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ALIEN HAND SYNDROME

Alien hand syndrome (AHS) is a rare neurological disorder that causes hand movement without the person being aware of what is happening or having control over the action. The afflicted person may sometimes reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the healthy hand to restrain the alien hand. A new study identified the areas of the brain involved in both voluntary and involuntary movement and found that neural activity was restricted to the primary motor cortex during the unconscious motor activity seen with AHS.

Gypsy Rose Lee

The dysfunctional Horvik family has once again been revived on Broadway in "Gypsy" the musical. This time with the considerable talent of Patti Lupone as Mama Rose and under the masterful direction of ninety year old Arthur who also wrote the book. This tale of the most notorious show business stage mother and her stripper daughter, is loosely based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. The original 1959 musical was nominated for eight Tony awards and developed by Ethel Merman and David Merrick with music by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim lyrics.

Gypsy Rose Lee was born Ellen June Hovickin Seattle Washington in 1911. Her sister also strangely named Ellen June Hovick and later known as June Havoc was born two years later. When their parents divorced the girl's mother, Rose Hovick developed a successful vaudeville act for her daughters aged five and seven, called Baby June and Her Farmboys. Although the act was making $1500 at its height, Vaudeville soon began to fade and Baby June eloped at 13 with a member of the chorus. Mama Rose though was hell bent on continuing without her main talent, and although Vaudeville was a dying art form--burlesque was blossoming and Gypsy Rose Lee was born.

Gypsy Rose Lee went on to a successful career as an actress, author, and talk show host. She wrote three books including the best seller Gypsy, and performed in 12 movies and , but the intimate details of smothering Mama Rose's life didn't feed public consumption until June Havoc wrote in her autobiography, Early Havoc. Rose 'turned toward her own sex,' at first ruining a lesbian boardinghouse in a 10-room apartment Gypsy rented for her on West End Avenue, and then owning a sort of lesbian farm in her country house in Highland Hills. At a party in that house, Rose pulled a gun on one of the girls, according to Erik Preminger Gypsy's son and killed a young woman.

GHETTO BROTHERS

AFTER YOU READ THIS BLOG WATCH CHANNEL 13 FROM 1971.

AFTER THE DEATH OF BENJII 3 WEEKS LATER:

FREE TIME HERE

When I was fifteen my grandfather died, and my father brought home his old black and white television set. Our house was small with not much space to store things, so my father set the thing on the floor of my room. It took a few weeks, but one night I decided to plug it in to see if the light would be bright enough to read by, but low enough not to wake anyone up. So I fiddled with the TV dial and found I could get the brightness sharp and I could read with the sound down. That is what I did for a little while, until after some experimentation I discovered that I could get one channel and if I sat real close with the sound low I could watch TV.

The one station was Channel 13, WNET and the show that I watched was called "Free-Time." This show was broadcast live and came on at 11 pm. Free Time had a rather eclectic offering of guests, musicians, radicals, politicians, and poets. It was on Free Time that I heard a young poet named Nikki Giovanni. She read poems about John Coltrane and Billy Holiday. It was unbelievably exciting to me. Nikki was young and radical, very untraditional with a huge Afro and she was different than anyone I had ever heard.

So one night when the address for tickets flashed on the screen I jotted it down and sent off.

When the tickets arrived, I arranged with a friend to go. We lied to our parents and took the LIRR to NYC at nine at night. I'm really not sure how, but we found our way to the subway and then to the TV station. We entered the studio which was nothing more than some bleachers and a stage.

The program that night was about gang violence. The studio was over flowing with gangs from the South Bronx. People were pushing and shoving and cursing. And to my amazement my desire to see this show was so strong that I convinced my friend to stay. We found seats and the program went on.

The gang members who sat on the stage were it seemed to me at fifteen--mature and insighttful. They got right to the point. Don't judge us, they said. A gang was a family that you needed to survive and you just had to live in the South Bronx to understand. Although I didn't live in the South Bronx I did understand and while the program was running I lost what ever misgivings I had about our situation and how it would unfold afterwards.

