I miss my boyhood. Matchbox, Hotwheels and Tonka...the holey trinity of my toy gods.

Did I upset the censors, Gerard?

I had an Erector Set as a boy, plus the then-obligatory Lionel train and slot cars somewhat later. I would have traded my bike, baseball mitt, and complete collection of cap guns for something even 1/10 the scale of this set up, though.

Chris Burden born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946 is an American Performance artist.

Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s, he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters.

One of Burden’s most reproduced and cited pieces, Trans-Fixed took place in 1974 at Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. For this performance, Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.

Later that year, Burden performed his piece White Light/White Heat at the Ronald Feldman gallery in New York. For this work of experiment performance and self-inflicting danger, Burden spent twenty-two days lying on a triangular platform in the corner of the gallery. He was out of sight from all viewers and he could not see them either. According to Burden, he did not eat, talk, or come down the entire time.

In 1978 he became a professor at University of California, Los Angeles, a position from which he resigned in 2005 due to a controversy over the university's alleged mishandling of a student's classroom performance piece that echoed one of Burden's own performance pieces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Burden

Well, he finally got one right.

Awesomely useless. I want to see it in person.

I've got no use for anybody who would strangle a kitten for any reason whatsoever.

It was probably a figure of speech. I'm guessing.