Lifestyle & Culture

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The Burros of Northern Colombia & The Men Who Love Them

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on December 27, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

It’s rare that a short film on man and donkey love is informative rather than gratuitous. No butts about it though, these fellows aren’t horsing around. They love their donkeys. Probably too much.


Well, she IS kind of cute.

I have a friend who’s getting on in years and occasionally uses the charming expression “I’m so hungry I could eat the north end of a southbound mule“. After learning about the unusual traditions involving donkeys that are practiced in Northern Colombia, I’m wondering if there’s a variation of this expression in Spanish. If you’re easily offended – scratch that – if you don’t like hearing about cultural traditions that involve sex with donkeys, or more importantly seeing such things occurring, stop reading. NOW. But if you can stomach it, VBS.TV – an online network headed up by Spike Jonze – has a feature called Asses of the Caribbean. Which – while it features sex with donkeys – is oddly not exploitive or gratuitous. It just happens to be about locals in Cartegena, Colombia who have a tradition of having sex with donkeys. It’s worth watching, if only to see and hear things like a local cab driver matter-of-factly saying “on Sundays we went into the hills to have sex with donkeys“, and to hear other locals – including the women – explain how it’s just a part of growing up around Cartegena. I would’ve thought that this was a gag of some sort, but in the clip they consult an actual sex expert (Hani Miletski, author of Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia) who explains that it’s fairly common around the world for young men to have sex with animals as sort of a “rite of manhood”. I tried to research this a little further, but quickly gave up. You can imagine the kind of Google results you get when your search terms are things like “bestiality”, “zoophilia”, “donkeys”, “sex with”, or “manhood”. So if you really want to know more, you’re on your own. And whatever you find out, don’t come back and tell us. This was already a little more than we wanted to know. However, we did find out that although Colombians love their donkeys in many ways (there’s a lighthearted Festival del Burro for instance), they also use them in rather cruel ways. The term “drug mule” takes on a new meaning when you use donkeys as bombs in a drug war. Oh. And I bet the headline Dirty Donkey Meat Seized means all the wrong things to you now. But, yes, donkeys are food in Colombia too. See the VBS film below…  Read the rest of this entry »

Did You Check The Elf-Help Section?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on December 18, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Friday, December 18th, 2009

In spite of the limited career options, a lot of people dream of being an elf. Or maybe obsess would be a better word. Elfing yourself is one thing, but maybe elf ear body mods and elf sex fan fiction is going just a little too far?

I saw the first few minutes of the movie Elf at a friend’s house the other night, and Papa Elf’s outline of the career options for an elf caught my attention, since I had recently referenced the racial oppression that Santa’s elves have to endure. Papa Elf only mentioned Keebler Elves (who of course have to be on guard for marauding squirrels), the shoemaker’s elves, and Santa’s elves. He left out the really freaky aspects of the shoemaker’s elf story, i.e.: two nude elves slave away night after night, making shoes that make the shoemaker and his wife filthy rich before they think to bother to repay the elves by making them ONE outfit of clothes. And he didn’t say anything about the the tragic exploitation of Santa’s elves. You think they enjoy living in the coldest, most isolated place on the planet, working in toy factories year ’round? Hardly. The fact is that they’re being exploited for their OCD-like industriousness and pathological positivism. Tragically, this abuse sometimes leads to insane and criminal behavior. But in spite of the obvious career dead-end that being an elf seems to offer, there are still plenty of people who dream of being one, so we’re here to help. First of all, you’ll need a special elfin name. Thanks to the Elf Name Generator I will have to insist that henceforth you shall refer to me as “Arthanu”, which means “Exalted Male”. Notice how I already started using words like “shall” and “henceforth”? It works! Next, you’ll need to choose a level of commitment. You could do the virtual thing and Elf Yourself, but you’d just be taking part in the terminal stages of a five-year-old Office Max viral infection. One alternative would be My Face LOL, which offers more video choices, and a little less brand-building. If virtual elfing isn’t your thing, you could implement instructables.com’s realistic elf ears in 5 minutes guide, and then just pick up a sleazy elf costume from Amazon. But for some, this simply won’t be enough. You may not realize how deep this obsession can go; there are elf sex fanfiction sites, people who spend all their time subtitling Lord of the Rings clips in Elfish, and really bad Flash games where you dress scantily clad elf chicks. But for the truly commited, the only option is elf ear body mods. And if you’re going to go that far, it might be pretty cool to see if this woman will make you an amazing set of elf wings like these to expand on the getup. As crazy as her expensive and meticulously executed idea seems, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that – like some kind of LOTR nerd – I briefly “fell in Internet love” with her. She’s not only gorgeous, but clearly a hardworking obsessive genius (and since I’m drawn to her, almost certainly married or a lesbian). In any case, see the “making of” video here. Pretty impressive. So in spite of the fact that we’ve wandered away from the realm of the “cute and tiny” variety of elves a bit here, I was left wondering: has anyone done a reindeer antler body mod? This is the closest I could find. A body mod not to be confused with ass antlers. Read the rest of this entry »

Whatever Will We Call This Decade?

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on December 10, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Help me out here, ’cause I got nothin’. Zero. Nil. Zilch. Nada. Nought.