These quickly came back when the house lights went down and the moderator left. There was a general uneasiness then. Everyone knew things was different out on the streets. The gangs were at war. Who would leave first? How would they do it? And what would happen as there was no promise of safety as we headed to the subway. By this time it was about 1 AM and my friend and I had little idea about how to get out of the City.

And then shouting started and we heard some threats, and because we were too frightened to leave-- we just stayed. We were still hanging around an hour later. Then these Ghetto Brothers walked over to us and started to talk.

The Ghetto Brothers were a gang (or club) founded in New York City's South Bronx in the late 1960s. They eventually spread to much of the Northeastern United States. Like the Young Lords, they were involved in Puerto Rican nationalism, including, in the case of the Ghetto Brothers, an association with the then-new Puerto Rican Socialist Party. Ghetto Brothers founder Benjamin Melendez, who left the organization in 1976, was also known as a guitarist. He led a band, also known as the Ghetto Brothers, which included his late brother Victor Melendez on drums. They released one (self-titled) album in 1972, which had only informal, local distribution.

The Ghetto Brothers, especially in their early years, had a reputation as one of the more politically minded and less vengeful of New York-area gangs. After Cornell "Black Benjy" Benjamin was killed in 1971 trying to prevent a fight between two rival gangs, the Ghetto Brothers did not seek the expected revenge on those responsible for his death. Instead, under Melendez's leadership (and that of Carlos Suarez, also known as Carlos Melendez), they were instrumental in achieving a moderately successful truce among South Bronx and other New York-area gangs. The best-known of the meetings to hammer out a peace treaty occurred December 8, 1971. Among those present was Afrika Bambaataa, then a 14-year-old Black Spade warlord known on the streets as Bambaataa.

Under Melendez's leadership, the Ghetto Brothers represented one end of the spectrum in terms of how they treated the women involved with the gang. Referred to as the Ghetto Sisters—the respectful term contrasted sharply with the names used for the women attached to other NewYork gangs of the period—the women were generally viewed as organization members and as girlfriends, whereas many other gangs treated women almost entirely as sexual property.

We talked with them like the high school kids that we were. We were all into this Free Time scene.The guys liked us and we had a lot in common. One guy in particular, a guy known as Benjii was a poet and we hit it off, he showed me some poems that he had written that he had in his pocket. Great stuff about the streets.

We felt comfortable enough to tell these guys we had to get home, but had no idea how to do it. They agreed to show us the way and walk us to the train. But first they had to do something important for our protection. Benjii made them turn their vest jackets inside out, so no one would see their colors on the street and we wouldn't be targets. They walked us to the train, these guys with their jackets turned inside out, and we talked some more and held hands. It was that kind of thing--kid stuff. We had a long walk, and it was winter and we were cold, but happy to have found each other, pleased about having a small bit of time like this when we could just be teenagers and not battling some problem.

When we got to the platform Benjii and I kissed and as I remember it, he read me another poem, and I thought it was really good and I knew we had a lot in common. Maybe he would call me sometime in the future—I gave him my number—give me someone to hang on to in my stupid life. And I went home. It was probably six in the morning when we arrived at the our stop and my friend and I slept on a bench in the waiting area until about 7 when we got up, school would start soon, and the school building was across the street from the train station. We didn't want to be seen by teachers arriving for work.

The next week while I was running some errands for my mother I waited in line at the cash register and grabbed up the Daily News to check it out---there it was on the front page, Benjii on the ground. Shot trying to make peace in the South Bronx. He was the only one killed. This was the kind of photograph that we were used to seeing on the front page in the Seventies of young men on the concrete because there were in gangs and crime was bad in NY. Young men were pretty much killing each other and themselves and later there were the riots and the police became the ones doing the killing and then of course there was Vietnam.

So, the way I remember it is-- I was shocked, but not shocked. I went to school and started to thinking about how much the sidewalks of New York City looked like tombstones and how headlines can sometimes read like epitaphs and how some people will always be trespassers because there will be places where they're not allowed to walk and how first someone had to let you come in before you can go out and I thought about how much pain there is in the world and how someone has to express it and I thought about poets like Benjii who die with their words in their pockets when everyone else has a gun and I wrote my first poem.

Where The Wild Things Are

Let the Rumpus begin. Where the Wild Things Are is set to appear in theaters in 2009 with a new script by Spike Jonze (Adaptation) and Dave Eggers (Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius). Currently in post production the cast includes James Galdolfini, Forest Whitaker, and seven wild creatures that have been created using foam body costumes and CIGI faces. The movie is based on the popular children's picture book by Maurice Sendak published in 1963. The story is all about Max, a little boy who is banished from his room for kicking up a fuss and decides to go live with the imaginary Wild Things. The movie version has been in development since the 1980's and has been tossed from studio to studio. The project eventually landed at Warner Brothers in 2007 when some concern arose at Universal over whether a 338 word book could really be turned into a movie. Here's hoping that the kinks have been ironed out of the little classic, but recent rumors say otherwise. Appears that Warner Brothers is unhappy with the film and Jonze may reshoot.


Another well known children's author and a personal favorite is Shel Siverstein. Silverstein wrote a bunch of kid's books like Where the Sidewalk Ends, Falling Up, and The Light in the Attic, but he was also known for his bohemian lifestyle and more adult fare. A fixture in Key West, Florida where he lived a "Peter Pan" like existence for almost thirty years before his death in 1999, Silverstein was among other things a pundit, a poet, and a songwriter. He won a Grammy in 1970 for the Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue and he penned many other songs including "Cover of the Rolling Stone" and "Sylvia's Mother" for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show and the classic "The Unicorn" for the Irish Rovers. Silverstein got his start as a cartoonist for Playboy and was surprised to find out that his work for Playboy did not interfere with his sucessful career as a children's author.

Where the Sidewalk Ends
by Shel Silverstein


There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

Birth Of The Cool

Everyone knows what cool means. Cool is an aesthetic, an attitude, an amorphous but defining quality that is often difficult to explain, but easily recognizable. The Internet is full of cool places like The Cool Site of the Day and Daily Candy and other search engines that aggregate cool. Cool can also be found on the library shelf and any up and coming Hipster can turn to the pages of the book Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury and explore the beginnings of Fifties modernist influences on the West Coast.



Besides being an aesthetic and an artifact of culture--individuals and music can also embody cool. Nothing is cooler than Jazz and nobody is cooler than Miles Davis. Davis' legendary album Birth Of The Cool was released by Capitol Records in 1957 with music from 3 recording sessions and the album is timeless cool and even inspired a whole school of jazz musicians in California known as the "cool school."

Objects, film, and fashion are also cool. Take Ray Ban Wayfarers, Messenger bags, and Cloverfield. But material cool can translate into consumerism based on a desire to enhance prestige and status by owning certain "cool" possessions. However, this kind of cool is a diminishing equation--affluent affectations are never cool.

People are Freezing in NYC

Looks like it's pretty cold in NY.
People are freezing---

Valentine's Day

Is There a Hell

Pointy-tailed Devils with pitchforks. Naked souls writhing in a lake of fire. The acrid smell of Brimstone. (What is Brimstone anyway?)

These are the familiar and icongraphic images of Hell with which most of us are familiar. But does Hell really exist? Almost all religions believe in a place of future punishment. For some religions the concept includes eternal damnation and an eternity of sado-masochist torture. For others like Buddhists, Hell is just a plateau where the human soul stops off to be cleansed before moving on to another life.

For those of you who believe in God--I know you're out there because you've been sticking The Lighthouse in this sinner's mailbox for years--The big question is whether or not believing in Hell means believing in accountability--Will people really get their props or be dissed for a minutia of earthly misdeeds come Judgement Day? (Just in case, my bro Steve broke that window in 1971 not me.) Answer me this believers; Is your God and maybe my God just some kind of big heavenly Accountant in The Sky recording sins in his/her/ one trillion terrabyte brain?
The notion and nature of Hell has been the subject of debate for religious folk, philosophers, and scholars for eons and eons and I know I'm not making any serious headway here, but it is an interesting topic for a reprobate to contemplate on a Saturday afternoon while avoiding real work.

