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.
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”.
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.
Yessir, it’s time for another installment in this series where we collect miscellaneous items that aren’t music but still make us think, “Fuck, that’s some metal shit right there!” Once again, we had help from a few of our readers, who will be duly credited by us (and perhaps blamed by you) for their contributions. We have quite a lot of killer items today, so let’s just just dive right in.
ITEM ONE
Our first item is really a series of items, all of which appeared in a feature at Cracked.com called “8 Real Photographs That Prove Hell Exists On Earth” (credit/blame to our reader Black Shuck who pointed us to this feature). Not only are all the photos metal as fuck, but the accompanying descriptions are also funny as shit. For example, here’s the narrative accompanying the photo at the top of this post:
“If doves are the messengers of the Lord, then the Satanic Leaf Tailed Gecko is probably Old Scratch’s preferred postal carrier. Though you should know that these guys are utterly harmless. They’re tiny — usually two to five inches long — and are endemic to the little island of Madagascar. So you’re not likely to stumble across one in the first place, and it certainly won’t hurt you if you do.
“It won’t hurt you at all. It needs you.
“It might ask you to hurt others, though. Oh, softly enough at first, in half-heard whispers borne on the wind, but they will grow louder, more frequent and more insistent — until one day you wake up to find yourself in a bathtub filled with liquid that used to be your family. And what will the Satanic Leaf Tailed Gecko do? Why, just take a gander at that picture again: It will smile, friends. It will smile.”
(more after the jump)
Here we go with our latest installment of THAT’S METAL! – where we gather together photos, videos, and news about items that made us think, “Fuck, that’s metal!”, even though they’re not music. We have five items for today. Ready, set, GO!
ITEM ONE (THE EMISSARY OF CTHULHU)
I woke up this morning and staggered outside to make sure the lorises hadn’t taken over the NCS compound while I was sleeping, and what should greet my bloodshot eyes but a pair of giant moths that looked like they’d entered our world from another dimension. One of these things would have made me jump out of my shorts. Seeing two of them convinced me that time is running out and the Elder Gods are about to return and lay waste to our world. Sheeeeit.
I took the photo above of one of the moths, and a photo of the second one is after the jump. Both of the mosts are about 3 1/2 inches in length. Surely we have an entomologist or two out there who can tell us what these things are. Yeah, right.
And if you think these fuckers are strange, wait ’til you see the disgusting creature featured in Item Two.
Man oh man, have we got a boffo THAT’S METAL! installment for you today. I did have lots of help — suggestions from NCS readers Ullr, ElvisShotJFK, and Phro. Lots of material, all of which are items that we think are metal, even if they’re not music (or not entirely music). So, with no further fucking around, let’s get to it:
ITEM ONE
Thanks to Ullr, I have a news report that includes all these facts:
- In Australia, there’s an ocean tour operator named Matt Waller who makes a good living taking tourists out for a look at Great White sharks (you know, the really big, prehistoric motherfuckers that were in all the Jaws movies)
- Many of the tourists Mr. Waller takes out on his boat want to see Great Whites up close and personal, so he lowers them down into the water in shark cages (is this metal, or is this just severe mental impairment?)
- Mr. Waller has discovered that he can lure Great White sharks into the vicinity of the shark cages by playing metal underwater — specifically, AC/DC. He says it works better than chum. According to Waller, “We know the AC/DC music works best by trial and error, and we are doing more research to see what works best with different species of shark.”
- The AC/DC songs that work best are “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “If You Want Blood”. (Is this perfect, or what?)
- Mr. Waller says: “Quite often we see the sharks on the surface, but most of the time our guests want to get in the cage and see them up close. I’ve seen the sharks rub their faces on the cage where the sound is coming from as if to feel it.” (Ain’t that just too fucken cute?)
(more after the jump . . .)
It’s time for another edition of THAT’S METAL!, where we take time off from our usual focus on music and collect items we’ve seen recently that aren’t music, but that we still thought were metal. We’ve got four items today, all visual in nature. The last three are amazing videos, all of which have a hypnotic quality. Departing from our usual format for these posts, we’re throwing in some musical choices of our own (metal, of course) as accompaniment for two of these items. Here we go:
ITEM ONE
Chefchaoen is a town in the North African nation of Morocco, located in the Rif Mountains. It was founded in 1471 — and virtually the entire town was at some point painted in the powder-blue color of tekhelel, a natural dye made of shellfish. Tekhelel isn’t available any more, but the tradition has carried on through the centuries. The shades of blue now vary, but the effect is still striking.
As far as I can tell, there’s no law in the town which commands people to paint everything blue. The fact that people do it anyway, to keep alive something so unusual, is pretty fucking metal. More photos follow after the jump, and you can see even more of them here. Your musical accompaniment for these images comes to you from the late, great Acid Bath from an album called When The Kite String Pops (right after the jump).
Yes, it’s time for another edition of THAT’S METAL!, in which we creep timidly outside our metallic island, risking our peace of mind through exposure to the “real world” in order to find news items, videos, or photos of things that aren’t music but still make us think, “shit, that’s metal.” Like that photo up above. That’s a creepy little fucker, don’t you think? Those paws look uncomfortably like hands, and those claws look ready to rend and tear. Do you know what that creature is? I’ll tell you after the jump, but I’ll say now that these animals don’t look nearly so metal when they grow up.
But before we get to that, take a look at this:
Looks like a cool new album cover, doesn’t it? Maybe for some prog or stoner metal band? We’ve devoted lots of space to album art this past week, but this isn’t an album cover. I’ll tell you what this is, too . . . after the jump.
Today we have a special edition of THAT’S METAL! It seemed like an appropriate day for this, since yesterday has passed, the world has not ended, and so fas as I know, there haven’t been any documented instances of anyone taken up into the clouds by The Rapture. But this edition of THAT’S METAL! isn’t going to be what you probably think it will be.
Having some vicious fun at the expense of one goofball evangelical minister or his delusional goofball followers would be too easy, and it wouldn’t cause anyone to do any actual thinking. And while it’s true that provoking serious thought isn’t part of the official NCS mission statement, on rare occasions we do make a stab at it. Today will be one of those days.
So, if you read the title of this post and were expecting cynical mockery of self-styled prophets of Judgment Day, or Christianity, or even religion generally, you won’t find that here (at least not today). There is a connection between the fallacious May 21 Rapture prediction and the point(s) of this post, but it may not be obvious.
And as for the point(s) of this post, well, I don’t intend to make that explicit either, mainly because I don’t really get off on preaching, or listening to preaching, for that matter. Besides, this post has as much to do with what makes good and bad art (including metal music) as it does with anything else. So, draw your own conclusions — and if you start to get bored, you can just skip to the bottom of the post and listen to some actual metal.
