Article by our guest writer M. Christian (from "Meine kleine fabrik"). M. Christian writes about odd, weird, and wonderful things - most of them are, just like life itself, as unexpected as possible
Few things are as strange as the tale of the The New Motor:
A locomotive "god" from the Victorian times, that was supposed to be "The Physical Saviour" of the race.
Illustrated by the wicked cyberpunk creations by artists Vladimir Tsesler & Sergei Voichenko, Belarus and Andrey Severinko, Kiev, Ukraine.
(art by Vladimir Tsesler & Sergei Voichenko, Belorus)
1854, America, the Northeast. The time, particularly, is important. Think about it: 1854. - Years before even the civil war, a time of technological innovation. - No electric lights. - The safety match was even a year away. - No elevators. - The hypodermic syringe and spinal anesthesia was either just developed (the former) or just a little ways away (the latter). So don’t even THINK of getting sick. - Think coal, wool coats, the Crimean War, legal slavery, and Sir Richard Burton in Mecca and Medina.
Go ahead, look him up. If you’re lucky, you might find him as a footnote, a side-thought in the spiritualist movement of the time. You know: ghosts, table-turning, trances, automatic writing, levitations ... in other words, spirits. Spear was part of that world, a medium-temperature medium.
Then sometime during that year of 1854 Spear was elevated from mediocrity to the domain of the truly, magnificently ... unusual.
Contacted by a bunch of spirits, with an “apparent mechanical turn of mind”
See in 1854 Spear was contacted by a bunch of spirits, with an “apparent mechanical turn of mind” (to quote A.J. Davis) that included the ghost of Benjamin Franklin: the Association of Electricizers, who commanded him to go forth unto this world and build The New Motor
(art by Andrey Severinko, Kiev, Ukraine)
“The Physical Savior of the race,” was how Spear described the Motor. As to its mysterious workings he said it was to be powered by “power from the magnetic store of nature, and therefore to be as independent of artificial sources of energy as was the human body.”
What the hell the New Motor looked like anyone’s guess. A clockwork Jesus? A steam-powered messiah? A rubber-band savior? A locomotive God? The fact that we haven’t the foggiest idea of what his “The Physical Savior of the race” looked like doesn’t diminish the fact that Spear and his spiritual mechanical gizmo really existed -- at least according to the eminent Lewis Spence in his An Encyclopedia of Occultism.
Birth Pangs as a "Jump Start" to a cult of followers
Slowly, Spear collected quite a little cult of followers … who did just that: Trail behind him and the New Motor, which they worshipped as a god, on tours throughout the Northeast. Eventually, this little band ended up in the lovely little town of Lynn, Massachusetts. There a certain lady received a vision of the New Motor and, while in its presence, suffered “birth pangs” for over two hours.
After this certain lady went through her “pangs” it was said that “it was averred that pulsations were apparent in the Motor”. After learning of this wonderful bit of unusual (okay, weird) history, the term “jump start” has not meant the same to me ….
(art by Andrey Severinko, Kiev, Ukraine)
Outraged citizenry smashed the Motor to bits
I really wish this story had a better ending: like maybe Spear vanishing one day with the Motor, or that it ascended into some kind engineering nirvana, or was lost only to be discovered to our fascination and delight in some farmhouse in Connecticut. But, sadly, real life is too often stuffed with clichés: I can only hope that the “outraged” citizenry of Randolph, New York, who smashed the Motor to bits, had been carrying torches.
Still, who knows? Maybe someone someday will discovered a twisted bit of spring and cylinder, a crumpled mixture of glass and copper, a wind-up collection of gears and pendulums in a old barn, at the bottom of a filled well, on a dusty shelf somewhere and, to his surprise and shock, he will notice certain ... movements ....
No, that’s not quite right. Not movements, rather: “pulsations” …. And so maybe The New Motor of John Murray Spear will tick and tock, and live again.
(art by Vladimir Tsesler & Sergei Voichenko, Belorus)
UPDATE:
Today's technology is advanced enough not to employ a steam power, or any motor at all - you can start believing in God instantly by means of this miraculous breathspray! -
The illustrations attributed to "Mikolka-Parovoz" is actually by Vladimir Tsesler & Sergei Voichenko See here for more info: https://www.winterhalter.com/node/23
Wow! This rare tale reads like a lost Ray Bradbury novel, complete with electric bodies, spooks, robot gods, torchlit mobs, and charismatic vagabonds roaming 'Winesberg, Ohio'.
Thank you Steve - couldn't agree more with this, a perfect Ray Bradbury story... or maybe some new writer like China Mieville or Jay Lake could pick this up?
I think you need to start putting a warning on more of your links. It doesn't happen very often, but that arm and a leg video is just too much. The worst I've ever seen here and something I did not expect from you.
The Southwest Airlines 737 photos are from an accident that took place in December 2005.
From Wikipedia: Southwest Airlines Flight 1248 (WN1248, SWA1248) was a scheduled passenger flight from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Chicago Midway International Airport. On December 8, 2005, the airplane slid off the runway while landing in a snowstorm and crashed into automobile traffic, killing Joshua Woods, a 6-year old boy in a car.
The black and white photographs in section "The road seems to be too small" are by swiss policeman Arnold Ordenmatt (born 1925) who's job was to take photograps of the aftermath of car accidents. His keen sense of composition and impeccable technique has earned him a place among "serious" photographers and his prints are widely available for sale. "James Kelly Contemporary" in Santa Fe is just one of the galleries where his work is now exhibited and for sale.
