That’s the caption for this photo I found someplace. It originally appeared at National Geographic. It’s metal, because it’s creepy as shit. Also, I would not stand under one of those trees, because fuck spiders. I hate ‘em.

And that’s how we begin this milestone 50th installment of THAT’S METAL!, a series in which we collect images, videos, and news items that we think are metal, even though they’re not music. I have five more items in this installment, many of which were suggested by NCS readers.

ITEM ONE

This next item came our way via Ben C., proprietor of the newly created Church of the Riff blog. In some countries, you show disrespect to pompous dicks blabbing away at press conferences by throwing shoes at them. Apparently, in Russia you buzz them with flying dildos.

This is funnier than a speech by Rick Santorum, which is saying something, but it seems that not everyone at this press conference was amused. Wait ’til you see the really intemperate response of the dude who swats the flying penis machine from the sky. Party-pooper!

ITEM TWO

Ben C. sent us this next item, too. The following photo is of Maria Jose Cristerna, better known as “La Mujer Vampiro” (Female Vampire), posing during the Venezuela Tattoo Expo in Caracas on January 27, 2012. She has prosthetic fangs and platinum implants in her forehead, and 98 percent of her body is covered in tattoos. Sexy.

Of course, Ms. Cristerna’s day job is practicing law. That’s right, she’s an attorney. I bet it’s an office practice of some kind, like writing wills, because I can’t see her getting many clients if she depends on court appearances. I’d still listen to her (at least when not doubled over in sympathetic pain), but most judges and juries might not. That’s just a wild guess, of course.

Here’s a brief video interview she did at the the Caracas tattoo expo, because you can’t see the teeth in that photo, and the teeth really complete the whole package:

 ITEM THREE

I found this video via TYWKIWDBI under the headline “Your Tax Money At Work”. It was filmed on January 20, 2012, south of Santa Cruz, California. As you will see, it’s metal — literally. I had several thoughts as I watched this.

First, I decided to poke around and find out what a tank costs. I don’t know for sure what kind of tanks were on this train, but the main U.S. battle tank is called the M-1, and according to The Font of All Human Knowledge, it costs $5 million per copy. And there were A LOT OF COPIES on this train. I didn’t make an actual count, because, y’know, I’m  a busy man. So I just made a rough mental estimate, and the total I came up with is a FUCKLOAD of money (that’s the standard fuckload, not the metric fuckload).

Second, seems like you might never have to use these things in actual combat, at least with enemies whose countries are mostly flat and not covered in sand that could gum up the gears. People who live in non-mountainous and non-sandy countries who try to fuck with the good ol’ U.S. of A., we just send them this video and ask them to rethink things.

Third, these babies aren’t painted in desert camouflage colors. Last I checked, we weren’t currently at war in any green places. So why do we have these, where were they going, and just generally, what the fuck?  Also, best YouTube comment: “I liked the part where a tank passed by.”

ITEM FOUR

Black Shuck sent me a link for this next video. It shows a modified record player that plays cross-sections of wood from a tree using an optical camera instead of a record needle. It reads the growth rings in the wood and, with help from a computer, translates them into a kind of music. The project is called Years and was developed by a German named Bartholomäus Traubeck.

So, yes, this is a bit of a cheat on the theme of this series, since it’s music. But I had to use this, because playing wood is definitely metal. Part of this actually sorta sounds metal, too.

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

ITEM FIVE

Our final item is delivered in remembrance of Super Bowl Sunday, which is today of course. I’m not a fan of either the Giants or the Patriots. If there were some way they could both lose, I’d be happier. But I’ll be watching the game anyway, at least for as long as it’s a good contest, mainly so I can see the commercials. And since the commercials will probably be the best thing about the game from my perspective, I’m closing out this post not with football but with . . . a commercial!

I don’t watch much TV, but somehow I’ve seen this commercial for DirectTV three or four times over the last couple of weeks, and it cracks me up each time. Maybe I shouldn’t, since it’s kind of making punks and metalheads out to be losers and undesirables, but on the other hand it’s obviously not serious. And I do think it’s metal.

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And that’s it for this edition of THAT’S METAL!

Enjoy the rest of your fucking day.

What a long time it’s been since the last post in this series — more than a month. And I’ve collected so many items to choose from — many of them from the NCS faithful. One of them I’ve been sitting on for a really long time, because it involves a massive amount of pus. I’m still not sure I can bring myself to use it, since I’m pretty sure it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I think I’ll just start going with this post and see how I feel when I get to the end.

What this series is about, for newcomers: Some things are metal even though they’re not music — photos, art, videos, reports of human behavior. Some things are metal because they’re fuckin amazing. Some things are metal because they’re brutal. And some things are metal because they’re unbelievably ridiculous — just like your average metalhead (me included). In these posts, I pick out things I see that I think are metal, for one or more of these reasons. Today, I’ve got six items for your entertainment.

