McSweeney’s brings us these brilliant Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter. Included are these Lovecraftian descriptions:

White Chocolate Truffle: What black arts could have stripped this chocolate of its natural hue? The horror of the unearthly, corpselike pallor of this truffle’s complexion is only offset by its fiendish deliciousness.

Nut Cluster Crunch: This eerie candy will test the sanity of all but those who possess the strongest of constitutions. Strange congeries of almonds, walnuts, and pistachios dance hypnotically within, promising to reveal their eldritch secrets to anyone foolish enough to take a bite of these ancient nut clusters!

Dark Chocolate Fudge: Dark! All-encompassing, eternal darkness! Human eyes cannot penetrate the stygian blackness of this unholy confection!

Chocolate Cherry Cordial: What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.

More at McSweeney’s.

via Serious Eats

Just in case any of you needed reminding, we are just hours away from the debut of Act 1 of Joss Whedon’s episodic Internet musical, “Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” Throngs of Whedon fanboys (and girls) are undoubtedly overcome with the vapors tonight as they maintain caffeine-fueled vigils in front of their monitors, awaiting the premiere at 3:00 am on the east coast, midnight on the west.

Co-written by Joss Whedon, his brothers Zack and Jed, and Jed’s fiancée Maurissa Tancharoen, “Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” was born of the WGA strike and created with a budget in the low six figures. It features Neil Patrick Harris as a nerd with villainous aspirations and his very own vlog, Nathan Fillion, the hero to NPH’s villain, and Felicia Day as the love interest.

An E! Online review called “Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” reminiscent of “Once More, With Feeling” (aka the Buffy musical.) That plus NPH is good enough for me.

Act 2 of Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog will debut on Thursday, July 17th at 12:00 am PST, and Act 3 will premiere at 12:00 am PST on Saturday, July 19th. Check the official fan site to find the launch time in your time zone. The three episodes will be available online until midnight on July 20th. While you’re waiting, enjoy the trailer:

As the Internet becomes increasingly cluttered with accumulated pop cultural detritus, it’s refreshing to rediscover a site like The Museum of Talking Boards that stands the test of time (even with it’s very 90s looking mouse-trailing planchette.)

The online museum chronicles the history of talking boards, also known as ouija boards, spirit boards, witch boards, and channeling boards. While the history presented on the site is fascinating and well-researched, the Museum’s pièce de résistance is the gallery of nearly 100 lovely examples of talking boards, both vintage and modern.

Also delightful is the page of ouija board superstitions which includes gems like this:

A Ouija Board will scream if you try to burn it. People who hear the scream have less than thirty-six hours to live. There is only one proper way to dispose of it: break the board into seven pieces, sprinkle it with Holy Water then bury it.

And don’t forget, there are three things you must never ask a ouija board:

• Never ask about God.
• Never ask when you are going to die.
• Never ask where the gold is buried.

It’s been a while since I posted and I almost gave up on this blog all together but I keep running across the most fascinating things on the web. Like the Victorian Romantic Tarot deck put out by Karen Mahony and Alex Ukolov. The deck is a nod not only to the lost Victorian aesthetic but to the growing neo-Victorian art scene of today.

Visually stunning and with a hint of fin-de-siecle sensibilities the Victorian Romantic Tarot makes a decadent addition to your divination collections.

There’s a YouTube video that shows most of the cards in the deck if you’d like to take a look before purchasing a set for yourself. You may want to turn the volume off though.

Here’s another live performance from a belly dance festival in Pennsylvania:

She has a website for you to visit complete with gallery so I won’t keep you. Click the pic to visit her home on the web.

I was recently reminded of Madame Ashleigh Talbot’s stunning Victorian Lowbrow work while browsing Kirsten Anderson’s Right Some Good blog. Madame Talbot uses her substantial talent to make gorgeous framed curio exhibits, handmade books, hand-illustrated posters, mourning dolls, and more.

Madame Talbot’s creations are composed of items like vintage velvet, century-old paper, and bits of real bone, teeth, and hair. Although her primary implements are needle, thread, and her own hands, she counts among her tools a vintage typewriter from the early 1900s.

Her site and art celebrate:

Sideshows and the Elephant Man, Victorian era tattooed ladies, strange medical exhibits, dime museums and East End shows, the cult of death and the funeral rituals of the lower classes, pubs, bars and saloons, public executions, titillating scandals involving death and betrayal, morbid legends such as Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden, the penny dreadful, Victorian drugs such as Opium dens, Absinthe rituals & Wormwood deliriums, Morphine syringes sold to High Society women, Chloral Hydrate fiends, Laudanum addicts, Secret Hashish Societies, laughing gas parties, and patent medicines.

(image: Framed Witchcraft Curio Exhibit by Madame Talbot)

My favorite objects are the lovingly crafted pieces in the Curio Exhibits section, like the Civil War weeping bottles and the test tubes intended to hold the final dying breath of a loved one. The description that accompanies each curio exhibit is as delightful as the exhibit itself.

Madame Talbot also sells wonderful vintage items, like an engraved mausoleum key and mostly empty bottles of medicinals and poisons.

Many dozens of unique objects are available on Madame Talbot’s Victorian Lowbrow site and some of her less pricey work can be purchased in the Madame Talbot eBay Store.

This image of Jane Russell comes from a deadlicious collection of 1940s era women in various states of undress brandishing their guns. The images were originally published in pinup magazine Paris-Hollywood which featured starlets like Ava Gardner, Esther Williams, and Rita Hayworth. Some of the images are NSFW (if you work with prudes or minors).

It’s a different world now, but this commercial reminds me of when I was a young man who had two loves, blasphemous knowledge and campy horror icons:

I found this at The Abattoir, which is the official blog of Rue Morgue magazine. They have a coffin full of Price commercials for various products sure to bring a smile to the face of every fan.

Raquel Welch, decked out in a skimpy sequined prehistoric cave-chick getup, shares the stage with a googly-eyed, oversized spider monster in this disco song and dance number from a 1977 episode of The Muppet Show.

The song is Baby It’s Me which was recorded by Diana Ross that same year.

Oh, and here’s some Muppet trivia for you. The spider is one of the full-bodied muppet costumes, meaning there’s a person pulling the proverbial strings from inside the costume, rather than puppeteers animating the character externally. In this sketch with Raquel Welch, the giant arachnid moves so rhythmically and gracefully because the costume conceals Graham Fletcher, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet.

Just in case you haven’t heard, zombies are the new bunnies, and Etsy crafter Tina Seamonster has all the gear you need to commemorate this shift in the order of the universe. Pictured above is one of her full color “zombies are the new bunnies” cards, complete with an angry green bunny who thinks Easter zombies are “crap.” Guess he liked things the way they were before.

By the way, if Tina’s zombie looks familiar, you might remember her design from the zombie plague holiday cards mentioned in my list of handmade gifts for zombie lovers.

Easter is March 23, 2008, so get thee to the Tina Seamonster shop at Etsy if you don’t want to be stuck sending cards emblazoned with cotton-tailed rabbits and baby chicks. If cards aren’t your thing, you can also pick up a refrigerator magnet, t-shirt, or necklace decorated with the “Zombies are the new bunnies” motif.