Warning: Contents are disturbing

Seriously people, I mean it. If you can't watch movies where people turn in to aliens, or alien beings burst out of someone's chest, then you'd better look away right now.

On the 4th of July, I decided to check out some California Culture. We went to the Mr. and Mrs. Muscle Beach Competition at Venice Beach.

We'll start with a relatively un-disturbing photo. Celebrate America!


Note that the women - even if they weren't all wearing exquisite lucite heels - are taller than the men. Herein probably lies some psychology.

How it works is, in the preliminaries, contestants line up and strike the same poses. Then later they do individual pose routines set to music.

One dude came out in a Conan skirt and waved around a plastic sword for his pose routine. He was the artistic one. I took at as an homage to the Governator, a former Muscle Beach regular. Schwarzenegger couldn't come to the event this year, due to a terrible hand injury from writing so many IOU's.

Some other stuff probably happened in the competition too, but this thing went on for about 75 hours and there was only so much I could take.

Now we will examine the interesting colors.

Orange is the most popular skin tone for muscle people. Also popular is a rich purple brown hue. A good specimen is exhibited here in the white dude second from the left. Compare him to the last guy on the right, who is exhibiting his (mostly?) natural skin tone.

Now we break for the funky chicken!


The woman sitting next to me had gone to all the competitions for the past ten years, so when she said this next contestant competed every year and was 70-something years old, I believed her.


How are you holding up? Are you ready to go on? It's only going to get worse from this point forward.


The aliens want out! They're going to burst through these human guises and kill us all!



This last one is the image that truly gave me nightmares. There is really nothing more to say about it than what my friend said - "It looks like a pee-pee."



I'm sorry about your eyeballs, but really it's your own fault for not looking away.

Perhaps this musical number will make you feel better:

Friday postcards from LA

Friday afternoon we went to an art gallery in West Hollywood to check out the David Lynch/Sparklehorse show. David Lynch's photographs are . . . David Lynchian. The furniture store next door was really more entertaining. There, for just a few thousand, you can purchase a life-sized horse lamp, a lot of furniture items dipped in tar, barstools made of hair, or this exquisite lucite pink-sand filled coffee table.


Here is a block of wood chips. This is not furniture, this is art. It was in another gallery.


On to higher pursuits. I give you . . . Clifton's Cafeteria!

It was a fitting place for dinner, since it looks like it could be the set of a David Lynch movie. Clifton's has been around since the 30's, and hasn't changed much. You don't go for the food. You go for the woodland experience. There's an indoor waterfall and stream, an animatronic pop-up forest creature of some sort, and a small chapel where you can listen to a recording about how redwoods will save your life. The guys at the table next to us were discussing Plato.

LA story

Hello from Los Angeles. Yesterday's culinary adventures started with some afternoon Persian ice cream. Here we see cucumber and orange blossom. I recommend not drinking yogurt soda. Then on to a Himalayan restaurant, which was six kinds of yummy. Maybe I should have ordered the yak.

Great leap forward

Learnin', episode 10

• The Four Pests Campaign. Mao Zedong declared that China needed to be rid of sparrows, rats, flies, and mosquitoes. Sparrows, who ate grain, were the first to go. People were ordered to destroy nests. There was a synchronized campaign were everybody would go outside at the same time and bang on pots pans and generally make a lot of noise to startle all the sparrows into flight. Sparrows can only fly for so long before they die of exhaustion. It worked, lots of sparrows died. Which meant there were fewer predators for locusts, and the locusts ate the crops. This was one of the factors in a subsequent famine in which somewhere between 17 and 50 million people died.
• Columbia University has an MS in Narrative Medicine. It "seeks to fortify clinical practice and training with narrative skills in order to strengthen the overarching goals of medicine, public health and social justice, as well as the intimate, interpersonal experiences of the clinical encounter."
• Composer Franz Liszt received so many requests for locks of his hair that he eventually bought a dog and sent people its fur.
• 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe got into a duel with a fellow student over who was the better mathematician. Tycho got his nose cut off. He made a new nose out of gold and copper. He also had a pet moose and hired a psychic dwarf named Jepp to sit under the table while he had dinner. One night the moose had too much to drink and fell down a flight of stairs.
• Discontinued Jell-O flavors: coffee, celery, chocolate.
  

Small town Texas

I saw you lying in the arms of a poet, I heard him tell you tantalizing lies

Best Ticketmaster security words ever?


Website security check words could also function as a band name generator.

PS. Regular season interleague baseball games. If an AL team is playing in an NL stadium, does that mean the visiting pitcher has to hit? If so, that comedy alone is worth the price of admission. And it could also mean the Astros might have an actual chance at winning a game. (Ok, not really.)

This week in HEB

After witnessing these wonders, I almost christened the HEB parking lot with vomit. Apparently this is my new reaction to going from frigid air conditioning to a 110 degree parking lot. Neat!

At the gates of the animal kingdom

I've been needing some good news, so I was pretty excited to see the workplace nutria this evening. He lives in the corporate swamp outside my office. I hadn't seen him all week and I was afraid somebody ate him.

Here's his closeup:


But all the simple joy I received from the animal kingdom was negated when I got home and found this at my door step:

My cat does not go outside, so this was not an offering. Due to the geometry of the front porch, there is no way for a bird to fly so hard into the window that it kills itself. So either this bird crawled to my door to ask me to call 911, or someone put it there. Either way, this does not seem a good sign.

