Yesterday, we crept forth from our carefully maintained informational coccoon in search of news items that might make us exclaim“That’s Metal!”, even though it’s not music. We did that with a lot of trepidation, since we knew we would immediately be swamped with a flood-tide of bloviating, pontificating, and punditry about the results of Tuesday’s elections. Avoiding that kind of thing is why we prefer to limit our intake of news to metal.

But, we’re hard as nails, and so we plugged our ears against the cacophony and waded out into the muck, because we love every last one of you. And why do we love you, even though we don’t know you, and even though you may be a low form of life we would try desperately to escape if we did know you? Because you are here, reading what we write. You see, our love can be bought cheaply.

Where were we?  Oh yeah, we waded out into the world of hard news — and we struck gold. We found four news items that fit the criteria for THAT’S METAL!, plus one video to cap off this post. This stuff is so juicy that this post will be a long one. As usual, it includes our tasteless commentary along with the reports.

And our first item involves spunk. Specifically, it involves recipes for the eating of spunk.  (more after the jump — and this first item isn’t even the strangest one we’ve got for you . . .)

ITEM ONE

This isn’t exactly breaking news, but it’s news to us.  It concerns the publication of the second edition of a book called Natural Harvest, sub-titled “An Inspirational Collection of Semen-Based Recipes”, by Paul “Fotie” Photenhauer. Yes, you read that correctly.

It features recipes such as “High Protein Smoothie”, “Irish Coffee With Extra Cream”, “Slightly Saltier Caviar”, “Roasted Lamb With Good Gravy”, “Special ‘S’ BBQ Sauce”, “Creamy Cum Crepes”, “Spunky Candied Pecans”, and “Tiramisu Surprise”. This is all true. We’re not smart enough to make up shit like this.

The book includes this Notice:

“This cookbook is written for consenting diners of semen.  Please do not add semen to your guest’s food without informing them beforehand.  All the recipes in this book have been tested by the author and friends of the author.”

This is fucking metal, isn’t it?  But not as metal as adding semen to your guest’s food without informing them.  I wonder if the author and his friends tested recipes that didn’t make the cut. Like “Baked Potato With Double Cream”. Or “Splooge Souffle”. I wonder how semen-based pastries rise while baking? The book also includes this description on the cover:

Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wines and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants.

We’re willing to take the dude’s word that the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. As for the texture of cooked semen, well fuck, we’ll take his word for that one too.

And the part about it being “inexpensive to produce”? I’d just say, speak for yourself man. Some of us  are already getting top dollar for our semen. For other people, like your true metalhead cellar-swellers, this could be a revenue source better than the blood bank, because they’re fucking drowning in excess supply, y’know what I mean?

Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food.  This book hopes to change that. Once you overcome any initial hesitation, you will be surprised to learn how wonderful semen is in the kitchen. Semen is an exciting ingredient that can give every dish you make an interesting twist. If you are a passionate cook and are not afraid to experiment with new ingredients — you will love this cook book.

Human feces remains neglected as a food, too. Doesn’t mean I’m ready to dig into a feces meatloaf, no matter how much ketchup I put on it. But hey, I get what the dude is talking about when he says how wonderful semen is in the kitchen. And in the living room. And in the shower. And down on the floor. And up against the wall. And, well, you probably catch my drift. But cooking and eating it? Uh, I’ll pass.

You can order Natural Harvest via this location. And just to disabuse you of any incorrrect speculation, I did not order this fucking thing. All the quotes included above can be found on that web site we linked for you.

ITEM TWO

This next story comes to us from the UK’s Daily Mail Online. Our first item made me a bit queasy. But this second one actually resulted in a little vomit in my mouth.

Librarian enters the Guinness Book of Records for collecting 22.1 grams of ‘belly button fluff’ over TWENTY-SIX years

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 9:13 AM on 25th October 2010

As hobbies go, it’s not something you are likely to share with too many friend on the grounds of good taste.

