What we can learn from a quick google search.

Raj mentioned that a google search for "an american orifice" yields a lot of fun stuff (depending on how you like your fun; I enjoy irony) on airport security. This makes sense, as I got a fairly joyless but extremely intimate pat-down at Tegel Airport before returning to the US from Berlin. Raj mentions similar brouhaha in Paris.

But the point is, my search didn't come up with as much hair raising stuff. Arttransponder tops the list, thank goodness. But most of the results are either engineering or heart-surgery related, both disciplines involving a lot of valves, I guess. Ever on the lookout for weird data, I clicked the "related searches" button. Gold mine. Here we go:

an united states orifice
an english orifice
an southwest orifice
an usa orifice
an delta orifice
an american venturi
an american weir
an american nozzle
an american office
an american flow
an american orifice straight
an american orifice they
an american orifice long
an american orifice major
an american orifice should
a us orifice
an continental orifice
an northwest orifice
a canadian orifice
an alaska orifice

My favorites are "an continental orifice" and "an american nozzle."

Niet Normaal: Difference on Display

Birgit Dieker, Bad Mummy, 2005

Marc Quinn, Stuart Penn, 2000

Thomas Hirschhorn, Mannequins avec Outgrowths,Le Creux de l'Enfer, Thiers, 2006


http://www.nietnormaal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=5&Itemid=33&lang=en

An American Orifice Press in Der Tagesspiegel

So they make me a man in this short write up . They also make Raph's love story in East Berlin between a man and a woman! Should we respond to the inaccuracies and write the author? Adrian Piper did this with great bravado.

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/zeitung/Ticket;art2811,3000272

Only in an emergency...

A nice safety tip involving the asshole. I just read Moby Dick so this seems like practical advice to me.

Das Berliner Medizinhistorische Museum

Today I went to the Berliner Medizinhistorische Museum, in the spirit of the grotesque. My timing was good because there is a show about the history of German dentistry, with lots of alarming antique dentures and pliers. I also checked out the Pathological Museum, a collection within the main museum, of anatomical specimens. There was also an exhibit both from a patient's and a medical point of view, explaining the hospital treatments of various patients over the centuries of Charité Hospital's existence, from a pregnant woman giving birth (she was a prostitute, and the hospital was originally for the poor and for soldiers, and care was provided by doctors in training to be military surgeons), to a 20th century man who received a liver transplant.

As is usually the case with me, I was most absorbed not by the actual bodies before my eyes, and there were many, whole and partial, in the pathology exhibition, but by the medical furniture and accoutrements, which tend to give a hint about the value, and possibly the aura, that these equipment and procedures held for doctors and patients. The birthing chair, a giant rough wooden throne with a half circle notch in the seat and two stones, presumably to rest feet on, on the floor below was pretty amazing, as were the delicate silver handles on antique toothbrushes and the velvet-lined cases of dental instruments.

In Berlin at last!

After a long journey, three of us have made our arrivals in Berlin and are getting things moving for Friday's opening at Arttransponder. In the meantime, I keep thinking about buildings, incomplete buildings, buildings that are falling apart. Plenty of buildings here in Prenzlauer Berg are pleasantly worn down and it's easy to see how old they are. But I've also come into a bunch of old photos from home that show the house I grew up in, at stages before the shingles, what can be compared to the skin, even went on. In the pictures, the house looks flayed, but it is actually being born. We had moved in before the outside was finished, and the inside was never finished in places. Here they are, including one with me inexplicably throttling myself for the camera.

Rosa Luxemburg's Body