These plastic wrapped heads aren’t carefully preserved props from a horror movie. They are made of bread and carved by artist/baker Kittiwat Unarrom. Unarrom creates replicas of various body parts- external and internal- and sells them out of a storefront in Thailand.

Howard the Duck is one of the most awesomely, enjoyably bad movies to come out of the 1980s. Amazingly, this was the first Marvel Comic adaptation to receive wide theatrical release in America. It was also produced by George Lucas, which makes the lack of quality even more impressive. But this movie did have a major influence on many of the box office hits we have today. Lucas made Howard because he was heavily in debt after building the Skywalker Ranch. He needed the film to be a hit to get his finances back in order. When it bombed, Steve Jobs offered to help his buddy out by buying Lucas’ new CGI animation division for more than it was worth. That division would become Pixar.

Talking Points Memo has a breakdown of biographical information on the four men arrested Wednesday for planning to bomb synagogues in New York. What I took away from the admittedly light amount of information about the men is that they turned to a misappropriation of a religion (fundamentalism) for the same reasons that people turn to street gangs: sense of community, a chance to feel powerful in a chaotic world, and a seeming lack of escape routes from that world.