Apparently this little guy really enjoys his smokes. From Metro.co.uk:

You don’t want to deny Po the pit viper his regular morning cigarette - he’s guaranteed to throw a hissy fit.

That’s because the three-year-old reptile from Taipei in Taiwan has become hooked on nicotine, thanks to his owner Sho Lau 20-a-day habit.

‘He is very tame and one day when I threw a cigarette butt away he went for it and seemed to enjoy having it in his mouth,’ said 33-year-old Lau.

‘One thing led to another and before long he was having one cigarette in the morning and another at night.’

‘He gets very agitated if I don’t have any to spare,’ he added.

(via Unique Daily)

 
Andre Williams, self-styled Black Godfather, is the man responsible for the berserk R&B of Bacon Fat, Please Pass The Biscuits and the immortal Jailbait. He is a legend and a lunatic. There is a new documentary about him called Agile Mobile Hostile: A Year With Andre Williams.

In 2001, WIlliams gave a career spanning interview to the Perfect Sound Forever e-zine that is utterly hysterical, especially the part about his “operation” to become Jewish:

Q: Speaking of Jewish people, we hear you are a recent convert to Judaism. How did that come about?

Williams: Well, I met a lady who I like real well and she’s from the Naftali tribe, she’s Jamaican. She’s a lawyer and she said “Well, Andre. If we gonna do something, you’ve gotta skin down!” [Laughs]

Q: Was it err.. painful?

Williams: Well, it was an experience! I went to the doctor’s office and I’m thinking that I’m going first for the interview you know. So when I got there, I had the $350 in my pocket, the doctor said it was gonna cost me that. So I said “OK, when do I come back?” And the doctor said “No, we’ll do it right here!” Sweat started popping on my motherfuckin’ head and I said, you mean you really are gonna do it right now?? He said “Yeah” and sat me on this fuckin’ table and said “Drop your pants!”. I dropped my pants and he grabbed my dick and said “Oooh! This is gonna be good! She’s gonna love this!” [Everyone laughs, loudly] I swear! Man, I looked around and I said “Doc, you know, err, I’m err…” He got the needle and said “I don’t put my patients to sleep. This is much better, I know what I’m doing.” He popped me the first time with the needle and by then I’m embarrassed like a motherfucker and I keep rolling in my seat you know. Then he got an even bigger needle and by that time, everything was dead and he was just “Crrrr crrr shhccrrr…” [Everyone laughs but are shuffling uncomfortably on our seats with our knees kept very tight together indeed. Andre is obviously enjoying this tremendously] Now this is kinda strange, like cutting through material “Crrr shhcccrr ssshh!” [More horrible sounds] He was playing with bits of cotton and dabbing here and there, and then the worst part about it was that he set the dead meat up on the table! [Screams of disgust!] Then he told me “Do you wanna see what I cut off?”, I said “Yeah” and looked over and I see this big ol’ dead piece of meat with blood and everything! Then he sewed it up and put a big ol’ bandage on it. No sex for ten days!

 
Thank you Michael Simmons!

 
Lonely this Valentine’s Day, bucko? Adopt a pet! If you or someone you know has been thinking of adopting a new pet and you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, this Valentine’s Day between 11 and 3pm, Amoeba Records, the best record stores in the entire world (or at least the parts I’ve been to) will be there to make your love match with a pooch or kitty.

Amoeba Pet Adoption Day

Thanks Ramie Becker!

 
A man sits in a couple of different tacky/surreal hotel rooms (possibly the Madonna Inn ?) contentedly manipulating tape loops on an ancient flea-market deck, oblivious to the goings-on beneath the covers of the beds next to him. It’s the mysterious work of LAFMS master loopist Joseph Hammer and artist/ hypnotist Sayo Mitsuishi aka The Swinging Chandeliers. Play both at once !
 

 
other LAFMS posts previously on Dangerous MInds here and here

 
Back when time and sleep were of the more surplus variety, I would sometimes spend the tail end of a late night with that horse-happy, cigar-waving TV preacher, Dr. Gene Scott.  Scott wasn’t like the other preachers littering the cable crap-scape.  He had a Ph.D. from Stanford, and, as he often demonstrated while dissecting a bit of scripture at his beloved dry-erase board, was fluent in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic.

He was also, apparently, fluent in alcohol.  Oh, and womanizing.  As the Internet Monk’s Michael Spencer says in his terrific article on Scott, “I Just Couldn’t Look Away.”

And while his shilling for money was a near-constant, his gruff persona and random cutaways to his ponies (and “pony girls”) made it all seem oddly endearing.  After an hour or so of watching, it was hard to not start hoping Scott got some of that cash he was asking (barking!) for.

So…in short, was he crackpot?  Absolutely.  But, hey, he was an L.A. crackpot.  And just the type of self-possessed subject to attract director Werner Herzog.  What follows at the bottom is the little-seen documentary Herzog made of Scott in 1980, God’s Angry Man.
 

Barbie Bridges vs. Melissa Scott
 
Gene Scott died close to 5 years ago from complications arising from prostate cancer.  His younger-by-40-years wife, Melissa Scott, seized took over the still-profitable ministry’s reigns—and still dodges allegations of having had a possibly pornographic past (see above).

 
Or one final screwing before you go completely.  A new U.S. patent was granted yesterday for the above “Easy Inter Burial Container.”  According to the patent application for the EIBC, the reasons for such a vessel are three-fold: space, time, and cash are all at a premium.

This invention relates to conserving land area and easy to install burial containers which can be pressed, agitated, screwed, self bored or by other means set into earth or other receiving materials and do not require a large amount of land area or a large pre-dug rectangular hole with subsequent refilling after the placement of the burial container.

(via Neatorama)

 
For rousing you, I imagine, One Second Before Awakening From a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate:

A Clock so strange, Dali would have it himself if he were alive… A fish rotates around the clock once a minute while Dali’s moustache tells the time.  A surreal Alarm Clock is the perfect way to wake you up and smack you with your own realism at 6:30am!

(via BOJ)

Doctor Who continues its steamroller assault on all fandom with the new announcement that Neil Gaiman has been contracted to write an episode next year for the new Doctor (aka “the Encyclopedia Britannica kid”). Apparently Michael Moorcock is writing a Dr. Who novel, too.

Neil Gaiman has been picking up literary prizes left, right and centre over the last year, but the fantasy author announced this weekend what could be the biggest honour yet for a long-time fan of Doctor Who: writing an episode of the television series detailing the adventures of the Time Lord.

Creator of the Sandman series of comics and author of novels including Anansi Boys and Coraline, Gaiman said in his acceptance speech for winning best comic at the SFX awards on Saturday that he had been a fan of Doctor Who since he was three years old, when he would watch the show from behind the sofa. “And while I know it’s cruel to make you wait for things, in about 14 months from now, which is to say, NOT in the upcoming season but early in the one after that, it’s quite possible that I might have written an episode. And if I had, it would originally have been called The House of Nothing. But it definitely isn’t called that anymore,” revealed the author, who won the best comic prize for his Batman story Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader.

Gaiman, whose latest novel The Graveyard Book won many awards last year, including best novel at the Hugos, the Newbery medal and the UK’s Booktrust teenage prize, is not the first fantasy author to have been tapped by the Doctor Who machine. Last year, Michael Moorcock revealed he had been approached to write a new Doctor Who novel for publication next Christmas.

(The Guardian: Neil Gaiman to write Dr Who episode)

(Doctor Who: The Complete Specials - The Next Doctor / Planet of the Dead / The Waters of Mars / The End of Time)

 
(via Arbroath)