“Don’t try this bullshit at home”—Russell Hawkins

Everyone meet Russell Hawkins. Mr. Hawkins grows Carolina Reaper chili peppers. The Carolina Reaper is currently ranked as the hottest pepper in the world and Hawkins decided—for whatever reason—to vape the shit out of his homegrown pepper stash. Not only does he vape the pepper on video, he proceeds to snort some (why not?) and then rub some in eyes (why not?). Sounds like a plan to me.

As you can imagine, none of this ends well. At the end of the video, you find yourself asking, “How in the hell is this man still alive?” Methinks Hawkins has been vaping the Carolina Reaper a lot longer than he admits to.

The video really gets going around the 3:27 mark. Enjoy!

 
via Geekologie

 
In 1968 the artist Brion Gysin invited Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones to record a group of traditional Jbala Sufi trance musicians—better known as the Master Musicians—perform at the village of Jajouka in northern Morocco.

Gysin had long been familiar with the Master Musicians having been introduced to them and “Joujouka” music by writer Paul Bowles in 1950. Gysin thought the music of “the people of Pan” would be of some interest to Jones. Jones agreed. He traveled with Gysin to Jajouka, accompanied by his then girlfriend Suki Potier, recording engineer George Chkiantz, and painter/folklorist Mohamed Hamri.

Morocco was a favorite holiday destination for the Rolling Stones as it offered easy access to marijuana. Keith Richards later described the experience as a fantasy where they were “transported” and…

You could be Sinbad the Sailor, One Thousand and One Nights.

Jones used a Uher recorder to capture the songs performed by the Master Musicians. These recordings included songs for Jajouka’s “most important religious holiday festival, Aid el Kbir” when a young boy is dressed as Bou Jeloud the Goat God in the “skin of a freshly slaughtered goat.” The boy then runs around the village as the music becomes increasingly frenzied. Gysin claimed this was a ritual to protect the villagers’ health. He said the festival harked back to an ancient pre-Roman festival Lupercalia, held in mid-February as a cleansing and fertility ritual to ward off evil spirits.
 

 
As Gysin later told Stanley Booth (and a very drunk William Burroughs) in a rambling tale in 1970—as recounted Booth’s book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones—Jones and his companions were guests at traditional meal in the village, when Jones had an epiphanic vision—or more likely he tripped out—and believed himself to be a goat.

‘I would really like to talk about Joujouka and what that music is and what Brian got on tape and how it ever happened that he got there. How does he [Jones] appear in your book?’

‘Brian? As—well—sort of—as a little goat god, I suppose.’

‘I have a funny tale which I’ll tell you about just that. A very funny thing happened up there. The setting was extremely theatrical in that we were sitting under a porch of a house made of wattles and mud. Very comfortable place, cushions were laid around like a little theatre, like the box of an old-fashioned theatre, and a performance was going on in the courtyard. And at one moment—dinner obviously had to be somewhere in the offing, like about an hour away, everybody was beginning to think about food—and we had these acetylene lamps, giving a great very theatrical glow to the whole scene, rather like limelight used to be, a greenish sort of tone.’

[Okay Brion we get the picture it was very very very very very very theatrical…now get on with the story….]

‘And the most beautiful goat that anybody had ever seen—pure white!—was suddenly led right across the scene, between Brian and Suki and Hamri and me [...] so quickly that for a moment hardly anybody realized at all what was happening, until Brian leapt to his feet, and he said, “That’s me!” and was pulled down and sort of subsided, and the music went on, and it went on for a few minutes like that, and moments lengthened into an hour, or two hours, which can sometimes be three hours or four hours or five hours—-’

‘Long as it takes to kill a goat,’ Burroughs said.

‘—and we were absolutely ravenous, when Brian realized he was eating the same white goat.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘He said, “It’s like Communion.”’

‘“This is my body,’” I [Booth] said. ‘But Jesus didn’t eat himself, he fed the others.’

‘If he’d been sensible, he’d have eaten Judas,’ Burroughs said. ‘I’m gonna eat Graham Greene next time I see him. Gulp!’

Continues after the jump…

 
Well, this isn’t exactly one inflatable pizza float. It’s individual inflatable pizza slices connected to look like one giant pizza. Amusing.

If you want to do something like this on your own, the indidual 6-foot by 5-foot pizza slice sells for $36.99 here. Now how you would tether all the pizza slices together to create one giant floating pizza is beyond me. You guys are smart, though.  I’m sure you can figure it out.

via Nerdcore

 
If you were going to ask musicians for recipes, the Butthole Surfers might seem like unlikely candidates. There isn’t a Martha Stewart type among them; indeed, their dancer, Kathleen, once mixed her own urine in with the macaroni and cheese. But reading through the band’s old interviews has more in common with taking a Home Ec class than you might expect.

