The Killer Flesh

You thought it was dead.

But they never found the body.

Now, it has returned!

It's out for blood!

Yes readers, it's that time once again for the Monster of the Month. August's creature is certainly the most unusual that the Hyper Kitchen has ever come across. Today's dish is offal of a terrifying variety. It is our pleasure to introduce to you: the Chicken Heart.
The Chicken Heart was featured in a 1937 episode of the old time radio program Lights Out. Originally produced by NBC, Lights Out was an anthology of horror stories and weird tales. The program was known for bizarre subject matter, including telepathic amoebas and a mysterious fog that turned people inside out. Characters were often messily devoured, torn apart, dismembered, or burned alive and Lights Out depicted these scenes replete with gruesome sound-effects.

It attained considerable popularity.

In one of its most well-known episodes (penned by future television and film writer Arch Oboler) a disembodied chicken heart is kept alive and beating at the "Research Institute" under the study of one Dr. Alberts. For reasons that are not elaborated upon, the Chicken Heart begins to grow uncontrollably, doubling in mass every hour. Eventually the Heart expands to grotesque size and has become a sprawling mass of uncoordinated "cannibal flesh" that consumes everyone in reach. Dr. Alberts urges city officials to evacuate the area and bomb the Chicken Heart, but his warnings are ignored. The Heart has sprouted "tentacles of protoplasm" that ensnare the guns of the National Guardsmen, and then the Guardsmen themselves. At the end of the episode, the Chicken Heart has nearly crushed the entire city under its titanic bulk and it has eaten most of the inhabitants. As Dr. Alberts attempts to escape in an airplane, the deafening beat of the Chicken Heart can be heard echoing through the ruined city. The good doctor and his pilot meet their doom after the plane's engine cuts out and they plummet straight into the pulsating ocean of meat.

Even today, when carnivorous blobs and city-wrecking freaks have become commonplace, the Chicken Heart towers above the competition as a bizarre and truly original monster. However, it may very well have faded into obscurity had it not been for comedian Bill Cosby. Having listened to Lights Out as a young boy, the Chicken Heart made such an impression on Cosby that he devoted a segment to the beast on his 1966 album Wonderfulness. Thanks to his parodic re-telling of the episode, the Chicken Heart endures.

It's a weird world, isn't it?


Would you like to know more?
You can listen the chicken heart program in its entirety here

How Things Work Part VI: The Quickening

We Must Fear the Termite

Anyone who has traveled on Interstate 95 through Providence, Rhode Island, is familiar with the above giant insect. Largely known as "the Big Blue Bug," the four-thousand pound fiberglass termite has occasionally gone by the droll moniker of "Nibbles Woodaway." It was originally constructed in 1980 to serve as a unique advertisement for an extermination company, but the the cobalt termite has since become an iconic piece of roadside Americana. We at the Hyper Kitchen feel that more buildings should be adorned with colossal bug statues if we want to remain competitive in the twenty-first century world economy.


Would you like to know more?
-Visit New England Pest Control's office website

And I thought this was a glamorous job

Naraka is the underworld in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jainist mythologies. Unlike Western hells, in which sinners sizzle in hellfire for eternity, Naraka is only a temporary cleansing state of existence, in which misdeeds are met with punishment and then the damned are returned to the realm of the living. With that being said, it still looks absolutely miserable. Let this be a warning to all you readers who like debauchery: embrace virtue or be made into soup.

What lies beneath the Burmuda Triangle? Who killed JFK?

What was Captain Stewart's mistake?
For the answer to this story, turn to page 82.

Who built the pyramids? Who killed the dinosaurs?

Write your answer on a postcard and mail it to your nearest Hyper Kitchen Resource Center,

Megadeath

You're looking at the man with the highest IQ ever measured. His name was Herman Kahn. Joining RAND in 1947 (two years after the detonation of the first atomic-bombs) Kahn worked with scientists such as Edward Teller and Hans Bethe to develop more-powerful nuclear weaponry, ultimately producing the H-Bomb. When it became clear that the growing conflict between the United States and Soviet Union could escalate into a nuclear exchange, Kahn was one of the many minds enlisted by the American government to develop strategy for such an exchange. His job entailed contemplating scenarios of unspeakable destruction with clinical detachment and professionalism.


In 1960, he wrote a book on the subject called On Thermonuclear War. The principle assertion of the book was that a nuclear war was not only likely, but basically unavoidable given the escalating conflict between the superpowers. But Kahn insisted such a prospect was not as apocalyptic as one might think, and indeed a nuclear war could be be a winnable war. Kahn believed that while the devastation would be beyond human comprehension, (with many millions of people dead or poisoned and entire cities reduced to ash) mankind had previously endured torturous eras and emerged strong and stable. The medieval Black Plague was cited as an example. His projections of post-nuclear America depicted a nation where fallout was a daily inconvenience and deformed, irradiated babies were an unfortunate part of ordinary life. Such horror, according to Kahn, "would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants."

Despite reasoning that can only be called at best spurious and at worst insane, On Thermonuclear War was highly influential in shaping America's nuclear policy. Kahn emerged as one of the most prestigious cold war minds, working for various think-tanks in the ensuing decades. He died in 1983 of a massive stroke. While his name is not widely known amongst the public, he has an appropriate cultural legacy, providing the main inspiration for the frenzied Dr. Strangelove.


Would you like to know more?
-Read Kahn's "The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence"
-Read this New Yorker review of "The Worlds of Herman Kahn"

Real men wear leopard print speedos

Angelo Siciliano was born in Italy in 1892, and moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York, twelve years later. A scrawny youth, Siciliano claimed to have been frequently harassed by neighborhood bullies. He became interested in fitness and bodybuilding, and dabbled in gymnastics at the YMCA. Unable to afford exercise equipment of his own, he was forced to find alternative methods. While visiting the zoo, he saw a tiger pacing about its cage and observed its mighty musculature. Inspired, he developed his own method of exercise, Dynamic Tension. The method was comprised of tensing one's muscles and then moving against that tension. It apparently worked quite well as by 1921 he was a circus strongman, having changed his name to Charles Atlas. The following year, he authored a comprehensive fitness program and began to market Dynamic Tension to the 97-pound weaklings of America. One of the ways he reached his target demographic was through comic-books, in ads like the one pictured, beginning in the forties and extending well into the seventies. Several generations of skinny bespectacled kids sent away for the program and Atlas made a considerable profit. The advertisement became a pop-culture icon (even inspiring a song in the Rocky Horror Picture Show), and has endured even after Atlas' death.

Would you like to be hero of the beach?
-Visit Charles Atlas.Com and man yourself up

The Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu

Find any cigarette-scented, mildewy comic-book from the seventies, and it's likely you'll discover one of Count Dante's advertisements for his Black Dragon Fighting Society. Despite his undeniably stylish mutton-chops/afro combination, it is generally accepted that Dante was not, in fact, the deadliest man alive.