The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Brace yourself. The dreaded “Food,” “Genitalia in the News” and “Now That’s Just Gross!” category combination means this one’s gonna get real ugly.

A new restaurant has opened in Beijing, China that only serves dishes made from animals’ penises and testicles. Kind of puts a new spin on tubesteak, doesn’t it?

I’m not sure which is worse, the “cuisine” or the description of it in the article. Here’s a couple of samples to whet your appetite:

Some dishes appear unexceptional, such as the simple goat penis, sliced, dipped in flour, fried, and served skewered with soy sauce.

…The Xinjiang horse and the donkey, on the other hand, were quite different. Though both came sliced lengthwise, and looked like bacon, the horse was light and fatty, while the donkey had a firm colour and taste. The testicles were slightly crumbly, and tasted better with lashings of the sesame, soy and chilli dips thoughtfully provided.

Kudos to the author, Richard Spencer, for indomitable courage and his use of the word “lashings.” I wonder how many food critics at the paper resigned before Mr. Spencer agreed to eat there and write up a review. Nixon faced a similar problem in 1973 when he tried to find an Attorney General who would fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate brouhaha.

A theater I worked at years ago had one of those candy menus with little snap-on plastic letters. Being young, bored and about to be fired, I used it to express my opinion that the proprietor was an enthusiastic consumer of “greasy donkey dick.” If only I’d known.

Months-Later Update: My friend John C. believes that this restaurant should be named “Members Only”. Tres bon!

What better time than Valentine’s Day to tell you about a horrific dong-related disaster? A Serbian man had to be taken to the emergency room when the pencil he had inserted into his penis shifted during sex and became lodged in his bladder. Initially the would-be woody denied having taken this MacGyver-like approach to erectile disfunction.

Doctor Aleksandar Milosevic from Belgrade’s Zvezdara hospital, who succesfully removed the pencil, said: “At first the patient did not tell us what really happened, but x-rays proved the truth.

“Tupic said he had no idea there were things like Viagra available but agreed that in future he will try pills before he takes any more chances with pencils.”

Frankly, I can come up with a lot of other things I’d try before cramming a Ticonderoga up my urethra. And there are questions remaining. What direction was the pencil pointed? Was it sharpened? Did he plan on leaving some “Zeljko hearts Katya” graffiti in there?

Quick: think of Godzilla’s roar. The man that created that sound, Akira Ifukube, has died. One of the great film composers, Ifukube scored more than 200 movies, including the wonderful brass-heavy music for most of the classic Gojira films. (That’s “Godzilla” for you gaijin.) He’ll be missed.

vending machine food
they say life’s one big gamble
expiration date

Please allow me to introduce you to China’s first humanoid robot, Xianxingzhe, or, as he is far better known in Japan, Senkousha. Contrary to appearances, Xianxingzhe is not a failed sixth-grade science-fair project from 1964. He is, in fact, state of the art Chinese robotics.

OK, you kids in the back settle down.

The Chinese, stung by Japanese and American prowess in robotics, decided to build their own humanoid. Sadly, they neglected the most important law of robot design, namely that a robot should look really cool. When the National University of Defense Technology unveiled this ungainly lamebot in 2000 it was greeted by universal snickering.

The Japanese immediately began writing snarky articles ridiculing the robot, and quickly fixated on its most unusual feature: the mighty crotch-cannon. (In all fairness, better-resolution images of Xianxingzhe show that the “crotch-cannon” is actually a pair of protruding joints of some sort, but in the original press-release photo it does, indeed, look like a groin-mounted howitzer.)

It was too funny an idea to pass up. Soon Senkousha, as he became known, was flattening his foes with pelvic-thrust-triggered blasts of white-hot plasma in video games, websites and spoof anime credit sequences. It became a nationwide craze, even showing up on popular TV programs. Senkousha got some weaponry upgrades in the process.

(For the record, I want the model kit depicted on the left so badly that I can taste it. This baby’d give me a real edge in geeky cubicle crap. You can keep your shitty Transformer figures, Maurice! Mine has a goddamned pubic rocket launcher!)

I have no idea what the Chinese reaction to all this hullaballoo was. No doubt some hard-working cybernetics experts got their feelings hurt. Still, you’ve got to admire the kind of guts it took for them to build something like this and then admit to it publicly. I mean, paddles for hands!? What was their target market? Burger King?

Straight from the “What the hell was he thinking?” file comes this bizarre item: Lee Tamahori, director of the James Bond movie Die Another Day, has been arrested for prostitution in Los Angeles.

Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the Los Angeles city attorney, says Tamahori was cruising Santa Monica Boulevard on Jan. 8, wearing a black wig and an off-the-shoulder dress, when he was caught up in an LAPD prostitution sting operation.

Ooooooo-kayyyyyy…..

This sounds like something that needs to be looked into by his doctor. No doubt some guys hold odd jobs to put gold in their fingers (sometimes from Russia). With love, though, it’s different. I can see no royal reason to scare the living daylights out of somebody with an awful drag act.

I apologize for that last paragraph. I couldn’t think up an Octopussy joke.

In the blur of progress, it is easy to forget the achievements of those who came before. The internet isn’t the first telecommunications advance to irrevocably change the world, it’s only the latest. One of the most influential technologies in history died a quiet death a few days ago, when Western Union stopped sending Telegrams.

I’m actually choking up a little writing this.

The telegraph has been called “The Victorian Internet,” and that’s no exaggeration. For those of us working in information technology, the telegraph operators of the 19th-century were our direct forerunners, and geek culture got its start with them.

The title of this post, by the way, is a statement attributed in various forms to the great Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn, who had been asked his opinion of so-called “message pictures.”

If you haven’t read the book The Victorian Internet, you owe it to yourself to do so. It’s an incredible story, and should be better known. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

We’re used to staring into the forward horizon, but sometimes we need to turn around and watch the sunset.

It isn’t often I get to file a story under the “Whoops!” category in which everyone involved handled the situation with civility and grace. A hapless visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England tripped on his shoelace and fell down the stairs, breaking several priceless Chinese vases from the Qing Dynasty. The man was not badly injured, and the museum did not release his name to the public. It is being regarded as an unfortunate accident, and nothing more. No one overreacted.

If this had happened in the US, of course, the man would have been beaten mercilessly and then charged with terrorism.