A tribute to Karl Marx — political economist, philosopher, beard enthusiast, and dreamboat — set to the soothing strains of Smooth Jazz saxophone, because nothing says “Workers of the world unite!” like the muzak played in your dentist’s office.

No, you may not have your nine minutes back.

karl marx [YouTube]

Scot points out that your cheap, uncomfortable paper towels may be turning your employees against you. Indeed, this gentleman has already acquired both the demeanor and moustache of the Communist. In other news, were you aware that you can catch Fascism from public restroom toilet seats? Believe it.

Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks? [Flickr] uploaded by Will S. : Socyberty : Neatorama

All I know is that its highly unlikely that a normal (i.e., not related to Lady Deathstrike) human being could, over time, scratch a hole into their brain cavity using their fingernails (which, again, even over time, would be worn down to nubs in the face of bone) and cause inexplicably green brain matter to leak out. Especially since in order to leak out, it would have to be either melting from high fever, or under pressure due to internal swelling, and either way she’d likely be unconscious, if not dead. Again, the wound probably just got badly infected (with staph or similar) and pustulent, which is a perfectly good reason to send someone to the hospital, especially if they have HIV. Its even possible that between the infection, the external damage, and the HIV, the virus managed to make it to her brain, or trigger a heavy fever, causing the apparent brain damage.

M was probably just misunderstanding or misremembering the incident, which is understandable given the stress she was probably under at the time. Unless I see a medical chart with notes saying “perforation of the skull”, or perhaps a particularly impressive episode of Mythbusters, I’m not buying it.

Comment by Joe Shadows — June 25, 2008 @ 8:17 pm

While Mr. Shadows and I may have our differences — for example: he thinks me a gullible fool and I am fairly certain that he is a Communist — we can both agree that the only way to settle this is to get the Mythbusters on this conundrum post-haste. Hopefully they can construct an itch scratching machine, comprised of a hand made from ballistics jelly and bone connecting to a large motor, designed for the specific purpose of creating a perforation in a severed pig’s head.

This 1:500 scale model of the center section of Moscow was commissioned by Nikita Khrushchev in 1968; eighteen years later it was finished. It measures 144 square meters and is made from wood. There have been other, impressive models of the city which included more color and lighting but this particular example makes up for it with its sheer scale. The model is housed in Moscow’s town hall. Hit the jump for more pictures.

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Wendy and Richard Pini, creators of long-running indy comic series Elfquest, are making the whole caboodle available free of charge at their website. New issues will be posted weekly until 30 years’ worth is online.

Comment from BoingBoing and Metafilter remind us why this is one of the best comics you’ve never heard of, but here’s a quick primer on why it rules.

• With Dave Sim’s Cerebus, it was among the first self-published comics to make it big, booting down the door for new talent the nation over. Its success as a graphic novel in mainstream bookstores helped infect the American mainstream with a European-esque appreciation for comics. Women actually read this. Women.

• Wendy Pini’s art is a melting pot of comics, manga and classical illustration. And she’s been at it since before most people had even heard of manga…

• The feral, omnisexual, hallucinogen-guzzling protagonists aren’t Tolkien-derived clichés, but a freakish medley of european lore, native american myth and hippy free love.

• No superheroes, magic wands or other arbitrary magics. It’s consistently plotted to tight rules of engagement and expertly crafted by the same wife-and-husband team thats been doing little else since 1977.

• It’s a neat blend of high fantasy and science fiction: the “elves” are aliens who wanted to impress us by appearing as angels, but got stuck in a genetic disguise by their slaves’ violent rebellion.

• All the fashions in it are either from the 1970s or the 1930s: everyone is either a pimp in furs and leather or something sculpted by Erté. They just don’t make ‘em like this any more.

• Winnowill is the best arch-villainess since Maleficent Cthulhu.

• It’s not over: the story’s final showdown, the creators write, has been written but not yet published.

• 6,000 pages of full-color classic indy brilliance free of charge. Precedent set.

• Issue #17’s Elf Orgy. If nothing else, a great name for a punk band. (Brownlee has already demanded scans, but I don’t have a copy to hand — any fans out there who can do the honors?)

The Guardian, apparently incapable of closing their yaps about the whole Max Gogarty scandal, has made another statement on the incident through their columnist, Rafael Behr.

It’s infuriating reading: Behr directly compares criticism of a banal North London boy’s column on his gap-year vacation to Communist Genocide. Then again, dismissing the mass-murder of millions by comparing it to a nineteen year old boy’s hurt feelings shouldn’t be surprising from the newspaper so clueless that it wrote: “Locked in a time warp since the 1950’s, Cuba is on the verge of change and now is the perfect time to visit before its distinctive character is eroded.” Yeah, that “distinctive character” is 60 years of violent political oppression: don’t miss it!

Anyway, Behr’s piece is worthy of a good Fisking, but I’m not going to bother. I’ve had some fun at Max’s expense here, but it’s just astonishing how the Guardian continues to avoid actually taking any responsibility for what happened, instead casting the entire scandal as an indictment of the ignorance, cowardice and blood-thirstiness of mob rule.

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It’s comforting in a way to know that one’s paranoid theories of powerful men bartering with the lives of millions of people as if they were human Pokemon are, in some ways, not so paranoid after all. Documents recently released by the State Department’s historical office detail a particularly enlightening conversation between Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong and US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger:

“You know, China is a very poor country,” Mao said. “We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.”

Mao circled back to the offer a few minutes later. “Do you want our Chinese women?” he asked. “We can give you 10 million.”