ITEM ONE

The first item is right up there at the top of this post, and it came our way from my friend Quigs. I poked around the interhole to see if I could find more about this awesome piece of construction. It appears to have been created by a dude in Bangkok from recycled auto and bicycle parts. More details about it can be found here. And a couple more pics of this thing are right after the jump.

Seriously, how badass would it be to ride down the road on an Alien chopper like this? For extra coolness, I’d want the ability to hit a switch and have the xenomorph’s inner mouth shoot out of jaws like it does in the movies in order to scare the living fuck out of anyone who gets too close.

ITEM TWO

We’ve proven time and time again in this series that nature is fucking weird and often disgusting, in addition to being beautiful and amazing. This next item falls into the “weird and disgusting” kind of natural-world metalness, and was brought to our attention by NCS reader Ben C. Meet Ampulex compressa, also known as the emerald cockroach wasp or the jewel wasp:

The xenomorph creature in the Aliens movies is a wicked creation, but this real-world creature has eerily similar reproductive practices. According to this article, the wasp uses roaches as hosts for its young. It slips a stinger directly into the roach’s brain and injects a venom that doesn’t kill or paralyze the roach, but disables its “escape reflex”. The wasp then directs the movement of the roach like a dog on a leash, using the roach’s antenna to lead it.

The wasp takes the roach into its burrow and lays an egg on the roach. The egg hatches, a larva emerges, and the wasp larva eats a hole into the living roach. It goes inside and grows by devouring the organs of its host for 8 days. It then emerges fully grown.

Disgusting?  Yes.  Metal?  Fuck yes, in a brutal way.  And don’t tell me you don’t want to see this happen, because I know you do.

I’m really glad this fucker didn’t evolve to reach the size of a German Shepherd, or one of those Alien xenomorphs, aren’t you?

ITEM THREE

After that piece of utter foulness, I think we need one of those “beautiful and amazing” pieces of natural-world metalness. Phro sent me this one. I was somewhat fearful that there would be an unexpected tentacle before this clip ended, but no.

This video was taken by the Russian and American crew of the International Space Station on December 29, 2011, as the station passed over Central Africa to the South Indian Ocean. The flashing lights you’ll see are lightening flashes in local storms lower in the atmosphere. Be sure to notice as the Milky Way rises from below the horizon. The pass ends as the sun rises over the ocean.

Motherfucking wondrous. To see that in HD, visit this location.

ITEM FOUR

It’s exactly two weeks until Super Bowl XLVI, and I’m already getting excited. Not because I care about the game — I don’t really give a fuck about any of the four teams who are still in the playoffs. No, I’m excited because of the Super Bowl commercials!

Volkswagen has already released a teaser for their commercial. I don’t think I’ve seen a dog choir perform quite this well before. The melody sounds vaguely familiar, too. Definitely not a metal song though. It will come to me eventually.

(Credit to TYWKIWDBI for this find, and for the intro to the vid.)

ITEM FIVE

So let’s see now, we haven’t yet featured anything ridiculous yet, so let’s take care of that right away. What makes this next video metal isn’t the music, (a) because THAT’S METAL! is a series about things that aren’t music, and (b) because the music in this video is fucking embarrassing. No, what makes this video metal are the subtitles. Funny. As. Shit.

(Credit to The Presurfer for this find.)

ITEM SIX

Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? For our last item, let’s stay with the utterly ridiculous — combined with the brutal. This is a montage of the Best Fails of 2011. I intended to post this around the end of last year, but I fucked up and forgot to do it. So I’m doin’ it now. Thanks to long-time reader deaths_embrace for this one.

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So, that wraps up this installment of THAT’s METAL!  As always, enjoy the rest of your fucking day.

P.S. Yeah, I wimped out on the pus thing. I just couldn’t do it. Toooooo fuckin’ gross. deaths_embrace sent me the link for this motherfucker, too. If you haven’t eaten recently and you don’t plan to eat in the near future (like, before March), you could go watch this epic cyst extraction on your own and come tell us what you thought.  Or you could just forget all about this, which would be the prudent course of action. The fact that this thing has 11.7 million YouTube views means nothing, believe me. Did I mention that this was disgusting?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEeMJgV75nQ

This will be our last THAT’S METAL! post of 2011, unless I decide to do another one, in which case this will be the penultimate one.  It really, probably, will be the last one.  I mainly just wanted to use “penultimate” in a sentence. I don’t see why Andy Synn should be the only person at NCS who uses words like this.

