Kishka is a Slavic word, meaning gut or intestine.

Eastern European kishka is a blood sausage made with pig’s blood and barley or buckwheat, with pork intestines used as casing. Ashkenazi kishke, on the other hand, is traditionally made from kosher beef intestinal links stuffed with matzo meal, schmaltz, paprika and other spices.

Via BBvbox by way of RStevens… again!

For no readily apparent reason, the trials and tribs of this venerated dish seem to have inspired a YouTube trend: scores of youngsters (and the occasional strong-armed adult) are shooting homemade music videos (of varying degrees of complexity) for versions of the classic polka tune, “Who Stole the Kishka?” It’s inexplicable, ridiculous, and totally friggin’ adorable. As of this moment, some of the videos are even stealthily linked to (hurr hurr… link… geddit?) on the kishka Wikipedia page.

Enjoy several more renditions after the jump.

“It was a terrible, indescribable thing… a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light.” – H. P. Lovecraft

Many thanks to Paul Komoda, ever the friend of Coilhouse, for pointing out the eerie similarities between this 1952 advertisement for vegetable-flavored salad Jell-O, spotted in a  SocImages post discussing “how tastes are shaped by history” (see also:  “The Social Construction of Prunes“),  and this 1936 cover of Astounding Stories for Lovecraft’s  “At the Mountains of Madness.”

If you wish to further penetrate the Mysteries:

• The Icky Era of Aspic
• Jangelaphobia
• Jello Brings Dozens of Answers
• At the Mountains of Radness

There are some days on which I have absolutely no intention of blogging. My mind dessicated, dry and wrung out like an old, disintegrating sponge, the words are simply no longer there. They have abandoned the empty husk which once housed them and have relocated elsewhere, out of my reach and away from the harsh, disapproving gaze of the blinking cursor on my monitor.

This was to be one such day and, indeed, it was until I came across this piece, entitled Fluid, by Clair Morgan. Something about it stuck with me and I kept coming back to it; staring at it. I thought about it on my way home. It’s hard for me to pinpoint just exactly what draws me to it. I suppose it’s the precision of the entire affair. The way the strawberries are hung in neat rows except for those that perfectly follow the trajectory of the fallen crow. The arrangement of the crow itself caught at the point of impact; and the carefully squashed strawberries that accompany its terminus. All these, working in concert create a startling sense of movement; of a moment frozen perfectly in time.

via who killed bambi?

Bottle caps are a particular source of shame for me, being as they are at the center of a particularly awful incident. Upon a hot summer afternoon a few years ago, in search of a salve for my burning thirst, I walked into my local drugstore and approached the soda counter. The jerk was busy with a young woman and her daughter who, being all of what seemed to be six or seven, was having an issue deciding exactly what to order. Not wishing to wait for my refreshment, I walked over to the cooler and extracted a frosty bottle of pop. Upon returning to the counter I looked over at the woman who, now aware of my presence looked over and, smiling politely, apologized for her offspring’s indecision. Telling her not to worry, I took my newly procured bottle of pop, pressed the neck of the bottle against the edge of the counter and preceded to execute the Donovan’s Reef maneuver.

Why I chose to attempt such a feat is a bit of mystery to me, even now. It may have had something to do with the fact that the woman was fairly attractive and I did it in an attempt to impress her or maybe it was just that the gleam of the counter’s edge caught my eye, calling to me and I was unable to resist its siren call. It may have been both but regardless, as my hand came down to strike that bottle cap it dawned on me that I had never actually done this before and as my hand struck the bottle’s neck I thought that perhaps this was a bad idea and I should have at least practiced this, preferably in the privacy of my own home, before using it in public to impress attractive mothers, and as the bottle shattered and glass broke the surface of my skin I thought that these were all excellent thoughts.

Like cherubs stuffed to their breaking point, Cheng Fei’s figures revel in vice. Their corpulent bodies, drenched in lust and gluttony, roil and roll on the canvas. Faceless, save for collagen plumped pornstar lips, their appendages have ballooned and bloated so that they are nigh unrecognizable. Incapable of seeing, hearing, or smelling they can only imbibe and consume, feeding their own, selfish desires. Some, their skins forced beyond the confines of their elasticity, split asunder, revealing a beautiful and ghastly store of jeweled offal; strings of pearly entrails; the digested result of their hedonism which, even in death, they claw at.

Cute and macabre they manage, mostly, to draw the viewer in while simultaneously repulsing them. They are undeniably repugnant, embodying as they do the most base facets of our society, culture, species, what have you; but they do it with a greeting card sensibility which is, perhaps, what makes them so effective. It’s an interesting dichotomy, regardless of the message.

You can’t go wrong with preserved shit in jars. You just can’t. It’s like a secret handshake. You like shit in jars, you’re on my team. We bond over Mütter mystique. I liked Alien: Resurrection, you hated it, but I know how we both felt about that scene.

And that is why Creature Feature is a site for sore eyes.  I’m sure that there are many more modern, fluid ways to locate images of these types of “creature-infused” wines from Indo-China; for example, I just tried typing “scorpion wine” into Flickr, and got 192 crisp (and probably crispy!) results. Still, there’s something precious and ordered about the musty pre-CSS presentation of Creature Feature that draws me. I like looking at that ancient HTML table, reverently stacked with aged Seahorse Wine, Centipede Wine and Toad Wine, the same way I like drifting away into a Joseph Cornell piece. I love stumbling across pages like this, pages that feel like they’re from another Internet that’s totally gone. We should preserve them.

