Found in a box: a 1969 photograph of my Pop surrounded by 8 lovely Korean hostesses at a party in Inchon. He looks like the cat who just got the cream, doesn't he?

Posted by MrBaliHai at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

The 1960 film, La Nave de los Monstruos (AKA: Ship of Monsters), has pretty much everything a Mexican scifi/horror/kiddie film should have: the ultra-hot Lorena Velazquez playing a bloodsucking babe from Venus, a Martian with a giant, pulsating rubber brain, a Cyclops named Ook, a really lame talking skeleton puppet, and their fabulously cheesy robot, Tor, who in this touching scene at the movie's finale, flies back into outer space in his rocket ship while crooning a romantic duet with his newfound love, a cantina jukebox!

Man, they just don't make 'em like this anymore.

[Link: Tor and the Jukebox]
[Link: Film review]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 5:58 PM | Permalink

Greetings from Blighty! It's a miserable, grey, and rainy Monday...quite a contrast to yesterday, when I met up with The Cartoonist, Konstantin, and several thousand commie bicyclists at the Sherlock Holmes pub in sunny Westminster for a Sunday Roast podcast where we talked a load of rubbish about Russian billionaires, bad '70s science-fiction films, bluetongue disease, and British football.

Afterwards, Konstantin left for the Scottish Highlands, where he intends to stay in a small cottage for several weeks and eat fried sheep.

[Link: Sunday Roast Podcast MP3 (19:19 minutes, 4.5MB)]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 2:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Behold, what must surely be the most poorly-translated, yet utterly awesome menu in restaurant history, featuring mouth-watering treats like Slippery Meat in King's Vegetables in Pillar, Benumbed Hot Vegetables Fries Fuck Silk, and the terrifyingly wrong, Every Form Rape. Guaranteed to make your inner editor's head ah-splode.

[Link: May I Take Your Order?][via Off the Broiler]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 4:25 PM | Permalink

You can thank (or blame) the orangeguru for adding yet another awful German music clip to my growing collection, although this is actually some Swedish guy singing about Bavarian hats, potato salad, shoe-slapping, and Lederhosen.

[Link: Tysken Dansar Med Lederhosen]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

My east-coast drinkin' buddy, Vern, travels almost as much as I do. He visited Korea recently and posted some nifty photographs of Changseung, traditional Korean village guardian totems, in this Tiki Central thread. The fine-looking fellow in the picture above is located near a tunnel dug under the DMZ by the North Korean military.

Long-time readers of the Goof may recall that one of my earliest posts documented my own trip to Korea where I also took a shine to the many Changseung I encountered in my travels. You can see a couple of photos of them in my Flickr set, Travels With Mr. BaliHai.

If that's not enough for you, check out these fine galleries of Changseung (or Jangseung) at the Life In Korea website:

[Gallery][Gallery 1][Gallery 2][Gallery 3]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:13 PM | Permalink

Nothing says "Christmas" to me like the Pope laying cable, and nobody knows that better than the Catalunyans whose traditional manger figurines called Caganer, depict nuns, fishermen, politicians, celebrities, and soccer players taking a healthy dump right next to the Baby Jeebus.

Thanks to my buddy, Mark, for dumping these crappy online Caganer collections on me.

[Link: El Caganer]
[Link: Caganer Gallery]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Der Spiegel's Germany Survival Bible helpfully addresses such Teutonic cultural mysteries as, "Why don't Germans say 'excuse me' when they knock you off the sidewalk?", "Why are Germans obsessed with gummi bears?", and that perennial conundrum of questionable hygiene, "Why do German toilets have that little shelf?"

[Link][via]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 3:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Deviled Ham links to the website of the Red Devil Deaf Bikers of Antwerp.

Now some of my best friends are deaf bikers, doncha know, but the fact that they're deaf Belgian bikers has me picturing horny hearing-impaired hellcats humping hot hogs while slamming down 750ml bottles of Kriek Cherry Lambic, then running down stuffy Eurocrats and terrorizing them with insults hurled in sign language that doesn't conform to EU standards.

Yeah, the sinus medication is making me a bit loopy, why do you ask?

Posted by MrBaliHai at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This week, the German government will begin enforcing new grammar rules designed to simplify what many consider to be one of the world's more confusing languages (English being the most perplexing, naturally).

Being a sprecher of Deutsch myself, a lot of these reforms rub me the wrong way, particularly the one that calls for breaking up egregiously long German compound words like RECHTSSCHUTZVERSICHERUNGSGESELLSCHAFTEN (insurance companies which provide legal protection) and the whopping great classic DONAUDAMPFSCHIFFAHRTSELEKTRIZITAETEN
HAUPTBETRIEBSWERKBAUUNTERBEAMTENGESELLSCHAFT (club for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services). They're also apparently getting rid of my favorite character...the Esszett...Scheiße!

What I can't understand is why they didn't streamline the bewildering array of male, female, and neutral articles along with simplifying the conjugation of verbs and the insanely confusing rules that surround the declension of adjectives.

"I'd rather decline two drinks than decline a German adjective" - Mark Twain

via LinkFilter

Posted by MrBaliHai at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)