November 28, 2011
A rat rod is a style of hot rod or custom car that, in most cases, imitates (or exaggerates) the early hot rods of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It is not to be confused with the somewhat closely related ‘traditional’ hot rod, which is an accurate re-creation or period-correct restoration of a hot rod from the same era.
Most rat rods appear ‘unfinished’ (whether they actually are or not), with just the bare essentials to be driven. The rat rod is the visualization of the idea of function over form. Rat rods are meant to be driven, not shown off. Sometimes the customization will include using spare parts, or parts from another car altogether.
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November 28, 2011
Erotophobia [ih-rot-uh-foh-bee-uh] is a term coined by a number of researchers in the late 1970s and early 1980s to describe one pole on a continuum of attitudes and beliefs about sexuality. The model of the continuum is a basic polarized line, with erotophobia (fear of sex or negative attitudes about sex) at one end and erotophilia (positive feelings/attitudes about sex) at the other end.
Erotophobia has many manifestations. An individual or culture can have one or multiple erotophobic attitudes. Some types of erotophobia include fear of nudity, fear of sexual images, homophobia, fear of sex education, fear of sexual discourse, etc. Continue reading →
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November 28, 2011
Love-shyness is a specific type of severe chronic shyness that impairs or prevents intimate relationships. It implies a degree of inhibition and reticence with potential partners that is sufficiently severe to preclude participation in courtship, marriage and family roles.
According to this definition, love-shy people find it difficult if not impossible to be assertive in informal situations involving potential romantic or sexual partners. For example, a heterosexual love-shy man will have trouble initiating conversations with women because of strong feelings of social anxiety.
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November 28, 2011
Avoidant personality disorder (or anxious personality disorder) is a personality disorder recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders handbook in a person characterized by a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation, and avoidance of social interaction.
People with avoidant personality disorder often consider themselves to be socially inept or personally unappealing and avoid social interaction for fear of being ridiculed, humiliated, rejected, or disliked. Avoidant personality disorder is usually first noticed in early adulthood. Childhood emotional neglect and peer group rejection (e.g. bullying) are both associated with an increased risk for the development of AvPD. Continue reading →
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November 28, 2011
A highly sensitive person (HSP) is a person having the innate trait of high psychological sensitivity (or innate sensitiveness as Carl Jung originally coined it). According to American pyschologist Elaine N. Aron, who coined the term, highly sensitive people comprise about a fifth of the population, and process sensory data much more deeply and thoroughly due to a biological difference in their nervous systems.
This is a specific trait with key consequences that in the past has often been confused with innate shyness, social anxiety problems, inhibitedness, or even social phobia and innate fearfulness, introversion, and so on. The existence of the trait of innate sensitivity was demonstrated using a test that was shown to have both internal and external validity. Although the term is primarily used to describe humans, the trait is present in nearly all higher animals.
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November 28, 2011
Novelty architecture is a type of architecture in which buildings and other structures are given unusual shapes as a novelty, such as advertising, notoriety as a landmark, or simple eccentricity of the owner or architect. Many examples of novelty architecture take the form of buildings that resemble the products sold inside to attract drive-by customers.
Others are attractions all by themselves, such as giant animals, fruits, and vegetables, or replicas of famous buildings. And others are merely unusual shapes or made of unusual building materials. Continue reading →
Posted in Art, Humor, Money |
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November 28, 2011
A plug (sometimes earplug or earspool), in the context of body modification, is a short, cylindrical piece of jewellery commonly worn in larger-gauge body piercings.
Because of their size—which is often substantially thicker than a standard wire earring—plugs can be made out of almost any material (e.g. acrylic glass, metal, wood, bone, stone, horn, glass, silicone, and porcelain). Continue reading →
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November 28, 2011
A flesh tunnel is a type of body piercing jewelry. It is also sometimes referred to as a spool, fleshy, earlet, expander or eyelet. They are hollow tunnels, usually used in stretched or scalpelled piercings. Some choose to wear them instead of solid flesh plugs because they weigh less. Flesh tunnels may be worn with a captive bead ring or other object passed through them. Flesh tunnels can be made from many materials, including surgical steel, titanium, Pyrex, silicone, acrylic, and a variety of natural materials, including bone, horn, amber, bamboo, stone, and wood.
Flesh tunnels are often worn in the earlobe, but other soft-tissue areas that are pierced can be used such as the nasal septum and nipples. In these cases the length of the tunnel might be different. The actual origin of flesh tunnels, plug piercings, and body plates derived from the many tribal groups of the world. The flesh tunnels symbolize different roles in their societies, for different groups, however, during the ancient Egyptian New Kingdom, both sexes wore a variety of jewelry, including earplugs/tunnels.
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November 26, 2011
A body suit is an extensive tattoo, usually of a similar pattern, style or theme that covers the entire torso or the entire body. They are associated with freak show and circus performers, as well as with traditional Japanese tattooing.
Such suits are of significant cultural meaning in some traditional cultures, representing a rite of passage, marriage or a social designation.
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November 26, 2011
Lucky Diamond Rich (b. 1971) is ‘the world’s most tattooed person’ (a title formerly held by Tom Leppard), and has tattoos covering his entire body, including the inside of his foreskin, mouth and ears. He holds the Guinness world record as of 2006, being 100 percent tattooed.
He is also a performance artist and street performer whose act includes sword-swallowing, unicycling and juggling. As a young boy, he read about and began to have recurring thoughts of the most tattooed men and women. It did not go much further than just a thought until he got his first tattoo, which was of a small juggling club on his hip.
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November 25, 2011
Day for night, also known as nuit américaine (‘American night’), is the name for cinematographic techniques used to simulate a night scene; such as using tungsten-balanced rather than daylight-balanced film stock or with special blue filters and also under-exposing the shot (usually in post-production) to create the illusion of darkness or moonlight. Historically, infrared movie film was used to achieve an equivalent look with black-and-white film.
Another way to achieve this effect is to tune the white balance of the camera to a yellow source if there is no tungsten setting. Another way to make a more believable night scene is to underexpose the footage to the desired degree of night/darkness. This depends on the amount of light shown or believed to be in the given scene. The title of François Truffaut’s film ‘Day for Night’ (1973) is a reference to this technique.
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November 25, 2011
In Hinduism and yoga kundalini [koon-dl-ee-nee] (literally ‘coiled’) is a ‘corporeal energy,’ an unconscious, instinctive or libidinal force or Shakti, which lies coiled at the base of the spine. It is envisioned either as a goddess or else as a sleeping serpent, hence a number of English renderings of the term such as ‘serpent power.’ The kundalini resides in the sacrum bone in three and a half coils and has been described as a residual power of pure desire.
Kundalini is described as a sleeping, dormant potential force in the human organism. It is one of the components of an esoteric description of man’s ‘subtle body,’ which consists of nadis (energy channels), chakras (psychic centers), prana (subtle energy), and bindu (drops of essence).
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