The depths of ventriloquism

Automatonophobes of the world, unite! You are not alone. Coulrophobia gets all the press these days, but let's face it: clowns aren't half as scary as ventriloquists' dummies. It's due to the old uncanny valley: the more something that isn't human approaches humanness, the weirder it gets. And what approaches humanness without actually getting there as well as a good old-fashioned dummy, especially one that's been through the mill of time and would be weird looking even if it weren't a dummy?

io9 starts the ball rolling with their Vintage ventriloquism portraits were incredibly unnerving, but then there's the link back to Flickr with more gems than the average person can bear: the one with the woman and the soldier will be keeping me up nights, I'll tell you that.

A little research into ventriloquism uncovers what you would expect, that it goes back to the ancient Greeks and had all sorts of ups and downs and connections with witches and whatnot up until the birth of popular culture, where it found its metier on the stage, and ventriloquists learned to drink water and throw their voices at the same time (except for Albert Brooks, whose dummy used to drink water while Brooks himself talked, but that's postmodernism for you). The greatest popularizer of modern ventriloquism was Edgar Bergen, who gained his popularity on the radio. Which is a poser. Think about it. A ventriloquist. On the radio. No wonder his lips moved so much when he finally made it to television.

Ventriloquism isn't seen much anymore, but automatonophobes can get their fix at places like Walt Disney World, where the automatons are animated and in many cases are even more uncanny. My vote for the one to avoid?



When the Mouse starts talking, I'm out of there.
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Lego art

This video gets serious about a subject that we constantly toss around lightly. Every time you turn around on the interwebs, there's some new, often amazing, occasionally ridiculous new Lego creation. We are obviously obsessed with these little blocks and their versatility. In this short, three artists who are very much artists absent Legos, talk about Legos as art. And they show some amazing creations.



They keep raising the bar on us!

Via
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Quick take - Lego gender

I've written about this in the past, in regard to Lego's latest attempt to bring in girls. Now Boing Boing points to a new site with some descriptive facts.
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Playmobil

The official toy of Grinwout's would be the Lego, if there were an official toy of Grinwout's. Many are our hours spent building everything from little houses to intergalactic space vehicles. Even without children in the house anymore, the Legos still come out on holidays. One of our visitors used them to make the flags of many nations, which was about as un-mechanical as you can get with Legos without being banned forever. We prefer our Legos to be more complicated. That seems to be the whole point of them in the first place.

The Playmobil toys, on the other hand, would seem to appeal more to the flag-making set. You don't really build anything with them, of course. Their entire purpose is different from Legos, as they are meant to be toys for role-playing games. Of course, once you build a castle out of Legos there are plenty of options for role-playing, but that may be beside the point. These toys are apples and oranges, intended for different parts of the young brain. We never had an Playmobil toys that I can remember in our Lego household, though. Maybe we were shortchanging the younger generation in the role-playing arena. We never claimed to be expert child-rearers.

The Geek Dad blog at Wired offers a look at Playmobil in A New Generation of Playmobil Fans. We go from unboxing to assembly (some of which is required) to playing. Pretty interesting.

I’ll confess: I was never much of a Playmobil kid. I may have had a figurine or two (and, presumably, some sets to go with them) but honestly I can’t remember them and I no longer have them... Recently I was offered the chance to try out a few Playmobil sets, and I was curious: how would my daughters respond to them?... While we were at the toy store, I even showed them the Playmobil aisle to see what they thought of them. My younger daughter picked out an alligator for herself, but both of them were kind of “meh” about the idea of the sets. Until the sets arrived.

Reading this makes you just want to stop reading and, instead, do a little basic playing. Whether you'll be convinced about Playmobil remains to be seen, but at least, if you a Legonian, you'll begin to see the appeal.
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