{ Footprints, available for both iPhone & iPad, tracks the location of the device and shares it with family and friends. These can then know in real-time a person’s exact location. The app can have several use cases, but the parent/child one seems the most compelling. | TechCrunch | full story }
In the community of believers, paranormal sexual encounters are known as “spectrophilia.” Whether it’s invisible kisses and caresses, sex with Satan, phantom fornication, or obscene phone calls from the dead, let’s explore some claims of anomalous amorous phenomena.
Swedish scientists have explored how a brain identifies its own body and how body image can change by successfully creating the illusion of owning three arms or being the size of a Barbie doll in a laboratory setting.
The research not only addresses some of the oldest philosophical and psychological questions about the relationship between body and mind, but also has potential applications in prosthetics and robotics. (…)
Ongoing projects question whether the perceived body can be shrunk to the size of a Barbie doll or if the brain can accept a body of a different sex.
Other seemingly bizarre recent projects have included giving participants the illusion of shaking hands with themselves, having their stomachs slashed with a kitchen knife and seeing themselves from behind. All were designed to trick participants into a false perception of owning another body.
photo { David Fenton, Nurses on the Sidewalk, Chicano Moratorium, Los Angelos, CA, February 28th, 1970 }
Begotten is a 1991 experimental/horror film, directed and written by E. Elias Merhige. The film deals with the story of Genesis. But as Merhige revealed during Q&A sessions, its primary inspiration was a near death experience he had when he was 19, after a car crash. The film features no dialogue, but uses harsh and uncompromising images of human pain and suffering to tell its tale. It also has no music, instead, the movie is accompanied by the sounds of crickets, and occasionally other sound effects such as grunting and thrashing. Plot The film was shot on black and white reversal film, and then every frame was rephotographed for the look that is seen. The only colors are black and white, with no half-tones. The look is described in the trailer as “a Rorschach test for the eye”. Merhige said that for each minute of original film, it took up to 10 hours to rephotograph it for the look desired. The film opens with a robed, profusely bleeding “God” disemboweling himself, with the act ultimately ending in his death. A woman, Mother Earth, emerges from his remains, arouses the body, and impregnates herself with his semen. |
Antropophagus, released in the UK as Anthropophagous: The Beast and in the US as Anthropophagus: The Grim Reaper, is a 1980 Italian language horror film, directed by Joe D’Amato. Plot A group of tourists arrive on a small Greek island, only to find it almost completely deserted. It seems that the only person still alive there is a blind girl who does not know what has happened to the rest of the island’s town, but is terrified of a man who she describes as smelling of blood. (…) They find a diary inside an abandoned mansion, which tells of a man who was shipwrecked with his wife and child. In order to survive, the man was forced to eat his dead family. This act drove him insane and he went on to slaughter the rest of the island’s inhabitants. (…) Almost the entire group is killed until only a few remain, but one of the survivors manages to overpower him and stab him with a pick axe to the stomach, and before he dies, in one final act of insanity, he attempts to devour himself, by chewing violently on his own intestines. |
{ Thanks Caitie for the inspiring discussion }
“Oh my God, I’m more naked that I was in Playboy,” Kim Kardashian told her sisters. “I’m so mad right now. [The magazine] promised I would be covered with artwork — you can see the nipples!”
“The whole concept was sold to me that nothing would be seen,” she continued. “I feel so taken advantage of … I’ve definitely learned my lesson. I’m never taking my clothes off again, even if it’s for Vogue.”
This wasn’t the first time Kim was upset over nude photos — when her Playboy spread came out, she similarly was upset, telling Harper’s Bazaar… (…) Then, she posed nude for Bazaar.
photo { Zoe Strauss }
Serial killers just aren’t the sensation they used to be. They haven’t disappeared, of course. But the number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public’s fascination with them. the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since.
There are plenty of structural explanations for the rise of reported serial murders through the 1980s. Data collection and record-keeping improved, making it easier to find cases of serial murder. Law enforcement developed more sophisticated methods of investigation, enabling police to identify linkages between cases—especially across states—that they would have otherwise ignored. The media’s growing obsession with serial killers in the 1970s and ’80s may have created a minor snowball effect, offering a short path to celebrity.
But those factors don’t explain away the decline in serial murders since 1990.
photo { Stephen Shore }
Also known as “Papa Doc,” Francois Duvalier was President for Life of Haiti until 1971. Among other things, Papa Doc claimed to be the Voodoo spirit of death, Baron Samedi. This kind of hubris is exactly what you want in your elected officials.
After a heart attack plunged him into a nine-hour coma in 1959 that left him with massive brain damage, things kind of went downhill. He demanded that his temporary successor, Clement Barbot, be arrested, but when they couldn’t find Barbot, Papa Doc’s people told him that they believed he had transformed into a large black dog.
Understandably, Papa Doc ordered the deaths of all black dogs, because as we have mentioned, he was fucking insane. Eventually Barbot was caught and executed, and Papa Doc kept his head. You know, for Voodoo.
In 1961, he ordered new elections despite the fact that his “term” wasn’t up until 1963. The move completely baffled everybody until the results of the election, which saw Papa Doc win with 100 percent of the votes.
Papa Doc eventually died in 1971 of natural causes, but not before telling the world that he alone was responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination by way of a Voodoo curse. He even sent someone to Kennedy’s grave to collect the air around it so he could use it in a spell to control Kennedy’s soul. By all accounts, Voodoo is kind of awesome.
