Here’s my short piece for Boing Boing’s Mind Blowing Movies series:

After reading over the other entries in Boing Boing’s Mind Blowing Movies series, I couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed that I was unable to think of even a single film that I felt had truly blown my mind. Works of art, music, weird science, books of philosophy, sure, ideas have blown my mind, but when I try to mentally flip though the catalog of my favorite films, or ones that I quote from the most often, or what have you (Female Trouble, Valley of the Dolls, Putney Swope, Ken Russell’s Isadora Duncan: Biggest Dancer in the World, Head, Richard Lester’s criminally underrated Petulia) I still wouldn’t file any of them as particularly “mind blowing,” just as movies that I happen to really, really like.

When Mark sent out the invite to contribute, I confess that I immediately drew a cinematic blank, but there was one film that that didn’t necessarily “blow my mind,” per se, in the same way that the other participants here have expressed it in their posts, but it did fundamentally alter my mind, or at least it did something to immediately change my perception of the world around me, in the sense that there was a before & after aspect when I watched it. Accordingly my anecdote will be short and sweet.

When I was a 7-year-old kid in 1973, What’s New Pussycat? the quintessential sexy 60s comedy “romp,” aired on ABC’s Movie of the Week and I watched it in the basement of my parent’s house on a cheap black and white TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna with balls of tin foil crunched at the tip of each branch. The picture quality was comparable to a security camera. Why I was watching What’s New Pussycat? sitting alone in a damp, crappy basement or even interested in this particular film in the first place at that age, I couldn’t tell you, but I am guessing I wanted to watch it because I liked the theme song, sung by Tom Jones (I owned the 45rpm on Parrot Records) or else simply because Peter Sellers was in it.

In any case, the pivotal moment for me happens at about 120 minutes into the film when Swiss bombshell Ursula Andress suddenly drops from the sky and parachutes into Peter O’Tootle’s convertible. I can vividly recall my eyes growing wider and wider and feeling what you might call a “stirring” in my loins as I stared in utter amazement at the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen in my short life. I was completely astonished and transfixed by how beautiful she was. I had never before seen a woman who looked quite like that and the sight of this blonde goddess strongly implied to me that there was something that I might be missing out on…

It was at that precise moment the proverbial light-bulb went on over my head about what the whole “big deal” with girls must be all about. That such a creature as Ursula Andress existed indicated that there were more of them out there. Suddenly there was meaning in my life and something to aspire to. I made a mental note to move to Switzerland as soon as I grew up.

By the end of the film—which being a comedy made in 1965 only hinted at the things that were going on offscreen—the mechanics of procreation seemed rather obvious to me.

After that brief “Aha!” moment, the world around me started to make a whole lot more sense…

Mind Blowing Movies (Boing Boing)

In the clip, Ursula Andress drops from the sky to tempt soon-to-be-married Peter O’Toole in What’s New Pussycat? to the tune of Dionna Warwick singing “Here I Am.”
 

 
Yes, fauxgina underwear does indeed exist. I did not know this.

Japanese (NSFW) website Kanojo Toys is selling ‘em for around $128.00 a pop. ‘Tis a steal if you ask me.
 
Via Gorilla Mask (NSFW)

 
This bust-gut-funny story with video is making the rounds on the Internet today, and deservedly so.

Xi’an Up Close is an investigative journalism program which airs on China’s Xi’an TV. On June 17 they aired an exclusive on a “mystery mushroom” discovered by villagers in a small farming area from the city.

One villager who was apart of the “discovery” said, “When we dug down to about 80m deep, we fished out this long, fleshy object. It’s got a nose and an eye, but we have no idea what it is! Even our 80-year-old neighbour here says he has never seen anything like this before.”

The reporter from Xi’an Up Close then chimes in, “On this side, you can see what looks like a pair of lips,” she adds. “And on that side, there is a tiny hole which extends all the way back to this side. The object looks very shiny, and it feels really fleshy and meaty too.”

Oh dear… Watch the video below and all its hilariousness.
 

 
Via Arbroath

 
SFW-ish. There are no naughty bits, just one or two F-bombs and some incredibly bad dialogue.

I’ve just learned a new phrase, btw: “lemon-whores.” According to the video, there’s lemon tree insurance to protect yourself against lemon-whores.
 

