. Tequila's attempt to keep performing even as her lifeblood was gushing out of her forehead is a sad echo of McCarthy's prose—and truly the stuff of nightmares. There was Bosch’s Garden of Earthy Delights, Picasso’s Guernica, and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian—and now we have Tequila’s Gathering of the Juggalos. We don't know if it qualifies as the sort of real-world pulp we're always looking for, but we do know we may never sleep again.  

It's that time again—we're availing ourselves of the local ultramodern train system and speeding away from home. We haven't actually decided where we're going yet, but wherever that is, we'll be back by Monday, barring natural disasters, sabotage, or hospitalization. And if we find something so amazing in our travels that we simply cannot contain ourselves, we'll post it. See you soon.

Cover of the New York Daily News from today in 1962, the day after Marilyn Monroe was pronounced dead from a drug overdose. 

Above, a photo of the mushroom cloud generated by Little Boy, the first nuclear weapon ever used on humans, at Hiroshima, Japan, in the final days of World War II, around 8 a.m. today in 1945. 

We were excited, to say the least, when we found this Imai model of Thunderbird 3 complete with a miniature Alan Tracy, because we remember first seeing this show in syndication during the nineties and it was one of the coolest, if craziest, ideas in television history. If any concept ever pushed willing suspension of disbelief to its limits, it was this one, and we… Sorry, what’s that? You don’t know what we’re talking about? Surely you jest. Thunderbirds was this great British sci-fi television show conceived by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, and the entire cast was comprised of marionettes that, well… Actually we can’t possibly do it justice with words. Let’s just say if you’ve seen Team America: World Police, you’ve seen Thunderbirds. But if that still doesn’t get the concept across, you can check out the opening credit sequence in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and GO! 

At top is a photo of the first atomic device, a plutonium bomb nicknamed Gadget, detonated in a test known as Trinity, at White Sands Proving Ground, aka White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The second photo shows the bomb's fireball at six-hundred feet in diameter 0.016 seconds after detonation, releasing energy roughly equal to 20 kilotons of TNT. The Trinity blast is considered the beginning of the nuclear age, today in 1945.

Curators at the London Dungeon, a museum of horrors which is part of a chain with outlets in Amsterdam, Edinburgh and other cities, were dismayed recently when a digital poster they had placed on the London Underground was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for overstepping the limit of acceptability. The ad, entitled “Bloody Mary: Killer Queen”, featured Queen Mary transforming into a red-eyed zombie. Several parents complained that the ad frightened their children, and the ASA quickly stepped in and forced its removal. It isn’t our place to comment on that, but we saw the ad and thought it was pretty cool, if extremely brief. Plus we liked the London Dungeon’s website. 

You’ve probably heard that the encierro is dangerous, but the truth of that depends on your idea of danger. Deaths average two per decade, including one last year. That isn't going to get most people quaking in their espadrilles, but injuries are common—this morning there were four minor horn wounds, one broken ankle and, we’d guess, several dozen bruises and scrapes. So the question is, how do you like those odds? The odds for the bulls are not so good—six will be killed in the plaza de toros this evening. We won’t bother with any polemics about the tradition of bullfighting, or animal murder, depending on your view. We’re not from Spain, thus we don’t feel we have the right to comment. How’s that for a refreshing attitude? 

Below, we’ve expropriated photos of some of San Fermin’s finest cornadas, which we’ll have to take down in a day or two to avoid any copyright issues. In panel 13 you see last year’s fatal goring (a horn through the top of the left shoulder, severing the brachial artery and shredding a lung), and in panel 14 you see a horn piercing the underside of an unfortunate mozo’s chin, though non-fatally. These are both atypical injuries—a bull rakes upward with its horns and usually hooks a human in the groin region (or the ass if you happen to be running away like a sensible person). In the final shot, panel 15, you see how the men of Pamplona separate themselves from the boys—in the plaza de toros they crouch en masse in the bull’s path and force it to leap over them. You want to show you’ve got true cojones? Try that.     

Above is an interesting American war bonds poster designed during WWII by Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. Geisel worked as a political cartoonist between 1941 and 1943, and he showed a completely different side of his personality during those years, to say the least. In response to complaints about his gross caricatures of the Japanese, he wrote: “…right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble “brothers!” It is a rather flabby battlecry. If we want to win, we’ve got to kill Japs... We can get palsy-walsy afterward with those that are left.” You can see more of the Doctor’s political cartoons here.