The Possession of President Trump.

153740-Trump He-Man image 2

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A Kurdish healer who claims to draw his knowledge and powers from God says that US President Donald Trump is possessed and unless he is cured he will either go insane or be killed before finishing his first term in office.

[…]

“Trump is possessed and I need to beat him on the soles of his feet to get the jinni out of his body,” Mala Ali told Rudaw in an interview. “He has lost his mind and oversteps his boundaries all the time. He needs help. Unless he is cured he will continue to act like he does now.”

He predicts meanwhile that Trump will not finish his first term as president and that “he will either go insane or be killed. He has become a creature that attacks everyone.”

Uh oh. That point was reached, and sustained during his campaign.

“I keep saying it but no one is listening to me. A huge number of jinnis have come to Iraq’s sky. Even Lucifer himself is among them and I’ve heard this from the spirits themselves. Jinnis have occupied all of Iraq and Syria and the situation could only get worse,” Mala Ali said.

“Most Iraqi MPs and ministers are possessed and they have come to me and I have thrashed them.

Mala Ali may be onto something here. Oh, not his grandiose claims to be able to heal anything under the sun, that’s bullshit of course, and dangerous bullshit at that. However, if people were given the opportunity to thrash all our so-called leaders, it would no doubt have a healthily cathartic effect.

Via Rudaw.

Really?

White House Director of Oval Office Operations Keith Schiller carries a red USA hat and a copy of Fortune magazine with President Trump on the cover as he and Communications Director Sean Spicer deplane from Air Force One yesterday. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.

White House Director of Oval Office Operations Keith Schiller carries a red USA hat and a copy of Fortune magazine with President Trump on the cover as he and Communications Director Sean Spicer deplane from Air Force One yesterday. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.

I was reading yet another article about leakiness, but got completely distracted by that photo. Specifically, by the lining of Spicer’s jacket. I know it gets routinely ignored, and rightly so in my opinion, but there is a law about using the flag as an article of clothing. Yeah, yeah, it’s probably just a flag type printed fabric, but it’s certainly meant to give the impression of the ‘merican flag. I…uh, is this like Mormon undies, or secretly wearing silk undergarments to give you that special feeling? It’s definitely ostentatious, and I don’t think it’s going to help with anyone even trying to take Spicer seriously, which is already a difficult enough task. A bloody impossible one now. Are the stars on a field of blue his boxer shorts as well as his tie? Okay, yeah, I’ll stop.

Pasilalinic-sympathetic Compass.

Escargots. Jacques Collin de Plancy - Dictionnaire infernal.

Escargots. Jacques Collin de Plancy – Dictionnaire infernal.

I’m being much too distracted by the Dictionnaire Infernal right now. How did I not know about the Snail Telegraph? The original text from Dictionnaire Infernal:

Escargots. On ne voit nulle part que ces honnêtes créatures aient jamais figuré au sabbat. Mais il paraît qu’elles ont aussi leur côté mystérieux, et qu’elles pourraient, quand les études dont s’occupent les savants auront abouti, faire concurrence au télégraphe électrique. On a donc proposé en 1850 un procédé qui se mûrit, c’est la boussole pasilalinique-sympathique. Si vous trouvez ce nom bizarre, l’agent de cette boussole ne l’est pas moins ; c’est l’escargot. Deux amis séparés par de grandes distances se seront munis chacun d’un escargot de même espèce, les auront magnétisés ensemble pour établir la sympathie ; puis l’ami resté à Paris chargera son escargots des nouvelles qu’il veut transmettre à son ami installé à Pékin, et ce dernier répondra de la même manière ; par quels moyens faciles ? nous l’ignorons ; mais en mars de la présente année, les journaux disaient qu’on était à la veille de résultats satisfaisants, et les spiriles affirment que cette découverte se rattache à ce que nos pères appelaient la magie naturelle. Un Américain prétend même que les escargots magnétisés parleront, ou bien un esprit, de ceux qui tiennent aux tables, pourra parler pour eux.

One Massive Trichobezoar.

IMG_1692

Via Atlas Obscura.

People with cats, rejoice they aren’t cows. Pictured above is a massive hairball, from a cow.

Situated at the entrance to the equally enjoyable Lee Richardson Zoo, the Finney County Historical Museum is a quaint museum that tells the history of Southwestern Kansas. It also tastefully displays the World’s Largest Hairball atop a brass spittoon.

Removed from the stomach of a cow that was processed in a nearby packing house, this mammoth trichobezoar was nearly 40 inches in circumference and was said to have weighed 55 pounds wet when first removed. Though smaller and drier now, it’s still a very impressive sight. Visitors are free to lightly touch the ball (it feels like a velvet basketball) but signage politely reminds them not to pick it up.

Via Atlas Obscura. All I can say is that cow must have been a mad groomer.

Diableries.

From a group of 11 tissue-stereo views of Satan (1860s–70s) (all images courtesy Swann tiontion Galleries).

