We try not to discuss anything to political on Ectomo. It’s not our forte really, and honestly, political discussion is an activity that almost instantaneously devolves into the equivalent of both parties taking turns punching one another in the genitals. It is, plainly speaking, unpleasant.
So it is with a certain amount of hesitation that I post the above clip, a parody of the Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor as presented by a child with a hydrocephalic cranium, knowing, as I do, that it may ignite the aforementioned genital boxing match. In the end, it’s a price I am willing to pay. After all, how often does one get a chance to hear a small child with a comb-over roar “Your dirty sex makes God send hurricanes”?
From Tom Horacek’s new book “All We Ever Do Is Talk About Wood“, a cavalcade of horrors, hydrocephalia, and hopelessness wrapped up in a darkly humorous package that features each of its characters at a moment of existential crisis. This is Ectomo’s kind of humor, rife with the bitterness and misanthropy we’ve all come to know, love, and assimilate.
From personal experience, I can tell you all that a drainage shunt fit with a canteen nozzle and inserted into the back of the cranium can not only decrease the dangers of a hydrocephalic losing his bobble-headed balance and spontaneously catapulting himself, but will also make him an unexpected hit at parties when the booze runs dry. By French designer Christophe Huet.
To the insipid pap that was posted by half of the dynamic duo that are the New Scum’s fearless leaders. I’m not sure if you can appreciate just what a slap in the face that post was, dear readers.
With a yelp I tumbled from my upended gunnysack and stared, in cringing horror, at the looming sillhoutte of John Brownlee (composed mostly of his hydrocephalic skull and massive fez).
“Get up boy, it’s time to earn your keep.”
You see, some months ago I was invited to write as a guest for Ectomo, in my excitement ignoring the pills bubbling merrily away in the bottom of my drink or the leering smile of Brownlee. I came to several days later in a sack full of soiled rags, shaved and implanted with electrodes, a horrible gurgling scream bubbling out of my throat. Since then I have been sacked nightly, and subjected to savage wire hanger beatings and filthy humiliations daily. I’m told this is all my fault, I’ve come to accept that.
Three years ago, a 44-year-old man was admitted to hospital in Marseille, France, complaining of weakness in his left leg. He had no idea what doctors would find to be the source of the problem: a huge pocket of fluid where most of his brain ought to be.
Normally, fluid continuously circulates throughout the brain and is drained away into the circulatory system. But in this case, the man’s drainage tubes had narrowed, resulting in an accumulation of fluid in the ventricles and an enlargement of the skull due to the great volume of fluid pressing against it. This had squeezed his brain into a narrow layer around the outside of the fluid, doctors report in the Lancet1 today.
“We were very surprised when we looked for the first time the CT scan,” says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University, Marseille. “The brain was very, very much smaller than normal.” Nevertheless, subsequent tests showed the man to have an IQ of 75 — at the lower end of the ‘normal range’.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
With a yelp I tumbled from my upended gunnysack and stared, in cringing horror, at the looming sillhoutte of John Brownlee (composed mostly of his hydrocephalic skull and massive fez).