“Penultimate” is a cool-sounding word, although it doesn’t really look or sound anything like what it means. In that respect, it’s like “mantissa”. Mantissa sounds like some kind of giant centipede-like monster with big mouth pincers that it uses to tear and consume human flesh. Instead, it means “an addition of little importance”. “Dragoman” is another example. It sounds like a name or the bass-player in a vicious black metal band, or maybe a Bulgarian MMA star. But it simply means “an interpreter or guide”.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, THAT’S METAL! These are the posts where we collect news items, images, or videos that we think are metal, even though they don’t have anything to do with music. Today, we’ve got four items, and I will act as your dragoman as we work our way through them, providing my own mantissas as we go.

ITEM ONE

Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist, though he has lived in New York since 1995. His medium of choice is gunpowder. He started off using gunpowder in drawings, and then moved on to the creation of “explosion events”. If you watched the waaay over-the-top opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, then you’ve seen his work. His most recent explosion event was a daytime spectacular on December 5 called “Black Ceremony” at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. It’s been described as the largest daytime fireworks display ever.

So you can imagine already why I thought this was metal. An “explosion event” called “Black Ceremony”? Is there any fuckin doubt?

Now if you think that was metal, watch this next clip. It’s an excerpt from an hour-long PBS special on Cai Guo-Qiang. The first few minutes of the excerpt give a fascinating example of how the artist uses gunpowder to make “drawings”. And hang in there til you see his installation of tigers and arrows and the airplane made from sharp objects confiscated at a Brazilian airport — it’s all about “the aesthetic of pain”. Amazing shit. You can see the whole PBS program here.

Watch Power on PBS. See more from ART:21.

(Credits: I found the video of the “Black Ceremony” display on Presurfer, and then started hunting around for more info about Cai Guo-Qiang from there.)

ITEM TWO

The next item is about sprites and elves. I’m not talking about Dungeons and Dragons or Middle Earth. I’m talking about things that happen 50-90 km above the Earth’s surface, the kind of thing that, once upon a time, would have gotten airline pilots fired if they started talking about what they’d seen.

“Sprites” and “elves” are the names for unusual kinds of lightening discharges that occur high in the atmosphere. They happen extremely quickly, they’re very bright, and they look sort of like fireworks (which is why I thought this would make a nice pairing with Item One). In the language of scientists who study them, “sprites” are the parts of the discharge that resemble jellyfish and travel downwards after starting out as a ball shape. “Elves” are the halos that create eerie visual effects.

The following video was filmed by a research team funded by the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation. They equipped two jets flying over parts of the southwestern U.S. this past summer with cameras, and they presented the results about two weeks ago at the American Geophysical Union Conference. There’s more info about this to be found HERE. The following clip from the film shot by the Japanese researchers is very short.  The one that comes after it is longer. Nature is fucken weird.

(Credit goes to Phro for tipping me to these videos.)

ITEM THREE

This isn’t artwork. This is more Nature, run amok. This is the x-ray of a two-headed albino Honduran milk snake that was born on Halloween this year (of course) in Central Florida.

It had its first real meal during Thanksgiving week. Unfortunately, that blessed event was captured on film. Yeah, this is metal, but watching this video made me a little sick in my stomach. So, of course I’m sharing it with you.

The voiceover at the end kinda creeped me out. People who love snakes are weird. Except if you love snakes, in which case I wasn’t talking about you, because you’re reading what I write, which makes you a certifiable genius.

I wonder if this is what it’s like when Dino Cazares tucks into a big feed.

(Credit to TYWKIWDBI for this one.)

ITEM FOUR

By the way, do you know what that last item was?  That was the penultimate item in this post.

For the final one, I have some artwork by an artist named Travis Louie. These are some of many paintings he did in a series featuring people and their unusual pets. You can find out more about what gave him the idea, plus see more of his demented creations, at this location. I do think this shit is metal, though I’ll be damned if I can explain why. Also, the penultimate painting below is called “Emily and Her Troll Head”. Just thought I’d mention that.

(Thanks to TYWKIWDBI for this one, too.)

What do you do when you see shit that makes you think, “Fuck, that’s metal!”, even though it’s not music? What I do is save it up and then periodically throw it your way in this series, which focuses mainly on videos, photos, and news items.

This is an all-video installment of THAT’S METAL! It’s going to be a slow build from the first one to the last one. I don’t really have a choice, because the last one is so fucking ridiculous that everything else would seem pretty meh by comparison if I ran it first. So, here’s what lies ahead: a very weird cloud phenomenon; a flamboyant cuttlefish; yet another emissary of Cthulhu entering our dimension; brick carrying like you won’t believe; and that last one . . . which is just lights-out nuts.

