Category: Weird

I Still Dream Of Organon…

I bought a copy of Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting the other day, because I’d bought her new album Aerial and it made me wistful for her old stuff from the 80s.

I knew that Cloudbusting was about Wilhlem Reich, but back in the old days we didn’t have no Inter Webs, and I couldn’t google around and learn the details. The details are pretty cool. It’s inspired by a book that Wilhelm’s son Peter wrote, about growing up in his father’s care, believing everything his father told him, and realizing only when his father was imprisoned and his books burned by the federal government, that almost nobody believed the things his father believed or thought his father was the genius that he considered himself.

I’d never made out the word “Organon” in the first line of the song (I’d thought it was something like “I still dream of all the noise…” — whoops). And other things about the song’s lyrics, which were puzzling before, become clear when you know what it’s about —

You’re like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark

What made it special
Made it dangerous
So I bury it and forget

A yo-yo that glowed in the dark? Well… Reich experimented with radium at his laboratory, Organon. A yo-yo that glowed in the dark might well be special… and dangerous.

It’s an especially thought provoking song becuase Reich is such a character. He was in many ways a reprehensible fellow — the word “megalomanic” leaps to mind when one considers that he’s the author of a book-length rant called Listen, Little Man! (which reads exactly how you’d think it reads from the title). And, well, you know, “orgone energy” ain’t exactly, um, real. But… I don’t know.  For all the craziness, it seems like at heart he was a man who saw how much society can hurt people, and fill them with anger and fear and hate, and who wanted to do something about it, and who convinced himself he’d found secrets which allowed him to change the world.

I would like to read the book that inspired the song.

Everytime it rains,
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out –
Ooh I just know that something good is going to happen
And I don’t know when
But just saying it could even make it happen.

The Prion Anomaly

Seed: The Prion Anomaly

Science has been progressing at a fantastic speed this decade. For old timers such as myself, the replacement of paradigms in biology has been intellectually bearable, but only just so. I was born and educated in the era before 1950, when life was the domain of proteins, and I had to adapt myself to a new way of looking at life after the discovery of the double helix and the nature of the genetic code. James Watson and Francis Crick’s seminal paper, in 1953, finally provided the structural and chemical explanation of how cells store, use, and pass on information to daughter cells. This gave rise to the central paradigm in molecular biology: that structural information in the cell flows irreversibly from gene to protein, intrinsic to which is the concept that the sequence of amino acids in a protein entirely governs its final structure. Similarly, what is true for protein synthesis is also true for the mechanisms of heredity: that the genome (the full complement of genes in a cell) controls phenotype (all the characteristics of a living organism).
AdvertisementMore than a half-century later, a large majority of biologists believe that the mechanism postulated by molecular biology is not only true, but the only conceivable system in life. Yet, a small number of researchers have recently discovered provocative anomalies that are threatening this scientific idea. The question then is this: Is the central paradigm of molecular biology—that all genetic information is stored and transferred digitally through DNA—the only possible explanation of how life evolved, or are there other mechanisms of heredity in living organisms? Evidence is mounting that hereditary information can be transferred in an analogous way through the prion.

Whoa.  A paradigm shift in molecular biology?

Via reddit.

Questionable Content

No, not the webcomic, though it looks like some major plot stuff is about to happen there — woot!

This post will contain questionable content. It is about Iron Crotch Qi Gong, and contains the word “penis,” though only in quotes. I would never subject my readers to an unquoted penis, except that one right there.

Apparently (according to this article):

Grandmaster Tu Jin-Sheng, best known for his Iron Crotch, attached himself not once, but twice, to a rental moving truck and pulled it several yards across a parking lot in Fremont. In lace-up leather boots and a black tank top, the 50-year-old tied a strip of blue fabric around the base of his penis and testicles and tugged to make sure it was on tight. An assistant kicked him hard between the legs before he lashed himself to the vehicle.

He groaned, grunted and pressed against two men for resistance.

Then, slowly, the truck began to roll forward.

You can learn more about Iron Crotch Qi Gong here, and even see a modestly pixellated image of a practicioner lifting weights.

If you want you can even buy Tu Jin-Sheng’s video.

For a completely Flash based site, check out Iron Crotch DOT COM!

An article in Kung Fu magazine featuring a truly frightening image of all the various metal tools used to condition oneself in Iron Crotch Qi Gong!

And more about Tu himself:

u is graceful man who moves like a swimming dragon, with sudden bursts of thunderous gestures, natural displays of raw power. He is a very calm speaker with a deep bass voice, softened with kindness. His hands move like brushstrokes while his thick body is solid and upright as an immovable stone statue. Tu was very open and frank about the “inner secrets” of his practice, exposing himself to scrutiny just as openly as when exposes his privates in his public towing demonstrations.

And just when you thought that wonder was gone from the world… Iron Crotch Qi Gong rescues you from the mundanity.

I don’t remember where I first saw this linked, but I most recently got it from Warren Ellis.