independent alternatives to the malestream media
Raoul sporting his new head. Thanks for the suggestion, Sis!
Raoul and I are back from the Himalayas. Got a bunch of stuff to catch up on, and I owe you guys an anthropology post, eh? Eh. (Vocal mannerism courtesy of two weeks in a tent with Raoul. When he was a parrot he lived with a family in Montreal.)
Left: An FBI sketch of “D.B. Cooper.” Right: The late Kenneth Christiansen, Northwest purser and former paratrooper, who, despite his strong resemblance to a doofus elf on qualudes, may have been the notorious hijacker.
Raoul and I had a fake fight last night so we could make up later, and while he was out of the tent I passed the time reading the D.B. Cooper story in last week’s New York magazine. Damn. Could it be? Probably not, but it’s a good piece anyway. Read it even if you think D.B. is just spattered DNA somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
If you’re a young whippersnapper and don’t know about D.B. Cooper, or if you’re an old whippersnapper but you’ve forgotten a lot of the case (or never gave a hoot in the first place), Crime Library has a good review. My hatred of Crime Library burns with the heat of a thousand suns (just how many ad views do you need from each article for crying out loud? What next, a paragraph per page? The greed, the greed, people, it’s destroying you) but their rundown on the Cooper case includes a bunch of details about the hijacking that didn’t make it into the New York piece.
The headline reads, China’s Leader Closes Door to Reform.
I guess so. Check out these two pictures from the accompanying slide show of the Communist Party Opening Day in Beijing:
“Hostesses for the Communist Party’s 17th National Congress played a game Monday outside the Great Hall of the People.”
“Party delegates — 2,200 in all — attended the opening ceremony of the week-long event, which is held once every five years.”
I think there is one woman in the second picture. She probably has a penis in a jar under the desk.
It’s been a tough week here in the Spirit Lounge, what with the state of humanity being such a goddamn clusterfucked trainwreck of horror and all. So when I found this old Onion article from 2000, my heart leapt with an irrational wild hope. Let it come true, I thought. I’m a Spirit, I’m in the Spirit Lounge, God stops by for tequila shots every now and then — maybe I can talk Her into it!
Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs
‘Oh, Shit,’ Says Humanity
August 30, 2000 | Issue 36•30
One of the evolved dolphins, whose opposable thumbs
have struck fear in the hearts of humankind.
Delphinologists have reported more than 7,000 cases of spontaneous opposable-digit manifestation in the past two weeks alone, with “thumbs” observed on the bottle-nosed dolphin, the Atlantic humpback dolphin, and even the rare Ganges River dolphin.
“It appears to be species-wide,” said dolphin specialist Clifford Brees of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, speaking from the shark cage he welded shut around himself late Monday. “And it may be even worse: We haven’t exactly been eager to check for thumbs on other marine mammals belonging to the order of cetaceans, such as the killer whale. Oh, Christ, we’re really in the soup now.”
Of course this wouldn’t actually be evolution, but rather a kind of synchronized mass mutation. But I’m sure God could handle that.
Thus far, all the opposable digits encountered appear to be fully functional, making it possible for dolphins – believed to be capable of faster and more complex cogitation than man – to manipulate objects, fashion tools, and construct rudimentary pulley and lever systems.
“They really seem to be making up for lost time with this thumb thing,” said Dr. Jim Kuczaj, a University of California–San Diego biologist who has studied the seasonal behavior of dolphins for more than 30 years. “Last Friday, a crude seaweed-and-shell abacus washed up on the beach near Hilo, Hawaii. The next day, a far more sophisticated abacus, fashioned from some unknown material and capable of calculating equations involving numbers of up to 16 digits, washed up on the same beach. The day after that, the beach was littered with thousands of what turned out to be coral-silicate and kelp-based biomicrocircuitry.”
See? It could go fast! They could be ready to take over the U.N. by this weekend if God got started tonight!
Today the Supreme Court decided to wish the El-Masri case into the cornfield, thus providing the second half of the one-two punch that began with Torture President’s sneering TV appearance last week when he said that our government doesn’t torture people. No, it just beats them, rapes them, freezes them, waterboards them, terrorizes them. Hey, el-Masri’s crime was that he had the same name (approximately) as a known terrorist, and for this he was kidnapped by the CIA and sent to a prison in Afghanistan and tortured. Sorry, not tortured: beaten, raped, those other things. But we won’t be hearing about that any more, ’cause el-Masri is in the cornfield now. Along with the Geneva Convention, the Constitution, all that bogus reality-based community crap.
