(Roughly) Daily

After receiving our 7,482nd corporate email about “Our Covid Response,” we knew we had to do something. That something was hose down the internet machine with brake cleaner and go make something… behold! Art!

While you’re at home flattening the curve, why not take a break from your rigorous nap schedule to make a puppet show?

Entries to our contest must be original work and less than 1 minute long. Extra points for:

• all homemade and recycled props

• pyrotechnics

• involving children and/or pets

• non-professional jingles.

Remember, basically anything can be a puppet: Peanut shells, over-ripe tomatoes, political regimes. Be creative!

Our top prize is a t-shirt and $100 gift certificate to Dean’s Car Care, and the runner up gets $50 gift certificate and some oily rags…

From’s Portland’s Dean’s Car Care (“Buy Less, Fix More”), the “Socially Distant Puppet Show.”

* Mikhail Bakhtin

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As we lend a hand, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that CIA director Allen Dulles launched the secret program Project MKUltra.  Its aim was to develop a perfect truth drug for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and to explore other possibilities of mind control, including the manipulation of foreign leaders (indeed, several schemes to drug Fidel Castro were devised).

Techniques explored included the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshocks,  hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.  Many of the experiments– especially those involving drugs– were conducted on unwitting test subjects.

The project ran until 1973, when most project documentation was destroyed on the order of CIA director Richard Helms.

A declassifed copy of one of the few surviving MKUltra files

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