ITEM ONE

It’s no secret: I like clouds. Cumulonimbus clouds are those big, white fluffy ones that look like giant cotton balls. They can store up huge amounts of electric energy, which sometimes results in lightning strikes. Those clouds also contain ice crystals that themselves can hold static electric charges. The ice crystals, particularly needle-shaped crystal, tend to become aligned with the electric fields within the clouds.

When something happens to the field, such as a lightning discharge, the field re-forms and the crystals realign. When the sun is reflecting off a sheet of ice crystals in a cloud when they realign, the change is visible — and it’s fucking metal to see it happen, which is what’s shown on the first video after the jump.

Before you watch this video (filmed in Singapore), take a look at this graphic.  It will show you where to look when the video begins:

(Credit for Item One goes to the Discover Magazine site, via Presurfer.)

ITEM TWO

Metasepia pfefferi, also known as Pfeffer’s Flamboyant Cuttlefish, is a species of cuttlefish occurring in tropical Indo-Pacific waters off northern Australia, southern New Guinea, as well as numerous islands of the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. Despite the name, it’s not a fish. It’s a mollusc, and it’s related to the octopus; they’re both part of the class Cephalopoda.

As you’re about to see, there’s a reason why this species of cuttlefish is called “flamboyant”. Nature is very fucking weird. It can also be very fucking metal.

(via Presurfer again.)

ITEM THREE

Well now, since we’re in the general vicinity of octopuses, let’s pay a visit to our tentacled friends — before they pay a visit to us. You may think they won’t, since you live on land and they live in the water. I hate to break it to you: That won’t stop them. Maybe when they come en masse, they’ll be bringing crab with them, like this one. We can only hope. Also, I move like this when I have had too much tequila. Except when that happens, I don’t look as metal as this emissary of Cthulhu.

By the way, if you find the running monologues of curious three-year olds adorable, then you’ll want to listen closely to the sound portion of this video. However, if you’re like me, and would find it preferable to hear the sounds made by three-year olds while their eyes are being gouged out with spoons, then you’ll want to mute this.

ITEM FOUR

Over many millennia, human beings have made and carried bricks. Some undoubtedly have carried them on their heads. The more you can carry, the fewer trips you have to make to get bricks from A to B. I get that. But this dude in Khulna, Bangladesh has taken that principle to new extremes. This is really fucking amazing. Just when you think he couldn’t possibly get more up there, he does.

(via TYWKIWDBI)

ITEM FIVE

That last video is a tough one to top, so to speak. But have no fear, this next one leaves it in the dust.

I suppose that once “reality”-based talent shows became booming successes on TV around the world, people inevitably would begin to really push the envelope. But short of on-screen death or dismemberment, I’m having a hard time imagining how anyone is going to out-do The Warriors of Goja. The shit they pulled off on a televised Indian talent show has to be seen to be believed; it gets more and more extreme as the video progresses.

I love the faces of the judges as they watch this. My mouth was open, too. Definitely metal.

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Welp, that’s a wrap. Enjoy the rest of your fucking day.

Here we go again — the latest installment of this series in which we feature videos, images, and news items that we think are metal, even though they’re not music. I have five items for you today. They involve sharks in a trance, humans in a slingshot, ESPNS, a blue devil horse — and a trippy bonus item.

ITEM ONE

Cristina Zenato is an Italian scuba diver who has mastered an unusual (and certifiably insane) technique: she can put sharks into a trance. According to this article, she induces the “tonic” state in sharks by rubbing the “Ampullae of Lorenzini” — which is the name of hundreds of jelly-filled pores around the shark’s nose and mouth. Those pores act as electroreceptors that detect prey moving in the electromagnetic field around the shark – but also, for some reason rubbing them produces that “tonic” state.

A “tonic” state is a natural state of paralysis in sharks that lasts for about 15 minutes. It can happen when they’re turned upside down. It also appears to happen when you rub their Ampullae of Lorenzini. Of course, to rub those pours, you’ve got to put your hand really close to the part of the shark that can bite off your whole fucking arm.

Cristina Zenato isn’t quite as nuts as it might seem at first. Although she’s been working with sharks for more than 15 years, she still wears a chain link suit in case one of the animals is tempted to make a meal from her body parts. But watching what she does is still awe-inspiring. (more after the jump . . .)

Sharks are metal, and fucking with sharks like Cristina Zenato does is, I dunno, über-metal? Here’s a fuck-tastic video, beautifully filmed and edited by Joe Romeiro, showing Cristina Zenato doing her thing. The music isn’t metal, but it’s still damned good. The song is a Mexican standard called “Malagueña Salerosa”, and here it’s performed by a band based in Austin, Texas, called Chingon (which includes film director Robert Rodriguez on guitar). Chingon’s version of the song also appeared in the movie Kill Bill 2.

