Tag Archives: balloon

Links, Curiosities & Mixed Wonders – 20

Monday morning according to Gustave Doré.

First of all some quick updates on my upcoming activities.

  • On November 1st, together with my friend Luca Cableri, I will be a guest of the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival. We will talk about wunderkammer and space, in a conference entitled The Space Cabinet of Curiosities. — November 1st, 10 am, Teatro Miela in piazza L. Amedeo Duca degli Abruzzi 3, Trieste.
  • On November 3rd I will speak at Sadistique, the BDSM party organized every first Sunday of the month by Ayzad. The title of my speech: “Pains are my delight”: Erotics of martyrdom. Obviously, given the private context, access is forbidden to the curious and to those who have no intention of participating in the party. Consult prices, rules of conduct and dress code on the event’s official page. — November 3rd, 3-8 pm, Nautilus Club, via Mondovì 7, Milano.
    [BTW, Ayzad recently launched his own podcast Exploring Unusual Sex, you can listen to it on Spreaker and Spotify]
  • I remind you that on November 14 we will inaugurate the collective art exhib REQVIEM at Mirabilia Gallery in Rome. The exhibition, organized by l’Arca degli Esposti and curated by Eliana Urbano Raimondi and myself, will feature works by 10 international artists within the context of the only Roman wunderkammer. — November 14th, 7 pm, Galleria Mirabilia, via di San Teodoro 15, Roma.

Without further ado let’s start with our selection of links & weirdness!

  • In his encyclopedia of natural history L’univers. Les infiniment grands et les infiniments petits (1865) Felix A. Pouchet recounts this case which allegedly happened in 1838 in the French Alps: “A little girl, five years old, called Marie Delex, was playing with one of her companions on a mossy slope of the mountain, when all at once an eagle swooped down upon her and carried her away in spite of the cries and presence of her young friends. Some peasants, hearing her screams, hastened to the spot but sought in vain for the child, for they found nothing but one of her shoes on the edge of a precipice. The child was not carried to the eagle’s nest, where only the two eagles were seen surrounded by heaps of goat and sheep bones. It was not until two months later that a shepherd discovered the corpse of Marie Delec, frightfully mutilared, and lying upon a rock half a league from where she had been borne off.“
  • The Halloween special which caused the death of a young boy, pushing the BBC to pretend it never even aired: a nice video tells its story. (Thanks Johnny!)
  • Fungi that turn insects into zombies: I’ve already written about them a few years ago in my little ebook (remember it?). But this video about the cute Entomophthora muscae has some truly spectacular images.

  • Italian creativity really tops itself when it’s time to put up a scam. A small business car ran over a wild boar in the Gallura countryside, forest rangers were alerted so that the accident damage could be reimbursed by the municipality. It turned out the boar had been just taken out of a freezer. (Article in Italian, via Batisfera)
  • In 1929, the Australian writer Arthur Upfield was planning a detective story and while chatting with a friend he came up with a method for the perfect murder. So perfect in fact, that his novel couldn’t even work, because the detective in the the story would never have solved the case. He needed to find a flaw, one small detail that could expose the culprit. To get out of the impasse the frustrated writer began to discuss the plot with various people. Little did he know that one of these listeners would soon decide to test the method himself, by killing three men.
  • I sometimes think back to a little book I had as a kid, Idées Noires by Franquin. Here is an example of the Belgian cartoonist‘s very dark humor.

“The law is clear: everyone who kills another person will have his head cut off.”

  • An since we’re talking about beheadings, I took the above photograph at Vienna’s Kriminalmuseum di Vienna. It is the head of criminal Frank Zahlheim, and on the cultural implications of this kind of specimens I wrote a post last year that you might want to re-read if you’ve got five minutes.
  • Greta Thunberg becomes a pretext to clarify what autism and Asperger’s syndrome really are (article in Italian).
  • In England, back in the days, whenever someone died in the family the first thing to do was tell the bees.
  • To conclude, I leave you with a picture of a beautiful Egyptian mummified phallus (circa 664-332 a.C.). See you next time!

Ballonfest 1986

On that saturday morning, September 27, 1986, Cleveland was ready for an explosion of wonder.
For six months a Los Angeles company, headed by Treb Heining, had been working to organize the event which would break, in a spectacular way, a weird world record held at the time by Disneyland: in the first hours of the afternoon, a million and a half helium-filled balloons would be released simultaneously in the city sky.

The event was planned by United Way, a nonprofit organization, as part of the fundraising campaign for its activities supporting families in Cleveland.
In Public Square, Heining and his team mounted a huge structure, 250×150 feet wide, supporting a single, huge net built from the same material of the Space Shuttle cargo nets. Under this structure, for hours and hours more than 2.500 students and volunteers had been filling the colored balloons which, held by the net, formed a waving and impressive ceiling. After a first few hours of practice, their sore fingers wrapped in bandage aids, they had begun working automatically, each one of them tying a balloon every 20 seconds. Originally two millions baloons were meant to be prepared, but since some “leaks” had occurred, with several hundreds balloons escaping the net, it was decided to stop at a lower number.

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Every precaution had been taken so that the release was completely safe: United Way worked together with the city, the Federal Aviation Administration, the fire and police department, to avoid unpleasant surprises.
Furthermore, the balloons were made of biodegradable latex, and organizers estimated that they would pop or deflate right over Lake Erie, only to decompose quickly and with no environmental impact.
With all this apparently meticulous preparation, no one could suspect that the joyful, colored party could turn into a nightmare.


Weather conditions were not the best: a storm was coming, so the organizers opted for an early release. At 1.50 pm the net was cut loose, and a gigantic cloud of balloons rose up against the buildings and the Terminal Tower, amidst cheering children, the applause and whooping of the crowd.

