All over the map: the Monday collection

Solar Eclipse at the Antarctic

Jument Lighthouse in France from DeputyDog’s Collection of Lighthouses

Casa Battio Staircase from OObject’s Collection of Spiral Staircases

I’ll be in Barcelona in a few days, and may in fact, ascend this wonder.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous: from EarthTimes the Japanese Boob Pudding

The package:

Opened:

From the land of intricate etiquette, cherry blossoms, budo, living treasures, sand gardens and ikebana. Of course.

Hey this can’t be mine….mine’s bigger.

Via BoingBoing this headline on Reuters:

Penis theft panic hits city..

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

These remarkable con artists, the penis thieves, though I would prefer the more substantial sounding cock snatchers or dick filchers, seem to be able to make the victim believe that something that is still there no longer is…kind of a reverse of the fairy tale…the emperors new member.

This curious news is one manifestation of what has been called penis panics where numbers of men will believe that their genitals have disappeared or are shrinking….in Asia this is know as koro. I like that word, reminiscent of sashimi, more than the medicalized Genital Retraction Syndrome.

At Kuro6hin, an article on Koro has the following:

Whilst penis theft would seem a fairly simple charge to refute, victims in an 1990 Nigerian outbreak (reported on by psychiatrist Sunny Ilechukwu) often believed that their penises were returned at the point of public accusation. Some even went as far as undress to prove their accusation to onlookers, subsequently claiming that their ‘returned’ penis had been replaced but was shrunk, leading them to think it must be a ghost penis or perhaps the wrong one.

which leads us to..

Transplanted penis removed after psychological issues

Doctors have previously succeeded in reuniting men with their sexual organs after traumatic accidents or attacks, but the Guangzhou operation is the first in which a donor penis has successfully been attached to another man, The Guardian reported.

Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to remove the penis after just two weeks.

“Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off,” Dr Hu said.

An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the body.

Maybe it was a ghost?

Waiting for Charlie

Kicking the Beckett with Charlie Rose via BoingBoing:

Homer’s Odyssey: Toon to Human

Found this via Cinematical on
Pixeloo:

Two more videos; laffs to be had

Seem to be on a movie kick lately…thanks to Cinematical, I discovered the new parody video for Tetris over at Black20.com

And while there I discovered one of their older ones for Pirates of the Caribbean:

Three course post: Gordon Ramsay, vegetarians and solid cocktails

Too Much Heat in the TV Kitchen

“You read Rolling Stone and you don’t see rock stars curse like this,” said the chef ,Tom Colicchio, the lead judge of “Top Chef.” “And it’s recent, too. It’s something you’ve seen just in the past year.”

Worth reading, all about keeping the bleeper busy for the ratings to stay high. Ramsay is so known for his tirades that it was news a while back that he could calmly show you how to stove top a steak without losing it. He passed for normal, and that was news.

Some Vegetarian Statistics

Being vegetarian-inclined is like a sorority pledge claiming that they still believe in their virginity and sobriety even after having a drunken tryst with Todd, the Sigma Kappa who got them into the mixer at no charge. It’s a nice thought that may let folks sleep easier at night. But let’s be clear - there’s already a word for someone who is ‘vegetarian-inclined’. It’s called an “omnivore” and it represents 96.8% of the rest of the country.

This one is fun because it led to quite the little comment flurry rightly castigating the writer for not acknowledging that there was a world of difference between someone who ate meat once a month and someone who ate it a few times a day.

a very interesting meal with lovely photos

These are solid cocktails; other unusual creations manifest themselves in this adventure from the Wandering Eater.

The Onion, plastic surgery, the law and seeking abortion

Every couple of weeks or so, the Onion strikes gold:

Oprah Launches Own Reality

(CHICAGO)—Calling it the next logical step in her celebrated career, and a groundbreaking achievement in applied quantum field theory, media giant Oprah Winfrey unveiled her latest project Monday: a completely separate realm of existence, known as OpraH, which she will control on the subatomic level.