Credit to TYWKIWDBI for this feature.

ITEM TWO

I guess human slingshot videos have been around the Tube of You for years, but I saw my first one only a few days ago because it appeared on the wall of one of my Book of Face friends. I looked at a couple more, but this one looks like it’s professionally filmed and definitely has the best visuals. It also has a soundtrack (a song called “Head In the Air” by Micah Anderson), but I wish I had the energy to replace it with something metal. You can always turn the sound down.

Anyway, this looks pretty fuckin’ metal to me. I’d do this, except with my luck I’d be impaled on one of those distant trees.

I’d also want to wear an adult diaper before doing that slingshot thing.

ITEM THREE

Look behind you dude!

(Thanks to Trollfiend for this penile contribution. It made him think of Phro. Made me think of Phro, too.)

ITEM FOUR

“Blue Mustang” is the name of a sculpture installed just south of the Denver International Airport. It’s a statue of a wild, cobalt blue horse, with electric red eyes, and it’s . . . uh . . . anatomically correct. Rearing 32 feet high, it demands the attention of every traveler driving into the Denver International Airport. I’ve been through that airport since the sculpture was installed, but only to change planes, so I haven’t seen it myself. But the photos I’ve seen are pretty striking. Like this one:

There’s quite a story behind the sculpture, too. The City of Denver originally commissioned it from New Mexico artist Luis Jimenez in 1993, two years before the airport opened. In 2006, Jimenez was killed when a section of the unfinished horse fell from a hoist at his Hondo, New Mexico, studio. Jimenez’s sons, Adan and Orion, completed the sculpture, and it was installed Feb. 11, 2008.

The fact that the sculpture killed the artist, plus the appearance of the thing, have generated continuing controversy in Denver. Some people think it’s cursed, and others are of the opinion that maybe this isn’t what travelers really want to be seeing right before taking an airplane flight. There’s some agitation to have the sculpture removed, but I hope that movement fails, because this sculpture is Fucking. Metal.

Of course, it has been given lots of nicknames. “Bluecifer” is the one I like best.

ITEM FIVE

And now here’s a bonus item. I saw the following animated video this morning on the Kuriositas blog. It seemed fitting to put it right here, because it begins and ends with a running horse.

It’s a helluva piece of pencil animation, filled with anime references and appearances of all sorts of other images from “pop culture”, and it gets progressively more trippy as it moves along. The music is by Fatboy Slim. The video is called PencilHead.

Enjoy the rest of your fucking day.

Sheesh, it’s been almost a solid month since I found time for one of these posts. That’s what I call falling down on the job! In an effort to make up for all the slacking off, I’ve rounded up five items that caught my eye. For any new readers who joined us in the last month, this series of posts collects videos, news items, and/or photos that I think are metal, even though they’re not music. All of today’s items are visual in nature, and credit goes to the incomparable TYWKIWDBI blog for all of them. Ready, set, go!

ITEM ONE

The first item is the image you see at the top of this post. Look at the squares labeled A and B. They are exactly the same color. No shit. The proof of that can be seen in the image to the right, in which cross-bars have been laid over the original image. You can see how the bars blend equally with the two squares. I see this and I still don’t quite believe it, and I don’t know the explanation for why my eyes see the squares as having different colors. As illusions go, I think it’s metal.

If you’re still skeptical, there’s video of this same illusion right after the jump. I suppose the highly skeptical among you might think there’s some kind of trickery going on in the video, but the creator insists there isn’t.

Here’s another similar illusion. If you think the two squares are different colors, think again. Cover the area between the two gray areas with your finger and take a second look.

ITEM TWO

Have you ever heard of a “stick bomb”? Well, before yesterday I never had. When I saw a stick bomb display for the first time, I had no fucking idea what was happening or the explanation for what I was seeing, but the concept turns out to be ingeniously simple. It’s all about kinetic energy. I think this kind of thing is pretty goddamned metal — inventions that serve no purpose other than to mystify and entertain, and which turn out to be surprisingly simple to create.

In the next video, you’ll see one example of a stick bomb going off, and in the next video after that you’ll see how to make them, and an explanation of how they work. The second video is almost as entertaining as the first one, because the narrator has got a good (dry) sense of humor.

ITEM THREE

Most people have to work for a living, or one day they will. People who are lucky enjoy the work they do, and the rest just do the job because they have to. I admire people who are good at what they do, whether they like it or not and almost regardless of what the job requires. There are exceptions, like torturers or hedge fund managers, for example. But in general, people who are really good at their work are fuckin’ metal in my eyes.

Take this Iranian man in the video below as an example. I now have a whole new perspective on pouring tea.