But that’s not a problem for librarian Graham Barker who is celebrating being recognised by the Guinness Book of Records – for collecting ‘belly button fluff.’

He has saved 22.1 grams of lint – after ‘harvesting’ it every day for 26 years and has even considered stuffing a cushion with his bizarre collection.

If this dude had collected semen for 26 years, he could have started a catering business. But navel lint? I guess this is metal. Maybe stoner metal. Wonder how this started?

Graham first began his record-breaking collection when he was bored one evening. ‘I noticed the lint in my navel and became curious as to how much of it one person can produce,’ he said. ‘I decided the only way to find out was to collect it for a while and see. I had an empty film canister with me which became a perfect receptacle.’

Yep.  Stoner metal. It could have been worse. He could have wondered how much ear wax a single person could produce. Or it could have been boogers.

He added: ‘I found that having a shower tends to wash away any lint, so the logical time to collect is just before getting in the shower each evening. I turn on the taps then pluck and store while waiting for the water to heat up.’

I think that last part is when I spit up in my mouth a little.

The daily harvests are stored in a little clay pot specially made for collecting navel lint and at the end of each year the small amount is added to his main collection. . . . ‘The overwhelming majority of people have a positive reaction. They are amused or surprised that such a collection exists.’ Graham said. ‘A few, usually women, recoil in mock horror, thinking that lint from a navel is really gross. And some think I must have too much time on my hands, which always strikes me as an illogical thing to say about a habit which only occupies ten seconds per day. A small minority with no sense of humour just don’t get it and express their opinion with rude words.’ Graham, an Australian from Perth, knows a few other navel fluff collectors but rarely talks to people about his odd hobby.

Allow me to express my opinion: I think you have too much time on your hands and I think you’re a fucking retarded lunatic. Were those rude words? Possibly. And really dude, why do you think those women were recoiling in “mock” horror, as opposed to genuine horror? If it makes you feel better to think that, okay, but really, I think they were truly horrified. I know I am.

Graham said: ‘When I ran a navel lint survey many years ago a handful of respondents, who were all men, confessed to having saved up some of their lint at some point. But none had continued with it. One guy might have persisted, but he got married and his wife ordered him to stop.’ Graham hopes to fill another five jars before he stops collecting and believes there is little chance of his record being beaten. He said: ‘I will stop collecting when I’m no longer physically capable.’

Why am I not surprised that the responses to Graham’s navel lint survey were all from men? Why am I not surprised that this freakazoid intends to fill five more jars? Why do I feel an irrational impulse to make this dude physically incapable of continuing to collect? Why does the sun rise in the East and set in the West?

ITEM THREE

While stewing in a grotesque vat of semen and navel fluff, I came across this story, which pulled me up from the vat and made me say, “Holy fuckin’ shit, this is metal!”

Cafe awning saves baby in seven-story fall

By Vicky Buffery
Tue Nov 2, 9:48 am ET

PARIS (Reuters) – A 15-month-old baby girl survived a fall from a seventh-floor apartment in Paris almost unscathed after bouncing off a cafe awning and into the arms of a passer-by, police said on Tuesday.

The infant had been playing unsupervised with her four-year-old sister on Monday when she somehow fell out of the window, a spokesman for local city police said.

Well, gut me like a big-mouth bass. How the fuck did this happen?

A young man saw the baby starting to fall and alerted his father, who raced to get into position, arms outstretched, to catch her after she hit the awning, the daily Le Parisien reported. “He must have played rugby for years to have developed reflexes like that,” a bystander who saw the incident told the paper.

I mean really, what are the odds of this happening? But that’s not all:

The owner of the cafe, located at the foot of the block of flats in the northeast of Paris, said it was a stroke of luck he had decided to leave the awning open that afternoon. “I usually close it to stop it catching fire as people tend to throw their cigarette butts onto it,” he told the television station i-tele.