“Now, Oprah’s always on!” Winfrey said through an interspatial image of herself broadcast between her world and ours. “I’ve created a place where anyone can come to share and laugh and feel totally free from the conventional laws of the physical universe.”

“I invite you all to be guests in my new reality,” she added.

This latest addition to Winfrey’s empire—which already includes her flagship talk show, a reality TV program, an influential book club, O magazine, the thoughts and emotions of millions of viewers, and two television networks—is Oprah’s first foray into large-scale nucleosynthesis. Developed over the past three years by the theoretical physics wing of her company, Harpo Productions, >OpraH was reportedly created by tearing a small hole in the fabric of known reality. The talk-show host then went about restructuring an infinite number of never-before-seen particles to produce a separate dimension, which is currently oscillating around Chicago.

According to her aides, Winfrey was personally involved in the most minute details of planning, from the type of coffee served in the green room of her new studio facility to the genetic makeup of every organism she deemed worthy of receiving life.

Plastic surgery book

Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a renowned plastic surgeon, wrote My Beautiful Mommy to help patients explain their transformation to their children. The story guides children through Mommy’s surgery and healing process in a friendly, nonthreatening way.

This has been news here and there in the blogosphere: yes, I suppose why not have a book explaining what could be a confusing time but its been pointed out that there is no questioning of the procedure itself. Nothing wrong with a nip and tuck for mommy but there just might be cause for concern if its passed off as either necessary or as anything but cosmetic. “And now you have even a better mommy” sort of talk.

Oregon: our laws are copyrighted and you can’t publish them

This is rather insane. As I understand it, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Kind of get you coming and going then. You’d think if you want people to abide by laws which supposedly are devised to make society run more smoothly and equitably that you would let people know what those laws actually are.

U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like “Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births,” and “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005.”

But on Thursday, a search on “abortion” was producing only the message “No records found by latest query.”

Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.

Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins’ Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

Won’t let you know the laws, and won’t give you information; only in China you say?

Forklift Safety

Saw this first a few years ago, and rediscovered it on Ticklebooth; its a keeper. It is in German but if you don’t spreche Deutsch its still pretty straightforward. Its kind of an industrial safety film on how to properly operate a forklift (the director seems to have studied under Sam Raimi). Similar sense of humour as Evil Dead.

Funniest videos

BoingBoing alerted me to this list of 50 great comedy sketches over at Never.com, which includes a few from SCTV, Kids in the Hall and Monty Pythons, and also introduced me to Catherine Tate from Britain who I had not run into before, and I managed to run down this gem:

Catherine Tate: Not Drunk Enough

And here is one I’ve been holding for a while (embedding disallowed) :

Rick Moranis: The Girl from Ipenema Rap

And also:

Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Bicycle Repair Man

Will get fooled again…

Last night I tossed and turned in bed, unsettled without quite knowing why, and then my unease took shape, and I struggled out of the murk of almost sleep and got up, I think around 2:30 am, and turned my computer on and did a little research.

What was worrying me was my post which included an entry on music created on ice instruments. This had been via DeputyDog where a guest blogger had uncovered a collection of bizarre music recordings. The more I thought about the ice instruments, which included a drum, the more unlikely the story seemed, and in the back of my mind I thought the original date was April 1st, yes, April Fool’s Day. Had I been taken, and then broadcast my being taken to the world?

What seemed to really tweak my spideysense was the 2nd bizarre music oddity which was about someone who “played” the US/Mexico border with a cello bow and chopsticks, making and recording the noise of using these things on the physical structures there such as barbed wire.

So I had to check out the ice instruments and went to the link and found a record company that looked legit but thought that with enough time on your hands this might be a worthwhile prank. Still uncertain, I scoured the web for reviews of the ice music and found it in more than one place and thought that you would have to be more than determined to create this false world, so I settled for it being real.

But playing the border? That is just both dumb and annoying; no, that gets into the artist as a spoiled child category.

As it is, Its hard enough to make good music with the traditional tools.