Some webcam footage of the defrosting process being conducted on the half ton colossal squid caught in Antarctic waters in February 2007, and currently housed in a New Zealand lab. The entire process will take up to two day to complete in order to not damage the specimen, as thawing it too fast would mean that the outside would being to rot before the internal organs had fully thawed. Researchers will only have a short time to examine the corpse before it is placed in a preservative, during which time they hope to, among other things, determine the squid’s sex; although the apparent lack of a six and a half foot penis leads them to speculate that it is female. It seems like a logical conclusion. They will also be live webcasts spanning the entire project. After the examination is concluded the squid will be put on display at Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand’s national museum in Wellington.
Every year on March 15th Japan celebrates Hounen Matsuri (Harvest Festival). The most well known of these festivities takes place in the town of Komaki which includes — among food and drink — an eight foot long, six hundred and twenty pound wooden phallus:
The wooden phallus is carried from a shrine called Shinmei Sha (in even-numbered years) on a large hill or from Kumano-sha Shrine (in odd-numbered years), to a shrine called Tagata Jinja.
Above is some video of the aforementioned cock parade which ends, as one might expect, with some exuberant penile fondling; and just in case that makes you uncomfortable here is a gratuitous shot of a Japanese girl eating a hotdog.
Here, laid bare, is the stuff of my private, Freudian nightmares. Imagine, if you will, finding yourself in an open field, clad in an orange spandex jumpsuit, unaware of how you came to be there. Standing up, you notice a shape on the distant horizon. Squinting you find yourself magically transported to a vast parking lot that surrounds a large warehouse. Turning, you see a field in the distance and now realize that this warehouse was leagues away just a few moments earlier. Yet this mystery will have to wait for the massive doors of the building have begun to creakily part, wailing as if the entrance were an immense mouth.
“Male seed beetles have spectacularly harmful penises covered in sharp spikes. These help the male’s chances of fertilizing the eggs by providing an anchor, but can also pierce the female during sex, causing injury.
For seed beetles – a group of insects consisting of many species that infest beans or seeds – the battle of the sexes is not a psychological game played out in the home, it’s a deadly serious evolutionary arms race, according to a new study…”
As it proudly declares, the Icelandic Phallological Museum is probably the only museum in the world where a visitor can take their children to gasp in wonder at the mummified penises of all the indigenous land and sea mammals in the country. The collection includes “thirty eight specimens belonging to fifteen different kinds of whale, one specimen taken from a rogue polar bear, nineteen specimens belonging to seven different kinds of seal and walrus, and ninety three specimens originating from nineteen different kinds of land mammal: all in all, a total of one hundred fifty one specimen belonging to forty two different kinds of mammals.”
A human penis has not yet been added to their archives, but don’t fret, the Icelandic Phallological Museum assures us that’s next on the menu. The hot dog stand is also held in wide renown among the international phallology community.
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.