 
Via the very NSFW Gorilla Mask

 
In 1969, the New York-based Franco American Novelty Co. manufactured this silly gag gift called the “Genuine French Birth Control Device.”

Har har har… It reminds me of that other old chestnut the guillotine urinal found at the Rheinfels Castle in Germany.

Anyway, if you can’t live without owning the “Genuine French Birth Control Device,” I found one in reasonably good condition for $10.00 on Etsy. Oo, la, la!

Via reddit

 
The very NSFW site Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn, as one might deduce from the name, is dedicated to indifferent cats showing up in amateur porn videos.

Via Nerdcore

“Can I do it ‘til I need glasses?”

It was odd seeing Nietzche’s face on that pancake yesterday, as I’ve just been reading Gregor Dellin’s Richard Wagner, His Life, His Work, His Century, where I came upon a bizarre perspective on the renowned Wagner-Nietzsche feud – one far less elevated than the philosophical dispute detailed by Nietzsche in his essay “Nietzsche contra Wagner” and elsewhere.

Nietzsche, of course, spent much of his life, prior to his complete physical and mental collapse, struggling with appalling ill-health; attacks of near-blindness, madness and incapacity that ruined his academic career and are nowadays almost unanimously thought to have been the symptoms of advanced syphilis. In 1877, when Wagner and Nietzsche’s friendship was apparently in its pomp, but Nietzsche’s health was moving through an especially rocky patch, Wagner (a bullish individual, to put it mildly) instigated a correspondence with Nietzsche’s then-doctor, evincing a great deal of concern for his younger friend, but an arresting want of tact:

“In assessing Nietzsche’s condition I have long been reminded of identical or very similar experiences with young men of great intellectual ability. Seeing them laid low by similar symptoms, I discovered all too certainly that these were the effects of masturbation [by hiding under their bed, perhaps]. Ever since I observed Nietzsche closely, guided by such experiences, all his traits of temperament and characteristic habits have transformed my fear into a conviction.”

Yes, what Herr Dr. Wagner wants to focus on is the possibility that Nietzsche was, in Wagner’s words, “a confirmed masturbator.” Back then, the world’s foremost pastime was widely considered to be an extremely risky business, as Dr. Balthazar Bekker’s study of 1716 (still influential in Nietzsche and Wagner’s day) details – the following, believe it or not, are just a few of the physical consequences supposed to derive from so-called “self-abuse:”

“Disturbances of the stomach and digestion, loss of appetite or ravenous hunger, vomiting, nausea, weakening of the organs of breathing, coughing, hoarseness, paralysis, weakening of the organ of generation to the point of impotence, lack of libido, back pain, disorders of the eye and ear, total diminution of bodily powers, paleness, thinness, pimples on the face, decline of intellectual powers, loss of memory, attacks of rage, madness, idiocy, epilepsy, fever and finally suicide.”

Which must have spiced up the average wank no end. But spare a thought for young Nietzsche, who already suffered from a decent number of these symptoms and must have regularly entertained the possibility that they were, so to speak, self-inflicted, just as Wagner (indiscreetly) would later allege. Dellin makes a good case that, for Nietzsche—a sexually sensitive man in sexually sensitive times—Wagner’s betrayal of his privacy was, once he learned of the correspondence, impossible to forgive or forget, the unflattering designation made in painful proximity not only to Cossima Wagner (the chick Nietzsche most dug) but also – and worse still – history itself!

But beyond Delin’s suggestion that Nietzsche’s subsequent philosophical feud with Wagner is only a smokescreen to distract history from these rumors and resentments, I couldn’t help entertaining the idea that Nietzsche’s entire later philosophy was an elaborate refutation of the possibility that he was a “confirmed masturbator” –  which Nietzsche could well have imagined his own medical history would suggest to future generations even louder than Wagner’s lay-prognosis.

After all, whichever “moral” worldview Nietzsche attacked – be it Christianity, Buddhism or Socialism – he always did so primarily on the grounds that they were only the symptoms of decadence and that the cultures in which they originated and spread had long since stopped being able to control themselves. As Nietzsche noted in Twilight of the Idols:

“There is a time with all passions when they are merely fatalities, when they drag their victim down with the weight of their folly (...) all the old moral monsters are unanimous that ‘the passions must be killed’.”

