- Culture
- 20 Mar 01
THERE MAY come a time when, for whatever reason or whatever sorry pass your life has reached, you need access to a corpse.
THERE MAY come a time when, for whatever reason or whatever sorry pass your life has reached, you need access to a corpse. Should this admittedly unlikely eventuality come to be a reality, the Corpses For Sale web site will almost certainly be your first port of call. It s a homepage which specialises in flogging dead bodies (fake ones, we hasten to add) to its customers.
We re not really that keen in delving into the machinations behind this web site, or how they have managed to recreate these cadavers so realistically, but . . . eh . . . well, let s just allow the site creators to do the talking for themselves, shall we?
Each corpse is hand crafted, they promise, and is very durable in construction. Total attention to detail is seen in certain features such as fillings in the teeth, nostril cavities and fingernails that are embedded into the decaying skin. The corpse is fully articulated so the head turns from side to side, the mouth opens and will snap shut, all the limbs move, and the fingers can be bent into different positions.
You can choose to have lights installed in the eyes and, when turned on, give off a bright glow that illuminates the whole eye socket. The lights have a life of 10,000 hours.
Each corpse is hand-made to your specifications. The Corpses For Sale page contains the variations that you can choose to make your corpse unique from all others. You can choose the hair color, skin color and the approximate degree of decay. The corpses are extremely realistic. The pictures do not show the actual realism of seeing it live (sic). You could literally be standing one foot away and not really be sure if it was real or not (except for the lack of smell and the slim possibility of coming in contact with a real corpse).
The males are dressed in a suit and the females are clothed in a dress, nylons and high heels. The females also come with earrings, a necklace and false eyelashes. The males are approximately 5 10 and weigh around 30 lbs. The females are about 5 6 and weigh about 26 lbs.
http://www.distefano.com/
William Shatner, the man who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek for something like eight decades, was renowned for many things, but his singing ability certainly wasn t one of them. This didn t deter him, however, from getting the notion into his head that he could serviceably carry a tune, in much the same manner as a million other self-delusionists who fall into the trap of fancying themselves as Frank Sinatra after a couple of bottles of wine.
In 1968, Shatner somehow convinced a record company to give him enough money to record an album of contemporary classics like The Byrds Mr Tambourine Man , The Beatles Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds , and other standards like It Was A Very Good Year and How Insensitive .
The result was The Transformed Man, an album which sits comfortably in the pantheon of Olympic-standard awful records, alongside other greats like Lou Reed s Metal Machine Music, Boyzone s Said And Done, and Ringo Starr s last release. On this site, you can sample snippets of Shatner s weather-beaten crooning, and there s also an order form for kitsch-lovers to purchase copies of The Transformed Man, should they so desire.
Many have studied this visionary work time and time again, proclaims the web site text, possibly with tongue embedded firmly in jowl, and they never fail to find something new. But what, exactly?
Incidentally, this website also contains the warblings of fellow Trekkies Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols (Lt Uhura) and Brent Spiner (Data). Spiner s album, which he released in 1994, is unforgettably titled Old Yellow Eyes Is Back. It s also even worse than Shatner s effort. Proceed with extreme caution.
http://209.68.1.93/emotionp/singalong/kirk.html #
aGiven that virtually every other ethnic group, from Poles to Asians, has now decided to re-appropriate racist humour for their own cultural ends, it should come as no surprise to stumble upon the existence of Raymond, an Amish comedian who claims to be the only funnyman among his community (a claim which is rather like professing to be the best skier in Senegal).
Visit his web site at the address below and you can expect to be treated to caustic ribaldry along the lines of This bloke walks into a barn . . . and Take my combine harvester . . . please!
http://www.amishcomic.com/
With the exception of Tom Wolfe (A Man In Full, The Bonfire Of The Vanities), Bret Easton Ellis has no serious competition for the title of Most Talked-About American Novelist Of The 90s.
1987 s American Psycho did much more than catapult him into the higher ranks of the literary world s biggest earners: it assured him of considerable notoriety during the years that followed. The controversy surrounding the book in which a wealthy, sociopathic Wall Street broker embarks on a graphically-depicted killing spree during his days off from work overshadowed its undoubted stylistic merits, as well as obscuring the point Easton was attempting to make about the greed-obsessed milieu of 1980s America.
Easton Ellis new book, Glamorama, is a satire of sorts about the fashion business, with some savagely cutting things to say about the foibles and idiosyncrasies of those who work in that field. This homepage features a lengthy interview with the author, transcribed from a back-issue of Rolling Stone magazine, as well as a progress report on the gestation of the American Psycho movie (at the time of writing, British actor Christian Bale will play the lead role of murderous yuppie Patrick Bateman, not Leonardo Di Caprio as had been previously reported).
Also on the web site is a lengthy screed by Easton Ellis, which details, bizarrely enough, his thoughts on the satanic malevolence of the Teletubbies! A brief extract follows.
They take karate stances for no apparent reason. They carry purses. They have names like Dipsy and Tinky-Winky. They have smooth, ageless, simian faces. They speak in sentence fragments and clipped phrases, sounding vaguely like giddy Japanese waitresses who work at the sushi bar in Hell.
Minutes go by as the Teletubbies fall over while the baby-faced sun looks down on them and squeals with delight. Sober, straining to pay attention, you have no idea what s going on. Imagining the performers on those suits making tubby custard , tasting tubby toast and trying on hats can move you to make yourself a very large drink.
These Oompa-Loompas on acid are actually living televisions all proudly baring screens embedded in their stomachs, which flash to life, showing short films of real children acting disconcertingly like the Teletubbies attempting gymnastics, zipping up bags, closing and opening drawers, deciding what to wear, singing mindlessly, hiding from each other (actually what any number of my friends in Manhattan do on a daily basis). This documentary footage reminds you of the thin line between the speech patterns of children and those of total drunks.
Though it lacks the forced, noxious gaiety of Barney The Purple Dinosaur, Teletubbies seems like a wicked satirist s idea of a horrible children s program watched in a future concocted by Huxley, Orwell or Gibson. Marilyn Manson s calculated shock tactics seem phony compared to these psychedelic teddy bears (a warning: do not play The Dope Show over Teletubbies with the volume off). I would actually rather have my kids watch Taxi Cab Confessions or Deliverance.
The soothing tones, the eerie quiet, the New Agey vibe, the immaculate surfaces, everything so anal and controlled and antiseptic, a world where even the spontaneous is rehearsed, the sheer humorlessness of it all is what makes Teletubbies so creepy.
www.ennui.clara.net/ellis/index.htm
fresh fish
Techno-rock titans Underworld have kept their public waiting long enough for their third full-length album: it s been a full three years since Second Toughest In The Infants hit the sales racks and, with a little help from the Trainspotting soundtrack, turned Messrs Emerson, Hyde and Smith into bona fide pop stars.
Now, the Essex boys have decided to make one of the tracks from their forthcoming album BeauGoup Fish available on their web site for one day only Friday, February 5th (i.e. tomorrow). The unnamed track is one of the eight cuts contained on BeauGoup Fish, which is released through Junior Boy s Own in March.
http://www.dirty.org