Food: Ich bin ein your dinner.

If you're a surgeon with a notably flexible interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath or a person who thinks you're being burdened with unnecessary body parts, then the forward-thinking restauranteurs behind Flime would love to hear from you.

A soon-to-open Berlin restaurant is touting for diners willing to do just that: donate body parts that it says it will turn into gourmet meals according to the age-old cooking habits of an Amazonian tribe infamous for its cannibalism.

The promotion has been declared grossly distasteful by a growing number of protesters, who say it is in particularly bad taste following the case of a real cannibal in Germany.

In a prominent advertising campaign on the internet, in German newspapers and on television, the restaurant, Flime, is appealing for willing donors and diners to become members of what it hints at being a new dining movement.

"Members declare themselves willing to donate any part of their body," the advertisement reads, adding that any resulting hospital costs will be taken on by the restaurant. They say they are also looking to employ an "open-minded surgeon".

The location of the restaurant – if it exists – is being kept a secret, as is the identity of the owners and investors behind it. As a foretaste of its menu, Flime is suggesting traditional Brazilian dishes such as bolinho, which it describes as "fried tatar balls with a sweet-sour dip", or feijoada, a main course consisting of "various pieces of meat with black beans and rice". It does not specify what type of meat is used.

The restaurant cites as its inspiration the indigenous Brazilian Waricaca tribe, which once practised the ritual of "compassionate cannibalism", or eating parts of the corpse of a loved one to emphasise the connection between the living and the dead, which was said to help with mourning.

Widely held to be a joke, local politicos are unamused by the hoax eatery and some evoke the specter of Armin Meiwes, the cannibal killer who sexually mutilated and partially consumed a willing victim in 2001.

"I'm working on the assumption that this is some sort of a warped joke," he [Michael Braun, the vice-chairman of Berlin's Christian Democrat party - CRwM] told Bild. "But it's disgusting, not least because it wasn't long ago that we had the case of the Berliner who was murdered by a cannibal."

Braun was referring to the case of the computer technician Bernd Jürgen Brandes, who in 2001 volunteered himself to the self-confessed cannibal Armin Meiwes, who chopped off his penis and prepared it as a dish seasoned with salt, pepper and garlic.

Meiwes then killed Brandes and consumed his flesh over the following months. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006.

The case drew attention to a growing underground cannibal movement. Experts believe cannibalism has about 800 followers in Germany alone, only a minimal number of whom have carried out the practice.

It should be noted that the restaurant owners reveal a decidedly one-sided understanding of the Wari' tribe (for instance, they prefer that non-tribesmen refer to them as the Wari') and the cannibal traditions they allegedly practiced before their pacification in the 20th Century. The "compassionate cannibalism" mentioned did take place. After a member of the tribe died, family members would embrace the corpse. Then the body was left alone for an unspecified number of days. After this aging period, the dead person's closest of kin would prepare the body of dead and offer tokens of meat to members of the extended family (given that the Wari' practice polygyny, these family networks can get pretty extensive).

However, this was only one of the cannibal practices of the Wari'. The other allegedly involved the consumption of fallen enemies. Wari' warriors would bring back the bodies of slain enemies and offer them to the women and young men of the tribe. Children were forbidden to eat the flesh of enemies and the warriors, due to an elaborate system of religious assumptions, stayed away for fear that consuming the flesh of a fallen foe was a form of auto-cannibalism that would weaken you. Because this latter form of cannibalism was triumphal and less constrained by ritual, it's here that the artistic and creative aspects of cooking humans were allowed to take the fore. If, in fact, Flime exists and it is using recipes from the Wari', it is more likely that they are pulling inspiration from this latter tradition and not the tradition of "compassionate cannibalism."

The image above is artist Lulu Allison's "Cannibal Figger."

Books: "Others are simply too strange and Swedish to ignore."

With e-readers finally making the jump from curio to viable product, the woes of big-box giant Borders, the existence of entrenched sharing tech, and business snake oil gurus hawking a freeconomy (which, to be fair, is excellent timing as so few of us have any money anymore), the band of Cassandras that ritualistically sounds the alarm for the "death of the book" has grown surprisingly large. Though there are certainly those who hold that the material object we call "a book " is an archaic bit of tech that is going the way of the polyspastos; more often than not, what the doomsayers are actually talking about is the end of the book-industry as we know it.

I'm not informed enough to make any sort of claim one way or another. However, I happily note that many of the same advances in production and distribution tech that are supposedly dooming the book are, currently, helping lower the cost of entry for small, niche publishers. I don't know if these odd, obsessive, quirky publishers may or may not be some sort of weather balloon for the coming era of the book-biz, but I do know that they please me to virtually no end.