From a group of 11 tissue-stereo views of Satan (1860s–70s) (all images courtesy Swann tiontion Galleries).

Hyperallergic has a great story on some 19th century stereoviews, some of which will soon be up at auction. Hell doesn’t look so bad, rather playful!

As one group of 19th-century French artists envisioned it, hell was no desolate destination for the damned. Rather, it hosted boating races, witnessed parties with a “live” band, and even boasted a lavish boudoir for one “Madame Satan.” Such are the scenes they depicted in their series of humorous stereoviews produced in the 1860s that capture a vibrant underworld of devils, skeletons, and satyrs, each carefully hand-colored so the frozen figures came alive with glowing red eyes.

Titled Diableries, the series was published primarily by Frenchmen François Benjamin Lamiche and Adolphe Block, as told in a publication, also called Diableries, that chronicles the works’ history. Unlike most stereoviews, these images married sculpture and photography: sculptors (unidentified on the images) would craft small dioramas from clay that would then be photographed and printed on albumen paper. The artists then applied watercolors to the fragile prints, added a layer of backing tissue, and inserted the prints into cut-out windows of two cardboard frames. The tissue stereocards, therefore, offer two views: when seen with light hitting only their front sides, their images seem black-and-white; but when illuminated from the back, colors appear to render hell in vivid visions. The artists would also pin prick sections of the images and apply color to these markings so light passing through the holes would highlight details on costumes or settings, even making them sparkle slightly.

A full set had dozens of individually captioned scenes, guaranteed to provide viewers with a unique form of entertainment in 3D when placed on a stereoviewer. Stereoviews were highly popular in the 19th century, but the Diableries would have certainly stuck out from many other sets: collections of travel photos, artworks, and religious pageantry have quite a different tone from these scenes of skeletons riding bicycles, playing instruments in a bony band, and dancing in flouncy dresses.

[…]

Swann Auction Galleries is selling 11 cards (est. $600–900) as part of its forthcoming sale “Icons & images: Photographs & Photobooks.” A couple of these scenes show hell as you may expect it: in one, winged demons poke weapons at skeletons crowded in a massive cauldron while wide-eyed monsters gawk from dark corners; another shows the entrance to hell, governed by a three-headed beast and monsters holding pitchforks. Humor, however, is the clear, reigning mood in these Diableries: a sign above the beast in that latter image reads, “Speak to the concierge”; there’s also a skeleton lifting his top hat to a guard while a woman in the corner offers water for passersby to refresh themselves.

Much more to see and read at Hyperallergic.

Don’t Call It Fashion.

CUNE-2016-SS-Meat-in-the-sky-1

Raw Meat, Cabbage, Moldy Bread, and other things that have inspired Japanese fashion label CUNE.

Don’t call it fashion. At least that’s what Hironori Yasuda will tell you if you ask him about his label CUNE, which he started in 1994. If anything, they’re “barely clothes,” he says.

Yasuda isn’t swayed by trends. He makes what he wants, and each season he picks a seemingly arbitrary theme, one that typically has no place in the world of fashion, and designs his entire collection around it. He doesn’t think about who would wear his clothes, or how they would wear them. In fact, he even says “you don’t have to buy them.” But with two stores in Tokyo, one in Fukuoka and a thriving online shop, people seem to like his bizarre creations.

You really need to click over and see all the stuff, it’s amazing. I love the red cabbage dress, and I’d buy it in a heartbeat. Same with the meat jacket pictured above.

It’s all at Spoon & Tamago.

Wax That Ass.

1

Wax That Ass, Allison Bouganim. Images courtesy of the artist.

2

3

What do laundromats, bus stops, and supermarkets have in common? Besides being everyday locales, these seemingly innocuous sites are also hotbeds of sexual harassment. Wax That Ass, a project by artist Allison Bouganim, fuses sculpture, photography, and on-site intervention to explore the everyday discomfort felt in public places.

Bouganim began the project by making a series of sculptural butts cast from actual butts. The results were a series of plaster and wax butts (hence the project title, Wax That Ass) in a variety of different shades that seem to represent a spectrum of skin tones. Once these were made, Bouganim went to a series of sites that are not only breeding grounds for sexual harassment, but are also places where the artist herself has been sexually harassed before, to enact the performative aspect of her project.

You can read and see more at The Creators Project.

Just The Facts, Ma’am.

facts

Handy dandy help for everyone, from FactCheck.org – How to spot fake news. An article to bookmark and refer to when needed, and I imagine it might be needed a lot in the coming years.

…Those all still hold true, but fake stories — as in, completely made-up “news” — has grown more sophisticated, often presented on a site designed to look (sort of) like a legitimate news organization. Still, we find it’s easy to figure out what’s real and what’s imaginary if you’re armed with some critical thinking and fact-checking tools of the trade.

Here’s our advice on how to spot a fake:

Good, solid advice. Click on over to read the whole article.

