Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, the P.T. Barnum of religious leaders, gave a rare, extended interview for this 1967 expose aboard his giant, private boat while docked in South Africa. The same day of this interview the Home Office banned Hubbard from re-entering England.

Hubbard, a man who is widely quoted as having said “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion,” looking very much like Alan Hale playing Jonas Grumby, explains his “science” with the semantic acrobatics of a seasoned politician. It is only when combined with his organization’s manner of dealing with journalists and critics that the veneer becomes unsettling.

Scientology: The Shrinking World of L. Ron Hubbard [YouTube]

He may say he loves his life but his soggy hirsute appendage and soulless eyes say otherwise.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell [Bizarre Records] : vintagephoto

In analyzing my name, a blessing and curse bestowed on me by my worldly parents, one might infer that I am a swarthy foreigner sipping Turkish coffee and smoking kreteks in a Middle Eastern cafe surrounded by throngs of brown skinned youth, eager for tales of debauchery and adventure. One might also infer I am simply a long haired, pimply faced, goon with a penchant for obscure literature in middle America having taken up the moniker of an Arabic poet in an attempt to obfuscate the shame of being named Ernie. While I fit certain portions of each stereotype, Ernie being what Brownlee calls my “bitch-name”, I am neither in whole.

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BE STIFF! It’s hard to believe that 1) Saturday Night Live used to be funny; and 2) DEVO was once regarded as the future of music. Here at Ectomo, we believe heartily in Devo’s theory of de-evolution! I may only speak from personal experience here, perhaps because I am the only member of the staff who lives in the wilds of southwestern Pennsylvania and routinely ingests mutagenic materials for Fun and Profit, but I have seen de-evolution in action: both in my neighbors, and in myself. My newly-grown semi-prehensile tail clearly demonstrates a step backwards–but not so much as my realization that Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction” describes visually, musically, and conceptually my entire love life.

*Le sigh* I guess I’m just a spud boy, looking for a real tomato. You’d think things would’ve de-evolved enough by now that I’d be able to find on every street corner spud girls being stiff, through being cool, to get me jerkin’ back and forth…but not, it was all just wind in sails. ARE WE NOT MEN?! Sadly, we all still are. Nothing but a bunch of damn new traditionalists bound by our duty now for the future. As a transhumanist, I know that someday…someday I’ll be a mechanical man and be above all this human BS, but until then…I’m just a blockhead.

I don’t buy a word of it, but this article on the penchant of Japanese fishermen for carnally penetrating their piscine catches before shipping them off to the sushi house gets recognition for spending all its prose points where it counts: in the headline. “Testicles and Tentacles: Seamen Show Their Derring-Do By Doing Denizens Of The Deep.” If only the rest of the article were written so well.

“A manta’s … thing is kind of similar to a human’s,” Makeburu says.
Japanese fishermen prove the old adage that there are plenty of fish in the sea.

Okay, well … not exactly. More than a reproductive organ, it’s basically an organ of elimination. So engaging in sex with a manta is basically an act of deep-sea sodomy.

“It’s shallow and there’s resistance at the other end, so the feeling isn’t that good,” is how he describes it.

At least the manta survives the violation. “With most fish, we just whack ‘em, but we release the manta’s we screw back into the ocean,” Makeburu relates.

Testicles and Tentacles: Seamen Show Their Derring-Do By Doing Denizens Of The Deep [Mainichi]T