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Mystery Tiles From Around the World
puppetman writes "The Kansas City Star has an interesting story about Toynbee Tiles.
They show up embedded in streets, and can be found in the US (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Aberdeen, Edgewood, Washington, etc), Chile, Argentina and Brazil. They are made of "epoxy or super hard plastic that's actually inlaid in the asphalt itself."
The tiles invariably state, "Toynbee Ideas in Kubrick's 2001 Resurrect Dead On Planet Jupiter".
Sometimes there are secondary tiles that request people make more while others are of a more paranoid slant.
Toynbee was a religious historian who believed that "well-being of a civilization depends on its ability to respond successfully to challenges, human and environmental". There is even a Ray Bradbury book, The Toynbee Convector.
Toynbee.net has a link to a Usenet posting where someone ask's Kubrick's daughter if the man himself knew of the tiles.
To date, the origin of the tiles are a mystery. Any /.'ers able to provide the location of additional tiles, or perhaps clues for solving the mystery?"
When the antichrist arrives, we wont even belive, because everyone will think it's a hoax :)
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
Title: "Mystery Tiles From Around the World"
:)
And from the article: "in at least 20 cities around the United States (and two in South America!)"
It kind of reminds me of the times when Europe was the known world.
"It's probably a man, because the tiles are obviously installed at night since nobody seems to have witnessed them being put in. It's unlikely a woman would risk being alone at night in a downtown environment."
Yeah, as if a person insane enough to put prophecy tiles into asphalt would drop the idea due to risk of being alone in a downtown environment.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
what, you mean this is not cool?
don't forget, we are only 3 and a bit years into the 21st century and already we have private astronauts (ok, for a few mill - but its a start!)
It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful made and crushingly boring movies of all time.
Somewhat on the mark, but methinks he didn't rent Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" which is actually, without a doubt, the most beautiful made and crushingly boring movies of all time.
That is all.
No offense, but the fact that someone would suggest that the little yellow line on televised football games and touch-tone phones make up for the lack of commercial space flight is a good sign of exactly how lame the 21st century is turning out to be.
I can't believe that we're all still living, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, on "an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think [touch-tone phones] are a pretty neat idea."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That was one of the funniest posts I have ever read. Authors like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett come to mind. Are you by chance British?
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
The Toynbee tiles are common vinyl floor tiles with the letters carved out using a stencil of sorts. This explains the awkward angles and other design features typical of papercut letters in children's construction paper projects.
As for how they're baked into the street, this is simple also. You'll notice most of the Toynbee Tiles are placed in busy inner city intersections with plenty traffic. In [U.S.] cities streets are often fixed with small patches of asphalt covering just the worst cracks and potholes. Who notices a new black patch on the road? Well, the Toynbee feller knows nobody does.
So his secret is this. He carves the tiles, then wraps them neatly in a parcel of layers of tar paper and wood glue with the tile at the very bottom. This slim dark parcel can be fairly inconspicously placed on the street in the dark of night. It'll resemble just another patch of road repair.
It's important that the parcel be placed about as far from the curb so as to get run over by the street traffic as often as possible, because the 'baking' process is actually just the combination of pressure and weather over a period of a couple of weeks where the combined forces of pressure, weather and sun erodes the paper until just some of the tar remains, which is forced into the street and around the spaces between the tile letters, which are gradually revealed as the tar above wears away. The finished impression a couple of weeks later is that just the letters themselves remains, forced thoroughly into the street.
The tile by itself would have cracked and never survived if it had been just left there on the surface. The tar paper sandwich is quite ingenious and simple to make, though it probably takes a few tries to get the formula just right.
That's the problem... this is a movie that demands to be seen in a cinema. Don't lessen it by watching it on a small screen.
If you have a repertory cinema nearby, catch it the next time around.
or the endless psychedelic sequence.
Mind blowing man! It was revolutionary in 1968; it was the in thing to drop acid and sit in the front row to see that, though I was a little young for that; I was 10 at the time and made a special trip to the city and stayed with my aunt to see it.