Views > May 14, 2001

Appall-O-meter

By Dave Mulcahey

That’s Entertainment 9.3

In what is possibly the most metaphorically suggestive case in the history of jurisprudence, two California teens are suing MTV for showering them with crap. According to Reuters, the pair ran afoul of the network’s extreme entertainment sensibility during a pilot taping last January of a variety show called “Dude, This Sucks.”

Monique Garcia and Kelli Sloat, two 13-year-old middle school students from the town of Big Bear, were apparently enjoying the program when production staffers invited them and four friends to the stage. The girls watched unwittingly as the camera crew covered its equipment with plastic, in preparation for the edgy jape that followed.

“All of a sudden I was smelling something disgusting and I started to gag,” Garcia explained at a press conference. “I looked around at my friends. They were covered in something. As I looked down at myself I realized that I was, too.” The “something” in question had issued, geyser-like, from the posterior regions of two performers identified only as the “Shower Rangers.”

“This was a terrible incident,” admitted Brian Graden, president of programming at MTV. “It was unintended and we regret that it happened.” Just what was intended is unclear, but MTV graciously has promised never to air the footage.

The Flesh Trade 9.7

Police in the former Soviet republic of Moldova have arrested two women for selling human flesh. According to a report in the Independent, the women were caught selling the meat outside a butcher shop in the capital city of Chisinau. They told police they had taken it from a state cancer clinic.

In related news, police in Tanzania claim they have arrested members of a gang they say is murdering children and adults, uh, for their pelts. In the past couple years, the BBC reports, police in the southern region of Mbeya have been on alert for the perpetrators of a bizarre spate of murders in which the entire skin of the victims was “expertly removed.” According to the regional police commissioner, the skins were taken for purposes of witchcraft and probably exported for sale abroad, where a pelt could fetch as much as $50,000, depending on the age of the victim.

Meanwhile, the creators of a German art exhibition featuring human corpses are taking their show on the road. Professor G¸nther von Hagens, an anatomist, replaces the fluids of the departed with silicone, epoxy or polyester polymers. According to Ananova.com, he is currently negotiating to bring the exhibition—which features a pregnant woman with a slashed abdomen revealing a fetus—to Britain this spring.

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