From the work of Dr. Harrison Pope, a Harvard psychiatrist, comes this illustration of the evolution of G.I. Joe dolls. On the left is the original G.I. Joe from 1964, with relatively normal body proportions. Over the years, the dolls grew progressively more muscular until finally, on the far right, we arrive at a recent version of the doll, "G.I. Joe Extreme." Pope is trying to establish a connection between the toys and an increase in "body-image disturbances" among men.
I started thinking about contortionists again when I happened upon a feature on them in an old issue of Life. In my novel Spondulix I had a character who was an "enter-ologist," a great term I found in Ricky Jay's wonderful history of sideshows and freaks, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. Enter-ologists get into impossible places, rather than escape from impossible places.
In any case, a short search of the web turned up lots of online contortionist info, including the Contortion Home Page, which is where I found this pic of April Tatro. That's her in the video below as well.
Continuing the baldness theme, there's something disturbing about this recent Hair Club for men infomercial. Don't Mike and his stepdaughter seem to be a bit too flirtatious with each other?
I loved reading Harvey Comics as a kid, and into "adulthood." (They're not published anymore, alas.) Their universe was quintessentially wacked and weird. As famed comics scribe Grant Morrison has remarked in an interview, sometimes the willed naivete of Silver Age writers following the Comics Code produced much stranger stuff than any consciously avant-garde writer could.
Take the two page strip to the right for instance, from an old digest-reprint of some Casper stuff. To parse it is to risk madness.
Is Nightmare indeed a mare, ie, female? if not, and even if so, is that the gayest hairdo ever, on horse or human? Why does a forest gnome like to hang out with a ghost horse? Why is playing human cowboys popular among the gnomes? Likewise riding an airplane. And finally, how demented does a ghost horse have to be, to stick planks up its butt and into its chest, and then purr like a cat, all in an effort to emulate a mechanical device so as to placate a gnome?
How I miss Harvey Comics! Thank goodness Dark Horse is reprinting some.....
Of course, we all recall personally or at least have heard of the Davy Crockett Craze of the mid-1950's, when Disney's promotional genius had kids everywhere running around in coonskin caps. But who among us lately has dared to summon up memories of the Castro dressup craze from a few years later?
Yes, once upon a time, at the start of his revolution, Castro was received in the USA as a hero of the oppressed peoples of Cuba, and seen as a fit role model for tykes to imitate.
Please click on the image for the full glory of this era, and excuse any flash glare from my poor photo skills. I had to photograph rather than scan, to capture the full impact of the double page spread.
The double-page ad below appeared in this week's New Yorker and is getting lots of attention from blogs.
The model in the ad is transgender queen Amanda Lepore. According to Adrants she "had her first cosmetic surgery at age 15, decided to have a sex change in high school, led a failed suburban housewife life and then hit New York for fame and fortune." You can check out her website (in places NSFW).
The ad definitely makes you look, but would it make you buy a Jawbone Bluetooth headset?
A 40-year-old Indonesian woman named Noorsyaidah is growing metal wires out of her stomach. Apparently this is "big news" in Indonesia. The problem has been plaguing her for almost seventeen years. From the Phantoms & Monsters blog:
During the first week wires kept falling off from her body and were gone. A month later, the wires grew back again and from that time onward the wires did not fall. They kept growing! One of her sisters said that she tried to help by trimming the wires. Alas, whenever she trimmed the wires, the wire retreated as if it were hiding and then popped up in another part of Noorsyaidah’s body.
And we've got video of wire woman:
If these "wires" are more like bony growths, then it might be a real medical condition. But if the wires are actually metal, then it's b.s.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.