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Lobsterotica, 1921

Xeni Jardin at 4:13 pm Wed, Jul 21, 2010

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Oh, it gets better. Read the whole thing. I dare say it's borderline NSFW. Lobsturbation?

Excerpt from "A Lobster Hypnotized," Ashburton Guardian (New Zealand), Volume XLI, Issue 9464, 11 March 1921, Page 2. (via NLNZ via Bibliodyssey)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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  • scdevine

    I wonder what a brainwave/eeg scan of the lobster would show. What the heck, do the chicken and the shark, too.

  • Anonymous

    Susy DeLucci and the Miracle of Life…

    GOOGLE IT!

    • GyroMagician

      Ewww. Need unicorn. Or maybe a seahorse.

  • Mark Dow

    In my experience this only works on uneducated females who buck like a mustang.

  • Brainspore

    Hold the presses- they found an uneducated lobster who was also a big fish? I thought fish tended to be found in schools?

    [rimshot/duck to avoid hurled vegetables]

  • jeffbell

    Yeah. They do that.

    When I lived in Boston we went and bought a 17 pound lobster. My roommate from Maine showed me how to run a finger forward along the “nose” at the top of the shell and after a few of these it’s eye stalks retracted and it stopped moving. We set it up tripod style on its nose and two claws. After about 15 seconds it woke up and flopped over.

  • Stooge

    Just how do you discover a talent like that “quite accidentally”?

    Something smells fishy here and I bet it’s not just Mr Duncan’s fingers.

  • LongHallOwl

    This definitely works… in Maine growing up, when we would cook (boil) lobsters, all the kids would ‘hypnotize’ the lobsters so they wouldn’t “fell the burning”. You would know that your lobster was ready when you could balance it on it’s nose (claws underneath, making a crude tripod). Unclear if this ‘hypnosis’ actually helped the lobster at all…

  • Phikus

    So now we know how Lobster Girl came into being.

    This works on a lot of reptiles too, by rubbing their belly, you can put them to sleep. I have seen this demonstrated on alligators and I used to do this with lizards I would catch that we called “chameleons” because of their color changing camouflage, though I’m sure that is not their official taxonomy.

    • Beanolini

      Well, that’s like hypnotizing chickens*, as Mr Osterburg would say.

      we called “chameleons” because of their color changing camouflage, though I’m sure that is not their official taxonomy.

      Anoles, probably.

      *hypnotizing chickens was standard operating practice in the Ministry of Agriculture when my father worked there in the 1970s.

  • corncob

    Ah, the elusive ‘beautiful trance’.

  • Havanacus

    What can’t librarians do?

  • Xeni Jardin

    Fucking miracles!

  • Anonymous

    I did a shark dive in the Bahamas (Nasau).

    The shark expert (who was on shark week), floated down in chainmail, grabbed an 8 foot reef shark, then started rubbing it’s head, putting it into a trance. He then brought the shark over to the other divers and let us pet the shark while it was floating in a trance…when we were done, he tapped it on the head, it woke up and swam away.

    Amazing!

  • frankieboy

    Dear Xeni, I must say I do appreciate your apparent lively interest in all things erotic, up to and including this anecdote of interspecies canoodling with a dash of light BD. Not unknown to produce results other than a warm afterglow, per

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070314-hybrids.html

    As for a human/crustacean relationship, you know it’s going to end badly, with our man lighting up a postcoital smoke as his “untrained confederate” ponders the inside of a pot. Men!!

  • Brainspore

    Lobsturbation?

    Better a shellfish lover than a selfish lover.

  • InsertFingerHere

    Lobsterbating is mere foreplay.

    Led Zeppelin got right down to it.

    http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/mudshark.asp

  • i_prefer_yeti

    Our lobster overlords have a weakness!

    Keanu Reeves must be informed immediately of this.

  • mdh

    lobsterotica sounds like a good way to get crabs.

  • Felton

    Zoidberg could have told you all of this. Nobody listens to Zoidberg.

    • Ugly Canuck

      And this surprises you?

  • forgeweld

    Sure you can get away with this kind of thing with the “wild, uneducated” lobster described, but a sophisticated, properly bred one will sue your ass.

  • Ugly Canuck

    OT, but here’s a link to “Lobster and Cat” by Pablo Picasso:

    http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Lobster%20and%20Cat&page=&f=Title&object=91.3916

    I like this Picasso more than most. It seems to capture the moment.

    Back OT: How can people eat those spider relatives, those…lobsters?
    Let me guess: with butter. And gusto.

  • Eric Hunting

    The love between a librarian and his lobster is the purest kind of love.

  • millrick

    yesterday my arachnophobia was triggered thanks to BB

    today my decapod phobia is making me all twitchy

    i gotta start taking my meds BEFORE reading boing boing

    • millrick

      cool archival website, btw

  • Lobster

    …I’ll be in my bunk.

  • Ugly Canuck

    Seems that he really rocked that lobster.
    Not the only one to ever rock a lobster…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDZy6-fMCw4

  • wargonzola

    Where I work, we call this Lobster Yoga. I wish I could say we do it to give the lobsters a less painful passing, but mostly we do it to creep out the garde manger guy. His insect phobia apparently carries over to lobsters.