Cannibalism is part of the great cultural legacies of our species. In times past, for instance, we would eat our honoured dead to gain their wisdom.
In medieval times, it was believed that memories were stored in the cerebrospinal fluid. Sadly, it seems that memory cannot be transferred biochemically. (…)
In the Polynesian islands, human meat has always been known as “long pig,” because people taste like pork.
{ Acrobats strip for Pope Benedict XVI, perform topless in Vatican }
In my column in Skeptical Inquirer (November/December 1996), I dealt with the major cases of alleged spontaneous human combustion (SHC) reported in Larry E. Arnold’s book Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion (1995). (…)
Obviously, the Hess case had nothing to do with spontaneous human combustion, as Larry Arnold should have realized.
Arnold, who is not a physicist but a Pennsylvania school bus driver, had no justification for asking ominously, “Did Hess succumb to SHC?” The unburned clothing should have led any sensible investigator to one of the possibilities limited by that fact: for example, that Hess had been burned previously, or his skin injuries were caused by steam or hot water, chemical liquids or vapors, or some type of radiation (possibly even extreme sunburn through loosely woven clothing).
{ Skeptical Inquirer | COntinue reading }
If you’ve never started a fire in a fireplace (and no, those automatic electric fireplace don’t count), then this guide is for you.
1. Make sure your chimney is clean and free of blockages.
2. Open the damper.
3. Prime the flue.
4. Develop an ash bed.
5. Build an “upside down” fire.
…
In an interesting display of Greco-Turkish friendship, visitors from the Greek mainland joined with locals in the coastal Aegean village of Yagcilar as they gathered to watch bulldozers and men with shovels move in on the former home of a Greek Orthodox priest.
Under normal circumstances the demolition of a holy man’s home and the excavation of his garden would have prompted political commentary, but in this case the events had been arranged collaboratively by the current Turkish landowners, the great grandchildren of the exiled priest, the Ministry for Culture and Antiquities, and the governor of the district of Urla.
The aim of the excavators was to uncover 400 kilograms of gold and money buried in the garden in the mid-1920s for safekeeping. It had been entrusted to the priest by his religious community as they found themselves forced to evacuate Greece in the exchange of population that took place at the time.
The tip on the whereabouts of the treasure came from a diary entry found by the priest’s descendents, in which he indicates that he hid the money on the grounds of his house. After three days of searching, nothing but dirt was unearthed, leaving the treasure hunters with suspicions that the priest may have protected the treasure with a special spell.
In desperation, Turks called in a well known local hoca, a local religious leader, to pray at the site. Eyyup Hoca directed the operation to new areas to in which to dig and, with the second excavation attempt coming out empty-handed, he announced that jinn (fairies or imps) had changed the hiding place of the money every 41 years since the date of its burial. This was accepted as a reasonable explanation, and the quest continues.
The concept and existence of jinn is widely accepted in Islam. God is said to have created the jinn before humans from “hot wind” and “smokeless fire”, and some jinn are Muslim. Like humans they were invested with intellect, discrimination, freedom and the power to choose between right and wrong. They live all over earth on a separate plane of existence from man and cannot easily be seen, though they are often thought to take the shape of snakes and black dogs.
It is believed that some areas are particularly attractive to jinn - deserts, ruins and places of impurities such as dunghills, bathrooms and graveyards - but jinn can quite easily live alongside humans in their homes.
The rite of exorcism, rendered gory by Hollywood and ridiculed by many modern believers, has largely fallen out of favor in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.
Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.
“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.
“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”
{ NY Times | Continue reading | related: In Rare Cases, Pope Justifies Use of Condoms }
photos { 1. Brassaï, Graffiti, 1933 | 2. Santiago Mostyn }
An Irish jury awarded nearly $14 million in damages on Thursday to a man who claimed that his former employers had slandered him by insinuating that he had made improper advances to a female colleague during a business trip.
The man, Donal Kinsella, insisted that he had been sleepwalking during a trip to Mozambique in 2007 when he showed up, naked, at the door of a female colleague’s hotel room three times in one night, The Irish Times reported.
He later filed suit against the mining company that employed him at the time because it had referred to the incident in a press release explaining why he had been asked to resign from the company’s audit committee, on which the same female colleague served.
During the trial, the court heard that Mr. Kinsella had also been drinking and taking painkillers on the night in question.
What makes people psychopaths is not an idle question. Prisons are packed with them. So, according to some, are boardrooms. The combination of a propensity for impulsive risk-taking with a lack of guilt and shame (the two main characteristics of psychopathy) may lead, according to circumstances, to a criminal career or a business one. That has provoked a debate about whether the phenomenon is an aberration, or whether natural selection favours it, at least when it is rare in a population. (…)
Despite psychopaths’ ability to give the appropriate answer when confronted with a moral problem, they are not arriving at this answer by normal psychological processes. In particular, the two researchers thought that psychopaths might not possess the instinctive grasp of social contracts—the rules that govern obligations—that other people have.
Most people understand social contracts intuitively. They do not have to reason them out.
illustration { Scott Hunt }
{ Funky Forest - After School Club | more | Thanks Glenn }
The World Health Organisation’s ICD-10 manual of diseases and health problems has a diagnosis of ‘Strange and Inexplicable Behaviour.’ (…)
R46.0 Very low level of personal hygiene
R46.1 Bizarre personal appearance
R46.2 Strange and inexplicable behaviour
(…)
R46.6 Undue concern and preoccupation with stressful events
R46.7 Verbosity and circumstantial detail obscuring reason for contact
