Our deepest apologies, dear readers, for having fallen down on the job as of late in regards to one of our most sacred traditions. Needless to say, we are filled with a great sense of shame and assure you it will not happen again. If, in the future, one of us is unable to fulfill their obligations our newly acquired team of Korean animators will leap into action, producing original cartoons for your enjoyment, although in all honesty I personally cannot guarantee this. You see, by “team of Korean animators” I actually mean a Korean family that Eliza met — and subsequently forced into her windowless van — while running errands at Home Depot. They have tried to reason with her, explaining that they are involved in other professions, the father is a salesman for a lighting manufacturer and his wife works as a bank teller. The children are, well, children.
Eliza would hear none of it however, either assuming that they were lying or under the impression that all people of Korean descent have an innate ability to animate. The rest of the staff has done their best to ignore the situation, knowing full well that once Miss Gauger has set her mind on something, one has little chance of ever changing her opinion. It is for this reason that we do nothing when she insists that her aforementioned van has the ability to travel through time or that Qais is, in her words, “a spy sent by space Turks to steal her chocolate secrets.” Regardless it has been uncomfortable, the tired and nervous familial unit has taken up residence in our break room where they were horrified to find only four items : coffee, tea, pipe tobacco, and squid chips. It would be worse when they found out that these items were our sole sources of sustenance. The children, unsurprisingly, did not take well to the tobacco. Perhaps we should send out for food.
Ah well, I’m sure they’ll be fine, besides it’s cartoon time! Click through, loyal Ectomites, and witness their triumphant return!
P.S. Also, remember that if you visit the YouTube page for a particular video you have the option to watch it in high quality. Especially well suited to the anime.
I can’t wait for lab grown meat. The possibilities that industrialized in vitro meat production brings are not only ecologically and socially conscious, but potentially deviant as the day is long. The long march of science nearly vibrates with the science community’s eagerness to make human hocks, chimp scampi, rhino roasts, and sure, ethically obtained beef. Yet while supermarkets lined with freezers full of laboratory delights have been the stuff of science fiction for some time; the hour of orgiastic over-indulgence in SmartFlesh is nigh.
Recently, at the In Vitro Meat Symposium in Ås, Norway, an economic analysis was presented that indicates meat grown in tanks would be cost competitive with European beef prices. So while the benefits of lab grown food are blatantly obvious to anyone that stops to think about it for more than a minute, it’s a similarly obvious fact that the almighty dollar (or euro as the case may be) is what really speaks, and the sweet, sweet song of bio-science gone oh so right is tickling my tympanics.
But doubt runs rampant among freak meat elite, with experts revealing skepticism as to whether “there is a large market of early adopters who want to eat test tube meat for environmental, health or ethical reasons.” I am here to calm your quaking. Not only is there a market for it, but if the readership of any number of blogs in my feed reader is an indication, the market is not only large but eager and deeply, deeply disturbed.
With a little luck — and a basement full of “missing” puritanical no-fun-niks — the first Ectomo barbecue will be vegan friendly.
Many are familiar with the rejuvenating properties of a bottle of Vitamin Water following an evening spent waging a campaign of genocide on one’s own braincells. Yet while replenishing depleted stores of ephemeral get-up-and-go, Vitamin Water lacks that certain something, that special ingredient that truly puts the spring back in the step of an otherwise lackluster, shuffling crawl. That ingredient? Why, meat of course!
It’s already been proven that household objects are made better with a hot meat infusion, it’s only logical that water too would benefit from an addition of nature’s delicious murder-candy. Now the choice between sating the rumbling nausea of a vicious hangover or enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous five foot trips to the kitchen (and the ensuing near-sysiphean 2 minute wait for that damn burrito to cook all the way through) is made all the more easy. Simply lie back and sup from the bountiful teat of water that satisfies all the needs of the terminally self-dehydrated. They even make Eliza’s favorite flavor!
One of my favorite questions to ask militant vegans is whether or not they would eat meat grown in a lab, and cultured from animals in ways that don’t inconvenience them in any way. The reasonable vegans are usually OK with the idea, the less reasonable ones give me exactly the reaction I was looking for in the first place.
All baiting aside, this line of inquiry raises some interesting questions. If we could grow beef, chicken, or pork in a lab from innocuously harvested cells could we not also grow human meat? And if so, would there be a market for it? Considering the horrific deviancy of our readership (and oh how we love you for it) I say an emphatic yes is the only reasonable answer. Apparently a student at Cranbrook (a college of art and science) agrees.
