In Conversation: John Cleese

The comedy legend on Monty Python’s legacy, political correctness, and the funniest joke he ever told.

“I want to murder this thing,” says John Cleese, fiddling with a medical contraption that’s attached to his leg. The 77-year-old founding member of the Monty Python comedy troupe — arguably humanity’s greatest comedic endeavor — and the star and co-creator of perennial best-sitcom-ever contender Fawlty Towers, is in his office on a cool London summer morning, going about things with what I suspect is his usual air of amused irritation. “I’ve got a leg infection and now have a fucking cube” — Cleese, sitting in a brown leather chair, pulls up a leg of his jeans and taps on a pump with his index finger — “sucking out the scunge. It’s quite annoying.”

-Vulture

Netflix Is Making Stranger Things Versions Of Classic ’80s Movie Posters, And They’re Amazing

Netflix has released new posters for Stranger Things Season 2 which pay homage to the classic movies Nightmare On Elm Street and Stand By Me, The Running Man, Alien, Firestarter, The Evil Dead and Jaws.

Stranger Things Season 2 premiers October 27, 2017 with the description: It’s 1984 and the citizens of Hawkins, Indiana are still reeling from the horrors of the demogorgon and the secrets of Hawkins Lab. Will Byers has been rescued from the Upside Down but a bigger, sinister entity still threatens those who survived.

-design you trust

How We Have Sex: Study Offers Glimpse Into American Sex Lives

In 2015, a team of researchers primarily based out of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at the University of Indiana surveyed 2,021 American adults about their sexual behaviors. Participants completed an extensive, fifteen-minute questionnaire in the comfort of their own homes under total anonymity. Their responses, made public recently in the journal PLoS ONE, reveal the sexual behaviors and preferences of American adults in greater detail than ever before.

-RealClear Science

David Simon: ‘If you’re not consuming porn, you’re still consuming its logic’

Alongside longtime collaborator George Pelecanos, The Wire’s creator talks about their new TV drama, The Deuce, which examines porn’s impact on US society.

Amid rows of houses and a sprinkling of bars, coffee shops, convenience stores and restaurants in Riverside, an unpretentious corner of Baltimore, one building stands out: a redbrick townhouse that was once an old church. It is the office of David Simon, a master of the medium of television.

-The Guardian

A List of 20 Ex-Agents Who Have Exposed the US Military Intelligence Complex – Part 1

The Military Intelligence Complex (MIC) of the United States has become a behemoth. It is a monstrous creature which is forming the foundation of the technological control grid that is being erected and rolled out all around us. As the NWO conspirators attempt to push the world forward with their model of technocracy (rule by technology), the Military Intelligence Complex is central to the execution their plans. Right now, the MIC is the basis of data gathering (spying, interception and surveillance), data storage, data processing and data analysis. As technology advances and we are pushed further along the path of transhumanism, the NWO agenda will dictate that the Military Intelligence Complex take on further roles and functions, such as being the operations center of fleets of robots which will administrate over society and completely enforce law and order.

-The Sleuthjournal

Why religion is not going away and science will not destroy it

In 1966, just over 50 years ago, the distinguished Canadian-born anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted the global demise of religion at the hands of an advancing science: ‘belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’. Wallace’s vision was not exceptional. On the contrary, the modern social sciences, which took shape in 19th-century western Europe, took their own recent historical experience of secularisation as a universal model. An assumption lay at the core of the social sciences, either presuming or sometimes predicting that all cultures would eventually converge on something roughly approximating secular, Western, liberal democracy. Then something closer to the opposite happened.

-aeon

L’histoire de Playgirl : beaucoup de pénis, pas vraiment de révolution

Playgirl n’était pas le premier magazine à faire saliver les femmes : Helen Gurley Brown, l’éditrice fonceuse de Cosmopolitan, avait réussi à persuader Burt Reynolds de s’étendre, nu, sur une peau d’ours.

Le premier numéro de Playboy date de 1953. Depuis, le magazine a provoqué plein de scandales et d'interrogations (combien de modèles ont eu l'herpès à la suite d'une baignade dans la grotte de la Playboy Mansion?), tout en publiant des auteurs renommés, comme Kurt Vonnegut et Haruki Murakami.

-Vice

Canal du Midi, France

The Strait of Gibraltar between Europe and Africa isn’t the only waterway that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. A thousand kilometer north lies another connecting route. This route connects the French city of Bordeaux, near the Atlantic ocean, to the Mediterranean port of Sète through a series of canals collectively called Canal des Deux Mers, or the “canal of the two seas.” Lying entirely in Southern France this man-made canal is one of the most remarkable feats of civil engineering carried out in the 17th century.

-Amusing Planet

80 Playtime Paperbacks: A Library of Sleazy Reads

Many decades before the internet began providing the word with a cornucopia of sleaze, paperback books were a favorite among adult smut connoisseurs. The sheer number of sleazy reads published during the 1960s and 70s is nothing short of amazing – all supplied by a variety of publishers more than willing to meet the demand for trashy paperbacks.

We’ve covered the infamous Liverpool Library, with their bizarre cover illustrations which seem family-friendly at first glance, but upon closer inspection are anything but.  Today, let’s have a look at another brand of risqué reads – Playtime.

The Playtime books were more run-of-the-mill, with lurid (but often terrible) cover art to match their often hilariously bad titles. They’re certainly tacky, but not anywhere near x-rated by today’s standards…. still, a lot of fun to peruse.  Enjoy.

-Flashbak

Former madam reveals what really goes on inside a brothel

A former madam has lifted the lid on what it’s really like to run a brothel. Vivien Walden, 67, from Wilmslow, Cheshire, worked as a hostess at the Toucan Club in Manchester, about four hours northwest of London, for three decades before it was shut down by cops in 2009.

-NY Post

Top 10 Intriguing Facts About The Golden Era Of Brothels In America

Although brothels and prostitution have been around since the dawn of time, they enjoyed a sustained period of growth—a golden age, if you will—throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in the New World of America.There are many indirect consequences and outright bizarre facts as a result of the brothel’s popularity during this time. And some of them are not the first thing that might come to mind when thinking of so-called “houses of ill repute.”

-Listverse

Abandoned states: Extraordinary pictures show how once idyllic vacation lodges in the Poconos and Catskills have transformed into dilapidated and abandoned shells of their former selves

A series of photos have captured how old lodges and resorts featured on 1960s postcards turned into scenes of abandonment. Photographer Pablo Iglesias Maurer visited different defunct locations in the Poconos and the Catskills to show how the once idyllic places had fallen into disrepair and decay. According to an article he wrote on DCist, Maurer was inspired by a matchbook showing a pool at Penn Hills Lodge and Cottages in the Poconos resort with frolicking guests - but the abandoned lodge resembled nothing of what remained.

-Daily Mail

Tour sombre du pays de Stephen King

Célébrissime résidant du Maine, Stephen King y vit depuis presque toujours et il y situe l’essentiel de ses intrigues. Voici une visite guidée de plusieurs lieux emblématiques — réels ou imaginaires — de ses récits, alors que se bousculent les adaptations de son oeuvre sur petit et grand écran.

En marchant dans les pas d’un écrivain et en visitant les lieux qui l’ont marqué, qu’il a habités ou qui ont servi de ferment à son imagination, on entre au moins un peu dans sa tête, on sillonne son univers et on accède à toute une dimension inconnue de son intimité, de sa créativité.

-Le Devoir