I’m sitting at my desk on Wednesday with nothing much to do. The last few days kept me pretty busy, and now I’m savouring the free time. Out here at work, the company subscribes to a few magazines, and someone helpfully deposits the January edition of the Risk Management Magazine. Most of you would probably rather wade through a pile of manure than read the Risk Management Magazine, but, well, this is my line of work (risk management, not manure-wading, just so we’re clear). I flip through the pages and glance at the articles to see if anything catches my interest. And there it was. At the last page, in the section titled Risky Business, was this little gem. I paraphrase it below.
The main point behind the article, and its relevance to risky business, is that one should keep any unusual hobbies/extracurricular activities secret from one’s colleagues. In Virginia, USA, an art teacher, Stan Murmur, failed to do this, and was suspended from his job after his superiors learned of his special hobby – painting with his buttocks. Apparently, the superiors deemed his unique talents and his (back)side business unacceptable, even though he paints under a pseudonym, and immediately sent him on paid leave. (To digress a little, I wish my superiors would send me on paid leave! Anyhoo…)
The article also states that Murmur’s butt-pressings often resemble butterflies and flowers, and can go for somewhere between US $619 - $1,113. His work is displayed at this website. I have only had a quick peek at it, but according to the article, ‘there is even a video on YouTube that walks you through the unique art of pressing bare, paint-covered buttocks onto canvas, should anyone wish to adopt a trend that is sure to take the art world by storm in 2007’.
Reports that Murmur’s students protested their teacher’s exile by photocopying their own buttocks en masse could not be confirmed.
What’s the strangest extracurricular activity you’ve ever heard of? If you think this is strange, wait till you see my next post. We move from buttock-painting to the next logical topic. If you thought ‘Puppetry of the Penis’, good guess, but no. It is Turd Art.
I shit (excuse the pun) you not!
1 comment:
Turd art is for lesser primates such as bonobos (all that sex-for-food-and-amusement does not engender Darwinian selection for creatures with intelligence to appreciate Rembrandt) and George W. Bush (who affectionately referred to one of his staff as "turd blossom"). But turd art I can live with. Turd culinary delights are probably the logical next step, which can only result in canine food critics and the general public making references to "outdated" concepts of personality in "Pulp Fiction". Food "between buns" will take on rather ominous connotations. Artists are perverts. Perversion of reality is art, perversion of art is reality - Confucius say (in Cantonese accent for his HK fanbase).
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