Gross “art”

What I really want to know is what Shelley was looking for when she stumbled across this: an art project to collect 1000 liters of human sperm and display it in a transparent cube. The Sperm Cube does not look like it was well thought out, I’m afraid.

One problem is the collection method. They just want donors to ejaculate into a vial, and mail it, unrefrigerated, to them. Would you like the job of opening tubes of rancid semen and dumping it into the cube?

Another is the health risk. Human fluids need to be treated as a biohazard—they can be ripe with nasty pathogens (HIV? syphilis?), and they do seem to be rather indiscriminate in who they’re accepting donations from.

Now look at the design. They’ve got a 1 meter cube full of a viscous fluid on top of their cooling element. Does that look efficient to you? There’s going to be a damp, runny slurry on the top and sides of that, and nothing will increase the visual appeal of a giant lump of frozen sperm than thriving multi-colored colonies of bacteria and fungi growing on it…unless, maybe, it’s nice squirming masses of maggots tunneling through the semi-congealed mass.

Do they have a disposal plan? This is not practical as a permanent display, and at some point they’re going to have to turn off the freezer and do something with the gunk.

I suspect this is a case where an artist really should consult with a biologist and an engineer before charging off into an insane project.

Grim Death awaits you, O my children

Any parents out there? I bet you know the children’s book, Goodnight Moon. I read it a few million times myself, with each kid as they came up through those preschool years, and I can still remember each page and how the little ones had to repeat each goodnight. Lance Mannion finds the strangest summary of the book, though—it’s a dark nihilist tract that portrays the inevitability of death.

Whoa. Heavy, man.

The other obsessive touchstone of my children’s early years was Pat the Bunny, where each page had a different texture glued on — a piece of sandpaper, a feather, some soft fluff — and the kids were supposed to touch it as we read it. I anxiously await the review that reveals this was actually naturalistic/materialist propaganda designed to inculcate the all-ness of the physical world into impressionable young minds.

I don’t remember much about my early reading habits, although I think Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel was in there, along with lots of Dr Seuss (One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish…oh no, he did warp my brain!) I know that once I got away from picture books, some of the earliest reading my father passed on to me were the Mars books by Burroughs, which perhaps explains my current fascination with many-limbed creatures and naked hotties who lay eggs.

Retroactive reinterpretation of kids’ books is fun!

What’s wrong with this statement?

Something is odd about this comment:

…to help make his point that the bible was the word of god, he introduced the Dead Sea scrolls. He said that they were 3,000 years old and that scholars had found that they were identical to the modern day bible. In fact, he said, “Every dot over every ‘i’, every cross of the ‘t’, every comma, and every period is in the exact same place as in the bible in your hand” (quote paraphrased).

And to this day in Hebrew school, the children receive careful instruction in dotting i’s and crossing t’s.

Demon squid?

This is just not right. Orac finds some wacky spiritualist ‘healer’ who claims to have the cause for diabetes: a demon, the great spirit squid of doom. What? A squid demon? How kooky. Everyone knows no self-respecting squid demon would confined itself to screwing up one subset of cells in your pancreas.

You’ll have to read the original page to find a list of other demons. There is, apparently, also a Demon of Excessive Foot Odor which you can cast out, and you can also have Demons in your Blood Sugar.