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April 13, 2004
Ew.









A surgeon in the Netherlands has developed a technique for implanting decorative jewelry inside your eyeball. As MSNBC explains it:

The procedure involves inserting a 0.13 inch wide piece of specially developed jewelry -- the range includes a glittering half-moon or heart -- into the eye’s mucous membrane under local anaesthetic at a cost of $610 to $1,232.

“In my view it is a little more subtle than (body) piercing. It is a bit of a fun thing and a very personal thing for people,” said Gerrit Melles, director of the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery.

Okay, the modern primitive movement is officially over. Clearly, Middle America has so openly embraced the supposedly-alternative world of body art that even the fucking Dutch are cutting themselves open in an attempt to stay ahead of the hipster curve.

This reminds me of an idea I thought of a while ago: Internal Tattoos. The pitch would go like this:

Dude! Want to stick it to the man with some consumption-as-rebellion -- but afraid that tattooing is getting too mainstream? We're with you, brother! Now that every Jenni and Robyn at the local sorority has a butterfly smeared on her ankle, that ink you had done back in '94 -- you know, the Chinese pictogram for "resist" on the back of your neck -- just doesn't have the same subcultural frisson. It really sucks.

But hey! We're here to drag you one step ahead of the pack again -- because we're offering internal tattoos. That's right: Tattoos inside your body. We'll open you up surgically, tattoo your desired pattern on any one of 17 major organs, then sew you back up again. Nobody will be able to see your tats -- but that's the point! Read the memo, man: Visible-skin tattoos are over. But you don't care. No you do not! You're surfing the edge again! With a super-ironic LIVE FREE OR DIE etched onto the surface of your pancreas, you'll be sporting a tattoo so extreme we've dropped the capital X. Call now. Operators are standing by.

Holy shit am I ever a crank.


(Thanks to Rummaging for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at April 13, 2004 06:57 PM

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Comments

Need further evidence that tattoos are played out. Fruit-Rollups now come in a variety that will leave a tattoo on your tongue! The commercial was on t.v. just last night but I can't find a link to it anywhere except this one which charges a sign up fee to view it. Bastards!

Posted by: chris at April 14, 2004 10:01 AM

Speaking as someone who has a substantial amount of ink (that's tattoo lingo for "a lot of tattoos"), if you are getting tattoos to impress/piss off/rebel against someone else, you deserve to be cranked on.

My tattoos have some meaning to ME, but frankly I couldn't give a rat's ass whether they make me cool, a modern primative, yesterday's news or whatever.

Posted by: marc at April 14, 2004 10:09 AM

Yeah -- I'd wondered how people who actually got tattoos for non-hipster reasons (i.e. personal, artistic, spiritual) have felt about the almost bathetic commercialization of it all. Obviously, one still sees gorgeous, carefully-done, genuinely artistic ink -- I live in NY, so I get to see some really amazing stuff with some frequency!

Sadly, ya also see a large amount of the I-got-drunk-with-my-frat-and-got-this-tat stuff. Of course, it's technically *impossible* to tell merely by looking why someone adopts any particular body adornment or fashion, so I probably slot far too many people into the tattoos-du-jour camp. Hence my self-designation as crank, heh.

Posted by: Clive at April 14, 2004 10:44 AM

I advocate the surgical implantation of plexiglass windows looking into the peritoneal cavity. Legend has it that they do this to cows at agricultural schools so students can look at the living innards of a beast. If I did it, I would get tattoed onto my duodenum and jejenum, "My Milkshake Is Better Than Yours..."

Posted by: Alfred O. Cloutier at April 14, 2004 1:57 PM

Clive, are the Dutch more milquetoast than middle America? I hadn't heard that but it's nice to think SOMEONE is. (Not that I'm from there. Ahem. I'm from the Bay Area.)

Posted by: june at April 14, 2004 4:22 PM

Ahahahah! I'm libelling the Dutch without having been the country, I'm afraid, so they would be within their rights to come and kick my lily ass.

Posted by: Clive at April 14, 2004 5:30 PM

If you could have a time limited tattoo: shine some UV onto it, wipe it clean & start again - it'd really change the concept. A subdermal t-shirt slogan, but with even less commitment.

& milquetoast? a fantastic ten dollar word, no mistake. I think amsterdam is the dutch san fransisco: all that is weird, concentrated into one place.

Posted by: julz at April 15, 2004 5:02 AM

Heh -- yes, milquetoast is a king among words.

Posted by: Clive at April 15, 2004 10:29 AM

I rather had the impression that the Dutch are one of the more likely nations to go transhuman. They'd start with earnest discussions, guaranteed to make rebellious hipsters sulky and uncomfortable, but that's what one gets for being a rebellious hipster....

Posted by: clew at April 15, 2004 3:02 PM

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