Michael Arnzen's Notebook on the Strange in Everyday Life 

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MUTTERVERSE: Mutter Museum Poems and Other Halloween Delights

Throughout #Halloween day I will tweet new poems inspired by my recent trip to @muttermuseum #MutterMuseum with hashtag #MUTTERVERSE — Michael Arnzen (@MikeArnzen) October 31, 2012 Happy Halloween! More tricks and treats over on the gorelets.com blog! Here’s an uncanny Halloween treat for you — a house strangely possessed by a familiar artifact of popular

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The Trophy Talks Back: Mike’s Hard Lemonade “House” Ads

The series of “House” party ads that Mike’s Hard Lemonade have started running are pretty effective and funny in the way that they domesticate tropes of the uncanny. In my favorite, the host of the party answers the door bell, and a headless deer simply stands on the doorstep, breathing. The mounted head in the

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Thing Addams, Photographer

I was very excited to stumble on this TV commercial from 1985 for the Nikon One Touch instant camera. Their slogan? “It puts great photography at everybody’s fingertips.” Their mascot? A dismembered hand, of course! Thing (sometimes spelled “Thingg”) — the ambulatory hand that lives in a box and serves as a literal “handyman” to

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The Uncanny Valley of Advertising

Russell Davies describes the invasiveness of advertising as approaching its own “uncanny valley” in a Nov 2007 post on his blog, advertising practitioner: It seems like we’re about to enter a period where our digital lives will be full of the online equivalents of those messages you find on your television when you check into

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Surreal Estate

Point Click Home magazine features a fun slide show feature called “Surreal Estate”. I couldn’t help but think of Anthony Vidler’s book, The Architectural Uncanny, as I paged through the designs, real and imagined. If the “home” is where we store our secrets, their shells are the stuff of fantasy — permeable-yet-impenetrable, wondrous and scary.

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The Web Browser as Ouija Board

I recently came across The Blog of the Damned — a group weblog that has compiled some interesting instances of “forteana 2.0 and the uncanny internet.” One entry in particular really jumped out at me: The Browser as Scrying Tool — that is, the literalization of the metaphor that “the Internet is haunted, and that

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