Pyrotechnics in art

More on Picturing Pyrotechnics from The Public Domain Review

Perfumery

Firstly, an artist decided to distill her sweat and tears, quite literally, into a perfume.

I mean, there is always Das Parfum to freak us out about smells, and at least this one comes from the source.

According to Wikipedia "The word perfume is used today to describe scented mixtures and is derived from the Latin word, "per fumus", meaning through smoke."

Hungary Water was the first alcohol-based perfume, allowing us all to suffer through the sprays of torturous mist that envelope the cosmetics counters at malls and other places. 

Sachets and pomanders were used prior to this.

A pomander on the end of a rosary bead

Christianatomy

I have seen quite a few interesting phenomena whereby religious figures are depicted bodily. We have the often seen vierge ouvrante, the Virgin Mary who opens to reveal a scene,

as well as the Maria gravida, who often has a little window to show the Christ child in her womb,

but more recently, I also found some Christ figures which show the internal anatomy:

Plastinated Placenta

Found a Great Quote from P.S: Poetry & Science:

Navena opened a through-door and took us into the present-day anatomical theatre, all stainless-steel and halogen lights. Navena herself, I should say, is a beautiful, lean and muscular lady with bottle-bright red hair, who falls into that age group of ‘I have no idea how old she is’ (30s, I’d guess,) with a charming little gap between her front teeth and colourful tattoo on her left bicep. She’s a mixture of shy and sweet and ‘don’t mess with this woman, she could take you down and stuff you’. I asked her how she began making wax models, and she said she learned from an old woman – not many people know the craft now. When we leaned over a plastinated placenta on one of the dissecting tables and asked if it was real, she chirped, ‘Yes – it’s mine!’

AND A PICTURE:

The Deadliest of Fashions

HERE is why you should do research before taking on new trends. From the toxic to the combustible, it's probably good that companies do testing before marketing (most) new products. But not on animals! (Or orphans...)

Courtesy of David Mamet

If that doesn't scare you enough, this might:

Your waist on corsets

Your foot on high heels

Thanks AW!

Biting Lady Bits and Other Craziness

Seven Most Ridiculous Myths About the Female Body by Jezebel


And HERE more on the history of the vagina dentata

Felicien Rops

And his 19th-century Belgian erotica:

THIS: http://www.valleypressuk.com/authors/kelleyswain/

Book Wheels

Anatomy Riots

"The New York Doctors Riot was just one in a stream of so-called “anatomy riots” that plagued the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. Medical historian Michael Sappol has counted at least 17 such incidents between 1765 and 1854, in New Haven, Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia. These riots were sparked by anger over dissections and grave-robbing, which was how most schools got their bodies, since there was no legal supply. People saw grave-robbing as an affront to the honor of the dead and the sacred nature of graveyards, and dissection frightened many Christians who believed that only complete bodies could be resurrected. Dissection also had a veneer of criminality: in England, the only legal source of bodies was executed criminals, and many saw anatomical dissection as an extra layer of punishment suitable only for the wicked."

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gory-new-york-city-riot-shaped-american-medicine-180951766/#btLQ9RYdJT5MlsmF.99

Words to Offend

The first instance of the word "fuck":

Excerpts from Salon's Modern History of Swearing:

Other wonderful words that may be unfamiliar to you include godemiche, another French import, meaning “dildo.” A dildo,  Grose  [In his 1785 “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue”] helpfully explains, is “an implement resembling the virile member, for which it is said to be substituted, by nuns, boarding school misses, and others obliged to celibacy, or fearful of pregnancy. Dildoes are made of wax, horn, leather, and diverse other substances, and if fame does not lie more than usually, are to be had at many of our great toy shops and nick nackatories.” Grose is wonderfully able to describe what a dildo is while denying any firsthand knowledge of them. Lobcock is “a large relaxed penis, also a dull inanimate fellow.” A rantallion is “one whose scrotum is so relaxed as to be longer than his penis, i.e. whose shot pouch is longer than the barrel of his piece.” Fartleberries are “excrement hanging to the hairs about the anus, &c, of a man or woman.” (Here &c, “et cetera,” is back to being slang for the private parts.) And then there is burning shame, “a lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman, certainly not intended by nature for a candlestick.” Why this lascivious practice bears mention when larking and huffling don’t is not completely clear. Grose defines cunt as “a nasty name for a nasty thing”; perhaps he was simply unable to deny himself the pleasure of the pun: burning shame is “terrible shame/shame (cunt) on fire.”

And to this I add a little poem all about dildos: The Dildoides by Samuel Butler, 1672.

Galileo's Finger

More on it HERE

Masturbating Animals for Research

According to Salon, Human-on-dolphin sex is not really that weird

Another One Bites the Dust, After He Reads It

I highly recommend reading the obituary of George J. Armelagos who, admittedly, I had not heard of until his obituary was published. But obituaries are always surprisingly interesting, revealing things that you may have missed years or decades earlier. I had the same phenomenon with Clyde Snow's obituary earlier this year.

Both were anthropologists, reading and deciphering history from bones. Great stuff, right?

And a few excerpts:

"Based on their examination of New World skeletons that displayed the bone scarring characteristic of syphilitic infection, they concluded that a progenitor of the syphilis bacterium was already present in pre-Columbian America, where it was manifest as the skin disease yaws."

...

"Still other findings are anachronistically astonishing, like the discovery by Professor Armelagos and associates of traces of the antibiotic tetracycline in 1,400-year-old Nubian skeletons from what is now Sudan. The drug was not introduced commercially until the 1940s.

"The Nubians were master brewers, and the tetracycline — born of a bacterium found in soil — was a spontaneous byproduct of their beer-making process, the researchers concluded."

...

"He remains best known to a general readership for “Consuming Passions,” which chronicled, among other things, the use throughout history of a spate of curious ingredients — including potatoes and hippopotamus snouts — thought to be endowed with aphrodisiac powers.

"In Elizabethan times, the book reveals, prunes were considered aphrodisiacs. Visitors to brothels of the period, Professor Armelagos took delight in disclosing in interviews, received a free prune with every purchase."

Getting Dowded

So, Maureen Dowd has become a point of not so much contention as much as fodder for satire. It began with her really not-so-innocent post where she reveals the harrowing effects of marijuana on her personally. With her usual lack of subtlety (she wouldn't have a job if she had any), she essentially quashes the idea that pot should be sold in such an appealing manner as, say, her delectable chocolate bar.

What happens next...

The New Yorker creates their own take on what Dowd might have done after the main show.

Salon gives a short review and excerpt:

What could go wrong with a paragraph or two?

Everything, as it turned out.

Just kidding. Maureen Dowd’s column did not send me into a hallucinatory state for 8 hours and leave me questioning whether or not I was dead. She just wrote a kind of confusing editorial that used a really long anecdote about her experience of being too high on pot chocolate as a way to make a point about the apparent dangers of legal pot in Colorado.

Here’s her retelling of what sounds like a pretty unpleasant experience taking drugs and rubbing her corduroy pants:

But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

Oh dear.

The Guardian imagines a scenario where other NYT columnists take various drugs and their responses. Gawker asks readers to match drugs with NYT columnists. Some more hilarious responses can be found through the BBC.

Newfound Treasures