As Long as I Still Have at Least One Arm

Radio Pirate Artichoke: 00 Void

To Make Soap, First We Render Fat

Unless of course you make your soap by cold process soapmaking like I did. This is the fourth batch I've ever made. It's coloured with blue food dye (I know it's purple, I clearly haven't perfected my soap colouring techniques yet) and it smells like a fifty megaton lavender bomb. It also has POTPOURRI!!! I wasn't shouting, this is how you pronounce POTPOURRI!!! Anyway, it's up on the curing rack now and in about four weeks someone will be rubbing their bodaciousness with the Lavender Bomb (and scratching themselves with POTPOURRI!!!). If this sounds daunting, it isn't, you should try making your own soap, it's quite empowering. POTPOURRI!!!

Revenge of the Jackalope

Abandon all ye faithful
Abandon all ye hope
Abandon all ye faithful
It's the day of the Jackalope
Clutch - Day of the Jackalope

Sore Thumb (or My Place in the World)

I wish I had the thousand words that this picture very easily sums up.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Tonight, We Make Soap

To make soap, we first render fat.

Mammatocumulus

Give us clouds.
Clouds like big breasts.
Like condensed milk dissolving in water.
Like ripe fruit hanging from the branches, waiting to be plucked.
Give us rain unending.

Choreomania (Saint Vitus' Dance)

Most people have heard of this. People spontaneously errupting into dance. Wobbling and jiggling until they colapse. Hallucinating about demons and such crap. Most people attribute it to "mass hysteria". Here's my scientific opinion on "mass hysteria". Bollocks. Utter and complete bollocks. You want to explain a complex social phenomenon based on people's psychology? Find a half-decent explanation then rather than a cheap cop-out that saves you the trouble of doing real research and work. Anyway, bollocking done. Back to the dancing mania. There is no real consensus as to what caused (and is causing) this. My guess, at least fot the cases that occured in the Middle Ages (let's just say that soap wasn't a prized possession back then, neither was a burial a thing of habit), and judging by the fact that the symptoms described sound a lot like the symptoms of poisoning and general neurological doo-hickeys (yes, doo-hickeys is a scientific term), the people that danced like crazy until they colapsed, foamed at the mouth and saw DEMONS!!! DEMONS!!! DEMONS EVERYWHERE!!! were most likely poisoned (possibly with ergot). Although I don't discard the possibility that under stressful conditions, psychologically vulnerable people are very susceptible to other people's behaviour (just look at all the crap about "The King of Pop"), "mass hysteria" is not a valid scientific explanation, in fact it's not an explanation at all. So, next time you use the term, expect the Science Ninjas to creep up to you when you least expect it to exact critically acurate and rigorous revenge. With the power of Peer Review!!!

Tokyo. Gore. Police.

Three words that on their own don't mean much more than their unique concepts. But put them together and you have something special. I may have mentioned this before, though I don't remember it, but I have a very broad taste in cinema. One of the extremities to which I venture frequently (in the company of my amazing partner which also found this gem) is fucked up Asian films. And when I say fucked up, I mean really weird ones, the kind that almost makes you feel guilty for enjoying it. I'll post the trailer to it but I feel it doesn't do it much justice, so right below the trailer I'll give you a quick synopsis and review, hopefully without spoiling it too much.

So as you probably guessed there's lots of gore. Duh. It does what it says on the box. This is a dystopian vision of near-future Tokyo where/when the police is fully privatised. Our protagonist is a petite, female super-cop named Ruka. She has the usual and almost stereotypical emotional baggage about the assassinated dad (notice I said ass... twice). In this alternate version of the Japanese capital, there are criminals which have somehow altered their bodies so that whenever they get hurt the wound almost miraculously transforms into a weapon. Cool huh? Our traumatised hero is trained especially to hunt down and destroy these people who are also known as "engineers", making her, rather cheesily, an "engineer-hunter". By the way, I should have said this earlier, the film is very cheesy so if you can't deal with that, well, get the fuck off my porch!
Anyway, there's tons of blood spurting with great force out of severed limbs and various other gashes and cuts, taking the whole notion to new extremes (I will not spoil the last scene, I will not spoil the last scene). The visual effects people have really set a new standard in this niche of cinema and as far as the weapons/mutations go, they really seemed to have a limitless imagination. The whole film is laced with really strange, twisted shit that could have easily come out of the strangest David Lynch films. My personal favourite is the random advert for the new-improved-and-cute self-harming razorblade sported by inappropriately happy Japanese schoolgirls. Dark shit indeed.
I don't think I do the film justice either. I only watched it last night and maybe not everything has sunk in yet, but if there is one thing to be told about this film is that it keeps topping itself. Where other films of this kind go WHAM!!! and then either dwindle or stagnate, this one goes wham!!!Wham!!!WHAM!!!WHAM, MOTHERFUCKER, WHAM, WHO'S YOUR DADDY BITCH?!
To cut a long story short, if you like strange, gory, unlikely and fucked-up Asian films this is not so much a must-see as a your-life-was-up-until-now-meaningless. It is definitely a serious contender for the most fucked-up film I've ever watched.

Radio Pirate Artichoke: Be Yourself, By Yourself, Stay Away From Me

I know you missed this. Even if you don't admit it to yourselves. It might hurt but you like it my filthy poop-minions.