Weirdness
pharyngula | June 6, 2007This fellow Kaufman sent me a link to this very odd photo.
Now my interest is piqued. Does anyone know what this is from?
pharyngula | June 6, 2007Do you really have to be a marketing genius to sell sex? This crazy Scot in Australia has hit on a scheme to combine aphrodisiacs: he feeds oysters Viagra. It sounds silly—if you want an erection, take the Viagra directly, without the additional step of having it diluted, filtered, and processed by a mollusc—but he claims his business is booming.
Now I just have to convince investors that my plan to breed rhinoceroses raised on a diet of Viagra-fed oysters is the Next Big Thing…hey, getting them to breed won't be any problem at all, will it?
(via Hillary Rettig)
pharyngula | June 4, 2007Literacity has the beginnings of a discussion of the horror genre, one of my favorite subjects (although I'm a bit picky—I'm a classic horror fan, and consider most of the recent offerings, both on screen and on the page, to be atrocity exhibitions rather than true horror), and one thing mentioned there is a taxonomy of horror stories. He argues that all are rooted in the idea of loss of control, and subdivides that into loss of control of self, the environment, and place in society…which was actually rather handy, because of the next item I discovered.
Gothic Lolitas. That's right, twee and…
pharyngula | June 2, 2007Yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, and it was exactly as the Dead Alewives portray it, right down to the guy always cruising for munchies.
(via Dr Bushwell)
pharyngula | June 1, 2007Worried that global warming will submerge your real estate? Here's the solution the town of Galveston hit upon after they were devastated by a hurricane in 1900: the entire town was hoisted up on stilts, and new fill placed underneath. The photographs are amazing—it was an impressive engineering project, and it was all done with manual labor.
It's also a little bit familiar. In my old home town, you could date the houses by their construction: the older ones were all built up on foundations that raised the floor a couple of feet off the ground, because the town was on a flood plain—my parents…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007Laura Sessions Stepp is wondering what it means to be manly, and of course she has to resort to the cultural phenomenon of the last 30 minutes, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and has invented an overwrought story that modern men are all confused by this swishy style personified by Captain Jack Sparrow — the fey sway, the frilly shirt, the lace on the wrist — and that all this business of empowering women is so stressful to young men.
I'm sorry, it's too ridiculous for words. The only people who could possibly pull off that pirate style are Johnny Depp and Prince.* And I think it's quite…
pharyngula | May 24, 2007In an exercise that will tempt photoshoppers world wide, but makes alteration superfluous, an Italian magazine has run a photogallery of the Pope in various strange costumes. I rather liked
cowboy Ratzi and the
grim leprechaun, but my favorite has to be
evil santa.
When I get to be old and sunken-eyed, I promise…I will dress comfortably and tastefully, put away the frilled shirts and the puffy pantaloons, and avoid wearing garish velvet. It's a good suggestion for both pirates and popes.
pharyngula | May 20, 2007Hey, maybe we're making more progress than we ever imagined, if this poll from Christianity Today is any measure:
As a somewhat cynical realist, though, I'm more inclined to believe in badly designed polls and cunning rascals with a script than I am that subscribers to a Christian magazine suddenly became wise.
(via Sandwalk)
pharyngula | May 14, 2007As the buggy summer looms, I have to confess to a sadistic enjoyment of this splatter film.
I think the insects are real animals filmed with high speed cameras, but the actual impacts are faked with CGI — the physics weren't quite right, and the flying insects should have bounced out of the camera field more. It just makes it funnier that no arthropods were actually harmed in the making of this movie.
(via Byzantium's Shores)
pharyngula | May 11, 2007That Holbo fella puts up a post about octopuses — it's got a winged cephalopod, and one driving a car — and he wasn't inspired to wax holbonically upon it? I'm disappointed.
pharyngula | May 10, 2007
A new book titled Flock of Dodos (a book, not the movie, and apparently the two have nothing to do with each other) is coming out, and Glenn Branch of the NCSE tells me it mentions something vile about William Jennings Bryan, the defender of creationism at the Scopes trial. That's his campaign poster to the right. Look closely, very closely — it's a rather small image — down at the bottom left. There's a cephalopod defending the American flag, and some kind of crazed scullery maid attacking it with an axe. Obviously, Bryan was no friend of biodiversity.
The description in the book of this…
pharyngula | May 9, 2007No, date rape isn't funny, but neither is the drug war. Here's an odd little story about a fellow busted for possession of a the date rape drug, GHB. It was in a bottle of soap. The police tested the soap with a portable kit, and it tested positive for GHB — as the video shows, a whole class of soaps test positive for GHB with this particular kit.
Amusingly, the company that made the soap turned it into a commercial for their brand. The drug kit isn't a test for GHB, it's a test for good soap!
pharyngula | May 7, 2007Since everyone is having fun with the good/evil quiz, let's up the ante: what kind of god or goddess are you? The questions are very dada-esque, which is appropriate, since godhood doesn't make any sense anyway.
Which God or Goddess are you like?
Your Result: You are your own God or Goddess
Sorry to say, i have no answer that fits you. You are your very own person, and you like to do things your own way. You have stumped me this time, but i will soon make a quiz that will have your answer, just you wait...
Budha
The Christian God
Jesus
Satan
Goddess…
pharyngula | May 7, 2007
This product is apparently a joke, but as long as Coke is constantly tinkering with their formula, I don't see why dumping in an extract of fried mollusc shouldn't be within the realm of possibility.
pharyngula | May 6, 2007I even tried going back and changing some of my answers to get a slightly less extreme result, but it sensed my true nature over the tubes of the internet.
How evil are you?
I did discover that if I lied in response to every question, I could get it to judge me as "angelic".
(via Circe)
pharyngula | May 5, 2007No, not the Republican presidential candidates: you've got your choice of a blooming corpse flower named Perry or a six-legged hermaphroditic cow.
I do think the next Republican debate would be enlivened by the presence of these two. I'd vote for Perry.
pharyngula | May 4, 2007
Grimpoteuthis is a cephalopod so cute, now it's being compared to Pikachu. That's harsh. Being plump and adorable is a good way to get kicked out of the savage monster club.
I know. I've been there.
pharyngula | May 1, 2007Dream of the future, and you're sure to get something that tells you more about the past. Here is a set of postcards from 1900, illustrating what they thought life would be like in 2000. It looks like a kind of steampunk opium dream, with everyone dressed in Victorian fashion, either puttering about outside with parasols or standing about in cluttered drawing rooms. All of the inventions are weirdly off in a charming way.
For instance, they foresaw television, sort of. I guess that might be a kind of LCD home projection system—we don't make them out of bakelight, though, and I can't quite…
pharyngula | April 30, 2007
There's more to invention than just slapping a new wrapper on an old device, and sometimes the superficial approach can lead to some funny results, like the Tampon Taser. The copy describing this device is weird: in addition to touting its absorbency, fresh floral scent and gentle glide applicator, it also has barbed probes and a range of 14 feet. Alas, it also warns that "It is not intended nor recommended for vaginal insertion."
After reading my last day's posts here, you might think I'm either a teenage girl, or obsessed with young girls, but really … it's just what has drifted to the top…