MonthOctober 2008

Sarah Palin blow-up doll

sarah palin blow-up doll

Created by adult product purveyors Topco, the Sarah Palin blowup doll is known as the “This is NOT Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll.”  Featuring a busty, conservatively dressed Palin lookalike, the box cover promises: “Cross party lines with your own inflatable running mate!”  The political love doll’s suggested uses include: “Blow her up and show her how you’re going to vote,”  “Let her pound your gavel over and over,”  and “It’s time some male interns caused a scandal in the Capitol.”  In addition, the company suggests, the Palin doll could stand in for the candidate at her next debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden. “This blow-up sex doll could really satisfy the swing voters.”  Who knew the coming presidential election could be decided by a sex doll?

Full Story: The Frisky

(via PervScan)

Craig Baldwin talks about his new film Mock Up On Mu

Craig Baldwin, director of Tribulation 99 and Spectres of the Spectrum, is screening a new movie about Jack Parson, L. Ron Hubbard, Margaret Cameron and Aleister Crowley called Mock Up ON Mu.

SF360: Back in the ’60s, dimwit journalists would ask McCartney and Lennon what they wrote first, the music or the lyrics. In your case, do you write a script and find the footage to illustrate it or do you have chunks of footage you love and invent a narrative to fit them?

Baldwin: The question is always asked after every one of my films. It’s a process. If I just dive into my archive, I wouldn’t get out of my archive. There has to be kind of a map, a direction. The script was not written when I shot the [original] material. I found the story of Jack Parsons, as a myth, as a schematic, as a way forward. These subject areas/ or themes would be included: the occult, the aerospace-rocket stuff, mind control, all this brain stuff that’s obviously a parody of Scientology, desert landscapes, military-industrial, the moon/outer space. Without a script, even though I knew the story, you can go out into the desert and shoot people looking into the meteor crater. It’s mythic, adds scale, is cinematic. So the two come toward each other”‘the accumulated ideas you have and the accumulated materials you have. I probably should have been a little more in control of my material. The best model for me was the underground film”‘this is a term you hardly hear anymore”‘you go out with people who may or may not be paid actors and you just generate ideas in a great location. I did that with Spectres too. Went down to the Salton Sea and got some good shots. It’s not a realistic movie, it’s a series of ghostly gestures. It’s all shot without sound, and you add the voices later. It is this idea of a personal commitment and a personal engagement with the project. Would I be a painter if I didn’t like to paint? That’s preposterous. There’s a certain amount of that in filmmaking, Filmmaking is absolute masochism, just so you know. Sometimes you have to burn some film that you’ll never use. You just have to be generous with yourself, and with visual possibilities.

Full Story: SF360

David Cronenberg Is Writing A Novel

The moviemaker, who was attending the Rome Film Festival on Thursday, said he has written 60 pages of a novel, but besides ruling out that it would be a horror or science fiction, offered few details on the project.

“Based on the pages I have written we found publishers all over the world, which is very terrifying to me,” Cronenberg told reporters. “It’s at a very delicate phase right now, so I can’t really talk about it. It’s not like Stephen King, I don’t know what it’s like but you wouldn’t call it a horror or science fiction novel at all. But what it is exactly, well, I don’t know yet.”

Full Story: Huffington Post

(Thanks Nick)

Who funds psychedelic drug research?

Also known as Lady Neidpath, Feilding is not a scientist, but spends a six-figure sum of her own money each year to explore the inner workings of our mind: how we think; where creativity comes from; and how we can harness this knowledge. Through her charitable trust, the Beckley Foundation, she instigated the first scientific trial in 35 years to use LSD on human subjects. Based in Beckley Park, the Oxfordshire estate where Feilding has spent all her life, the foundation’s remit is to push for drug policy reform and fund research that will delve into the altered states of consciousness induced by meditation, deep breathing and powerful psychoactive drugs such as LSD. Even trepanning, the ancient practice of drilling a hole in the skull, is a line of modern inquiry as a treatment for Alzheimer’s. It is research that – in the UK at least – no one else appears willing to back.

“We are on the verge of making real breakthroughs,”  she says.

Why would an English Lady want to spend her money on high-risk projects with poor-to-zero financial returns? Feilding’s fascination with consciousness started at an early age. Interested in spirituality through her Roman Catholic upbringing, she was sent aged 16 to India to visit her godfather, a Buddhist monk. She went on to study mysticism and comparative religion at Oxford University and dabbled with drugs throughout the Sixties. But her interest in the medical applications of such substances sprung from a friendship with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who invented LSD, and who pushed for the medical benefits of the drug to be investigated. Hofmann died this year aged 102, shortly before the foundation published his last book, Hofmann’s Elixir: LSD and the New Eleusis, a collection of his essays and lectures.

Full Story: Times

(via OVO)

The Confessions Of Robert Crumb

From Ectoplasmosis:

The 1987 documentary on the life of Robert Crumb, underground comics pioneer, 60s icon, and the quintessential Dirty Old Man. Written by the man himself, it lacks the distance from its subject that made Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb more of a revelatory study in neuroses and emotional trauma and instead puts you squarely in the middle of Crumb’s gonzo world of misogyny and self-loathing and in that sense it is a much better illustration of Crumb the Artist as opposed to Crumb the Man.

Scientists Erase Specific Memories in Mice

It sounds like science fiction, by scientists say it might one day be possible to erase undesirable memories from the brain, selectively and safely.

Using a complex genetic approach, U.S. and Chinese researchers believe they have done just that in mice, but the feat is far from being tested on humans.

Study co-author Joe Z. Tsien, co-director of the Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, says the “work reveals a molecular mechanism of how [memory deletion] can be done quickly and without doing damage to brain cells.”

Full Story: Yahoo!

(via Cryptogon)

‘Flying syringe’ mosquitos, other ideas get Gates funding

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded 100,000 dollars each on Wednesday to scientists in 22 countries including funding for a Japanese proposal to turn mosquitos into “flying syringes” delivering vaccines.

The charitable foundation created by the founder of software giant Microsoft said in a statement that the grants were designed to “explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve global health.”

The grants were awarded for research into preventing or curing infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis and limiting the emergence of drug resistance.

They are the first round of funding for the Gates Foundation’s “Grand Challenges Explorations,” a five-year 100-million-dollar initiative to “promote innovative ideas in global health.”

Full Story: AFP

(via Cryptogon)

Hexx returns!

Hexx, Technoccult’s own Digg-clone, is back at last! Hexx was originally powered by PHPdug and mysteriously stopped working. My plea for help at the PHPdug support forum went completely un-answered, so Hexx sat disuse for several months. Now it’s back and powered by Pligg.

A Night with Kenneth Anger – October 30 and 31st in London

kenneth anger

kenneth anger

(Thanks Alex!)

Chemical From Tainted Milk Found In Sex Shop Items

“The British government has released a health warning over a so-called “willy spread”  found to have the same chemical blamed for China’s bad milk.

The Ann Summers sex shop’s “I Love You”  sets seemingly have melamine, the stuff that made thousands of Chinese babies sick and led to at least four deaths. The British Food Standards Agency says it’s in the kits’ chocolate-flavored “body pen,”  “willy spread,”  and “nipple spread”  “‘ all of which are made in China.

“This is a first. We’ve never had to put out an alert before on “?willy spread’ “‘ chocolate-flavored or otherwise,”  an FSA spokesperson said in the official announcement.”

(via The Inquisitr. Thanks DJ!)

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