ITEM FOUR

I’ve never had my wrists bound by a zip-tie or seen anyone bound by a zip-tie in person. I’ve seen police use zip-ties to bind the wrists of suspected criminals on TV and in movies. It looks like getting out of them without cutting through them with something sharp would be pretty fuckin difficult. Now I’m not so sure. The video below makes it look easy, if you employ the right technique. By the way, this is not an instructional video for criminals. It’s part of a batch of instructional materials to help people save themselves if malefactors invade their homes, try to kidnap them, etc. I thought it was pretty metal.

There’s more detail and more videos about how to get out of zip ties and other restraints at this location.

ITEM FIVE

At one point in human history, on the plains of Africa and probably elsewhere, people survived by running their prey into the ground, running other animals to the point when the prey reached a state of exhaustion and collapse before the hunters did. It was the original form of marathon running, where the goal was survival instead of competition or voluntarily meeting a challenge you set for yourself. Experts in evolution trace many aspects of the human organism to the physical adaptations necessary to make this practice work. It’s called “persistence hunting.”

Today, only one culture remains on Earth in which persistence hunting is still practiced as part of the regular routine of life — a tribe in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa known as the San People (also called “bushmen”). The San are considered to be one of the oldest cultures on Earth — maybe the oldest. In the next video, and the last one in this post, David Attenborough narrates a 7-minute segment from the BBC’s Life of Mammals series.  It documents a man chasing a kudu for 8 hours until the animal collapses from exhaustion.

It’s a little bit cheesy, maybe a little bit overly dramatized, but it’s also quite powerful. We’re lucky we no longer have to chase our food into the dust in order to survive. Still, there’s something profound about the respect shown by the hunter for the hunted, and by the end of the chase, there’s almost a kind of communion that has developed, though it will end in death.

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That’s it for this installment of THAT’S METAL!. If you’ve got any thoughts about the items in this post, leave us a comment, and if you’ve got any ideas for the next installment, e-mail me: islander@nocleansinging.com.

Bacon strips, bitches. Authentic camping experience, complete with acetylene campfire starter and urine streams to bring the heat down to proper marshmallow-roasting temperature. Candied bacon strips and Jack Daniels and drizzling chocolate and layering the shit three and four across. And of course stuffing your fucken face with it when it’s all done. That’s metal. That’s all I got to say about this shit.

Man, time does fly. More than six weeks have passed since the last installment of this series. With so many days drifting by like tumbleweeds on the prairie, I’ve accumulated lots of potential items, including recommendations from our readers. I’ll have to save some of them for the future or this post would go on and on and on, and I know my metalheads, so the last thing I wanna do is overtax your limited attention spans.

What we do in this series is feature images, videos, occurrences, and other items that we think are metal, even though they’re not music. Today, we’re going to start off with a couple of photos and then go from there.

ITEM ONE

You’re looking at Item One at the top of this post. You get one guess what that is. If you guessed the cover art for the next Graveworm album, you’re close, but no cigar.  If you guessed an image of a hydrothermal worm made with a scanning electron microscope, congratulations. These worms are deep-sea creatures and live near hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor. They are very small — almost as small as a bacterium. This photo magnifies the worm 525 times. The true width of the field captured in this photo is actually 568/1000 of a millimeter.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really fuckin’ glad these things aren’t the size of sharks, or pro football linemen. And as far as I’m concerned, they can stay down on the ocean floor. The original of this image is here. Thanks to our buddy Ullr for the tip on this photo. Our remaining items are after the jump.

ITEM TWO

Yep, that photo up there is our second item. You don’t often see a moose in a tree, unless of course you’re totally shit-faced. In this case, it was the moose that was totally shit-faced. A fellow named Per Johansson returned from work to his home in Saro just south of Gothenburg, Sweden, and found a moose lodged in one of his neighbor’s trees. According to Johansson, “It must have been drunk after eating fermented apples and as it was reaching out for more fruit it must have slipped and fallen into the tree.”

Johansson called the local fire and rescue department, which succeeded in getting the moose out of the tree — whereupon it collapsed on the ground and went to sleep. Swedes being Swedes, they left him there to sleep it off. It was still sleeping the next morning.

According to a spokesman for the Gothenburg Fire and Rescue Department, “Moose are attracted by the apple trees, and in the autumn when the apples have fallen off the trees we normally have at least one of these cases of intoxication.” Huh. And I thought Gothenburg was just populated by drunken death metal bands. Drunk moose in trees: that’s metal! (The original story is here; thanks to ElvisShotJFK for the tip on this one.)

ITEM THREE

Since we’re already in Sweden, we might as well stay there for this next item. This is a story I saw in the online edition of the Seattle Times. When you see the headline, you’ll understand why I stopped and read the story.

