Pubic Static Void Man

Guess who this is:



I KNOW RIGHT

This video was shot in 2004, when she was a sophomore at NYU, a mere four years before being discovered. "Norah Jones, look out?" Lol. Random emcee dude, you have no idea.

( and so begins a far-too-soon musical retrospective!Collapse )

Maybe I'm just on an abandoned places kick, but...oh, hell, I'm always on an abandoned places kick.

The Concord Resort Hotel in upstate New York, from the early 1950s to 1998, was once the swankiest resort hotels in the Borscht Belt. Spanning 2000 acres (how many football fields is that? lots of them), boasting a world-class golf course (which is still open today), several Olympic-sized swimming pools, a huge bar, riding stables (with both indoor and outdoor riding areas), an IMAX theater, an arcade, a reportedly amazing kosher restaurant, and a Disneyland-esque shopping district of gift shops, this place was the poshest vacation spot in the Catskills. And then the time came when "poshest vacation spot in the Catskills" no longer meant anything, and over the course of 30 years the resort slowly went bankrupt, and in 1998 things fell apart. And the resort was abandoned, and things continued to fall apart. And continued to fall apart. And continued to fall apart. And now, merely ten years after its closure, the huge, sprawling luxury resort is now a howling, decrepit ruin.

This is what the place looked like in 1998:



This is what it looks like now:



(more pictures)
(more more pictures)

As someone who left America around the time the hotel went bankrupt and came back six years later to find the country a different place, I WANT TO GO THERE SO BADLY.

(Anyone have a crowbar and a flashlight I could borrow for a weekend, just in case I come across any faceless nurses or man-eating beds?)

(edit) Curses! They demolished the last building in 2008. Now there isn't even a ruin to explore. RIP, Concord.

23-year-old Forrest J. Ackerman, in 1939, as a spaceman at the first World Science Fiction Convention (Nycon I).

This silver-suited nobody would eventually go on to become literary agent for a number of greats, including Heinlein, Bradbury, and L. Ron Hubbard, as well as the editor of one of the late 20th century's most popular science fiction magazines (Famous Monsters of Filmland). As a prank he also wrote lesbian stories (under a female pseudonym) for the Daughters of Bilitis, America's first lesbian rights organization, which declared him an "honorary lesbian." He coined the term "sci-fi," and was part of a small and now mostly extinct group of founding fathers of geek culture who were mock-reverently (and are now actual-reverently) referred to as the First Fandom.

He did the costume as a joke. I'm pretty sure he never expected the joke to run for this long. :]

I'm a spaceman / I've got my spacesuit on / I've got my space girl / Singin' my spaceman song / I've got my moon rocket, I've got my moon rocket, got my moon rocket, got my moon rocket...