Miscellaneous Marxism"Why A Duck?" @ marx-brothers.org |
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Miscellaneous Marxism"Why A Duck?" @ marx-brothers.org |
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Over the past fifty years, Mad Magazine has used references to and images of the Marxes many times. I have gone over every issue from the beginning through December 1998 and found about 35 of these and have included them in a feature I like to call Mad Marxness.
Read Kathy Biehl's interview with Simon Louvish to find out about this novelist and biographer and his latest book, Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of The Marx Brothers, widely regarded as one of the greatest books ever written about the Marxes.
Michael W. Davidson at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at The Florida State University has taken a whimsical approach to optical microscopy with his Molecular Expressions Website. His collection of photographs taken through an optical microscope (commonly referred to as "photo-micro-graphs") have won the acclaim of many and were featured in a blurb in the September 1999 issue of National Geographic. The microscopic photographs featured at Michael's site range from vitamins, beer, ice cream, and cocktails to images taken from integrated circuits and ceramic superconductors. And it is in this latter medium that Groucho has recently been sited. (The photos and descriptions below were taken from the Molecular Expressions Website and are used here by permission of the copyright holder.)
"Julius 'Groucho' Marx was the most famous of the Marx Brothers comedy team and eventually wound up with his own television show. Groucho has now moved into the cyber age with his presence on a pad woven within the integrated circuitry of the Silicon Graphics MIPS R12000. This microprocessor chip bears the greatest number of silicon creatures (six) that we have ever found on a single chip. The wireframe rendition of Groucho is about 100 microns high."
"We found this unusual character smoking a cigar on the Weitek P-9000 graphics accelerator chip used to power many video cards in the early 1990s. This particular chip was cut from a dysfunctional Diamond Viper VLB video card with 8 MB of RAM. The card was labeled "Fastest video on planet Earth" by Dell in a 1993 marketing campaign aimed at selling high-end 486 local bus computers. We don't understand the significance of this guy with a bushy mustache and eyebrows, but it appears that he is wearing polarizing sunglasses (that may be 3D glasses to enhance video) and the whole thing strongly resembles a Groucho mask."
...is over, and the results are in! If you entered and want to see how you did, or even if you didn't enter but you'd still like to see the answers and the winners, click on "Why A Duck? Contest Results.
In June of 2000, we held a contest to decide the best Marx-related haiku that could be produced by members of The Duck List. Here are the results.
...is also over. But I attended and took a bunch of pictures, some of which are available for your enjoyment. The Marxes were honored with a lifetime achievement award, we were treated to a strange comedy show, and I (for one) had a great time. Check out the pix and what I have to say about the whole experience by paying a visit to The 13th Annual Ocean City DooDah Parade.
©1995-2006, Frank M. Bland
The pages under www.marx-brothers.org/whyaduck were originally created by Frank Bland for his site www.whyaduck.com. Frank did kindly give me permission to use the contents of his site.
If you find text referring to "I" or "me" on pages under www.marx-brothers.org/whyaduck, this will usually refer to Frank.