Slideshow of Disturbing Med Student Photos

These photos are from medical students fooling around with cadavers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To modern people,they are downright wrong. But damn, they look cool. If anyone on here was looking for an album cover for their dark metal band's next album, your welcome.

GOGOL BORDELLO: Immigrant Rebels

This is an excerpt from a paper I am writing now about immigration in American media. I chose to focus on the kickass gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello.



A Scene Witnessed by the Author

December 21, 2006, at the Irving Plaza in Manhattan, the lights flash and the music swells. A guitar lets out machine-gun riffs, a bearded fiddler summons screams from his strings. An acrobatic woman bangs on a giant drum, and an accordianist squelches belching notes from his squeezebox. The crowd is a pulsing mass that shakes the floor, bulging the ceiling of the lower level in. A skinny man takes the drum from the woman and gingerly places it on top of the crowd. He climbs onto it and kneels, and the crowd pushes the drum along, slowly, as if he were riding on a gentle sea. He reaches down and pulls a young woman up from the teeming masses, and holds her steadily on top of the drum. Her face is rapturous, and she is panting, exhilarated, riding with the man across the crowd and back onto the stage.
“Party!” the man screams into the microphone, with a thick Ukrainian accent.
What does this intense scene have to do with the experience of immigration? Everything, when it's created by the New York punk rock band Gogol Bordello, self-described “multi-kontra-culti” immigrant punks.

An example of the incredible stage presence and crowd reactions:

Am I confused?

Wait, is the Taliban about to acquire a nuclear arsenal? Because the country they are taking over are basically cool with being taken over?

Wait. Why is nobody flipping out about this?

Or is it more complicated than this, and I am misinformed?

For some reason I am still afraid of a nuclear holocaust happening, I know, old fashioned, right? So this does scare me.

Don't we have enough military people to...stop this? Are they too busy? Are they too afraid of looking like the assholes in an ally country like Pakistan?

Nobody is flipping out. Extremist, violent group about to get nukes. And no chicken littles or people calling for military action on the US's part.

I think the most appropriate question is, WTF?

I feel weird posting this, since I am normally very very anti-war. But if we have a giant military, and a group that specifically says it really wants to kill us, is on the verge of grabbing nukes...shouldn't we send some robots or something their way? Intelligently, surgically?

Pirate Mania! Fiction Overtaking Reality...

I never thought I'd see the day that a Hollywood movie meme would cross over into reality to become a news meme. It usually goes the other way around, with filmmakers ripping stories from the headlines to make blockbuster movies.

It's like "Stranger than Fiction." Or "The Never-Ending Story." No, no, it's not like a movie, it's more like contemporary weirdness going on right now. In real life.

Monster Logic

Illustration Time: Punk Romance

How to Not Be When Drunk

Do not be a minister of finance for a powerful country at an international summit.