“I can cook a bad-ass peach cobbler,” Gibby Haynes bragged in the June ‘86 issue of SPIN. The interview concluded with the recipe for Gibby’s Spillane Peach Cobbler, named for Haynes’ old college basketball teammate Jeff Spillane, whom Gibby named alongside Ed Asner as one of the band’s heroes:

He’s this weird kind of straight guy with heavy beard growth and a hairy chest. He’s a nice guy, but he’s kind of geeky. He used to wear this lime-green polyester leisure suit. He’s the first person I ever saw light a fart. We usually sing songs that have Jeff Spillane in them, like “Back on Spillane’s Gang.” I think he’s now an accountant somewhere.

 

 
SPIN doesn’t say if Gibby read these very precise instructions off the back of a foxed, four-by-six recipe card inked with a grandmotherly scrawl, or (as I prefer to imagine) reeled them off from memory.

GIBBY’S SPILLANE PEACH COBBLER

Stir together ½ t. salt and 2 c. flour. Cut in ½ c. shortening until crumbly. Add ⅓ c. milk and stir with a fork until the dough leaves the sides of the bowl. On a lightly floured board, roll the dough into a rectangle a little less than ¼ in. thick. Put it on a baking sheet and bake it at 425° until it’s lightly browned. Then put mixed-up water, brown sugar, egg white, and cinnamon [5 egg whites, ¾ c. water, ½ c. brown sugar, ¼ t. cinnamon] on top of the crust and bake it until it foams up like a custard. When it starts to look cooked, take it out and put sliced fresh peaches on it. It’s amazing. It’s a killer dessert.

Gibby also gave a cocktail recipe to Fiz, a short-lived, strongly pro-alcohol punk magazine from Los Angeles. In the 23 years since that issue of Fiz hit the newsstand, I’ve never mustered the courage to fix a Bloody Leroy for myself, but I imagine it would complement the peach cobbler very nicely when dining al fresco on a summer evening. The interview it accompanied outlined the band’s plans for a Joy Division game show in which contestants guess what Ian Curtis is singing (“You get points for correct answers and more points for better answers which are incorrect”), and is worth reading, though the transcription omits the drink recipe. From my personal tear-stained copy of the March/April ‘93 issue of Fiz, here’s the “BADASS BUTTHOLE BEVERAGE” you didn’t know you craved:

GIBBY HAYNES’ BLOODY LEROY

The best drink is barbecue sauce and vodka with a twist of lemon. The barbecue sauce has gotta be real thin. Stir it with a rip up. It’s badass. It’s cold. A Bloody Leroy!

Below, whet your appetite with the savory Buttholes rarity “Beat the Press.”
 

Cong kisses a guest
 
You ever look at raccoon headlines in the news? They’re often amusing or interesting. Right now on Google News you’ll find the headlines “Raccoon Takes Out Power to Thousands” (Wisconsin) and “Burglary Suspect Turns Out to Be Raccoon” (Florida) and “Raccoon Moved, Twice” (Connecticut).

If you find any of those stories worth clicking on, then you’ll surely be interested in an establishment called Blind Alley in Seoul, South Korea, which counts among its primary features two live raccoons—their names are Cong (male) and Milk (female)—and patrons have the option of staying in the “normal room” (where food can be consumed) or entering the “raccoon room,” in which they can interact with the furry creatures.

The cafe has been a mecca for raccoon lovers for about a year and a half, when Han Song-hee took over the establishment gave Cong and Milk the run of the place. Those who are dubious about the whole concept of a raccoon cafe might be mollified to hear that one of the pair of raccoons was rescued:
 

I adopted Cong from a breeder. Cong’s family has been domesticated from his grandmother’s generation. Since he was alone, I wanted to get him a friend. Milk was one of those raccoons imported to China and destined for pelt or fur coats. I was able to adopt her from one of [the] animal importers.

 
In my experience, there’s not much middle ground on raccoons—either you find them super-cute or you detest them—and that’s If you don’t happen to have a debilitating fear of them. It’s clear who Blind Alley’s target audience is, anyway.

The author of the book on raccoons—literally, he wrote Raccoons, A Natural History—Sam Zeveloff isn’t sure the raccoon cafe is such a good idea: “Raccoons, like other wild animals, typically are not good pets, given that their behaviors are incompatible with ours. ... We should interact carefully with them, from a distance.” Not surprisingly, Zeveloff understands the attraction, however: “Their striking masks, impish faces, lustrous fur, and ringed tails are all aesthetically appealing.”

 

Milk on a walkway
 
More after the jump…

 
Lately it’s become a trend in China for live streaming websites to feature women eating fruits—especially bananas—in an “erotic” manner. The authorities in China, however, are not amused, and have moved to block distribution of the images.

As part of the Chinese government’s crackdown on “inappropriate” online content, Chinese live-streaming video services are banned from showing images of women filming themselves while eating bananas “erotically,” China’s state-run CCTV news reported last week. The details of what is and isn’t legal have not yet been set, but people featuring themselves in live streams are henceforth barred from eating “bananas seductively” in front of the camera.

