TO SPITE HIS FACE

Lord of the Rings fan raises his game, lowers his life prospects.

An interesting item began popping up online yesterday about Fernando Franco de Oliveira, an avid Lord of the Rings fan from Brazil who made himself look like an orc with the help of tattoos, dermal implants, and surgery—including an operation to remove his nose. The result is what you see above, and well, it’s both atrocious and very sad. We liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it’s junior high literature. Imaginative and well written to be sure, but a typical person aged twelve to fourteen—like we were when we first came across it—would be able to read the books and enjoy them. Same with the movies. They’re officially rated for filmgoers aged thirteen and up.

The point is that neither the books nor movies are something to let influence your life to the extent that you get your eyeballs tattooed black and your ears crimped. There’s not a lot to say about this other than that the obsessive quest for individuality on a planet of almost eight billion people has claimed another victim—a mentally ill one. Yes, yes, we know. You’re not supposed to say things like that these days. You’re supposed to be supportive and non-judgmental, but we can do what we want on our website, and we judge that de Oliveira is mental.

Being able to express himself rationally, de Oliveira can of course present the façade of a sane person, but his outward appearance makes a mockery of that, because to do what he’s done is to deliberately destroy one’s life, or—even worse—to not understand that to do it is to destroy one’s life. True, he was never a beauty queen, as you see in the soft-bodied, monobrow dominant photo at right. But he still had a nose. And anyone with a nose has a shot at good things in life.

De Oliveira will of course tell you his existence is good, that people tell him he looks cool, that chicks dig it or he has a committed partner who loves it, that he was never happy until finding himself in this way, that it even earns him money, and anyone who hates on him is really the one with problems, but he’ll be using his surgically forked tongue to lie through his vampire teeth. He’s insane. End of story. He’s even crazier than Caius Veiovis and that guy probably bites the heads off bats. All that said, we’d still rather hang out with Orc Boy than someone who bases their life upon Atlas Shrugged. At least he’s decided to be a monster only on the outside.

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HISTORY REWIND

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1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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