The picture with the roundabout-sign must be in luxemburg or france next to it, and might be staged, since the ad-panel promotes some driving licenses. I might be wrong tho.
Two pictures below, the car squeezed between pole and train must have happened in paris or close to it, ratp is the paris dept. train.
The majority of these images were taken in the less civilized parts of the world.. Doesn't surprise me one bit, since pretty much the only trucks I saw were MAZ, VAZ and KAMAZ models. The drivers of these trucks are never sober behind the wheel.
Those ETF trucks looks fantastic, indeed, but for now it seems to be only a dream of a single (Dutch) engineer, since i haven't seen any picture of the real thing or even a real company building.
Those images of a truck in a mine are rendered from a 3D-model.
The German vehicle at the end is actually designed for crossing minefields. Hence the solid tires with no body structure around them and the heavily armored cab. Think of it as the ancestor of the MRAP.
I wouldn't insult a good looking Ultra Large Truck by calling it a "monstrosity" as the dictionary defines that word as: 1. Very ugly thing: an object, animal, or person that is very unpleasant or frightening to look at, often because it is large and strangely shaped. 2. Monstrousness: frightening size, shape, and ugliness a figure of overwhelming monstrosity.
And that ETF 190 Truck is really good looking for a such a large truck.
When I was young, I discovered a stack of Playboys from the '60s in my uncle's old room in my grandmother's basement. One of them had a pictorial of the set of Barbarella you would've loved. http://www.dtmagazine.com/cmopg1924/pb368.html
YOu forgot to mention that Barbarella has an amazing title sequence where Jane Fonda strips and the letters from the titles dance to cover up her lady bits:
When I was young, I discovered a stack of Playboys from the '60s in my uncle's old room in my grandmother's basement. One of them had a pictorial of the set of Barbarella you would've loved. http://www.dtmagazine.com/cmopg1924/pb368.html
Regarding the Ford Focus Orchestra, as visually entertaining as that video was, I suspect the music is overdubbed or at least enhanced by real instruments. It sounds too clean to be coming from those contraptions.
Obviously it's a misspelled version of "Chilled Beer"; but it's get weirder when the Hindi script there says "Government's Chilled Beer Store"!!! WTF!!
The crushed mercedes is in downtown Macon, GA. I used to drive by there pretty regularly. I'm pretty sure the church spire in the background is St. Joseph's
The top one's a jellyfish warning. Jellyfish in Northern Australia are some of the most toxic animals on earth (most toxic is the Stone fish, which also lives there), so if beaches are prone to jellyfish the warnings are valid.
I've seen the Church of Uncertain sign several times. It is in Uncertain, TX. Uncertain is a very small town with population just over 100. I always laugh at all the different Uncertain signs there.
When I was living in Belgium, I got one of these at the local hardware store and put it up next to my desk at work. I don't think they ever got the joke....
I found the "used rainbows" to be the best, although many were good. But about the holy ground: The chucks has a russian orthodox cross, the cell tower has a roman catholic cross. That could be a deliberate thing.
A note on the http://lh5.google.ca/abramsv/R7Dx-aoDzzI/AAAAAAAAIG4/y27mLScsZXE/79C01484-B431-40DC-B672-2D62558841E7.jpg?imgmax=512 sign. The funny thing about it is a very odd way in which one of the letters is drawn, so it became hard to read the last row differently than 'to shit' in Russian. 'Welcum' would be a good translation, I think.
The first of the Jon Dunbar photos is especially funny - the Korean words are transliterations of the original English words.
Going word by word, the Korean is pronounced as follows:
Kuh Rab (crab) Bee Em Tee (BMT) Ham (Ham) Bee Jee Suh Dee Ra Ee Tuh (Veggie Delite) So Buh Way Kul Lobe (Subway Club) Chee Keen Bu Ray Suh Tuh (Chicken Breast)
and so on... The Korean characters spell out the English words - the only actual Korean word on the sheet is Cham-Chi, the word they used for Classic Tuna!
The BIG "van seumeren" crane: This company (now: Mammoet") owns the two largest cranes in the world. Both can be transported in 40 foot container sized parts. THe assembly on site takes a mere two days. They´re the same people thatraised the Kursk submarine in murmansk. A wonderfull example of dutch stuborness...
haha the first 4 pics of the 2 part happened in holland they where lifting a dredging boat wich has sunk. the first crane fell over and the mamoet had to come whit a crane link http://www.waldnet.nl/fotonieuws.php?d=1163946127
This puts on the desk the importance of training and knowlege in fisics and mechanisms that a crane operators mus have before taking the machine's controls.
"QUANTUM SHOT" #373
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I call dibs on writing a New Weird novel on this guy! Or...something related to him! Tough luck, Jeff Van Der Meer. :)
The illustrations attributed to "Mikolka-Parovoz" is actually by Vladimir Tsesler & Sergei Voichenko
See here for more info:
https://www.winterhalter.com/node/23
Thank you, credits updated
Wow! This rare tale reads like a lost Ray Bradbury novel, complete with electric bodies, spooks, robot gods, torchlit mobs, and charismatic vagabonds roaming 'Winesberg, Ohio'.
Thank you Steve - couldn't agree more with this, a perfect Ray Bradbury story... or maybe some new writer like China Mieville or Jay Lake could pick this up?
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