In Spring '92 the New Agers had their say about Hell when in the Journal of Near-Death Studies P.M.H. Atwater described some very interesting interviews with individuals who had experienced near death. These interviews revealed that for some folks the near death experience wasn't all hearts and flowers and a tunnel of light.

"I had been looking up into the big glass cupola over the operating room. This cupola now began to change. Suddenly it turned a glowing red. I saw twisted faces grimacing as they stared down at me. Overcome by dread I tried to struggle upright and defend myself against these pallid ghosts, who were moving closer to me.I could no longer shut out the frightful truth. Beyond doubt, the faces dominating this fiery world were faces of the damned. I bad a feeling of despair, of being unspeakably alone and abandoned. The sensation of horror was so great it choked me, and I had the impression I was about to suffocate." Curd Jurgens, actor in James Bond films revived after a heart attack.

You can take what you want from that, but I think it was all about the drugs. The concept of Hell in popular culture is a curious one and Hell has turned up in the movies including What Dreams Will Come, Little Nicky, Constantine, and Deconstructing Harry. If you are feel like living dangerously you can put those bombs on your Netflix Q. In comic art Hellboy is a demon conjured up by Nazis in DarkHorse Comics. (Now there's an imagination)

Hell is also a popular bar on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Now didn't I really take the long way around to get to that?

Spock Goes Nude

Leonard Nimoy is one of the latest to add his voice to the female body acceptance movement. Last May he mounted a gallery show that featured photographs of obese women and in November he released a book The Full Body Project that includes photographs of full bodied women like those pictured above.

In an article in the NY Times Nimoy says that the Xtra large nude photographs were his artistic response to the cultural pressure on women in American society to conform to the size 2.

It's true. The size 2 woman is an unrealistic standard. Most women weigh 25% more than the average runway model. BUT STILL not many women are at the top of the curve that Nimmoy photographs. My guess is that this particular aesthetic is truly under appreciated by the public and in my opinion the unimaginative poses that the ex-Vulcan uses for his models seem to do little to change that view. Nimoy is no stranger to the female form and he's been photographing nudes since the early seventies.



His Shekhina series of photographs has its own quirky hook—sensual images of naked women in religious Jewish wear. Nimoy is a man of many talents-- artist, photographer, director, musician, and actor. He is best known for his run on the Star Trek series as the unemotional Vulcan Spock. Vulcanism is something Nimoy shares with Kirstie Alley ( The former Lieutenant Saavik in "Wrath of Khan.") Alley made some money by turning the tables on herslf in Fat Actress a rather distressing one season comedy from Showtime about Hollywood's warped view of women's bodies.

In the series Alley played a 200 lb plus actress trying to get a few yucks by making fun of bulimia. Besides being spokesperson for Jennie Craig and an actress who has long battled a weight problem herslf, Kirstie Alley has another Hollywood curse. She's a Scientologist who made news by donating over 5 million dollars to Scientology last year. In a recently unearthed video from many years ago she appears claiming that she "would be dead" without her man L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology.

Haunted Television

Stories of souls trapped or lost in television's nowhere land permeated the folklore of the Sputnik Era.

In 1953 the NY Times carried an article about a Long Island family with a TV set inhabited by the ghost of a mysterious woman. Jerome Travers and his 3 children reported seeing the woman during Ding Dong School. The Travers family was besieged by reporters, but the image never reappeared.

In the 1960's a Wisconsin woman claimed to have seen a couple arguing on a balcony and the call letters of a defunct radio station on her television screen. The vision was followed by a desperate cry for help. Rosella Rose was not the first person to see the KLEE station card almost twelve year after it was abandoned, and when news of her sighting appeared in the papers it reinforced public perception that television was a netherworld where even the most fleeting earthly message could be trapped.

Reports of electronic transmissions between the real and the spirit world in the early days of television were generated by public anxiety surrounding the new technology. For a viewing public unfamiliar with ideas like electromagnetic waves, static, and cathode ray tubes, a host of suspicions arose including the belief that a television set was capable of transporting individuals to another dimension, holding them captive in some sort of electronic limbo, and if conditions were right, becoming remote viewers for surveillance.