On April 14 China’s Culture Ministry announced an investigation of popular live-broadcast websites for “allegedly providing content that contains pornography or violence and encourages viewers to break laws and harms social morality.”

On Thursday, CCTV reported that the targeted websites had already moved to restrict the behavior of some of the most popular hosts, which were “predominately attractive women showing their cleavage.”

The draconian new regulations require live-streaming sites to monitor their output 24 hours a day to make sure that explicit material is not broadcast.

Some Chinese social media users think that the new regulations can be circumvented by dispensing with bananas. “They will all start eating cucumbers, and if that’s no good, yams,” one user commented. (I am reminded of this song. Wait for the punchline)

Here’s an example of the kinds of streams that will no longer be allowed:

 
via Dazed

 
Just when you think you’ve seen everything—like the Steve Buscemi bikini—you come across an item like Klaus Nomi salt & pepper shakers. Now I would have never thought this up in a million years, but yet here we are. Looking at them.

The set sells for $35 by Etsy shop Yokai John. It looks like there’s two different sets in the listing for the Nomi shakers. If you do wish to order these, I’d be specific with the seller about which set you want. The listing’s a bit confusing.

 
According to an article by Brian Owens in New Scientist, a German scientist working in the Congo has discovered a fun new fact about gorillas, that they hum and even sing during mealtimes. Food-related calls had been documented in chimpanzees and bonobos, but never in gorillas.

But far from just vocalizing, gorillas appear to generate two different types of sound while eating. One of them was “a steady low-frequency tone” that sounds rather like a sigh of contentment, or a hum:
 

 
The other was “a series of short, differently pitched notes” which resembles “a random melody”:
 

 
And it’s not like they “sing the same song over and over,” commented Luef. “It seems like they are composing their little food songs.”

According to Ali Vella-Irving of the Toronto Zoo, “Each gorilla has its own voice: you can really tell who’s singing. And if it’s their favorite food, they sing louder.”

The behaviors, however, differ according to whether the primates are in captivity or not. In zoos every individual sings during meals, but Luef found that in the wild “it was generally only dominant silverback males that sang and hummed while eating.”

She speculated that vocalizing might be the silverback’s method of informing the group that the meal is not yet concluded and that the time to move on has not yet arrived. “He’s the one making the collective decisions for the group,” Luef says. “We think he uses this vocalization to inform the others ‘OK, now we’re eating.’”

Because there is so much variation in calls both between individuals and species, food calls provide a good way to study the origin of language, says Zanna Clay, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham: “It gives a good insight into the origin of meaning in animal signals, and also the social pressures that might drive the flexibility we see in language.”

 
I wish there were more images of this Eraserhead baby cake by Debbie Does Cakes, but sadly I only have this one shot. It’s pretty great, though. I’m assuming some diehard David Lynch fan asked for this custom design.

I wonder what it tasted like? And what exactly was the (presumably foul) occasion this cake was made for? Don’t you want to know? No?

Below, a short scene of the Eraserhead baby to refresh your memory (although, how could anyone one forget this?!)

Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh enjoying some health food, 1966
 
You’re more likely to associate vegetarian fare like falafel, hummus and ganja goo balls with the Grateful Dead and their parking-lot partisans than bloody steaks, and for good reason. The cookbook Cooking with the Dead collects “over 65 fabulous kynd [sic] and caring vegetarian recipes prepared with love” that Deadheads came up with to feed themselves and make money on the road. They took that “are you kind?” thing to heart.

But Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Dead’s visionary soundman and the West Coast’s industrious LSD manufacturer, had some peculiar ideas about nutrition that might not have been welcome in the latter-day Deadheads’ tailgate scene. When the Dead moved down to Los Angeles for a few months in 1966, Owsley found a cheap house for rent in Watts—probably not a hard trick so soon after the riots—where the Dead and their retinue observed Owsley’s zero-carb, zero-fiber diet. From Rolling Stone:

In February 1966, Owsley and the Dead moved to Los Angeles for another series of Acid Tests. Owsley rented a pink stucco house in Watts, next door to a brothel, where they all lived together. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. The bad news was that since Owsley was paying the rent, he expected them to adhere to his unconventional ideas and beliefs. He was convinced that human beings were natural carnivores, not meant to eat vegetables or fiber. “Roughage is the worst thing you can put through your body,” he says. “Letting vegetable matter go through a carnivorous intestine scratches it up and scars it and causes mucus that interferes with nutrition.”

For the next six weeks, the Grateful Dead and their girlfriends ate meat and milk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “I’ll never forget that when you’d open the refrigerator, there were big slabs of beef in there,” Rosie McGee, Phil Lesh’s girlfriend at the time, later told Garcia biographer Jackson. “The shelves weren’t even in there — just these big hunks of meat. So of course behind his back, people were sneaking candy bars in. There were no greens or anything — he called it ‘rabbit food.’”

 
More on the idiosyncratic carnivorous diet of the young Grateful Dead after the jump…