Gift Ideas

In the past I have drawn your attention to quirky plush toys such as Pee & Poo and the Giant Microbes. Well, it seems there are new varieties of Giant Microbes available, including H.I.V, TB, Polio, Hepatitis C and Mad Cow Disease:



Fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grail may appreciate the Black Knight plush toy with detatchable "flesh wound" limbs . . .


. . . or perhaps the bobble variety for your car (comes with faux arterial spray):

Why stop at one, when you can collect the whole cast: a Knight who says "Ni!" or God or Sir Bors:


Or the Beast of Arrrgghh or a Killer Bunny Rabbit:


These beauties are available from www.thinkgeek.com

Anatomy for Beginners

SBS television is currently screening the 4-part series Anatomy for Beginners (SBS Mondays 10.35pm). It makes for amazing viewing, but it's not for the faint-hearted.

***A WARNING: If you are at all squeamish you may want to stop reading now. This post contains descriptions of human anatomical dissection.***

In each episode, famously weird fedora-wearing German anatomist and cadaver plastinator Gunther von Hagens dissects a fresh human body before a live audience, focusing on a particular bodily system. This week it was the digestive system. You may have seen the promo, with Gunther (or was it his Fedora) explaining to ze kamera how he “vill unravel zis vooman's bauwelz from her maus to her anus."

Boy, did he ever. I think the official SBS info describes the action adequately:

Episode 3, Monday, 31 July – Digestion:

Professor von Hagens dissects a woman in front of a live audience to reveal the digestive system. After slicing off the back of her head so that he can demonstrate from behind the passage of a mouthful of food down the oesophagus, he removes her entire abdominal block from her tongue all the way to her anus and, after dissecting all the organs along the digestive tract, he unravels it to its full length of seven metres.

Apparently these are the first ever televised human dissections and the live studio audience includes prospective body donors to Gunther von Hagens' Institute for Plastination.

The final episode is this coming Monday 7 August, where SBS's summary promises:

The Professor dissects a man and a woman in front of a live audience to reveal their reproductive systems. Following the path of the sperm from his testes, along the vas deferens and out of his penis, von Hagens picks up the journey inside the female dissection specimen where he dissects her uterus and finally demonstrates how a baby passes through a female pelvis.

I've seen two of the three episodes screened so far: one featured a formalin-injected fresh cadaver, the other a totally fresh "wet" cadaver. It makes riveting television if you can tolerate the sight of blood and organs and the squelching sound of wet cartilage, tendon and bone being cut, snipped and yanked. Gunther actually uses something resembling a pair of box-cutters for much of the cartilage and bone work.

Alongside the eccentric Gunther -- who enjoys his flesh cutting work just a little more than most would consider seemly -- is Yorkshire pathologist Professor John Lee. Lee is the straight man. He is Dean Martin to Gunther's Jerry Lewis and provides a running commentary on what we are seeing, occasionally walking over to demonstrate on a live nude model who spends each episode on stage having the circulatory, digestive or reproductive system painstakingly colour-drawn on their bare skin by an artist in real time.

This is visceral, gruesome, stomach-churning television, bordering on prurient, yet I can't look away . . .

New Sleepwear

I didn't go in there looking for a replacement for my old Purple Ronnie T-shirt.

There’s no section marked "Novelty Sleepwear" and even if there were I wouldn’t be drawn to it because I consider my Purple Ronnie T-shirt absolutely irreplaceable.

J doesn’t agree, and it’s a funny thing because my reasons for the T-shirt being a unique, irreplaceable thing of wonder happen to correspond exactly with her reasons for it becoming part of next week’s offering to the Rubbish Gods:

1. It’s well over 10 years old
2. It used to be a bit too warm to sleep in but the large holes and tears that have developed over the most recent half-decade, plus its overall threadbare nature seem to have sorted out the optimum temperature thing
3. It is no longer black, but rather a subdued shade of feldgrau-charcoal
4. It features a poem about farting

Those of you familiar with the Purple Ronnie range of greeting cards or books may understand. For the unenlightened among you it is probably enough to say that Purple Ronnie is a world populated by simple stick figure people, in the early days obsessed with bodily functions, emissions, fluids and orifices, but lately encompassing other less purple themes as well. It is the world as seen, felt, smelled and understood by a somewhat cheeky – yet loveable - child.

You can explore Purple Ronnie at your leisure HERE. For now, here is the poem as it appears on my beloved old T-shirt:
----------------------------------------

A Poem about BOTTOM BURPS

If your bottom burps in public
Try to say in time
“Goodness gracious what a whiff
It doesn’t smell like mine”






Poo-eee

Poo-eee

---------------------------------------------

Perhaps now you understand the raw appeal . . . ?

As I said, I wasn't looking for a replacement - how could you possibly replace THAT - but they were having a storewide sale so my eyes flicked up and down the racks as I walked along, half-looking for shirts and T-shirts (of which I'm generally in need).

And there it was: a simple T-shirt. Prussian blue. It looked a good size, felt well made. I pulled it out from behind the other T-shirts . . .

Damn! It had some printing on the front. That’s an automatic disqualification in my book.

Too bad. . .

Just as I was replacing it on the rack, rejecting it out of hand, something in my brain screamed: “It says WHAT?”

Schlong’s

**KOSHER**

HOT DOGS

[. . image of hot dog in bun . .]