Kissinger noted Mao was “improving his offer,” and the chairman is on record then saying, “We have too many women … They give birth to children and our children are too many.”

“It is such a novel proposition,” Kissinger replied. “We will have to study it.”

Novel indeed, Henry. Certainly it can be argued that Kissinger’s stance on Cambodia during the Vietnam War puts the man in a light that may be less than flattering but I think everyone can agree that this shows full well the depths of the man’s depravity. I mean what kind of animal turns down an offer to supply the citizens of his country with Chinese women.

China to the US: Take Our Women! [Weird Asia News] : Associated Press

We all know how I feel about LOL Whatever memes. You’re all idiots. I just hate and I hate and I hate as you type out verbatim the same spelling mistakes, the same bad grammar, and then slap it in a Something Awful font on a picture of surprised looking kitty cat with the smug satisfaction of Jacques Barzun finally settling upon le mot juste to sum up the cultural impact of Moliere. Stop. Stop.

The other day, someone I knew came up to me on the streets and said, “Oh, hi!” But from the smile on her face, I knew that, deep in the jelly of her brains, she had mnemonically spelled it as “O HAI!” Consequently, I have spent most of the morning scraping that brain jelly in little squidges from underneath my fingernails, which was the unfortunate natural result of pushing my thumbs through her eye sockets.

That all being said… hey, check out this cool LOL meme, LOLSheviks! I post really for the fantastic Soviet art and the crazy commie font. But for one brief moment, I was just like you, reading “I Can Haz A Reign Of Terror?” and giggling idiotically like a thorazine addict staring at a spinning pinwheel. Gabba Gabba! One of us!

LOL Sheviks [Flickr] : Laughing Squid : Mike Monteiro and Matt Haughey

I love abandoned places…especially abandoned scientific establishments. You’d be amazed at the stuff that people will just leave behind. In Russia, the government literally left behind an entire neurological laboratory full of monkey brains in jars, half-mummified rat heads, and assorted other blocky, thrown-together Russian electronics. This place is like a candy store for zombies and medicophiles like myself.

The next time I’m in Russia (which would, technically, be the first I will have ever been in Russia), I plan to bust into this joint and abscond with a number of preserved brains and Frankensteinian Russki computer equipment. All part of my longterm plan to turn my house into an authenthic Mad Scientist’s Laboratory.

Abandoned laboratory of studying a human brain [Brushnicka.com]

It’s 1925. Mad Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin, weary of the pathetic frailties of the flesh — the easily snapped limbs, the hearts that explode under mere superhuman stress, the stomachs that eat themselves away in starvation no matter how red the spirit — is eager to rebuild his weak and demoralized army, as well as begin his first Five Year Plan on the Road to Industrializaton.

“I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat,” Stalin explains to Moscow papers.

The invulnerable human being he envisioned? The perfect soldier? The ultimate Communist? A race of half-man, half-ape super-warriors, to be created for Stalin by Dr. Ilya Ivanov. Unfortunately, his experiments were a failure: though Ivanov was sent off to Africa in 1926 with $200,000 to conduct his first experiments in impregnating chimpanzees (the money was spent on booze, blindfolds and pornography), he failed to produce the race of superhuman monkey men of Stalin’s dreams. Back in the Soviet Union, Ilanov’s attempts to use monkey sperm to impregnate fertile Georgian babushkas similarly failed.

Ivanov died in exile on a cold train plattform in Kazakhstan in 1931. Stalin never did get his race of super-human monkey men.

Stalin’s half-man, half-ape super-warriors [Scotsman]

In between sock hops and chocolate malts, American everygirl Patsy Walker sticks it to some no-good, dirty commies who arrive in Centerville to confirm their suspicions about the flabby decadence of American life.

Patsy Walker #99 [scans_daily]

Another fine masterpiece of consecutive non-linear art by the fabled Al Hartley, Christian comics pioneer and author of “The Cross and the Switchblade.” The lesson is stark and simple: ignore your Bible and watch in horror as Hitler rises to power, gets his ass-kicked by gum-chewing American gangster, then leaves you as prey to roving Communist rape gangs.

Hansi, the girl who loved the Swastika [Scribd.com]

Pinko commies hate consumerism, but sometimes, while Enron and Haliburton scandals run hauntingly through my mind, I take a deep breath, smell the pheremonal allure of a pair of used panties, freshly purchased from a vending machine, and realize, as my palate thrills, that all is right with the world. Capitalism’s a-okay.

But what if Japan’s fondness for used panty vending machines weren’t real? Would I become a filthy red? I don’t know the answer to that, but the prospect fills me with disquiet, and if this linked article casting grave doubts upon their existence is anything to go by, I may very well need to tattoo a left buttock sickle to mirror my existing right buttock hammer.

Japan’s Used Panty Vending Machines: Fact or Fiction? [Inventor Spot]

I smoke a pipe. It is a subtle, gentlemanly art: the selection of a spicy oriental blend, cured over the burning dung heaps of the Turkish nomads, then the throbbing down of the thumb to pack it into the bowl. The master pipe smoker will only use a single match to light his pipe and smoke it for hours, never relighting it, puffing slowly but rhythmically at the exact moment between the dottle’s cooling from purple into black when the flame can still be reignited into a cherry red gloam.

On the other hand, here’s a sociopath in a rubber Joseph Stalin mask, smoking a pipe the size of a forearm with the help of a blow torch. Enjoy!

huge pipe mad masked brigadier [YouTube]