Thanapong Vudhichamnong, the aforementioned student with a jones for auto-cannibalism, and the best name I’ve seen in a long time, has created the consuME Meat Make; a speculative design that would grow a small donut-shaped piece of meat fit for consumption from a biological sample. While this would do wonders for global stability as far as consumption of resources is concerned, I can’t imagine this device would be available for very long before someone made a human sample.
Early in the 22nd Century the recently formed World Government passed legislation declaring there could exist only one fast food mascot. The reasoning behind the decision remains a mystery to this day, though conspiracy theorists and rational thinkers suspect it was simply a display of power by an infant government. The tyrannical government’s method of pairing down what had become a veritable orgy of brightly colored clowns and cows with opinions on our dietary habits? Gladiatorial combat.
Long and hard they fought, showing bravery and cowardice in equal measure. Finally, from the viscera strewn pits of endless fighting emerged a victor. A relative unknown in his world, yet no less savage and cunning for his lack of infamy. This man, nay, this hero goes by the name of McClucksky. May his epic never be forgotten.
The Blair Godzilla Project is released in theaters today meaning that, hopefully, I will stop being assaulted by viral ads and television commercials. As Nevin reminds us, a big movie release means that Asylum must leap into action with a small budget, direct to DVD release and this is no exception. Behold, the less pretentiously ambiguous Monster!
Arlette has begun the tedious task of sifting through the thousands of photos vomited onto Flickr by the Library of Congress and surfaces with some welding, wartime beauties.
Dr. Zoidberg is not nearly as funny and innocent as first assumed. Thanks, Your Name!
Kevin Nuut and Daniel want you to know that, even though figures based on Mike Mignola and Brian Augustyn’s Victorian-era Batman/Jack the Ripper mash-up Gotham by Gaslight will never be produced, if only to spite you, someone was inspired enough to make some custom Justice League figures to drive the knife in deeper.
The ever excitable Melissa demands that her toilet bowl have a cephalopod decal!
This is not a pizza. It is a heart attack disguised as a pile of greasy, fatty ingredients covering pizza dough. Thanks, Evil Jim.
While Americans continue to gorge themselves on retched, processed food chock full of a plethora of chemical preservatives and engineered flavors, the rest of the world is making their food taste awful the natural way. Take for example this traditional, Icelandic delicacy: rotten Greenland shark.
The sharks are full of urea and other chemicals which, in the shark, act as antifreeze but when digested by other animals are converted into neurotoxins, making the meat unfit for human consumption unless you know how to prepare it. This can be done by thorough and repeated boiling or, more traditionally, by letting the meat rot and the toxins ooze out of the fetid flesh. The cured meat has, apparently and unsurprisingly, the taste and smell of urine.
An audience’s reaction to a piece of “grotesque” art is always an interesting one. A cringing, a curl of disgust in the lip, an expressive gasp; each one gives the artist exactly what they were looking for, a visceral reaction to their viscera.
Being a carnivore can be difficult when, like me, your significant other is a member of that reprehensible subspecies of mankind known as “vegetarian”. Many nights have I spent mournfully choking down a plate of soy excrement, trying desperately to recall the inhuman sins I had surely committed in a previous life to warrant such punishment.
My delight, then, at the sculptures of Simone Racheli is understandable. I have visions of my other reaching, her eyes half full of sleep not yet dispelled by her scalding shower, for her hair dryer. Little by little, as its steady drone begins to pull her from her morning reverie, she notices that its hum is decidedly more moist than she recalls; its case, usually comfortable and familiar in her grip, feels slick and alien to her now.
Slowly she pulls it away and turns, her eyes widening in horror as she gazes deep into the gooey maw of the Meat Dryer I have replaced her normal instrument with. Steadily a scream begins to bubble in her throat, silent at first but rising quickly in both pitch and volume, at which point she drops the device, which emit a low groan upon striking the floor, where it lies, writhing.
Fleeing from the bathroom she rushes into the living room. Her cries recede gradually, so it takes some time for her to become aware of the low chuckle reverberating off the walls. As insane laughter fills the room she whips around to see me, my eyes full of madness and underlined by a terrifying rictus, seated upon my Meat Throne, my vengeance complete!
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.
