Topics | Dangerous Minds (2024)

01.14.2010

03:34 pm

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01.14.2010

01:37 pm

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Recently finished Martin Starr’s epic “The Unknown God: W.T. Smith and the Thelemites,” published by Teitan Press, an immaculately researched history of Aleister Crowley’s neo-religion Thelema after Crowley’s personal story trails off. Crowley’s life has been documented ad nauseum, what hasn’t been is the history of his ideas after his death and what happened to the people who took them seriously (“By their works shall ye know them”). Martin Starr fixes that historical oversight here, providing fascinating insights not only into occultism during the two World Wars (including all the bickering infighting between the various occult orders?

01.14.2010

01:12 pm

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Last night I caught Enki Bilal’s 2004 CGI flick “Immortel (ad vitam)”?

01.13.2010

11:43 pm

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01.13.2010

11:26 pm

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Sleep Talkin’ Man is one of the hottest “viral” sensations on the Internet and Twitter these days. It’s as funny as sh*t My Dad Says but in a different vein. What STM is all about is simple, it’s the day to day transcriptions of what one woman’s “mild-mannered English husband” spouts while he’s sleeping at night, utterly hilarious “surrealisms” to savor:

Jan 12 2010

“I’m making pillows. Burn them slowly, keeps them fluffy! Mmmmmm, pillows.”

“Potato bags. I can’t find my potato bags. I need them! [desperately] Who’s got my potato bags? Oh, f*ck it! I’ll have to use something else.”

“Dogs’ scrotums. They stretch.”

“Pork chops are most satisfying. Mmmmmmm. Dangle them from the ceiling.”

Wife’s note: After we listened to the recording, Adam turned to me and said, “I’ve never had pork chops.”

01.13.2010

11:06 pm

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Wonderful short essay from Christopher Hitchens, writing about British novelist J.G. Ballard on the occasion of the publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.

From The Atlantic:

For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively ?

01.13.2010

07:29 pm

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ScienceDaily reports on a species of ants that has adopted a completely asexual lesbian society…

Most social insects?

01.13.2010

07:23 pm

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South African crime lord “Fat Murphy” is not only feared on the streets of Cape Town, he’s also a congenital hermaphrodite. Police were pleasantly surprised recently when, during a chase, Murphy’s plastic dong fell out of his pants.

SOUTH African police caught more than they expected in a Cape Town drug raid when a strap-on dild* fell off a suspected crime lord during a search, the Sunday Times reported.

Fat Murphy, feared on the streets of Cape Town’s notorious Cape Flats suburb, told a court that he is a hermaphrodite who holds male and female identity documents - one under the name Fadwaan, the other under Hilary.

Police and a tearful Murphy recounted the saga during a bail hearing for Murphy’s charges of possession of stolen property, which come on top of earlier charges of kidnapping and intimidation, the paper said.

“I had a vagin* that could not be penetrated. But I also had male organs, testes. But I always knew I was really a man and that was what I wanted to be,” he told the court, according to the newspaper.

“God created me with both sexual organs. It was God’s decision, not mine.”

Included below is King Missle’s early 90s hit “Detachable Penis.”

(News.com.au: “Crime Lord’s” Fake Penis Falls Off During Raid)

01.13.2010

07:11 pm

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Sadness in the streets! The Bodhi Tree, one of the best bookstores, period, and THEE very best New Age and Spirituality bookstore anywhere on the planet is closing. Although in recent years I’ve not gone there nearly as much as I used to, in the mid-90s, I went to the Bodhi Tree every single Saturday morning without fail and poured over the shelves of the used books annex. There I found Leary first editions, tons of rare Crowley and even signed firsts of Terence McKenna’s The Invisible Landscape and True Hallucinations. I’d comb through this store sometimes twice a week. For book hounds into the occult and weirdo culture in general, the Bodhi Tree was like an intellectual candy shop. I felt great pride to see my own books and DVDs for sale there. But sadly, those days have passed. With Amazon and Barnes & Noble taking massive bites out of the profits of niche booksellers—Shirley MacLaine probably shops on Amazon—it’s hard to run a business on fumes. Even storied operations like the Bodhi Tree, in the end have their life cycles. I wonder what it will reincarnate as?

From the LA Weekly:

Owners Phil Thompson and Stan Madson informed their staff last Wednesday that the cozy Melrose Avenue shop, a nationally renowned and much beloved spiritual center, will be shutting its doors in a year’s time.

After some eight months of discussion, Thompson and Madson decided to sell the property to a local business owner who leases space to several other nearby retailers. The Bodhi Tree opened in 1970. Land values in the area have risen dramatically since then. Meanwhile, the business of selling print books has been on a steady decline. For years, real estate agents had been circling the Bodhi Tree like vultures. In the end, selling the property became a much more profitable option than continuing to sell books.

Thompson and Madson started the bookstore when they were in their 30’s. They are now both in their early 70’s. They were aerospace engineers who left a life of science for one of contemplation and meditation.

“Twenty years ago we felt like it was an expanding situation,” says Madson. “We were concerned the store was getting too big. We had a staff of 100. Publishing was expanding. Spirituality was expanding. But what changed was that the market became widely dispersed.”

01.13.2010

04:49 pm

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Newly discovered: a tape recording of Nazi officers describing the moment they found the body of Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. While the recording was made on October 25, 1956, in a courtroom in Berchtesgaden (the place of Hitler’s Bavarian mountaintop retreat), it was unearthed only recently by researchers for the German Spiegel TV channel.

Among those giving evidence that day were Otto Guensche, an SS officer, and Heinz Linge, a valet, who first discovered the corpses of Hitler and his new bride Eva Braun. The men speak under oath of entering the Fuehrer’s study after hearing shots ring out on April 30 1945. “When I entered to my left I saw Hitler on the sofa,” said Linge, who died in 1980. “Hitler had his head bent forward somewhat and I could see a bullethole approximately the size of a penny on the right side of the temple.”

Guensche, who went to his death in 1983 refusing to give details about the dictator’s end, said: “Hitler sat on the arm of the sofa with his head hanging down on the right shoulder which was itself hanging limp over the back of the sofa. On the right side was the bullet hole.”

From that point, on Guensche and Linge started removing the bodies and preparing them for cremation. After Berlin fell—and before their story went very far—the pair were captured by the Soviets and whisked off to Moscow. Their testimony lay hidden all this time in Munich’s public records office.

Recording Of Nazi Officers Who Found Hitler’s Body Released