Language apparatus

Every so often I'll come across something that happens to perfectly describe my current state of being. Which currently is this:

"I experienced . . . a depletion of my interiority, a vacuum of thought and language. I went to the mountain to replenish my mind, to reboot its language apparatus." - Alexander Hemon.

Now the phrase "reboot my language apparatus" keeps popping into my head like a mantra. My language apparatus is in such a sorry condition that I can't even come up with my own description for this state, I have to steal from someone else.

PS. In the summer fiction New Yorker, Edna O'Brien's "Old Wounds" scores 75 points for deadly disease, death, and unhappy middle aged white people.

Grisi siknis

Wrapping up our little mini-series on infectious mass hysterical diseases . . . grisi siknis.

Grisi siknis is a contagious syndrome that occurs among the Miskito People of eastern Central America and affects mainly young women.

Traditional belief holds that grisi siknis is the result of evil spirits or black sorcerers. While Western medicine typically has no effect on those afflicted with the disease, the remedies of Miskito herbalists or witch doctors are often successful in curing grisi siknis.

Symptoms of grisi siknis vary, but a distinct set of central characteristics. Most of the victims are young girls from 15 to 18 years old. The attacks are prefaced by headaches, dizziness, anxiety, nausea, irrational anger and/or fear. During the attack, the victim loses consciousness and falls to the ground, and subsequently runs away. The victim may view other people as devils, feel no pain for bodily injuries and have amnesia regarding their physical circumstances. Some grab machetes or broken bottles to wave off unseen assailants. Other victims are reported to have performed superhuman feats, vomited strange objects such as spiders, hair and coins and spoken in tongues. In some cases the semi-conscious victim will speak the names of the next to be infected, although it is not always accurate. During attacks, victims report mental visions in which devils or evil spirits come for them, and have sex with them.

The first recorded cases of grisi siknis date to the 1800s. An outbreak in May infected 34 people in northern Nicaragua. Authorities had to close four schools to prevent widespread panic among students. In 2003, 60 people in Nicaragua were infected. One 15-year-old girl is said to have died.

Penis panic

Genital retraction syndrome (GRS), generally considered a culture-specific syndrome, is a condition in which an individual is overcome with the belief that his external genitals are retracting into the body, shrinking, or may be imminently removed or disappear. A penis panic is a mass hysteria event or panic in which male members of a population suddenly experience this belief.

Penis panics have occurred around the world, most notably in Africa and Asia. Local beliefs in many instances assert that such physical changes are often fatal.

Penis panics in southeast Asia have become known under the term "Koro." Injuries have occurred when stricken men have resorted to apparatus such as needles, hooks, fishing line, and shoe strings, to prevent the disappearance of their penises.

An epidemic struck Singapore in 1967, after rumors started that local pork was impregnated with female hormones. 446 men turned up at hospitals insisting that their genitals had shrunk. Government and medical officials alleviated the outbreak by a massive campaign to reassure men of the anatomical impossibility of retraction together with a media blackout on the spread of the condition.

The belief has triggered waves of panic in Senegal, Benin, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Most recently, Police in the Congo arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink penises. Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure. Rumors of penis theft quickly began circulating in Kinshasa, and dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

In September 2003, a Sudanese merchant was visited by a customer who had travelled to Khartoum from West Africa. The two men became embroiled in an argument during which the West African grabbed the shop-keeper's hand and shook it violently; almost immediately the merchant could feel his penis beginning to shrivel as it withdrew into his body. Terrified at the thought of losing his manhood, the merchant became hysterical and had to be taken to hospital where doctors could find nothing wrong with him. For weeks the streets were alive with rumors of the mysterious West African (sometimes called "Satan's Friend") who was causing men's penises to disappear by shaking their hands. At least another 40 men were hospitalized after having had their penises stolen.

Totally not loitering

Sunday morning, not loitering. Photo courtesy of.

The Dancing Plague of 1518

Dancing mania was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 18th centuries; it involved groups of people, sometimes thousands at a time, who danced uncontrollably and bizarrely, seemingly possessed by the devil. Men, women, and children would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth until they collapsed from fatigue.

The Dancing Plague of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, France in July 1518. The outbreak began in July 1518, when a woman, Frau Troffea, began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. This lasted somewhere between four to six days. Within a week, 34 others had joined, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers. Most of the people died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

As the dancing plague worsened, concerned nobles sought the advice of local physicians, who ruled out astrological and supernatural causes, instead announcing that the plague was a "natural disease" caused by "hot blood."

The authorities were convinced that the afflicted would only recover if they danced day and night. So guildhalls were set aside for them to dance in, musicians were hired to play pipes and drums to keep them moving, and professional dancers were paid to keep them on their feet. Within days those with weak hearts started to die. Finally they were loaded aboard wagons and taken to a healing shrine. Not until early September did the epidemic recede.

Agnar

Agnar is a nutria. He is a warrior. He is a warrior nutria. Agnar travels through space and time via his magic hula hoop. Whenever a nutria is in trouble, Agnar is there. While he prefers the swamp, he is comfortable in any setting, whether it be the opera, the moons of Jupiter, or ringside at a midget wrestling match. He only allows certified virgins to cut his fur and trim his nails. He is in the official fan clubs of several Scandinavian Death Metal bands, but secretly he likes show tunes.