Total Badasses: Serge Gainsbourg

When I think of the words "Europe" and "cool" together I think of Serge Gainsbourg. What a fucking cool guy. Always with a cigarette in his hand, always drunk and slightly disheveled, this guy was the debauched poet/bard of his generation.

There are some amazing stories about Serge. In the 60s he wrote songs for various pop artists, one of whom was a very young French starlet named France Gall. One of Gall's biggest hits was the Serge-penned Les Sucettes, a seemingly innocent tale of a little girl who loves aniseed-flavoured lollipops. France continued to sing and perform the song until eventually finding out it was about oral sex, at which point she locked herself away for several months out of shame. Serge. What a dirty badass..

Watch them perform Les Sucettes here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nr0dUcrAU0
(can't embed this one, darn!)

Another is from his late period, in the 80s, when he'd appear on French TV, constantly drunk and ramble erotically. Here is a legendary moment when he tells Whitney Houston that he wants to fuck her:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMdXi6f5KRg

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Aurochs were so cool

The Aurochs was a really impressive wild cattle that roamed the plains of Europe hundreds of years ago. It was many times larger than regular cattle -- standing two metres tall and weighing 1,000kg. Such a "grand" animal. Imagine just walking through some plains or something and seeing them grazing regally in the distance. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the aurochs is now extinct -- the last ones died in the year 1627.

Here is a totally awesome picture of an Aurochs fighting a pack of wolves: