[Premiere.com] Long-time BME supporter (and full-time-job-having sell-out) Jenni recently interviewed Vera Farmiga, co-star of the new amputation-fetish film, Quid Pro Quo. Nick Stahl takes the lead as wheelchair-bound journalist Isaac, who, while researching the subculture of voluntary amputees (some of whom mention their jealousy of Isaac’s condition), meets Fiona (Farmiga), a woman with Body Integrity Identity Disorder who wants nothing more than to spend her life in a wheelchair. Something tells me Farmiga’s been reading BME. From the interview:

Farmiga: You know, you read these testimonies online and there’s such a sense of aloneness and this desolate feeling of despair, just feeling so alone in this, and self-demand amputation is illegal [except] under only the most rigid psychiatric evaluations and testing. There’s only a handful of doctors and hospitals that will approve self-demand amputation, so people go to great lengths… throw themselves in front of trains, use shotguns, hurt themselves. I don’t know what to think. I can’t even imagine… This obsession completely possesses these people, and there is a real sense of spiritual unrest. The cases I’ve heard of and read about of people actually going through [amputation] — whether they’ve done it themselves or had it professionally taken care of — there is a ninety-something percent satisfaction, that these people say that they feel more spiritually fulfilled and it’s not a case of being disabled any more, it’s becoming able-bodied… feeling whole in relation to that broken person within. I cannot pretend to comprehend it, and it’s very difficult. I mean, this is like the same thing as transgenderism a while ago; people couldn’t fathom it… I have no personal feelings towards it; I couldn’t, especially having to play Fiona.

[InkedMag.com] Athletes with tattoos hardly qualify as breaking news, but Inked Magazine just put together a rather entertaining profile of Florida Marlins pitcher Justin Miller, who is pretty much tattooed from asshole to elbow. He’s so heavily covered, in fact, that Major League Baseball insisted that he wear long sleeves, as his various pieces of work were apparently too much of a distraction to opposing batters. Luckily, his teammates seem fine with it:

[…] it was revealed that Miller had “I (heart) Billy Koch” tattooed on his ass after losing a bet with teammate and friend Billy Koch. In exchange, Koch gave Miller $2,000 for his trouble and paid for the tattoo. As word of the bet spread, Koch felt so bad that he gave Miller’s wife $500 as compensation for her pain and humiliation.

“It was a silly bet. Honestly, at the time I was getting a lot of tattoos. [Koch and I] got traded for each other a couple of years before. I have fun telling that story, and we’re boys to this day. He’ll definitely never let me forget about it,” Miller says. “I think [my teammates] wait until the shower just so they can peek instead of asking to see my ass.”

Of course, it’s hard to live down the reputation one receives after getting teammates’ names etched on one’s hindparts, I guess:

Marlins pitcher Scott Olsen, who had been pulled over by Florida police the previous summer and charged with DUI before allegedly being shocked with a taser, approached Miller with a proposition of his own. “He wants me to get his mug shot tattooed on my ass. I don’t think that’s going to work,” says Miller. “I don’t think my wife wants to see Olsen’s picture there. So we’re not going to go with that.”

Geez, you lose one bet and everyone treats your ass like the community mural. Remind me to convert to a religion that prohibits gambling. (Via Deadspin)

[MSNBC.MSN.com] Speaking of religion (Ed. Note: That’s how you do a fucking segue, friends), Jessa sends in this story about Todd Bentley, an evangelist from British Columbia, Canada, who is not the average preacher. Bentley, the founder of Fresh Fire Ministries, leans toward the Pentecostal range of practices — none of which, luckily, seem to conflict with the fact that he is likely one of the more heavily pierced and tattooed evangelical ministers around. Apparently, such appearances are insignificant when you can flex your God-ceps the way he claims to be able to:

Bentley claims that God has used him to supernaturally heal hundreds of people of diseases ranging from glaucoma to diabetes to even cancer.

[…] he doesn’t know exactly why now, why him, […] and he does not promise that everyone who comes to him will be healed. But he does maintain a pragmatic posture toward prayer.

“I say, you have nothing to lose but your sickness. If the doctors can’t help you, why wouldn’t you give God a chance?”

Pragmatic indeed! But I hear you saying, “Well, religion is a crutch and a fairy tale, why travel such a distance and at such an expense when I could just as easily pray to the water stain on my bathroom wall?” To which I say, if you’re not willing to give yourself up to the will of a man who lists on his MySpace page the people he’d most like to meet as “Jesus, King David, Paul the Apostle [… and] Hulk Hogan,” well, then you probably deserve the Gout or whatever the hell it is that’s wrong with you.