Public reaction today to a ghost in the machine is quite different as evidenced by the reaction of the giggling group in the YOUTube video showing above. Due to constant exposure to the video stream our reactions are now mitigated by both experience with the technology and our sophistication with the meaning and limitations of media.

Happiness

Everyone recognizes that "in the groove" feeling when someone is totally immersed, focused, and fully involved in some activity. In this state time drops away, the world recedes, and we become at one with whatever endeavor or task we are engaged.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist known for his work in the field of creativity called this feeling flow. In his best selling book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a source of great freedom, enjoyment, and fulfillment. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is one of the hallmarks of happiness in life and work.

Until recently happiness has been an unexplored dynamic of human life, but lately some psychologists have begun to map the dimensions of positive human experience. In fact there is a Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pittsburgh where academics are collecting information for happiness studies. Individuals can take a Happiness Inventory ( I'm a 3.2 on a 1-5 scale) and participate in happiness journaling. There is also a six part series about the Science of Happiness available on the BBC News website that includes happiness tips. (Hint: It does help to count your blessings.)

The comic began with a 16 year old student, Kris Wilson and is now the work of 4 authors. Cyanide and Happiness can be hot linked to myspace and other social networking sites which has added to its rocketing success. The sketchy stick-like comic characters cover topics like venereal disease, racism, sexual deviancy, blasphemy, and other nonsense in pathos driven scripts.

New Black Panther Party

The New Black Panther Party takes its name from the original Black Panther Party, a radical black nationalist group active in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the late 1990s, NBPP has become the largest organized anti-Semitic black militant group in America. After the death of former leader Khallid Muhammad in February 2001, Malik Zulu Shabazz took over leadership. Under Shabazz, the NBPP is expanding, forging relationships with violent prison gangs like the Black Guerilla Family, and organizing the party hierarchy to include links to The Nation of Islam.

The Black Separatist Movement has a long history in the US going back to the time of African American abolitionist Martin Delaney, the first black nationalist. Black Separatist groups are against interracial marriage, desegregation, and military service for blacks. They want separate institutions for whites and blacks—or even a separate nation.

The original Black Panther Party, was formed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California in 1966 and was not a separatist organization. The Panthers combined militant black nationalism with Marxism and advocated black empowerment and self-defense, often through confrontation. By 1969, the group had an estimated 5,000 members spread throughout 20 chapters around the country. In the early 1970s, however, the group lost momentum and most of its support due to internal disputes, violent clashes with police and infiltration by law enforcement agencies. Despite the collapse, the group's mystique continued. In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center, singled out three Black Separatist groups in the United States as hate groups based on their “anti-white” and “anti-Semitic” activities: The New Black Panther Party, The Nation of Islam, and the religious cult, United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors.

Drinking Games

Duplessis Orphans

The New Age Travellers

Free Beer

Guess what? I posted this a few weeks back and my Sis is one of the latest winners. Whoopee Do! That means free beer.....glug....glug. One more day to go on the contest so you'd better hurry. Dreams do come true....

Capgras Delusion

The Capras delusion is a rare disorder where a person suffers from the delusion that someone close to them has been replaced by an identical looking imposter. A French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras was the first to discover the disorder and the MH literature has many examples. The syndrome is believed to arise from damage to the fusiform gyrus, the same part of the brain that recognizes faces. The theory is that there is both an unconscious and conscious pathway to recognizing faces and that damage to this area of the brain causes an emotional reaction to a familiar face.

Several movies including the Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers have made good use of this fear inducing delusion to provide a plot full of twisted "what-ifs" for audiences. In most of these plots the replacements or imposters involve aliens or in the case of Stepford Wives some big bosomed robots.

Daydream Believer

I'm all for directed thinking but a rigidly structured brain is of little use to poet and writer types like me or to college students either it seems. In one recent study college students reported that daydreaming took up a third of their day. Now that's an interesting statistic but what does it mean? All this distraction does serve some purpose and scientists theorize that when a mind goes AWOL we may actually be still at work on the subliminal level. While our executive function is taking a lunch break we plan and visualize our future. A something that may be the basis of art or the creative instinct.