Well, as the year and the decade come to a close, it’s time to start rounding up all those lists of the best of the….oh wait. Ten years have passed, and we still haven’t decided on a name for the friggin’ decade? The oughts? The noughts? The O’s? Nothing seems to quite work. Which is perhaps appropriate, the decade began with a bunch of nothing; the Y2K bug was a big no show, the first election of the decade was a zero sum game, and the biggest stars of the decade were genuine nobodies. Calling the decade the “oughts” won’t happen, but might be fitting for a few reasons. It’s a word that no-one knows, for a decade that has no identity, and it has two silent letters in it. Probably the only hope for naming these ten years is for someone to nail the character of the decade the way that some people refer to the 70′s as the “Me Decade”. And never mind the name, how will the decade be remembered? If the 70′s were disco, leisure suits, The Joy of Sex and Ford Pintos, the 80′s yuppies, Reagan, and Electropop, the 90′s infohighways, grunge, and school shootings, how will we characterize 2000-2009? It’s never what you think it will be. The seventies were probably most influenced by Nixon and the oil embargoes, but we remember disco balls and polyester. I think we’ll be surprised that everyone will forget the whole Bush-driven annihilation of privacy rights and wars of aggression, the bank bailouts and corruption (I bet you already forgot all about Enron, didn’t you!), and remember Susan Boyle. What do you think? What should we call the decade? What will we remember about it? I mean, what will the Time Life Greatest Hists of the 80′s, 90′s, and _____ be called? If you need a refresher, Newsweek has provided the decade in seven minutes below: Read the rest of this entry »

ExtInked: Helping Endangered Species Through Tattoos

[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 4, 2009 by admin in Clean & Green, Lifestyle & Culture

Friday, December 4th, 2009

How a UK design studio’s experiment has inspired me to finally defile my body with a tattoo.

We’ve touched on tattoos and body mods before, and I’ve shared why I may never get a tattoo myself. That may all change though, which I’ll explain at the end of this piece. My new-found willingness to think about getting a tattoo myself was inspired by reading about an interesting “social experiment” that was recently promoted in the UK by Ultimate Holding Company, which -although its web site gives the impression is some sort of non-profit – is in fact an ethically-minded commercial design studio in based in Manchester. In their words, they are “committed to sustainable practices, ethical and responsible business, and design driven grass roots collaboration“. UHC recently put together an exhibit and event called ExtInked,  in which 100 “ambassadors” applied to have one of England’s 100 most endangered species tattooed on their bodies. A cool idea, although it might have been interesting to see them do something more than basically garner attention for their own studio; as of this writing, neither their web site, their Facebook page, nor any of the press they’ve generated mentions any tangible results of the idea, beyond a few hundred people getting interested in the concept, and a hundred of them getting tattoos of endangered species. The last I knew, getting “Mom” tattooed on your arm isn’t going to bring her back from the dead. All the same, it’s a pretty cool and hip idea, and it will be interesting to see if generates some real results. I wish the UHC, their partners, and the participants the best, or I wouldn’t be sharing their project here. As I was reading about their project though, I ran across another tattoo idea that hit closer to home. Earlier this year, Phil Plait of Discover Magazine’s “Bad Astronomy” Blog announced he’d get a tattoo if site traffic increased to 2 million page views for a month. It worked, and he and Discover CEO Henry Donahue ended up getting tattoos. So here’s the deal. I’ll get a tattoo if Dissociated Press traffic increases to 250,000 monthly page views in January. Right now it’s hovering around a paltry 20,000 page views monthly, a level that  – trust me – does not generate enough revenue to make it worth maintaining. So, much like the UHC’s project, if you don’t want to see Dissociated Press become extinct, send us some visitors. Maybe I’ll let you pick the tattoo.

Dubai-ous Dealings: It’s Never Too Late For An Econopocalypse

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on November 27, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Friday, November 27th, 2009

The US military may decide to Sheik Djibouti if this keeps up.


Images like this used to inspire awe.
Now they more likely inspire awwww…

I like to think that in a decade or so, we’ll scan the impoverished Sultan-peppered wasteland of the once deleriously luxurious Dubai, and wonder how it all ever happened. Call me a Gloomy Gus, but waking up to parallel headlines today about how it’s Black Friday and everybody’s going shopping while Dubai’s late payments on their $80 billion debt caused global market panic got me thinking again about the impending econopocalypse. I mean, we’ve all heard of a “jobless recovery”, but is there such a thing as a “recoveryless recovery”? One look at this frightening animated map showing job losses in America between 2007 and 2009 makes me wonder how we can possibly think we’re on the way back to economic stability. Very few people I know have either the liquid assets or the confidence to suggest to me that things are getting better, but at the same time, I don’t see us heading for global catastrophe. In my starry-eyed vision I see more reality sinking in as unexpected debtors like Dubai spring up, and more fictitious capital being generated until the average person snaps out of it and it sinks in that all this money being thrown around is merely a social contract, and one that we never signed. And maybe, somewhere in this morass that is the global economy, we’ll get a little smarter, and remember that what’s good of all is good for the individual. Of course, it’s ultimately moronic of me to think this way; if major UAE-backed debtors like Dubai start defaulting, war is more likely, especially as we ramp back up in Afghanistan. I have this weird hunch we’ll be hearing the name Djibouti a bit more in the coming year. But what the hell do I know? The graphic below sums up my understanding of banking and finance… Read the rest of this entry »

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