Knarf Presents: That's Just Wrong

By Knarf Black XIV
Seer of the Non-unseeable

On the roundish ball of hydrogen and oxygen that we like to call home, it sometimes seems like nature and mankind are forever locked in a struggle over who can come up with the most uniquely disturbing practices. Nature will lay spider eggs in your brain and send spiny parasites up your urethra, but man counters with the iron maiden and genital mutilation. Whenever either side comes up with something particularly noteworthy, it ends up breaking your brain here at "That's Just Wrong."

#1. The Human Centipede

Despite claims of 100% medical accuracy, we can all thank our lucky stars that the concept of surgically connecting three people via the gastric system remains purely the fictional invention of some clearly diseased minds.

It opens next Friday if anyone is interested. More info at Video Updates.

#2. Tibetan Sky Burials

Tibet is not a great place for "civilized" western style burials. They don't have much in the way of dirt or trees, so good luck getting cremated or dumped the traditional six feet under. Instead you get to go take the fast lane back to nature via the gastric systems of hungry vultures flocking overhead.

While its not too much more than ceremonial window dressing on the ancient practice of "just leaving the guy where he died" or "dumping him outside of town", it makes far more economic and ecological sense than the 'proper' method of pumping the corpse full of embalming fluid and sawdust, then sealing it in an elaborate, expensive box to be leisurely devoured by smelly anaerobic bacteria. (Also, some older boys down the street told me they take out your organs only to put them in ziplock bag and sew them back into your chest.)

#3. Sokushinbutsu

It turns out that leaving you on a mountain to be stripped of your meat by ugly birds is only the second most disturbing method for Buddhists to deal with corpses. At least that way you're already dead when the weirdness begins. The Sokushinbutsu were Buddhist monks in Japan who literally mummified themselves alive; a process that could take up to eight years.

After the monk's decision to mummify himself, he spends the next few years on a nuts & berries version of the Christian Bale Machinist diet. After exercising away all body fat, the monk spends a couple years subsisting on toxic, water-leaching tree sap and nearly nothing else. Barely alive and probably resembling a holy man shaped pile of jerky, he would at last be locked in a cave until expiring. In the unlikely scenario that everything went exactly according to plan, the cave would be unsealed years later to reveal a perfectly preserved "living" mummy. (The consolation prize was becoming a boring old regular corpse.)

In the immortal words of Morgan Freeman, "Get busy living, or get busy dying." Those monks got really fucking busy dying. They put more effort into the simple act of killing themselves than most people put into raising children or starting record executive careers.

More info at Pink Tentacle. (Scroll down past the freakshow mummies.)

That's just wrong.