Swedish man caught trying to split atoms at home

Associated Press
August 3, 2011

STOCKHOLM —

A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen said Wednesday he was only doing it as a hobby.

Richard Handl told The Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material.

The 31-year-old Handl said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.

Only later did he realize it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.

This is fucked up on so many levels I don’t know where to start. I mean, I’ve had meltdowns on my stove before, but not that kind of meltdown. And really, how did he think he was going to split atoms in the kitchen? Puree the  radioactive elements really fast in a blender? And how do you not have a clue that possession of uranium in your home could be illegal? And maybe most perplexing of all, where the fuck did he get the uranium?

I guess the police arrested him because he didn’t have a fission license. He can probably kiss his damage deposit goodbye. (Credit to Seattle Times readers for those choice comments.) Trying to split atoms on your stove: That’s fucken metal!

ITEM FOUR

This next item comes to us from the blog of Dr. John Marshall, a mathematical biologist working at the California Institute of Technology, which featured the following question and answer (I’m excerpting the answer — for the whole thing, go here):

Q:  Your recent article regarding sex at the speed of light has caused me great concern, for if my boyfriend were to ejaculate whilst thrusting into me at the speed of light, then would not his semen be travelling faster than the speed of light? Could this superluminal semen travel back in time to fertilise me before he put on his condom? And does this thought experiment disprove the theory of relativity?
Anna

A:  The average speed of ejaculation has been measured to be approximately 45 km/hr (just below the allowable speed limit in most suburban areas). This is the average speed of the ejected semen relative to the ejaculatory penis, and can be increased by training the Kegel muscles (by pretending to withhold your urine). Anyway, according to Galilean relativity, if one is to ejaculate whilst thrusting inwards at the speed of light, then the relative speed of their ejaculatory semen will be equal to the sum of the two speeds, namely the speed of light plus 45 km/hr. In other words, Galilean relativity says that the semen will be travelling faster than the speed of light. Einstein’s special theory of relativity showed this to be impossible.

By assuming that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames, Einstein showed the speed of light to be the cosmic speed limit. Actually, only massless particles can reach this limit, because an infinite amount of energy is needed to accelerate a massive object (and a penis is a massive object) up to the speed of light. It is possible to persist with the calculations at the speed of light, but this invariably leads to paradoxes, such as a penis having no apparent length, and therefore semen travelling through a penis with no apparent length. According to the semen, time stops, and space contracts down to two dimensions. Obviously, it is more realistic to consider the scenario of ejaculation at speeds arbitrarily close to the speed of light.

At such speeds, the relativistic velocity addition formula applies. Suppose your boyfriend has been training his Kegel muscles and he can achieve a speed of ejaculation of 2% the speed of light. Then, if he is to ejaculate while thrusting inwards at 99% the speed of light, his semen will be travelling not at 101% the speed of light as common sense would suggest, but rather at 99.04% the speed of light. This relativistic semen will then be decelerated to about 94.2% the speed of light as it escapes the gravitational pull of the penis.

An average ejaculation produces approximately two teaspoons of semen (this amount decreases with age, and increases with time since last ejaculation). Anyway, two teaspoons of semen travelling at 94.2% the speed of light will create enormous air resistance, which will heat up the semen in the same fashion as a spaceship re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The semen will burst into flames almost instantaneously, creating deafening sonic booms in its wake.

Meanwhile, two teaspoons of flaming semen will generate enormous impact forces, sufficient to rip straight through the structural integrity of an extra-strength Durex condom. But you will have much greater concerns than an unwanted pregnancy. The relativistic flaming semen will pierce a small hole straight through your lower torso, just like a speeding bullet, only incinerating the surrounding tissue as it passes through. Relativistic ejaculation brings true meaning to the question, “Is that your gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Well it’s not a gun baby… it’s a rocket launcher!

Physics thought problems involving semen traveling at near relativistic speeds: Now that’s metal! (Thanks to Phro — of course — for pointing me to this article.) Pass me another fermented apple, will you?

ITEM FIVE

Nuke this from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

So, we’re kind of ending where we began. Nature is scary as shit, and we’re mighty fuckin’ lucky that some things in nature are . . . small. Like the Devil’s Flower Mantis (a/k/a Idolomantis Diabolica — which could easily be 1349′s next album title). Sheee. It. This is one metal motherfucker. Don’t let these get into the growth hormones. Or any fermented apples. If you think of any clever captions for this, drop ‘em in the Comments.

(Credit to TYWKIWDBI for this video.)

ITEM SIX

Phro sent me this next video. It’s not metal. What’s metal is what the video doesn’t show. Yeah, lorises look all “aww, cute!” when you’re brushing them, but I’m here to tell you that if you’re late with their grubs, they go medieval on your ass in a heartbeat.