Take, for example, Bazillion Points Books: purveyor of all things insanely metal. Whether you're looking for "the ultimate blow-by-blow account of Sweden’s legendary death metal underground" or the autobiography of Hanoi Rock's Andy McCoy ("My dad beat my mom, my mom beat my big brother, my big brother beat me, I beat my sister, my sister beat the dog, the dog beat the cat, the cat beat the hamster, and the hamster beat whatever bugs he could find. That was our family’s version of the natural order.") then Bazillion has your next new favorite book.

Even if you're not particularly into rock's lunatic fringe (I, for example, have a medical condition called "kinda being a big pussy" that prevents me from listening to metal's harshest offerings), there's plenty to dig. I know of more than one cult film fanatic who would be happy to receive Daniel Ekeroth's Swedish Exploitation Cinema: An Uncensored Guide to Sweden’s Clandestine Film History. The collected punk zine Touch and Go is pretty sweet too.

Finally, I don't know if it would ultimately bring you joy or grief, but Hellbent for Cooking: The Headbanger’s Kitchen, by Annick Giroux "The Morbid Chef" is fantastic beyond belief.

Stuff: True believers.

The PopSci site has a short interview with author Stacy Horn, details the history of the Duke University's parapsychology department in her new book Unbelievable (review here, on this very web log).

The interviewer's questions are fluff-piece work, but Horn gamely works with what she's got. On the subject of whether or not she grew scared researching ghost stories and possession phenomenon:

PopSci.com: Wow! So was it spooky reading about the cases?

Horn: Everybody asks me that. No, it really wasn’t to me. It was exciting! The possibility that the things they were studying were real was exciting. I just thought that it was more fun. The only time I became scared was when I was reading about a study of letters about people’s ghost experiences. The Duke lab compiled hundreds of letters people sent them about experiences with ghosts. After going thorough all of them, they found if people were having experiences with ghosts, they were hearing them more than seeing them. It’s known as EVP, electronic voice phenomena, and I started researching this stuff. I started Googling EVP and I found there are people who record the noises they hear and actually do put this stuff on the web. I started listening to the noises and even though I did not believe I was listening to the dead or ghosts from beyond, I got scared. I was at my computer and I looked up at the ceiling in my apartment and said, “Please don’t speak to me.” If there are ghosts or spirits in my apartment, I didn’t want to hear from them. That was the only time I was scared.

Horn, at greater length in her book, defends the scientific validity of the department's work:

PopSci.com: Most people do not think of studying unseen phenomena and ESP the work of scientists. What did Rhine and his colleagues do to make their work considered scientific?

Horn: They identified an effect, like psychokinesis, and went through the process of studying it. They went about coming up with calculable experiments, just like any other experiment in science. They specifically designed experiments to study the different things like psychokinesis. The most famous of the experiments that I think most people are familiar with were the tests with ESP cards. They used the experiment in the movie Ghostbusters. They would test mostly Duke University students and would see if the students could recall the shapes and symbols on the cards. And it turns out they could. It was all statistics and probability and they tested it over and over again. By the end, they were testing double blind, the researchers and students did not know the symbols on the cards, and they found the students could still recall the images. And that is science, establishing an experiment, refining controls and using statistical methods to analyze the results.

PopSci.com: Were you a believer in the paranormal and life after death before you began your research?

Horn: No, and I would not say I am necessarily a believer now. I researched this to the best of my ability and found no reason to not believe the work done by Rhine and the lab. Over the years scientists tried to say the experiments were not controlled, but that is simply not the case. I think they made a case for telepathy and to me it is exciting. It implies there is another way to get data out there in the world and some people seem to have access to it. I don’t know if telepathy is necessarily the answer but some people seem to have access to another realm.

From Unbelievable to the unlikely, what to make of Ghostbusters alum Dan Aykroyd's new paranormally inspired vodka, which comes in a skull-shape bottle meant to evoke the 13 Crystal Heads? From Mr. Aykroyd's site:

Thousands of years ago, thirteen crystal heads were scattered across the earth – and they are greater and more powerful than anything we have the ability to manufacture today. Their workmanship is perfect: they contain no tool marks and have been cut against the natural axis of the crystal, defying the laws of physics. Some say they are artifacts from the lost civilization of Atlantis, some say they date back to the Mayans, still others say they were created by a higher intelligence.

Brought together, the Crystal Heads are said to contain vast knowledge and enlightenment capable of unlocking our most enigmatic ancient mysteries. Alone, each is believed to house radiant psychic energy, which has magical powers and healing properties.

