Art world controversy alert here.  A few weeks ago, the magazine Artlurker published an interview with artist Richard Whitehurst, who was supposedly working on a piece called The Rape Tunnel.  It was to be a plywood tunnel that constricted as it ran on, forcing anyone in the tunnel into a crawling position.  At the end of the tunnel, there would have been a room where Whitehurst would try “to the best of [his] ability” to rape anyone exiting.

There were questions, there was furor.  Is it rape, if you willingly enter what is quite plainly labeled “The Rape Tunnel”?  What if the police come and make it a Right To Remain Silent Tunnel?  What happens if like five linebackers enter the tunnel one after the other?  IS IT ART?  Only a very special episode of Law and Order: SVU can say for sure, but Whitehurst claimed that The Rape Tunnel was the only way to go after his Punch-You-in-the-Face Tunnel saw such stunning (get it?) success.  However…   Continue »

Venice, jewel of Europe, peaceful siphon of American tourist dollars, target… for DISASTER.  In a continuing attempt to slake the moviegoing public’s ravenous appetite for dangerous animals in unlikely places, Hollywood has offered us Sharks in Venice, now, as FilmDrunk notes, available on DVD.

The seemingly tranquil waterways of Venice are terrorized by the perfect killing machine. In search of his father who has mysteriously disappeared diving in the city [Ed: three guesses], David stumbles across the cryptic trail leading to the long-lost fortune of the Medici. As the unwitting pawn in a Mafia plot to recover the treasure, David’s girlfriend is kidnapped at gunpoint, plunging him into a desperate race against time…

It is important to note that David is played by Stephen Baldwin, the one who baptized Spencer Pratt in the holy rivers of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! If the trailer above isn’t enough to convince you to buy the movie, be sure to admire the special effects, plus a sneak peak at the next “organisms where they aren’t supposed to be” films in production, after the jump.   Continue »

So there’s a new book out called Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, by anthropologist Peter McAllister.  McAllister studies some of the athletic benchmarks set in today’s sporting world and scrutinizes them against fossil and anthropological evidence of man’s old-school feats of physical ability.  It makes us look bad.

Usain Bolt, for instance, hit a speed of 42 kph during his record-breaking 100m at Beijing last year, but fossil evidence shows that some guy in Australia 20,000 years ago was hitting 37 mph while chasing mammoths in the mud.  And that was just a guy, not the fastest guy in the world.  The average aboriginal hunter could probably have trucked at 45 kph with the right equipment.

Today’s man can’t even play ball with Neanderthal women:

McAllister said a Neanderthal woman had 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European man. Trained to capacity she would have reached 90 percent of [Arnold] Schwarzenegger’s bulk at his peak in the 1970s.

Oh snap.  This all feels a little defamatory and insulting to me, personally (“inadequate??”), so I’ve gone ahead and made a short list of things we moderns can look to to restore our man-bravado, after the jump.   Continue »

Ah, I don’t know how I missed this initially, but… here we go.  Maybe you’ve heard of Etsy.com, the lady-site where handmade craft nonsense gets pushed for huge profits?  It’s a decent site I guess, if you trust products made in a first-world country under a non-corporate entity by tailors and seamtresses over 10 years old.

But if your craft sensibilities are more… eccentric, you might want to consider Regretsy.com instead.  With items like a knit pregnancy doll (w/removable placenta!), an Obama toilet seat cover, a catnip fetus toy, an “HIV Clock,” and a “masturbating dinosaur” wall fixture, you’re sure to find something for everyone in the family.  Gallery of a few of the funnier selections (maybe NSFW?), ATJ.   Continue »

Own a genuine piece of real American history!  Brace yourselves, collectors of significant Americana: the Sarah Palin XBox is up for auction.  Seller Dave Morrill (N.B: of Canada) describes the transcendent July moment of its creation at the governor’s picnic:

When I was in front of Sarah Palin, I told her that I had traveled three days to see her and asked her to sign my Xbox360. She said it was the most extravagant thing she had ever been asked to sign. I shook her hand, removed myself from the crowd, and then I packed up my Xbox360 and headed home. It was one of the greatest thrills of my life to have watched Sarah Palin on CNN, SNL, Youtube, and then to see her right in front of me.

