Face It

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say. Cool, I get that. I just hope the beholder is looking at my face because I am nursing a decent beerpizzaburger belly these days. Thanks to the extra weight, here I sit, gimped by a stress fracture in my leg from jogging ... jogging because I am working on that buff body shape I think I need. Shazam! Come to find out, it's about the face. Here is a study that presents hope for the bodily challenged, for the misshapen. Not that I want to let my body go ... any more than I have ... but I can't imagine getting all Jabba the Hut fat folds and jiggles and still being appealing regardless of my kisser. True, I'm not Nick Cave hot, but compared to the rest of me, my face is probably the lesser of two evils. Anyway, let's all raise our cracked glasses and drink to Erik (aka Phantom of the Opera) and all monsters who, butt for their faces, might have done alright with the ladies. Dig the Phantom's moisty complexion.

What's Up Doc or Holy Shit, She Birthed Rabbits

Here is an curious book: Imagining Monsters, re: a fantastical occurence involving a human giving birth to rabbits. The Mary Toft hoax. I almost finished the Toft book but someone loaned me The God Delusion and I was forced to abandon it.

Love the monstrosities, our response to them, the weird tension between repulsion and attraction, our need in some cases to invent monsters to explain or excuse. Raeblais' giants, Greek mythology. Creature from the Black Lagoon (can he be on the same stage?).

Here is a synopsis I grabbed from Amazon.

"In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to seventeen rabbits. Deceiving respected physicians and citizens alike, she created a hoax that held England spellbound for months. In Imagining Monsters, Dennis Todd tells the story of this bizarre incident and shows how it illuminates eighteenth-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity. Mary Toft's outrageous claim was accepted because of a common belief that the imagination of a pregnant woman could deform her fetus, creating a monster within her. Drawing on largely unexamined material from medicine, embryology, philosophy, and popular "monster" exhibitions, Todd shows that such ideas about monstrous births expressed a fear central to scientific, literary, and philosophical thinking: that the imagination could transgress the barrier between mind and body.

In his analysis of the Toft case, Todd exposes deep anxieties about the threat this transgressive imagination posed to the idea of the self as stable, coherent, and autonomous. Major works of Pope and Swift reveal that they, too, were concerned with these issues, and Imagining Monsters provides detailed discussions of Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad illustrating how these writers used images of monstrosity to explore the problematic nature of human identity. It also includes a provocative analysis of Pope's later work that takes into account his physical deformity and his need to defend himself in a society that linked a deformed body with a deformed character".

A cautionary note: the book is fairly graphic in its account of the pieces parts aspect of the "births".

B-Movie Terrors: The Shoes Closet Below"

This month's B-Movie ...

" Dust and dust bunnies piss off. Dropped socks, go to hell. This is the real shit." --Why Ain't It Cool News

"I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats."
--Out of Touch Cinema

"A Nine West horde of size 9 flats, sandals and heels. A different kind of Blob."
--Crispin Science Monitor

(Shakey cammmmmm)

My wife Blaze has two shoe closets. One in the study, and one under our bed. In all fairness, in the WAY back you can see my piles of bedside books.

"It's in the trees, it's coming!" Dryad Blues

Ha. The irony's thick enough to cut with a chainsaw. Note the Google ads that appear after the Dryad entry copy I pasted in.

specifically, a dryad is a spirit associated with an oak tree, as “drys” means “oak” in Greek, but over time, these spirits have come to be associated with trees in general. According to legends, the dryads look after the forest and keep an eye on the health of the trees ... devout members of society would make offerings to appease or thank dryads when they needed to harvest trees or branches. A specific type of dryad known as a hamadryad actually lives inside the tree, according to legend, and if the tree dies, the hamadryad dies with it. For this reason, the Greeks believed that it was necessary to ask permission from the gods before felling a tree, to confirm that they would not be killing a hamadryad by mistake. The gods were also said to punish people severely for cutting down trees ...

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Reading the Classics (the other classics)

Back in the day, when dogs were puppies, summers smelled of cornfields, and Kathleen wore those cut off jeans to perfection, when I was reading comics I was reading this (Love the fractured tree stump that seems to be growing out of the rock). Not pictured but always loved: Eerie, Creepy, Man-Thing, Turok Son of Stone, Monster Times, Werewolf by Night & someone's copy of Happy Hooker.

Zombies, werewolves and swamp creatures as righteous heroes? Not bad, eh? I loved Spider-Man but well, he wasn't scary and scary is/was manna.

Xaviera, wherever you are, thanks. You were scary in a special way.

Hamburger Neck

... and the award for shittiest (but hey, you gotta love the effort) make up goes to ... this is my little Bubba, who let me mess around with make up on his neck back when I was doing the spook house gig and applying mutilation effects nightly. (See Mr. Chunkles' head shot. Click on the image to embiggen the gore and you can see the detail work. Meaty goodness.

Squirm Factor 10 - Bonk, notes on Sex

Laughing Scared has room from non-supernatural horrors as well, like this excerpt from Bonk, the Science of Sex, by Mary Roach. Coincidentally, I just had a punch biopsy recently, and was feeling kinda worked over and sorry for myself until I remembered this "procedure".

Word spread. By 1916, the nut graft had gone mainstream. The next step in the operation, Dr. Hsu has named the inside out maneuver. Though it is not so much inside out as just out. Using his gloved fingers, Dr. Hsu pulls the man’s penis up and out of the skin, through the three-inch slit, by its midshaft. ….. Dr. Hsu’s nurse is unwrapping the second implant, for the other erectile chamber. This one does not go gently. The insertion is done in two stages. One end is submerged down to the pubis bone …