Like the mushroom cloud from an explosion, expanding in slow motion, the mass ascended in the sky to form a multicolored column.
That is when things took an unexpected turn.

The balloons met a current of cool air which pushed them back down, towards the ground. In little time, the city was completely invaded by a myriad of fluctuating balloons which covered the streets, moving in group, obscuring the sky, preventing drivers from seeing the road and hindering boats and helicopters. According to the witnesses, it felt like moving through an asteroid belt: some cars crashed because drivers steered to avoid a wave of balloons pushed by wind, or because they were distracted by the surreal panorama.

But the worse was yet to come: Raymond Broderick and Bernard Sulzer, two fishermen, had gone out the day before, and were reported missing; the Coast Guard, who was looking for them, spotted their boat near a a breakwater, but had to abandon the search because balloons filled the sky and covered the surface of the water, making it hard for both boats and helicopters.
The two bodies later washed ashore.

During the next days balloons kept raising concern: they caused the temporary shut down of an airport runway, and scared some horses in a pasture so much so that the animals suffered permanent damage. The balloons ended up on the opposite shore of Lake Erie, some 100 km away, so complaints began to come even from Canada. Also because, according to some environmentalists, the plastic was not at all “biodegradable” and would have soiled the coast for at least six months.
Other criticism involved the waste of such large quantities of helium, a gas that is a non-renewable resource on Earth, and which some scientists (including late Nobel Phisics Laureate R. Coleman Richardson) believe there already is a shortage of.

This attempt to create something unforgettable, in the end, was meant to be one of those joyful, purely aesthetic, wonderfully useless experiences that bring out the child in all of us. As laudable this idea was, it turned out to be maybe a little too naive and planned without taking into account with the due consideration all possible consequences. The game ended quite badly.
United Way was sued for several million dollars, turning the fundraising campaign into a failure. The due damages to one of the fishermen’s wife and to the horse breeder were settled for undisclosed terms. This disastrous stunt, which ended in the red and in wide controversy, is the perfect example of a world record nobody will attempt to break again.
Treb Hining and his company, in the meantime, still are in the balloon business, working for the Academy Award, the Super Bowl and many presidential conventions: his team is also in charge of dispersing three thousand pounds of confetti (yep, 100% biodegradable this time) on Times Square, every New Year’s Eve.

Looners

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYjVXTUwBTU]

Date un’occhiata al video qui sopra. Una ragazza carina gonfia un palloncino fino a farlo scoppiare. Perfettamente innocente, no? E invece, senza saperlo, avete fatto il primo passo addentrandovi nel mondo delle fantasie dei looners, e fra le centinaia di video come questi ospitati sulla rete.

C’è chi la chiama parafilia, e chi stenta a vederci molto più che un innocente gioco sessuale. Eppure quello dei looners è un feticismo che, emerso negli anni ’70, resiste nel tempo. Si tratta dell’eccitazione sessuale nel vedere qualcuno gonfiare un palloncino (in inglese balloon, da cui looner). Osservare una bella donna soffiare, udire i suoi ansimi, l’alzarsi e abbassarsi ritmico del petto, insomma la fisicità dell’atto è il fulcro di un tale spettacolo. Aggiungete a questo la stimolazione sensoriale giocosa dei palloncini multicolori, il rumore del lattice sotto i polpastrelli, e l’eccitazione di non sapere esattamente quando esploderà, e avrete una chiara idea del climax di cui i looners vanno ghiotti.

Ma, come per tutte le cose inerenti alla sessualità, i gusti sono molto precisi: il video che avete appena visto è riservato agli amanti del B2P (blow to pop, soffia fino a farlo esplodere), mentre esistono molti adepti del palloncino per i quali l’esplosione finale è assolutamente tabù. Mike D., gestore del sito Mellyloon, è un looner da una vita ma ha un brivido ogni volta che sente lo scoppio. “Ho ancora oggi la fobia dei palloncini che esplodono – dice – è proprio da questa paura che è nato il mio feticismo”. To pop or not to pop è questione davvero seria per molti looners.

Riguardo allo sviluppo della sua fissazione sessuale, secondo Mike tutto ha inizio nell’infanzia: “Qualcosa come la tua babysitter che ti gonfia un palloncino, o tua madre che te lo fa scoppiare. Quando arriva la pubertà, tutte le cose che ti hanno impressionato da piccolo  diventano qualcosa di erotico”. Incidentalmente, questa teoria della sessualizzazione di ricordi relativi alla fase prepuberale è comunemente accettata dagli psicologi come una possibile spiegazione della nascita di parafilie.

Il sito Mellyloon ha permesso a Mike, se non di diventare ricco, almeno di discutere apertamente la sua fantasia. Nei suoi video le modelle gonfiano palloni colorati di dimensioni fuori dall’ordinario, e nei primi tre anni di attività ha ricevuto più di 1000 ordini dall’Asia e dalle Americhe. Mike ha una ragazza che, per fortuna, ha sempre assecondato le sue preferenze, dopotutto piuttosto innocue. Ma come si riesce a confessare al proprio partner che i palloncini sono parte integrante della tua vita sessuale? “Be’, come si riesce a confessare una qualcunque preferenza?” risponde Mike. “Si chiede all’altro, c’è qualcosa di strano che ti piacerebbe provare? Nove volte su dieci, qualcosa c’è, e poi tocca a loro chiedertelo, e tu dici, be’, sì! E puoi goderti la sorpresa sulla loro faccia, quando ti chiedono, ehi, a che serve quel palloncino?”

(Gli estratti all’intervista di Mike D. sono tratti da un articolo del 2007 di Sandy Brundage per l’ormai defunto Wave Magazine.)