If you want to commemorate the year Sarah Palin lost her bid for the vice presidency and then signed some clown’s videogame console at a picnic to celebrate how she wouldn’t have to be governor any more, the bidding is open.  And the seller is only asking for…   Continue »

This news is just blowing the roof off the internet.  Or parts of the internet.  The parts labeled “Sports” and “How To Freeze Your Body After It Is Dead,” specifically.  Larry Johnson, a former exec at the cryogenic freezing facility Alcor Life Extension Foundation, is publishing a tell-all expose about how – duh – cryogenics is a pseudoscience aimed at milking big money from the estates of dead egos who couldn’t deal with the fact that the world would spin on without them.  Alcor’s grimmest offense:

Technicians with no medical certification gleefully photographed and used crude equipment to decapitate [Ted Williams], the majors’ last .400 hitter.

Williams’ severed head was then frozen, and even used for batting practice by a technician trying to dislodge it from a tuna fish can.

Yeah.  It’s pretty bad, and gets worse, after the jump.   Continue »

Jude Law, an already well-regarded actor, is further burnishing the wellness of his regard by appearing on Broadway and the West End as Hamlet.  So he’s got the impassioned, lilting, I guess the word is “Shakespearean” delivery down pretty well, Serious Theater Actor that he is.  However, Jude Law isn’t so seriously devoted to the craft of drama that he can’t drop in for a bit of comedy once in awhile, in the way that someone might, say, devote oneself to a famous and beautiful blonde actress but still dabble in another woman on the side.  (Jude Law did that also, get it?)

So Law appeared on Jimmy Fallon (somebody get that guy suited up in the role of Yorick) and recited a few lines of verse at Fallon’s request, in his best soliloquy voice: “I won’t tell you that I love you/ Kiss or hug you/ ‘Cause I’m bluffing/ With my muffin…”  Video ATJ: Continue »

Well, this is fun.  Yang Ya-ching, a 27-year-old Taiwanese blogger and music student living in Paris is going to make out with 100 different strangers and photograph each kiss.

The desire for a lasting memory of Paris is what inspired Yang. According to her blog, the first kiss was from a worker installing outdoor advertising and was like “an autumn leaf falling into my pocket by accident.”

It was pretty special for him too until he learned that she pulled that play on EVERYONE.  From the looks of the photos so far, she’s at least halfway through, so if you’re a handsome lad in Paris, you best look out or she will neck the sh*t out of you and dump you out on the street like a fresh pail of garbage from un cafe (it’s France; no littering laws).  So keep it in your scarf.  There is indeed a minor controversy, plus a few photos from her project, ATJ:   Continue »

So a book was published a few weeks ago by two researchers who had surveyed more than a thousand women on the UT Austin campus.  It purports to answer the big question of – drumrolllll - why women have sex (that is also the book’s title).  84%, it was claimed, answered that they usually were just looking for a little peace and quiet and/or some help with household chores.  Some of the more depressing answers:

“I have sex to relieve the boredom because it’s easier than fighting. Plus it gives me something to do.”

“I slept with a couple of guys because I felt sorry for them.”

In one survey of students, nearly one in 10 women admitted to “having sex for presents”. Others said: “He bought me a nice dinner”, “he spent a lot of money on me early on”, “he showed me he had an extravagant lifestyle”.

Another “sexologist” recently weighed in on these answers with some of her own, after the jump.  Plus: a poll!   Continue »

The theater: it’s the last safe place where famous people can get naked without worrying about it getting circulated all over the internet.  For this and other reasons, theater naked is considered the classiest variety of naked.  So that’s the kind of naked Anna Friel is doing now.  According to ONTD, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the play Friel is starring in, debuted in London last night.  Friel plays Holly Golightly.

“The guys in the front row couldn’t believe it, their eyes were on stalks. It looked like they were about to pass out.”

OK then: a nude scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  The only question is, is it what Deep Blue Something would have wanted when they wrote the famous novel?  We’ll never know, I guess.  Oh, and the thing about no one taking pictures of nudity at the theater didn’t really work out.  Since someone took a bunch of pictures.  Link after the jump.   Continue »