Well, that’s it for this edition of THAT’S METAL!. I’m gonna grab me a couple more fermented apples and listen to this Graveworm track (they do have a new album coming out on October 21 on Nuclear Blast, but it doesn’t have a hydrothermal worm on the cover). Enjoy the rest of your fucking day.

In Seattle, the city near the metallic island that NCS calls home, there is a summer tradition called Seafair, which is just about to begin. It’s been going on since the 1950s. It involves things like hydroplane racing on Lake Washington, a Boeing air show, music concerts (no metal, of course), both US and Canadian naval warships on parade, human parades, and copious drinking and eating. But my favorite part of the festival is the air show put on by The Blue Angels.

For those of you living outside the US, The Blue Angels are a squadron of Navy pilots who perform aerial acrobatics using F/A-18 Hornet aircraft flying at the speed of holyfuckwhatwasthat! They perform for 2 days in a row (this weekend), and they have practice runs for two days before the performance (the first of which happened to be today). They’re loud — louder than a drunken fuck in a thin-walled motel. In fact, they’re so distracting that a major interstate highway in their flight path is shut down when they’re practicing and performing. You can imagine how drivers feel about that.

Yes, The Blue Angels are metal, but that’s actually not what this post is about. What this post is about is an Onion-style piece of reporting about The Blue Angels in an internet mag called The Seattle Salmon. It so perfectly captures the tight-sphincter side of Seattle culture, and it’s so goddamned hilarious that I have to put it up, verbatim, right after the jump. It is definitely metal. The title of the piece? “Seattle’s Pussies Prepare To Bitch About The Blue Fucking Angels”.

Seattle’s Pussies Prepare to Bitch about the Blue Fucking Angels

The high performance jets of the US Navy Blue Angels give Seattle’s pussies much to complain about. “Well they’re loud,” said Wallingford pussy Ron Matthews, “and I don’t think we should have a symbol of American imperialism at the center of a summer celebration.” Matthews, a soft-dick pastry chef, succinctly described in one sentence what more long-winded pussies drone on about for God knows how many fucking hours.

Mr. Wigglesworth's birthday in 2010, ruined by the Blue Angels

Seattle is known for a population capable of complaining at length on any subject. Seattle-ites can complain about – for example – salting the roads during snow storms, or not salting those same roads with equal emotional investment. But for the city’s wusses, pussies, dorkburgers and fuckwits, Seafair season is like Christmas, the World Series, and their cat’s birthday rolled into one.

Alan Hatsche, a total pussy who lives in Fremont, was concerned about the well-being of his motherfucking pets. “The jets traumatize my cats. My pets are very sensitive to noise and overt displays of militarism. I don’t see why these noble creatures’ discomfort is worth the cheap amusement derived by some dick waving bonehead.”

I choke up when I hear the Blue Angels . . . Beer me.

William Boyd, a self-described dick waving bonehead from Mount Baker eagerly anticipates the arrival of the Angels. “Fuck yes! I love watching those blue bastards screaming around… crankin’ and bankin’, zoomin’ and shroomin’. Maybe not shroomin’. Are you a cop?” When asked how he felt about Seattle residents who dread the noise and traffic delays, Boyd commented, “Come on, even pussies gotta admit this is the Navy’s year. Was it pussy SEALs that iced Bin Laden? No. Navy SEALs. Case closed.” Boyd added, “Beer me.”

Lydia Parr, a closeted female dickhead from Capitol Hill felt compelled to hide her love of the Blue Angels, “Of course I vote Democrat, but I also love things that are fast, loud and fuck shit up. In this part of town, it’s really best to keep that information private.” Ms. Parr acknowledged the complicated nature of the Blue Angels’ visit. “Nobody likes having I-90 shut down, and the jets certainly are loud. But I can’t help but think those sensitive types would feel a lot better if they knocked the sand out of their vaginas and grew a pair.”

July 29, 2011. That was four days ago, right? This video was posted on that day. As of the time I scheduled this post for publication, it had already garnered 1.025,448 hits on YouTube. And no wonder.

Some people would say this is music, and therefore wouldn’t qualify for this series of things that are metal but AREN’T music. But I beg to differ. This is NOT music. But it is metal. It is also fucking hysterical.

I have only one more thing to say: Thank you ElvisShotJFK for the tip to this bit of awesomeness. It may be the pinnacle of 2,000 years of Western civilization. Or it may be a sign of the Apocalypse. If this puppy doesn’t generate comments, then I don’t fucking know what will.

And by the way, fuck toasters, just fuck them. And chairs, fuck them, too. Just FUCK. EVERYTHING.