Links (8/25/08)

From my obsessive-compulsive wanderings on the web:

An, er, eye-opening article about all the wild hot sex going on in the Olympic village.

And here’s a blog about some of those who probably aren’t getting any nookie. The ones who finished last in the Olympics. China not only won the most golds, but it also had the most athletes come in dead last.

Mother Jones has put together a fascinating/disturbing map of America’s troop presence abroad for the past 57 years.

A photo essay of women in the Israeli military. [via Boingboing]

Photos from Venice Beach’s annual Go Topless Rally. Y’know for equality. [LA Curbed]

Today’s cities that might be ghost towns by 2100. Check out the slide show here.

Monkeys running rampant in Shibuya train station.

Ninjas in New Jersey arrested for attacking drug dealers. No really!

A company that will turn your pic into a Mao Zedong-era propaganda poster.

The crippling problem of PSAS (Permanent Sexual Arousal Syndrome).

“In six months I was having 150 orgasms a day—and it has been as many as 200.”

More about this problem can be see here and here.

And finally, this completely awesome (and gory) claymation zombie flick.

Hong Kong’s Most Disturbing CG Illustrations, Part 2

By popular demand, here’s another collection of luridly surreal CG illustrations of sensational news stories from Hong Kong’s trashiest tabloid, Apple Daily. Part one can be seen here.

Links (8/17/08)

From my obsessive/compulsive trolling of the world wide interwebs:

A link to some of the world’s weirdest restaurants.

A great list of some groovy non-cult cult flicks.

Darwin reportedly spent much of his later life investigating whether or not blonde did indeed have more fun. Or at least that’s what he was telling his wife.

And then there’s American Carol, a remarkably dissociative screed against Michael Moore, liberals, critical thought, intelligence in general. Watching this gave me a migraine. More on the flick here.

Another soulless creation squeezed out from the plastic asshole of American culture.

Just in case you were confused by the whole battle between God and Satan, this graphic nicely keeps score.

And here’s a great quote from Hunter S. Thompson I ran across:

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…. Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music…. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

I’ll have one of those, please. Link

And finally, a trailer from the infamously awful Mighty Peking Man. It has it all — tiger attacks, blonde she-tarzans, and guys in rubber suits trashing a cardboard Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s Most Disturbing CG Illustrations

Joan and I stumbled across this on some Hong Kong message boards and I couldn’t pass this up. Following up on the awesome CG reenactment by Hong Kong’s Apple Daily of the guy who tried to hump a metal park bench, we found a whole collection of similarly crude, lurid and unintentionally hilarious illustrations from Hong Kong’s trashiest tabloid. For more pics, click here.

And my favorites, Apple Daily‘s recreation of Morgan Freeman’s recent car wreck.

Links (8/8/08)

My regular trolling of the intertubes:

A great article about how materialists are more likely to be miserable.

Here’s a really fascinating article about the (welcomed) death of mall culture in America. Seems that driving 30 miles to shop at the mall is becoming less and less appealing with $4 a gallon gas. Some mall are being opened up and converted in insta-town centers. [via Boingboing]

A man in Hong Kong almost loses his yang humping a metal park bench. [h/t Ted] UPDATE: Here’s a Hong Kong computer graphic re-enactment of the incident.

That crazy woman who spend a small fortune to clone her dog might been the same person who kidnapped a Mormon missionary, chained him to a bed and used him as a sexual slave. While he cried rape, she declared her love.

‘I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to.’

Link. [via BoingBoing]

And then there’s this terrific article in the Washington Post about corporate influence in the Olympics. Was it found on in the news or opinion sections? No, it was in sports.

So what is this Olympics really about? It’s about 12 major corporations and their panting ambitions to tap into China’s 1.3 billion consumers, the world’s third-largest economy. Understand this: The International Olympic Committee is nothing more than a puppet for its corporate “partners,” without whom there would be no Games. These major sponsors pay the IOC’s bills for staging the Olympics to the tune of $7 billion per cycle. Without them, and their designs on the China market, Beijing probably would not have won the right to host the Summer Games.

Link.

And finally, there’s this brilliantly cynical opening rant from the cult flick How to Get a Head in Advertising.

My Brush with Low-Level Religious Terrorism

Ok. For someone who has lived in Los Angeles for the better part of a decade, I have an odd confession. I hate driving. I’m not scared of cars, but I loathe being dependent on them. And the grinding tedium of stop and go traffic often leaves me more aggravated than a full eight hours on the job. So I take the bus a couple times a week.

The thing I like about the bus, aside from not lining Dick Cheney’s pocket with more of my hard-earned money, is that I get a half-hour or so of reading in before and after work. It’s a nice buffer between the bustle of the office and relative quiet of home. And this morning I was eager I dive into my new book, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart. I’ve been wanting to read this puppy since I read an excerpt in the New Yorker some two or three years ago. Yet the moment I get a seat and open my book, some guy next to me who looked like a thinner version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and who was sporting an outfit that looked like a silken Mao suit opened his book, the Bible, and started spouting off a sermon. Using the bendy part of the bus as his pulpit, he delivered Biblical commandments in a booming, sonorous voice that was almost impossible to block out. Almost immediately, I pipe up saying, “Please don’t. This is a crowded bus…” but that didn’t even register. Between Western and Westwood, I don’t think the guy paused for more than five seconds. I realized with greater and greater frustration that there was no way I was going to be reading my book this morning. Nothing short of a kick to the teeth is going to shut him up.

He continued, “You work five days a week, six days a week. But then you send all of your money at clubs, the bars. You hook up with prostitutes. Go to crack houses?” Jesus, how does this guy spend a weekend? Once we rolled into Westwood, he shambled off and the whole bus said a collective, “Hallelujah.” Yes, I thought. This was my brush with low-level religious terrorism.

Links (8/5/08)

From my regular trolling of the interwebs:

A huge scale model of Shanghai in 2020. Looks like they’re going to trash all of those beautiful traditional houses. [via Boingboing]

And here’s series of pics about how a post-apocalyptic Tokyo might look. [h/t Ted]

Looks like Franz Kafka was something of a porn hound.

Creepy weird jokes tech jokes from the Aphex Twins.

This is the best example of Rickrolling I’ve seen yet.

The 5 best human accomplishments done totally high.

And finally, a music video Godard-style. From his cinematic rant La Chinoise.

[h/t Joan]

August is Studious Behavior Awareness Month among others…

National Catfish Month
Peach Month
Harvest Month
National Water Quality Month
and
Studious Behavior Awareness Month

Links (8/1/08)

Holy Crap! A crazed bat-shit loon ball beheads the guy sitting next to him on a bus.

A great article about how hipsters are the death of civilization. [h/t Joan]

What is it about the right wing’s fetish for Michael Moore?

And what is it with the right wing’s fetish with sex toys? [h/t Ted]

And what is it about Japanese men and used ladies underwear?

Starved bears are attacking stranded miners in Kamchatka.

And finally, with the death of Bruce Ivins, who was supposedly behind the anthrax scares on ’01, Glen Greenwald has a fascinating blog entry on anthrax, ABC news and the run up to the war in Iraq.

Clearly, Ross’ allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really “well-placed,” one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted — Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.

Link.