And, here’s a good way to sharpen up those bullshit detection skills, learning that correlation does not imply causation. While most people know this, at least hazily so, that’s one fact that tends to get kicked out in favour of “hmmm, that’s interesting, ennit?” and “that’s some coincidence!” and so forth. We’re all prone to veering off into the more magical type of thinking, and the correlation/causation bit is an oft used trick to manipulate people. Being much smarter than that, of course you want to make sure you don’t fall for such shit. Head on over to Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations, and you can enjoy learning all about it. Spurious Correlations is now a ridiculous and wonderful book, and I highly recommend it.

Okay…Inauguration Roundup.

IR

© Laura Racero.

Oh, where to start. I guess we’ll start with “Hey, look, a tiny, Bane-full inauguration!

(Photo: Wikipedia commons and screen capture).

(Photo: Wikipedia commons and screen capture).

For all the boasting about the bigliest ever, the crowds at Trump’s inauguration were woefully scant. The Twitternet jumped all over this immediately, and you can see many of the tweets here. Also noted by the Twitternet, and most everyone else on the planet, Trump borrowed a bit of his speech from a fictional villain, which is terribly apropos, but he picked the wrong villain, Bane. Bane was more of a “eat the rich!” kind of villain. That didn’t stop Trump:

Fans of the Batman franchise film The Dark Knight Rises were startled to hear the words of the movie villain Bane coming out of Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s mouth as he made his inaugural address — purportedly written by Trump himself — on Friday.

“We’re giving the power back to you. The people,” Trump said Friday, a nearly verbatim quote from Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay for the 2012 film starring Christian Bale as Batman and Tom Hardy as Bane.

You can read all about this one, and see some of the tweets here.

The Twitternet also broke out in gales of laughter and comparisons over Kellyanne Conway’s outfit:

Kellyanne Conway attends President Trump's inauguration (Screen cap).

Kellyanne Conway attends President Trump’s inauguration (Screen cap).

Conway’s outfit, which TMZ claims she describes as “Trump Revolutionary Wear,” is a red-white-and-blue getup that is meant to be somewhat reminiscent of Revolutionary War-era military uniforms.

CNN’s Hunter Schwarz notes that her coat is actually a $3,600 Gucci wool a-line coat — and CNN’s Kate Bennett writes that the coat was originally designed to pay tribute to the city of London, which isn’t exactly a place to celebrate the American Revolution.

You can read all about that, and see tweets here. Oh, and the buttons on it are cat heads.

Then there’s a compilation of all the things that didn’t happen, didn’t come through, and weren’t bigly at all:

Women’s March bus permit requests outnumber inauguration requests by 3 times.

Most hotel bookings have been made by anti-Trump protesters.

Trump is wrong (again): dress shops still have plenty of available frocks.

“There’s never been less demand for inaugural ballgowns in my 38 years,” Peter Marx, who owns D.C. dress shop Saks Jandel, told People. “Never ever has it been less for the inaugural.”

Other shops expressed similar sentiments.

“We were expecting heavy traffic and it has not been that way,” a D.C. Bloomingdale’s representative told Elle. “The last inauguration was a lot more people shopping.”

A spokesperson from Intermix told the outlet, “Usually, it is really big for us, but this year we haven’t seen anything yet, surprisingly.”

Elle notes that “among others we called, White House Black Market and Cusp in Georgetown confirmed they have options in stock. So does Neiman Marcus. And Gucci. And Lord & Taylor. And Nordstrom.”

There’s more here.

And there were artists out, as well as all the marchers and protesters. FORCE put on a big show:

CREDIT: Nate Larson.

CREDIT: Nate Larson.

…For roughly 45 minutes, a slideshow of photos and quotes from survivors circulated on the front of the building, as passersby stopped to take it in. The organizers of the installation hoped their message reached at least a few visitors here for Trump’s inauguration.

“As a native woman, as a queer woman, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and intimate parter violence, there’s so much that is traumatic about seeing my country support somebody that represents violence against all of those things,” said Rebecca Nagle, a co-director of FORCE. “The racism and the misogyny that [Trump] represents is bigger than just him as a person and a figurehead, but is something that is deeply embedded in American culture.”

Many victims of sexual assault were particularly traumatized by the election of Donald Trump, who bragged on tape about sexually abusing woman. Now, as he prepares to enter the White House, there are already signs that Trump won’t pursue policies aimed at preventing sexual violence. As part of his proposed plan to reduce government spending, Trump administration officials reportedly approached the Department of Justice with a plan to eliminate the federal grants used to combat violence against women.

“The goal of the piece is really to uplift survivors voices at a time that a lot of people are normalizing Trump’s behavior,” said Nagle.

Full story at Think Progress. A great work by FORCE!

And because there’s always bad news:

President Donald Trump’s whitehouse.gov page omitted references to a number of policy issues championed by his predecessor, including climate change, civil rights and healthcare, providing a blueprint for the new administration’s priorities over the next four years.

Full story here.