If it isn’t 12 inches it isn’t a SCHLONG

Of course, I simply HAD to have it!

It was a dark and stormy night ...

The results of the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for truly bad opening sentences of (imaginary) novels have been announced. The overall winning entry by Californian Jim Guigli reads:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

Stuart Vasepuru from Edinburgh, Scotland came a close second-place with his homage to Dirty Harry:

"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"

Other notable entries include these from the "Romance" category:

Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.

- Dennis Barry
Dothan, AL

He loved her like no other, their romance developing quickly, like the rapid growth of farm swine which grow from 2 to 4 pounds daily until they're fully grown and put to market for slaughter, or like the rapidly growing cells that produce moose antlers until they fall off in early spring, and suddenly Bill sensed the imminent doom of his romance lying in wait.

- Jeremy Perreaux
Sarnia, Ontario

Ramon kissed Juanita hard and fast, his tongue probing her mouth like an urologist's finger searching for a lone polyp on an engorged prostate gland, which reminded Ramon that he needed to get a colonic irrigation to make next week's annual physical more pleasant for both him and his doctor.

-Ted Begley
Lexington KY

And these from the "Purple Prose" category:

Words cannot describe the exquisite loveliness of the brilliant azure sky with its cerulean striations of periwinkle, cornflower, and cyan.

- Mary Barberio
Northville, MI

The steam rose off his sweaty red flannel shirt like cotton candy on a cardboard cone, if cotton candy were transparent in a misty sort of way and didn't actually stick to its cone, but instead rose upwards something like steam rising off a sweaty flannel shirt in the twilight of an early winter Vermont afternoon.

- T. Edward Lavoie
Essex Junction VT

As I watched the sun rise through the wisps of smog like an angry Scandinavian sumo wrestler clad in a gold lamé muumuu, riding an arthritically slow escalator through the smoke of his own cheap panatela to the linens and beddings floor at J C Penneys, I realized that upon the orb's overtopping the horizon, simple geophysics would deal that metaphor a quick and far less painful death than it deserved.

- Dennis Grace
Austin, Texas

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was the author of Paul Clifford, the novel whose opening line is: "It was a dark and stormy night." Apparently he was the one who first said "the pen is mightier than the sword" and also coined the phrase "the great unwashed."

More about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest HERE, and the complete 2006 contest results HERE.

My Encounter with the PM

It happened last week as I was walking back from a medical appointment along Grattan Street, opposite Melbourne University. I saw a car travelling slowly towards me with its headlights on. At first I thought perhaps a funeral procession (there were another two white sedans in tow, also with lights on). Then I saw the flag on the bonnet.

Is it Bracksy, the Premier?

No cigar.

Then I made out the plates: C-1

Ka-ching! The Prime Miniature himself.

He'’s a front seat passenger. I’'ll give him that much.

As the car approached I took off my sunglasses. Partly so I could see better; mainly because I wanted him to see my eyes. In the space of the next few seconds a stream of images poured through my mind, most of them related to social injustice and disadvantage.

I furrowed my brow and glared.

Well, he refused to meet my gaze, but he did appear to be intensely physically uncomfortable, as if caught in the process of trying to shift his body weight –-- while seat-belted –-- from one haemorrhoid to another. This will ever be a source of comfort to me.

Of course, he may always suffer like this in the vicinity of ACTU headquarters and Trades Hall (just up the road) but I’ had not seen the “"haemorrhoid"” look in the flesh (so to speak) before. I have to say though, the expression is remarkably similar to the one that comes over him these days whenever Peter Costello’'s within knifing distance ....

Dümmerth Chronicles #2

In which our hero continues to display a predilection for movement towards the right-hand edge of the page . . .

.... and whose attempts at disguise are undermined by his distinctive profile ....

"Dümmerth" and images copyright Handi Péter (Powered by BARNABY)

Überpet of the moment: GROVER

This is Grover - an artist whose preferred medium is claw and tooth on paper. Here we see her posing beside her most recent creation: "Headless gull in rigor"

[Now that the Überpet Parade is taking off, I'm moving it to a Flickr photoset. Each new Überpet will now appear in their own entry here, plus there will be a link to the entire Parade which you can view as a slide show, leave comments etc.]

View the complete (and uncut) Überpet Parade HERE.
.

The Dümmerth Chronicles #1

. . . Where we gape in awe as the full repertoire of Dümmerth's striking poses and bodily contortions is teasingly revealed . . .

"Dümmerth" and images copyright Handi Péter (Powered by BARNABY)

Not quite a picture, not quite a thousand words

I don't have a digital camera, but I do have pen & ink (and an old scanner). Here's a random peek inside my notebook: it's where I jot down those things--you know those things--and do the occasional doodle.

Do we really want to encourage this sort of thing? . . . OMG Yes!

Some of you may already be aware of the Giant Microbes range of plush toys which are available in configurations morphologically identical to Gonorrhoea, Syphilis (at left), Ebola (at right), E. coli and many other microbial nasties.

Well, in the realm of the gross senses (ie those not requiring 50,000X magnification) I was recently pleasantly surprised to come across Pee and Poo.

If your browser is Macromedia Flash capable, take a quick tour here.
And this from their website by way of introduction:

We are Pee & Poo. Escapees from the bathroom, we are entering the world on a journey filled with new adventures. Maybe we can stay with you for a while?

Bring it ON!
*