Which is to say that you would only preach against the passions if they were fucking you up in the first place! The more moral the philosophy, insisted Nietzsche, the more debauched its adherents; Christianity, then, for whom “the only ‘cure’ is castration” (“if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out”), would therefore find its natural adherents among the most hopelessly degenerate:

“Survey the entire history of priests and philosophers, and that of artists as well: the most virulent utterances against the senses have not come from the impotent, nor from ascetics, but from those who found it impossible to be ascetics, from those who stood in need of being ascetics.”

What might the private life of such a moralist and would-be ascetic look like, then, at its worst? You might envisage (were you alive in the nineteenth century, that is), none other than a chronic masturbator, one (say) whose habit had become such a “fatality” that they risked permanently blinding and paralyzing their mind and body with the “weight of their folly.” 

Quite the opposite, then, of an anti-moralist like Nietzsche, who definitely didn’t have, as Bob Dylan sang, “One hand tied to the tightrope walker/ The other in his pants…”

 
From a 2004 survey where rappers and hip-hop artists weigh in when asked, “How Do You Decide Who You’ll Have Anal Sex With?”

Click here to read larger version. (NSFW-ish)

Via Dressed Like Machines

 
In 2008, 47-year-old British businessman Barry Pring had just finished celebrating his first wedding anniversary at a restaurant near Kiev with his Ukrainian wife, Ms Zuizina. As they stood outside waiting for a taxi, Ms Zuizina realized she’d forgotten her gloves and popped back into the restaurant. A car came roaring ‘round the corner and took Mr Pring’s life.

Initially ruled by the Ukrainian police as a random hit-and-run, pressure from the British Foreign Secretary William Hague and Mr Pring’s remaining English family (who are contesting £1.5 million Pring fortune with the widow) has led to it being upgraded to a murder inquiry this week.

“Ms Zuizina, a former stripper,” notes BBC News, with a frigid nudge-nudge wink-wink, “met Mr Pring on the internet in 2006.” Say no more, guv,nor, say no more!

Far be it for me to pre-empt anything, but if it was foul play, this sort of thing is apparently quite common, which is why any gentleman looking eastwards for a younger, poorer wife might do worse than consult the charming Russian Bride Guide: How to Meet, Court and Marry a Woman from the Former Soviet Union by husband and wife intercontinental matchmaking duo Stuart J Smith and Olga Maslova.
 
I must admit to bringing a number of preconceptions to the Russian Bride Guide, but, randomly opening the volume yesterday on the bus (not hugely recommended) I instantly came upon the following halva-sweet sentiment:

“Of course, love is ideal…”

Well isn’t that outright romantic, I thought – it just goes to show yet again that you should never judge a book by its cover, even if that cover does feature a half-naked woman athwart a cardboard box.

Yet what is it, I wondered, reading on, that drove such idealistic men to travel so far and to undertake the risks and costs detailed in this very practical book (its chapters have titles like “Scams, Scammers and Sharp Practice”)? The Russian Bride Guide (a sort of “The Decline of the Western Woman”-type manifesto) explains:

“Because they simply don’t find fat, lazy, smoking, junk food-eating, sloppy, flip flop-wearing [!] women to be attractive. Unfortunately, this is all they seem to see at home.”

Faced with all these “self-empowered, man hating feminists” (in the book’s words), what can the RBG’s “fat, old, ugly and bald” readers (also the book’s words) expect from a Former Soviet Union bride?

“Why pick girls from poorer countries? Less money means fewer cars and more walking, more walking means slimmer bodies. The same scarcity of money means junk food is unpopular, hence less junk food consumption and slimmer bodies again.”

One of the ways the good old RBG tries to protect its readers is by warning them off really excessive age differences. While a couple of decades are the least every “fat, old, ugly and bald” Western man deserves, a cautionary note is struck for those hoping to aim for anything significantly more pronounced:

“If seeking a very large age gap, you must consider the future when she is bopping around the house listening to the latest dance music eyeing the young muscular gardener through the window and you are dozing in your rocking chair with Bing Crosby oozing out of your stereo. It happens; what do you think will happen next?”

Ummm, Svetlana’ or Uschi forgets her gloves (and who could blame her)?

 
It doesn’t say if the masturbator was also fed mushrooms. Or if he continued masturbating. Either way, it all sounds very John Waters.

Thanks Boag!