Fuckin’ smokers could have killed that little girl. It’s bad enough that smokers slowly or not so slowly kill themselves, but to jeopardize the lives of gravity-bound falling children? That’s just fucking criminal. (Hang on a second while I go puff on a cig.)

ITEM FOUR

Thinking about that semen cookbook, when I saw this next story, I thought maybe the Earth ejaculates. To be brutally honest, I also think that maybe hobbits and goblins and fickle, godlike cubes also exist. So on the Earth-ejaculating thing, I’m not asserting that as a scientific fact, okay?  I’m just thinking . . .

Huge volcanic blast spurs more Indonesians to flee

By SLAMET RIYADI, Associated Press
Wed Nov 3, 3:25 pm ET

MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia – A deadly Indonesian volcano spewing lava and smoke for more than a week erupted Wednesday with its biggest blast yet, shooting searing ash miles into the air as soldiers hastily evacuated villages and emergency shelters.

One scientist warned the worst may be yet to come. Women screamed and children cried as they were loaded into trucks while rocks and debris rained from the sky. Several abandoned homes were set ablaze and the carcasses of incinerated cattle littered the scorched slopes.

Man, if that’s not fucking metal, I don’t know what is. We can crawl around the surface of this planet thinking we’re the alpha and the omega of existence, but all it takes is something like this to put us in our place. We are a slightly elevated version of ants waiting to be stepped on by something way up the food chain ahead of us, even if it’s inanimate (maybe). But wait, there’s more . . .

A Volcano’s Sentry to the Very End

By STEPHEN MILLER, Wall Street Journal
Oct 29, 2010

The fires of Mt. Merapi consumed the volcano’s spiritual gatekeeper. Mbah Maridjan was the sultan’s representative to the spirits atop the volcano on the Indonesian island of Java, where an eruption claimed a dozen victims in the small village of Kinahrejo on Tuesday.

His charred body was discovered in an attitude of prayer, according to an announcement by the present Sultan of Yogyakarta, an Indonesian province to the south of Mt. Merapi. He was 83 years old.

“My job is to stop lava from flowing down,” Mbah Maridjan told the Jakarta Post in an interview last August. “Let the volcano breathe, but not cough.”

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s a crying shame this dude got charred to death. On the other hand, he fucked up on his job, amiright? If the dude had taken care of the task at hand, he’d still be with us. Didn’t pray hard enough, obviously.

His record up to then had been pretty good. Appointed to the job of gatekeeper in 1983 by then-Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, Mbah Maridjan had survived previous eruptions that volcanologists had warned could have been much worse.

A kind of bridge between Indonesia’s spiritual past and the future, Mbah Maridjan talked with spirits, worried about the environment and had a Facebook account.

Yeah, so he had a “pretty good” record. But “pretty good” doesn’t cut it. All it takes is one fuck-up, and you get charred. Ain’t that life in a nutshell?

Where did he fuck up? I’ll tell you where: He’s a spiritual guardian and he had  Facebook account. The fuck is up with that? He probably posted nude photos of Mt. Merapi. The mountain was clearly not amused.

Thousands turned out for his funeral on Thursday, when he was buried next to the previous gatekeeper, his father, in the family plot two miles from his home village. “We knew long ago that Mbah Maridjan would be taken by Merapi,” said a spokesman for the sultan. “Now he’s gone, we have to choose a new gatekeeper soon.”

Applications are being accepted. It’s not a long waiting list. It’s better to be a semen factory for your local restaurant, or a lint-picker, but someone’s got to appease the volcano. Who will be next?

ITEM FIVE

We like seafood. Inconsistently, we also like it when creatures who are about to be dead, dismembered, or disfigured for human enjoyment get a little revenge as they go to their fate. With that in mind, we have a video of a snoekbaars (which is some kind of fish) in one final moment of fuck-you rebellion. Of course, we think it’s metal, though it’s not music.  (Thanks to Niek at DMB for tipping us to this.)

Enjoy the rest of your fucking day.