They also house vodka. Go figure.

Link Proliferation: The dead stay with us.

The Body Part Bakery

Here's some video footage of The Body Part Bakery, a Thai bakery that specializes in making baked goods in the shape of human body parts. It's what the Texas Chain Saw Massacre would have looked like if it'd been an anti-gluten screed instead of metaphor for the horrors of factory slaughter.


The Scary Body Parts Bakery - More bloopers are a click away


The amazing tale of the Ovitz clan

At the fabu Human Marvels site, there's the amazing story of the Ovitz family, a clan of Transylvanian Jewish midgets who became the "research subjects" of the infamous Dr. Mengele.

From the article:

The Ovitz family were Transylvanian Jews. Their patriarch, Shimshon Isaac Ovitz, was a respected Rabbi and dwarf. The majority of his children, Elizabeth included, inherited his pseudoachondroplasia dwarfism and upon his sudden death his widow reasoned that the seven stunted Ovitz siblings could secure a financially sound career as a traveling music troupe. In relatively short order, the siblings formed the 'Jazz Band of Lilliput' and began touring Central Europe.

By 1942, despite the unstable status of Central Europe of the march of the Nazi army, the Ovitz family managed to continue touring by concealing their Jewish identities. Elizabeth was able to marry in May of that same year to a young theatre manager named Yoshko Moskovitz. The couple was forced to split just ten days after their marriage when Yoshko was drafted into a labour battalion. For another two years, the Ovitz family continued to tour, unfortunately they were in Hungary in March of 1944 when German troops occupied the country. On May 17 the Ovitz family was captured, loaded into a boxcar and sent off to Auschwitz.

There the family fell into the clutches of the infamous Nazi doctor.

Mengele had previously tortured, experimented upon and dissected dozens of twin siblings for no reason other than to document the similarities of their internal organs and in the Ovitz family Mengele saw the ultimate test subjects. In fact, Elizabeth quoted Mengele as enthusiastically declaring: 'Now I will have work for the next twenty years; now science will have an interesting subject to consider.'

At Auschwitz Elizabeth and her family were segregated and subjected to all manner of frenetic experimentation. As Elizabeth would write:

'The most frightful experiments of all were the gynaecological experiments. They tied us to the table and the systematic torture began. They injected things into our uterus, extracted blood, dug into us, pierced us and removed samples. It is impossible to put into words the intolerable pain that we suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments ceased.'

The gynaecological experimentation was so severe that even the doctors assisting the procedures eventually refused to continue out of pity, whilst citing the very real possibility that the family would not be able to survive further invasive procedure. Mengele relented as he did not want to risk the lives of his favourite lab rats. Instead, he concocted and implemented new sadistic experiments.

'They extracted fluid from our spine. The hair extraction began again and when we were ready to collapse, they began painful tests on the brain, nose, mouth, and hand region. All stages were fully documented with illustrations. It may be noted, ironically, that we were among the only ones in the world whose torture was premeditated and "scientifically" documented for the sake of future generations.'

Would that were true, Elizabeth.

When the death camp was liberated in 1945, Elizabeth and her family were freed. They continued to tour and perform for several years. Before the decade was out, Elizabeth immigrated to Israel, where she died in 1992. She outlived Mengele by nearly two decades: the Nazi butcher escaped to Brazil where he lived, free and un-prosecuted for his crimes, until 1979.


Crazy revenge wackiness, cubed

The fine folks over at Cubeecraft, mayhaps in protest over the proposed "not a" remake, have made an Oldboy cubee figure.

Park life

Here's Does It Offend You, Yeah's bizarre video for their tune "Weird Science." Though the special effects are pretty cheesy, there is a couple with a fused face and a decided non-surgical separation procedure which leads to a fair amount of blood. NSFW? You'll have to make the call. I refuse to play bad cop here. You're an adult and you can make these decisions on your own.




Another minute off the Countdown to Skynet Clock

Mad science marches on!

Scientific American has some footage of Israel's new intelligence-gathering, armament-capable robot soldier.

The thing actually has the Cobra-worthy name of Versatile Intelligent Portable Robot or VIPeR.


How our brains make ghosts

Those mad science experts as Scientific American are at it again. This time, an article in the mag discusses grief hallucinations: vivid multi-sensory hallucinations of the recently departed that are, apparently, not that uncommon.

From the article:

The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.

Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved's passing. As a marker of how vivid such visions can seem, almost a third of the people reported that they spoke in response to their experiences. In other words, these weren't just peripheral illusions: they could evoke the very essence of the deceased.

More:

Occasionally, these hallucinations are heart-rending. A 2002 case report by German researchers described how a middle aged woman, grieving her daughter’s death from a heroin overdose, regularly saw the young girl and sometimes heard her say "Mamma, Mamma!" and "It's so cold." Thankfully, these distressing experiences tend to be rare, and most people who experience hallucinations during bereavement find them comforting, as if they were re-connecting with something of the positive from the person’s life. Perhaps this reconnecting is reflected in the fact that the intensity of grief has been found to predict the number of pleasant hallucinations, as has the happiness of the marriage to the person who passed away.

There are hints that the type of grief hallucinations might also differ across cultures. Anthropologists have told us a great deal about how the ceremonies, beliefs and the social rituals of death differ greatly across the world, but we have few clues about how these different approaches affect how people experience the dead after they have gone. Carlos Sluzki, the owner of the shadow cat and a cross-cultural researcher at George Mason University, suggests that in cultures of non-European origin the distinction between "in here" and "out there" experiences is less strictly defined, and so grief hallucinations may not be considered so personally worrying. In a recent article, he discussed the case of an elderly Hispanic lady who was frequently "visited" by two of her children who died in adulthood and were a comforting and valued part of her social network.

(Admittedly vaguely related pic awesomeness is my favorite photo from Diane Arbus)

Stuff: Yum yum.

Halloween is about ghost and goblins. It is a time when we get make faces at the devils of our worse nature and play at evil. Its roots date back to ancient folk rituals of . . . blah blah blah.

Halloween is, first and foremost, about candy. You knew this as a child. And, admit it, you know it now as an adult.

Epicurious, the cooking web site, has laid out a spread of tasty articles on Halloween grub, decorations, and entertaining – and they've got a fantastic slideshow of some of this Halloween's neatest treats.

Above is a coffin featuring the bones of a white chocolate skeleton that you can assemble before devouring. Other notable sweets include chocolate cockroaches (crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside) and chocolate Day of the Dead skulls "available in Venezuelan white chocolate, milk chocolate with gray sea salt and hickory-smoked almonds, and spicy dark chocolate with Mexican ancho and chipotle chiles and cinnamon."

Dig in, Screamers and Screamettes.

Stuff: What about "Ketchup from the Black Lagoon"?

There's naught sweeter to a blogger than the celebrity commenter and this humble little blog is rapidly becoming the freakin' Viper Room of horror blogs!

Besides Screamin' Cattleworks, who appears in the soon-to-be-reviewed Prison of the Psychotic Damned, we've had painter Isabel Samaras, whose surreal pop vision helped us give Lily Munster a stylish send off.

Now, joining this select group of V.I.P.-posters, we hear from Victor "The Undertaker" Ives, the zombie king numero uno behind Haunted Hot Sauce.

The Undertaker writes:

Hey all,

I realize this is an old post but I just had to respond.

I've been a "zombie-holic" for most of my life. For some reason, the thought of the living dead seemed more believable to me than some of the other Hollywood monsters and therefore more frightening. It's only because of the recent zombie trend that people are interested enough in my products for me to build a business from it. I'm in zombie hot sauce heaven! Not only am I able to build a small business creating zombie-themed hot sauce products and building cedar coffins, I get to talk about it all year long w/ fine folks such as your selves. Feel free to contact me if you're interested in pursuing one of your other monster-themed hot sauce ideas...sounds like fun! Thanks!!

Stay Rotten,
Victor "The Undertaker" Ives

So the question I put to you, Screamers and Screamettes, what monster-themed hot sauce should we propose?

Food: And silly little me thought that variety was the spice of life.

While I feel it would be wrong to blame the current relentless trend of zombified everything on the fine folks at Haunted Hot Sauce, perhaps the first zombie-themed hot sauce, I would like to point out that zombie ketchup, zombie mustard, and zombie relish can't be far behind. Sure, there's a long trend of horror-themed kiddie foods. But when people start pushing condiments that tie into a specific horror trend, isn't it time we let that trend rest for a bit and move on? Seriously, couldn't we have done one zombie bottle and then make the green one a Frankenstein's monster dealie. Or "Howlin' Good Hot Sauce" with a werewolf. Hell, I'm getting so tired of zombies that I'd accept "Blobby Blob Hot Sauce: It's Blob-tastic."

Please, for the love of all things good and true in horror, let's stop beating the undead zombie horse.

Don't let that stop you from buying some hot sauce though. 'Cause hot sauce is good stuff.