And what can I, disgruntled citizen, do about it? Not a goddamn thing as far as I can tell. Have a drink, maybe. That sounds good. What time is it? Is the sun over the yardarm yet?
Meanwhile, the bobble-heads on TV hosted another debate today to see who gets to be the next Republican candidate for Merovingian king. Why not just wheel them out in carts so we can look at their long hair, see how pretty they are, how nice they look in their king suits, that sort of thing? Why bother with the questions? We might as well have them tap dance instead. Actually that would be better! Tap dancing!
Definitely time for a drink.
And more importantly, what is they learning?
I was shopping for a new head for Raoul when I came across a terrifying place called einsteins-emporium.com, “The Internet’s Largest Science and Nature Store.” Please, god, don’t let it be true.
So, does that mean that a biography is the story of two people’s lives? Or is it perhaps the story of a bisexual’s life? Are biologists bisexuals?
Oh, that’s why they’re called zoologists! ‘Cause they take care of the animals in the zoo!
Who wrote this shit? Are they Creationists? Are they Republicans?
They’re definitely sexists, ’cause that crap is all over the site:
So was Thales just a pre-Socratic punk band?
Never mind — let’s just thank our lucky stars that men are still asking all those science-y questions. Cause we women are too busy getting our hair done.
Gee, I wonder if there’s a branch of science that deals with gender-neutral language? Probably not, since the great men of science have assured us that something as ephemeral as language has no impact whatsoever on man’s attitude to the world around him. Science is open to all men! Normal men, female men — everybody!
There are two excellent carnivals up today:
The Carnival Against Sexual Violence #32
The Sixth Carnival of Radical Feminists
Both are very well done and full of intriguing posts. Go read!
I’ve been tagged with a new meme by Mr. Hotty McNature Pants himself, and since he also happens to be my control in the Illuminati cell that runs this part of the tubes, I have no choice but to comply.
An interesting animal I had
I could go with the “most exotic pet” thing here, but in truth, when I think of an interesting animal I think of my late dog Katie. She was not only the most interesting animal I’ve ever known, but she was significantly more interesting than a lot of humans I’ve met. Smarter, too.
An interesting animal I ate
I’m not big on eating animals, but an interesting animal I almost ate was a soft-shelled crab.
My friend and I were in a tiny fishing village one day, and the only place to eat was a little crab shack down by the water.
“Whaddya got?” we asked the attendant.
“Soft-shelled crab sandwich.”
“Anything else?”
“Nope, just soft-shelled crab sandwich.”
“Okay, then, guess we’ll have the soft-shelled crab sandwich.”
The soft-shelled crab sandwich turned out to be two slices of Wonder bread, some Miracle Whip, and a big spider-looking thing.
“It’s a spider sandwich,” my friend and I whispered to each other at almost the same moment.
We ate the bread.
An interesting thing I did with or to an animal
Toured the country with the aforementioned Katie. We agreed that Mount Rushmore was an absurd monument to honky hubris, but we loved the Badlands. Other thrills included almost running out of gas on Pine Ridge reservation, almost dropping our car keys into the Grand Canyon, and herding the waves at Carmel beach.
An interesting animal in the Museum
The prairie dogs at the Prairie Homestead outside Badlands National Park. The original 1909 sodhouse is mesmerizing, but so are the prairie dogs popping in and out of their little hills. Oddly enough, Katie wasn’t remotely interested in them.
An interesting animal in its natural habitat
The mountain goats on the upper slopes of Mount Evans in Colorado. They had the raggediest coats I’ve ever seen, plus space-alien eyes and a weird fixed stare. Though maybe that was the altitude sickness getting to me.
(Note: Turns out Mount Evans isn’t really their natural habitat.)
I’m supposed to tag nine more people with this thing — nine! Oh man, at this rate we’ll have taken over the entire internet in four days. It’ll be like the Andromeda Strain.
Okay, consider yourselves tagged:
Ann Bartow
Burrow/Lost Clown
Echidne
Foilwoman
Professor Zero
Richard (aka Simply Wondered when he’s not pretending to be Dave Cameron)
The Lovely and Talented Timothy Shortell
Twisty (who typically eschews memes, but maybe this one will jolt her out of her writer’s block. I’m offering you a lifeline here, woman.)
Victoria Marinelli (when she gets back from doing important stuff)
And to all my readers who feel like chiming in — chime away. Use the comments to tell us about your animal encounters.
