Thunder peals, the sky flashes like an Instamatic bulb, the rain pelts down: it's been a while. Made you realize how much of summer lacked the standard drama. I could take another week of this - the humid morning, the worried wind, the grumbling sky. We're owed a warm fall.

HEIL-YA! Time is hard on film; it desaturates, loses focus, and turns into a mushy wash that makes it hard to comprehend the power and horror of Starfish Hitler.

More? Sure:

Do I need to say this is from Japan? No.

Via Dangerous Minds, which has much more on the show and the subsequent phenomenon of Starfish Hitler.

OH FINE THEN A newspaper in England has secured an interview with the Northampton Clown.

Similar?

At least advertisers don't think clowns are good for selling things anymore. Once upon a time the magazines were full of them. Here, this'll sell pickles:

Yikes. More of those here, if you're brave. (Disclosure: that's my site.)

ARCHITECTURE The WSJ has a piece on the 40th anniversary of a skyscraper in Paris everyone has hated for the entirety of its existence. I remember visiting it in high school, and thought the tower was cool enough - it's like the IDS, except it's pinched in on the sides instead of flaring out - but the shopping area around it was a charmless concrete bunker that summed up every anti-human Brutalist idea about how people should live. (Hint: with their heads on their chins, contemplating the futility of hope.)

There are plans to spiff it up, but like City Center, it's all ribbons-on-a-pig.