WHAT?!? (Watch video.) Now, Skittles, through ad agency TBWA\Chiat\Day\NY, has done some truly bizarre candy advertising in the past couple of years. There was Long Beard, Piñata Man, Sour Milk, Sheep Boys, and, one of my all-time favorite commercials, the sadly hilarious Touch. But this spot is—as we say in the fake-wonderful land of ad creativity—trying waaay to hard. In case you missed it (I did), the Caucasian customer’s three reflections are an African-American, a Latino, and an Asian (Filipino, according to the YouTube description). And, the tailor is Thai. The Filipino reflection begins eating Skittles, prompting a complaint from white man, prompting a berating from the tailor, prompting the Filipino to complain “I’m hungry. I’m hungry, I haven’t eaten yet” (according to Adrants’s Angela Nativdad’s translation), prompting more berating, prompting the kicking of the mirror…tagline: “Reflect the rainbow. Taste the rainbow.” So, is this some sort of social advertising by M&M Mars? A rainbow coalition? Sorry, but a candy ad should just make me want to eat the candy, not contemplate hostilities between Southeast Asian countries.

Mario, a magician, and his assistant, Katie, have a 1920s-themed wedding. Kate wears a headband bought on Etsy. Photos by Daria Bishop. More images here.

In Junior High, our Health class had a unit about “basic adult life skills”: how to pay your bills, how your car works & why you really do need health insurance, despite the fact that you think you’re indestructible. One of the final projects we had that quarter was to budget out $30,000 in one of two ways: it was to be either your funds for one year of single living, or your budget to plan a wedding. The teachers assigned this without irony, and kids took it very seriously: it was not a lesson to show us how excessive the average wedding seems when you consider how else the money could be spent, but a lesson in how a proper American wedding was to be done. I was horrified. Years later, the following passage from The Commitment, Dan Savage’s gay-marriage memoir, summed up my perception of The Great American Wedding perfectly. In the scene below, Savage and his boyfriend Terry find themselves at a wedding expo:

Each and every vendor, from the lowliest florist to the highest-end caterer, was selling the fairy-tale princess wedding, the wedding that almost all straight girls grow up fantasizing about. For the women in the room, this was their one and only chance to be the princess in the Disney movie and they were determined not to fuck it up – and “it” refers to the ceremony and the reception, not the choice of a mate, as divorce rates would seem to indicate. (The wedding industry rakes in billions annually at a time when one out of every two marriages ends in divorce. Isn’t it about time some trial lawyers slapped Brides magazine, Vera Wang, and the rest of “big marriage” with a class action lawsuit modeled on the ones filed against big tobacco?)

Back to the boys: As we worked out way up and down the rows of vendors, I caught sight of the same guys again and again. Every time their fiancées or future mothers-in-law looked away, the boys would send out subtle distress signals, like a kidnap victim in a ransom video, blinking messages in Morse code. “Oh my god, what have I done?” As they were dragged from florist to caterer to limo, they looked like pawns. No, it was worse than that: They looked like hostages. No, worse still: they looked like afterthoughts. You don’t need men to have weddings! You need women and their mothers and sisters and their best friends and container ships full of machine-made lace from China and towering ice sculptures and enormous white canvas tents and karaoke machines and stretch Hummer limos and bouquets and chocolate fountains and cover bands and garter belts and veils and trains and engraved champagne glasses and sterling silver cake knives and on and on and on … you need a boy at a wedding like you need a stalk of celery in a Bloody Mary: It looks nice, and it makes things official, but it’s not crucial and probably wouldn’t be missed if you left it out. But a wedding – as currently understood, practiced, and marketed in America – without a bride? Unthinkable.

Clockwise from left: pink-haired bride, casual Arkansas wedding, Lucifire & Dave Tusk’s bright red circus wedding, Han Solo & Leia cake topper

There are, of course, other ways to go, especially this year. More and more people are opting for crafty, creative weddings that either twist around the tired tiara-and-lace tropes, or toss them out altogether. And on the site Offbeat Bride, the Wedding Porn section chronicles the most unusual, inspiring weddings ever to be documented on the web.

These are the weddings of our generation: pixelated 8-bit wedding invites, space helmets, brides as officants, a special category on the blog just for black wedding dresses, a San Francisco bike wedding, and, of course “Wedding! The Musical.” There’s enough love and joy on this site to make you queasy if you’re in a “only stupid people have good relationships” kind of mood, but even then, something on the site will make you smile.  Like these Lego cake toppers, for instance.

This week, let’s take a look at a highly questionable bit of “ambient” advertising, as it’s been dubbed in my buzzword happy industry. La Hacienda, tagline “The Hottest Food In Town,” is a chain of 37 Mexican eateries dotting the heartland of America. They are known for the spiciest, south-of-the-border specialties. To totally ram that point home, they’ve apparently installed mini refrigerators filled with rolls of chilling toilet paper into their restroom stalls. Erm. I guess we could give them brownie points (sorry) for their brutal no-shit honesty? Maybe they should hire attendants to hand out mini-tubes of Preparation H cooling gel, too? What do you think of this south-of-the-waistline stunt? Me, I think it might have put me off of mole poblano sauce for life. (images via: scary ideas)

A stern, last-minute reminder from M.A.D.D. (Muftaks Against Drunk Driving): all ya boozers attending the launch party tonight need to BRING A DESIGNATED DRIVER, or use a taxi service. That goes double for anyone who so much as sips the Electric Lemonade. We don’t want to see your drunk ass behind the wheel of anything besides the gorgeous carousel horse Roxy‘s lending us for the photo booth.

Cheers!