Jun 172011
 

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). Continue reading »

Sep 182010
 

We were so happy that our precious web site survived the Bluehost debacle yesterday with all our data intact that we decided to creep forth from our informational no-fly zone into what some deluded people call the real world and sniff around for news items that would cause us to think, “shit, that’s metal!” We shielded our eyes from the grotesque headlines that continue to dominate the “hard news” and began the search . . .

And in almost no time we hit a trifecta! First, we found two recent items that concern events right here in the Pacific Northwest (which is already becoming depressingly waterlogged with premature seepage from the sky). Second, the stories we found enabled us to continue using alliterative titles for these THAT’S METAL! posts. And third, one of them involves BOTH dogs AND douchebags. Win! Win! Win!

So, here are our two stories for this installment: One involves an intrepid dog that pulled off a truly amazing feat of aerodynamic skill at Crater Lake that enabled him to survive the negligent douchbaggery of his owners. The other involves a self-inflicted acid bath that became the basis for a truly egregious lie. We’re stretching to call this second story “metal”. In fact, upon reflection, it’s really just unadulterated douchebaggery.

As usual, we’re supplementing these stories with our usual, ignorantly juvenile and completely tasteless commentary, plus suitable musical accompaniment.

ITEM ONE

This story requires a little background information for those who don’t live in the Pacific Northwest: Crater Lake is a remarkable natural formation in Oregon. It’s a body of water that filled up the caldera of a collapsed volcano that was formed about 7,700 years ago. It’s almost 2,000 feet deep (594 meters), making it the second-deepest lake in North America and the ninth deepest in the world, and it’s 5-6 miles (8-10 km) in diameter.  (more detail, possibly more entertaining, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »