The Monster Museum

The Vrolik Museum is housed in the Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam and contains nearly 500 animal and human specimens on display. Every specimen has some anatomical abnormality; congenital deformities that rendered the majority unable to survive past their birth. The various warped forms, usually floating in preservative fluid, are astoundingly varied. At the museum, one can see microcephalics, conjoined twins, ancephalics, dysmeliacs, and all the rest. The study of such developmental defects is called teratology, which literally means "the study of monsters."

Still, this is no mere freakshow. This collection (largely amassed by the father and son team of Professors Girard and Willem Vrolik) has supplied biologists and medical scientists key information about the morphological development.





Would you like to know more?
-Visit to University of Amsterdam's page for Vrolik Museum
-View this set of photos of Vrolik exhibits.

Who built the pyramids? Who killed the dinosaurs?

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

Trapped in a World Before Later On

Transhumanism.

You've heard about it.

Perhaps done a little experimenting while in college.

But it's time you learned the true beef, the real dirt behind the philosophy of engineered evolution.


Transhumanism is this idea that the human form is merely a transitory phase in a greater evolutionary game-plan, and that it is the obligation of mankind to seize the available technology for the use of creating faster, stronger, bigger, and better Post-Human forms.

The notion has become especially vogue of late, amongst the self-proclaimed futurists and esoteric academics of the world, due to continual advances in genetics and cybernetics. Truthfully, however, there's nothing new or especially futuristic about it. Transhumanism is little more than a new iteration of the desire to be more than human, something people have been obsessed with since the dawn of civilization. The originator of the term was a man named Fereidoun Esfandiary (born 1930), a former Olympic athlete, professor at the New School of New York during the mid-sixties, and author of books with such wonderfully pulpy titles as his 1989 release Are You a Transhuman?: Monitoring and Stimulating Your Personal Rate of Growth in a Rapidly Changing World.

Esfandiary famously proclaimed that he was a " 21st century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th." He postulated that inevitable technological and societal progression would enable people to transform themselves into androgynous immortals. Sex would be a thing of the past, and reproduction would be done entirely by mechanically-assisted means. All traditions and customs would be jettisoned, culled to make way for a new global mega-culture.

He eventually changed his name to FM 2030, deciding that names were merely collectivist labels, and therefore had no place in the dawning of Transhumanist era. Esfandiary chose the suffix of 2030 because he theorized that this would be the year that Post-Humanity would be fully achieved, and he further asserted that he would live to see it, despite that he would be 100 years old.

Esfandiary died on July 8th, 2000, of cancer. He had at last reached the twenty-first century, only to discover that it fell woefully short of his expectations.