Bio Mapping

Eddie Would Go

Zombie Squad

Ran across information on the Zombie Squad while tip-toeing through the Internet looking into the recent resurgence in survivalism in the U.S. The group calls itself a non-stationary cadaver suppression task force, but the pierced and tattooed members of Zombie Squad are actually a posse of latter day survivalists intent on preparing people for the Apocalypse by making it fun. I guess there's no sense in being dark and gloomy about the End Times.

Appears that in the post-9/11 and post Katrina world the guys and gals of ZS have found a mission. They want to educate people about the next big disaster and these survival enthusiasts use Zombies as a metaphor for catastrophe and the slogan "You can never be too prepared" to push the message. No matter what Tom Ridge said about duct tape and plastic bags, The Zombie Squad wants to offer more. They provide training sessions on self reliance and preparedness, survival boot camp, and fund raisers for disaster relief. According to the website Zombie Squads are popping up all around the country and you can expect to see one soon I guess if you live near Heaven's Gate.

I can't think about Zombies without being reminded of Night of the Living Dead one of the original scare-fest movies of the 1960's. Before Tim Burton there was George Romano scaring the pants off kiddies down at the Bijou with this Zombie reanimation film. Made for a pittance ($114,000) Night went on to gross something like 50 million. There are some bone shaking Zombie moments in the movie, but to me knowing that the cast and crew were stuck in rural Pennsylvania for over six months is the scariest. Filmed in black and white the movie had minimal special effects, but the dark ending and scenes of flesh eating Zombies, child murderers and human bonfires were more graphic than had ever been shown before.

In fact some scenes were so objectionable that they had to be reshot before distribution. Even so the impact in the theaters was immediate. The movie was released to a matinee audience of pre-teens and children who didn't know what hit them--actually I was one of them (Sob!) Audiences were not prepared for the graphic fare and Roger Ebert described the reaction in the Chicago-Sun Times:

"The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying."

Seriously--the movie was a bit traumatic at the time. I really didn't like that creepy kid that ate her parents! But seems the barrier-crashing gruesomeness just whet the bloody appetite of a generation of adolescents and opened up a new era in the genre of horror.

The Blue Wall

Salt was headed to the top of the heap, but after being blacklisted he found himself writing commercials and working under his wife's name in television. Years later when he was in his fifties Salt was given film work on the screenplay for Midnight Cowboy which he adapted brilliantly and for which he later won an Academy Award. Salt went on to write several more screenplays, winning an Oscar for Coming Home and a nomination for Serpico. He also taught at the Sundance Institute and he was filmed there for a documentary, Waldo Scott: A Screenwriter's Journey released in 1990 three years after his death. The documentary also received a nod at Oscar time.

Free Beer

Tales from Objectophilia Land
A friend of mine recently acquired a huge stainless steel refrigerator after many years of mooning over them in the Home Depot. When she asked me to stop by her house for a viewing I went over and praised the thing, but honestly I couldn't see what the fuss was about. It was a refrigerator, right? I was a little surprised when she confided in me, "I love this refrigerator so much that I want to have sex with it." From the look in her eye I knew she meant business. I'd heard of "Roomba Love" but this thing looked like an ugly tank. Maybe my friend suffers from Objectophilia, a psychological condition where people fall in love with inanimate objects. Stop biting that pen! That tidbit brings me to Lars and the Real Girl, a comic little movie about a lonely guy who falls in love with a female blow up doll. Sound quirky? Yep, but there's a deeper premise at work here, one that has a certain appeal--"love conquers all." Oddly enough, even though I have a knee jerk reaction to simple and bland movie messages I still bought it. What can I tell you? I guess that sometimes I like my movies sappy, Pappy.

BIZARRO BOOKS

About twenty years ago booksellers in England were encouraged to display their worst sellers in an exhibit called Dud Books. The idea was a popular and financial success, and ever since there has been public interest in bizarre book titles. Here's a few examples that I've encountered in the blogosphere.

11/12/07
UPDATE.
How bizarre is this?
Looks like the NY Times blogged this same post a few days ago on Paper Cuts. Here's a link to a book on the subject from Harper's Collins, Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities.