In Which I Discover Another Very Weird Corner of the Internets…

Back after a long hiatus in which I have been a) attempting to write a novel and b) generally pissing away my life…and what, you ask, brings me back?

Grossness, in a word. Don’t ask me how I found out about this or, ok, ask me how I found it, but don’t ask why I know more about it than I would with just a cursory glance.

I’ve long been fascinated with the very strange communities you find in out-of-the-way corners of the web – the Furries, for example.  About a month ago, I discovered a new one, when the YouTube threw up (literally) a link to the following, extremely gross video:

If you don’t want to watch it, believe me, I’ll understand.  Me, I couldn’t help myself. And then I found there are literally THOUSANDS of videos like this on YouTube.

So I watched some more of them. There are several things I found just absolutely fascinating about these: first, someone decided to take video and put it up on YouTube. But even more interesting is the fact that in most of them (that I’ve seen, anyway), there’s a big crowd of onlookers when the home surgery takes place.  Participants regularly make comments like “this is the best day of my life!” as they push and prod on their friends and loved ones to remove the pestilence from their bodies.  In the video above, there’s a group of KIDS watching all the fun and providing commentary from the peanut gallery.  It’s like these folks are calling up their friends and neighbors to come over and watch them cut open Bob’s cyst.  In some of them, the amateur doctors reference other “famous” YouTube cyst removal videos, referring to “Marco” (the patient in the video above) or with jokes about “make a bigger hole” referring to an unfortunate named Lou, who throughout his surgery exhorts his wife to, you guessed it, “make a bigger hole” so she can “clean out ALL that crap.”

Then there are the comments.  We all know that YouTube comments represent the worst the web has to offer…except, surprisingly, in the case of these home surgery videos.  Comments for these are usually hysterical.  Two that show up on a lot of the videos are “I came” and “how did I end up here?” and “I wish I was the one doing the squeezing.”  Even funnier are the ones where the commenters are upset by poor video quality, or a video not matching or living up to the promise of its title.  Imprecations about the hygiene and skills of the amateur doctors abound.  Marco came in for quite a bit of abuse for being a “nasty redneck” and a lot of folks wanted to kill Lou for his repeated admonishment to “make a bigger hole.”

And it’s not just amateurs getting in on the act: there’s an Indian doctor, Yadav Vikram, who has apparently become somewhat of a celebrity in this very strange subculture.  Viky does a lot of blackhead squeezing accompanied by commentary like “and now you can see like little worms coming out of the pores” (imagine in Indian-accented English for full effect).  Other videos were taken by friends or family members in a clinic or hospital, as real doctors do the honors.  In most of the ones I’ve seen, the intention to “put it up on YouTube” is openly expressed by either the practitioner or one of the onlookers, and they’ll often reference having already watched a lot of the videos already posted.

I started wondering, WTF?  Am I the only one who hasn’t been watching these things already?  And then came the crushing shame and embarrassment of admitting that yes, I am one of the sick fucks who are watching these things NOW.

Some of these things, I shit you not, feature a 70’s porno soundtrack.

Let that sink in for a moment.

…

So why write about it?  For a start, to expose my shame.  Shame’s one thing; hidden shame is a much worse one.  In my defense, watching these things is far from the worst or sickest thing I could have done, though granted I’m not setting the bar real high.

Why did I watch any of these in the first place?  First there’s the freakshow aspect.  You can see how Marco sucked me in to begin with – just the still frame for the video shows a man with a TIT on his BACK.  I’m powerless to resist something like that, which is why I watched – and made it all the way through – the TV presentation of The Man with the 132-lb Scrotum.  How are you NOT going to check into that?  And then, I have to admit that there’s something I find oddly satisfying about seeing a big ugly excrescence meet its end and purging a body of an imperfection – though it makes me feel a little dirty to admit it.

I’m certainly not recommending you watch any of these videos, even (or perhaps especially) the one posted above – but you might enjoy clicking through them to the comments.

Who knew that zit, cyst, and boil-popping enthusiasts were the funniest and most literate YouTube commenters?

Color Commentary

Thanks to a post over at TBogg’s, I somehow got sucked into a discussion that involved Kardashians, and somehow in the course of googling, turned up this awesome video of three grandmas watching, and commenting on, the Kim Kardashian sex tape.  It’s pretty fucking hilarious, as you’ll see:

I was blissfully unaware of Kardashians up until a couple of years ago; after seeing them splashed on the covers of every trash celebrity magazine at the salon every time I went in, I finally asked, “who are the Kardashians and why does anyone care?”  The girl who did my hair, Nula, who hails from Queens, said, “Oh, they’re just a bunch of hoors.”  I thought that was funny as hell, especially when about a year later, Kathy Griffin, commenting on our brain dead media’s coverage of Kim Kardashian’s wedding (“The Kardashians are our version of royalty“), said “I think they’re more like our version of a family of dirty whores.”  On a later Griffin special, she described having to do some event with the Kardashian mom after having described them as “a family of dirty whores,” which just made it funnier.

Of course, having remained blissfully unaware of the Kardashians for so long, I didn’t know that the whole dirty whore thing wasn’t just hyperbole for the sake of humor, because I didn’t know that their whole claim to “fame,” such as it is, spun out of Kim Kardashian making a sex tape with a C-list rapper, which then somehow got “leaked” (my money is on Kim herself or her mother as the leaker).  So, yes, dirty whore it is. 

I’ve never seen the tape itself, of course, which probably makes the grandmas’ blow-by-blow even better.

There are a lot of these three grandma videos – I’ll be posting more.

Before Goatse, There Was The Goat Man

In an effort to move the unpleasantness of the last post further down the page, I’d like to revisit a bizarre childhood memory:  The Goat Man.

People I’ve told about the Goat Man in my adult life have tended to be disbelieving, probably for the simple reason that the Goat Man spent most of his time on the east coast, so they probably never saw him when they were kids.  But he was a regular fixture in Georgia where I grew up; I remember one time, aged 5 or 6, riding down US 41 and my dad saying, “kids, look – it’s the Goat Man!”  Even to a young child, the sight was surreal – a ZZ Top figure in overalls walking alongside a rickety wagon piled with scrap metal, rags, and other detritus, all being pulled by a team of a dozen or more goats, with more goats behind.

I think this photo must have been taken in the late 40’s to mid-50’s, but since the Goat Man pretty much defied progress, the whole tableaux looks about the same as it did when I saw it in the late 60’s – except US 41 in those days had become a very busy road, so the Goat Man kept to the shoulder.

One other time the Goatman had pitched camp on the side of US 41; we begged Dad to stop so we could see the Goat Man, but he refused with some comment about how bad goats smell and something about the Goat Man being crazy.  Dad had long familiarity with the Goat Man, who he said had travelled through regularly since he was a kid.

Those are the only two times I remember seeing the Goat Man; I mostly forgot about him until the late 80’s, when I was browsing through a book about southern legends in a bookstore – and there he was, in a chapter devoted to his life and travels.  I don’t remember all the details or the name of that particular book, but do remember how surprised I was to learn that he had been married and had a child.  According to this account, his wife didn’t like travelling but he found he couldn’t settle down, so she left with the child and he continued on with the goats.  One phrase I remember, in a section where he talked about sleeping (in the non-Biblical sense) with his goats, was how he described cold nights as “two-goat nights”, when he would pull two goats on top of himself when he went to sleep.  Reading that, I had no problem sympathizing with the former Mrs. Goat Man, who probably had no more love for the smell of goat than any of us do.

Charles "Ches" McCartney, a.k.a. The Goat Man

 These days with the fancy internets and all, information about the Goat Man is a bit easier to come by, though much of it, cobbled together from Ches McCartney’s own accounts, seems quite fanciful.  The way he told it, he ran away from his home in Iowa in 1915 at age 14, went to New York City, and married a Spanish knife-thrower a decade his senior.  Then again, given the circumstances of his last travel, maybe it’s not so unbelievable.  In the late 1980’s, he followed the well-trod path of both Jon Lovitz’ “the Liar” character and Pee Wee Herman and went to Los Angeles to woo Morgan Fairchild; once there he was mugged.  He never did get to meet Ms. Fairchild – funds were raised to purchase a plane ticket to bring him “home” to Macon, Georgia, and his travels finally drew to a close.

The “goat years” of his travels for which he was known took place from 1930 – 1969, and the wife who briefly travelled with him was his second.  He claimed to be an ordained Pentecostal (what else?) minister, and apparently preached whenever a crowd showed up at his camp – which solved for me the riddle of why Dad wouldn’t let us stop to see the Goat Man.  From various internet accounts, he also seemed to have some rather novel ideas about other things, like race war, which probably would serve him well in today’s paranoid teabagger crowd.   He mostly travelled the east coast between Maryland and Florida, typically going south in the winter and travelling back north the following spring, so any of you old farts reading this who grew up anywhere in the Southeast during that time period might have seen him. 

Whatever else he may have been, he was an original, an eccentric throwback to the hobos of the Depression, and clearly someone who managed to live life on his own dirty, smelly, goat-ridden terms.

Goatse: A Retrospective

No one ever forgets their first goatse, though some people (I speak here of my co-bloggers) have had the good fortune to have never been goatse’d in the first place.  And I, to my credit, have been good enough not to tell them what goatse is.  Now, thanks to this piece in Gawker, Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History, everyone has a chance to learn what goatse is without being subjected to the indelible image itself. 

My feeling about goatse is, well, it’s gross of course, but in a very very sick and twisted way, much much funnier than a Rickroll.  Goatse was the original Rickroll, and though it has now faded in popularity, remains one of those things that is so horrible to behold that it must be shared, so that others can share in the pain.

Gawker has covered the ground here quite well, so I’ll leave it at that, except I’ll share this image I found quite a while back but never had reason to post.  My thought was that if Animal House was remade and set in the 2000’s, that cake float would instead look something like this:

H/t, or blame, goes to Halloween Jack in comments at alicublog, for bringing the Gawker link to my attention.

What is *wrong with you people out there?

This week’s search terms include…

monkey throwing poop

shadoobee poop

not furry sick bastard

choad

nice pennis

(several other porn search terms, both with and without clothes, often involving toes, that are too vulgar to repeat even on  this site)

(except for this one. I have to repeat this one) bill maher huge penis

rick perry looks like a used car salesman

thomas kinkade not worth it

… and my personal favorite … bacteria bridge club.

Porn (without clothes)

Jaffner, I told my youngest son today that he needed to grow out of his flatulent sense of humor, but I must admit that this blog of yours brings out the puerile in me.

Because this just makes me laugh…

It gets worse, folks — choad is a top winner, toe-sucking sisters are prominent, and giant walking penis makes an appearance. What was the person searching for “sister smells like ashtray” hoping to find? Surely the mom Googling Fraggle Rock birthday cakes was in for a surprise.

Imagine My Parents’ Pride

The following are the top search engine terms that found our site:

Search	Views
perry and corndog	4
rick perry corndog	3
rick perry eating corndog creation of adam	2
rick perry eating a dick	2
perry corndog adam	2
rick perry penis corn dog	2
choad	2

Since I see no reason to break this streak, I give you the following:

Anticipation….an-ti-ci-payay-shun…

I haven’t done any political consulting since way back before the dawn of the Internets, but even then, I would have never allowed any of my candidates to eat a corndog in public.

It’s just too….obvious.