There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. Personally, I would regard such an individual with deep suspicion…If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race. – William S. Burroughs
The first video this week was contributed by Angela Keaton; it’s really the only important comment on Arab-Israeli hostilities you’ll ever need. The second video, and the links above the first, were provided by Jesse Walker, and the links between the videos by Korhomme (“buttocks”), Dave Barry (“recipe”), Saladin Ahmed (“Venn”), Michael Whiteacre (“accident”), Grace (“Nazca” and “dog”), Radley Balko (“satire” and “ticket”), Luscious Lani (“employee”), Cop Block (“police state”), Nun Ya (“rescue”), and Police Misconduct (“medal”).
- Headline translation: “Cops Charge More Arrestees With Assault“.
- I’m not quite this repulsed by them. But it’s close.
- Sinister buttocks.
- I want this recipe.
- Good utilization of space.
- Best Venn diagram of all time.
- He’s obviously just accident-prone.
- Previously-undiscovered Nazca lines!
- Too believable to be really good satire.
- Want an imaginative, dedicated employee? Hire this guy.
- Cop writes parking ticket before driver gets out to feed meter.
- That HPL really knows the eldritch secrets of a truly sick party.
- I’ll bet some of you still think “police state” is an exaggeration.
- Cop fails to murder dog, gets court order to murder her instead.
- Cop idea of “rescuing” a hostage includes murdering her husband.
- Cop celebrates medal by breaking into stranger’s flat, beating her.
From the Archives
- Obviously nude pictures are far more dangerous to “children’s” lives than spending 20 years in prison.
- Cops, thieves, Gandhi, Hitler, lard, water, bureaucracy, Satanists and nuclear war.
- Never on Sunday, New Orleans, Pretty Baby and Taste the Blood of Dracula.
- Fanatics complain “authorities” don’t invent enough “trafficking victims”.
- Three generations of anti-whore propaganda are not quickly overcome.
- Dear prudish twit actresses: leave sex worker parts to grown women.
- Politicians want to destroy the internet to make life harder for whores.
- “He was so desperate for money he actually opened a legal business!”
- Politicians wasting other people’s money to fight a legal sex business.
- More sex≠better sex; underwear≠better sex; ignorance≠better sex…
- When a Japanese millionaire doesn’t look like a Japanese millionaire.
- Why are more female teachers getting involved with male students?
- Cats, cops, apes, TSA, free speech, prohibition, guitars and fascism.
- How to get free publicity by labeling your ad copy a “press release”.
- Norwegian study says that Swedish Model causes “sex trafficking”.
- “The House of the Rising Sun”, “Farewell to Storyville” and “Jacky”.
- Swedish Model proponents are NOT “sex industry lobby groups”.
- It’s hard to tell whether activists are winning ground or losing it.
- It’s time for humanity to grow up and set aside childish beliefs.
- Presumably, the cops wanted her to snitch on the girl instead.
- “Trafficking” means whatever its proponents want it to mean.
- Man argues it wasn’t a crime because he only raped a whore.
- Are some escorts starting to encrypt client communications?
- The weird situations that arise from sex work legalization.
- Prohibitionists “rescue” young sex workers into cages.
- I wonder how this would have turned out in America?
- An extended example of New Orleans’ “Yat” dialect.
- Another example of why legalization is a bad idea.
- Prohibitionists will say whatever they need to say.
- What if all workers were treated like sex workers?
- I trust the FBI even less than I trust Kristin Davis.
- Activists’ impressions of the Desiree conference.
- A historical version of “50 clients a night” idiocy.
- The new and improved version of the Mann Act.
- What the hell is going on in Washington state?
- Behold the lawhead psychosis in action.
- An editorial telling the truth about porn.
- Did the fake ad actually state “I am 13”?
- Chicks masturbating in MRI machines.
- A short glossary of terms I’ve coined.
- Politicians, hookers, yawns.
- Opium.
A few months back I read Mr Ahmed’s fantasy novel Throne of the Crescent Moon and the short story prequel Where Virtue Lives.
I can heartily recommend them.
By using an Arabian Nights style setting Ahmed neatly sidesteps a lot of the cliches that blight the genre and his characters are refreshingly complex compared to most in the field. But more importantly Ahmed neither over-writes nor tries to extend his stories beyond his capacity to develop characters and plot ideas (unlike a certain Tolkien wannabe who has gained a lot of prominence lately), though it remains to be seen whether he will fall into that trap as he turns his novel into yet another fantasy trilogy (or even a five book (and counting) ‘trilogy’ like that same overrated ‘R.R.’).
Still, anyone who would endorse something that puts Steve Miller at the centre of an artistic universe …
Two meetings with centipedes at Haad Khom on Koh Phangan in the 80s.
1. I am standing outside the shower block in shorts with a towel draped around my neck waiting for a vacancy. Suddenly I feel a burning sting on my chest. I look down. Apart from a spreading red welt, nothing. I look away and a few seconds later there is another sting. Again I look down. Again nothing. This time I keep my eyes on my chest. After ten seconds or so a large centipede emerges stealthily from a fold in my towel, stings me yet again, then effects a lightning reversal back into the cover of the towel. A quick flick ejects the centipede onto the cement surrounding the showers but it is too fast for my descending heel and makes good it’s escape.
2. I’m lying in bed around 2am too agitated by the day’s events to sleep. I decide to get up and mellow out. I have already struck the lighter and the bong is millimetres from my face when a huge centipede – maybe eight inches long – emerges from the mouth of the bong and barely misses finding refuge in my mouth. It scurries down my face and neck under my t-shirt but emerges without stinging me. I flick it from my leg as hard as I can and it flies somewhere off the edge of the verandah. I change the bong water and give it a good shake out before repacking. I also tuck in the mosquito net very carefully before going to sleep.
I am told that in the West Indies, the sequential welts which can result from a centipede’s repeatedly biting a person when trapped under clothes are called “railroad tracks”.
Actually the centipede stings were relatively benign compared to the scorpion stings at Wat Suanmoke near Chaiya, which were comparable to European Wasp stings. The Wolf spider bite when I was a teenager at Ettalong (hand feeding it flies and failing to let go in time) was somewhere in between while the something I stepped on in the estuary of Patonga Creek was much worse.
For years I thought the latter was a stingray, until I saw what a real stingray can do. Now I consider myself lucky. Compared to my former girlfriend at least.
We don’t have the biting-stinging centipedes here in the Midwest but they’re big and frightening all the same (oh and their cousins, the silverfish). Chicago, being a former swamp area, has a lot of them. I will never forget the night I thought someone had broken into our house via my brother’s room due to all the crashing and screaming coming from the area. Nope, a centipede fell on my brother’s face while he was sleeping. I never went to sleep again in that house without checking the ceiling and the gap between the ceiling for any of those multi-legged bastards.
Then there was the time I reached for my washcloth and there was one chillin’ on there like he was waiting for his turn in the shower. And the one that crawled up out of the drain in the basin. I became pretty good at doing controlled burns on those suckers if they were in the bathroom.
Loved the HP Lovecraft piece.
Regarding the first video: I don’t see what’s great about Nina Paley. Her animation consists of simple, uneased tweens; boring expressions; too much needless talk; bland staging; and sometimes unfitting music. (Sita Sings the Blues was really terrible.)
I’d never heard of Nina Paley beforehand; but her video says it all about the Levant and Palestine. Indeed, with minor modifications, you could apply it to most places where wars have been fought. (It would be churlish, though, to note that the British Officer is wearing his Sam Browne incorrectly, unless this is a message so subtle that I’ve missed it.)
I like the video. Nicely explains that this conflict, like so many others boils down to immaturity of the “I want your stuff” and “I don’t like you” class.
Which would not only be ultra simplistic but, in this case, verging on victim blaming.
The same sort of shit has been going down there for millenia.
Now maybe, just maybe, it’s got something to do with the geostrategic value of the intersection of three continents and the passage from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea. It’s always been in the interest of external imperial powers to keep the locals divided and at each other’s throats.
Then they found oil …
Well, it is extremists fighting extremists. And quite a few of the “victims” on both sides somehow seem to be cheering them on. Yes, I am sure there are also quite a few people that are just tired of this senseless conflict.
Well that says not much at all, eh Celos?
Setting aside the circularity of your use of the word ‘extremist’ surely a couple of important questions are :-
What creates the ‘extremists’?
How are ‘extremists’ able to exert so much influence over their entire communities?
Do you think Israeli governments would maintain such extreme positions were they not able to count on unquestioning diplomatic and material support from the US?
Do you think those firing rockets from Gaza would keep doing so but for the moral and financial support they receive from extra-territorial sources?
Or would both sides perhaps settle down and learn to live in relative harmony – as did Muslims and Jews all across the world for centuries – were it not for outside powers promoting conflict?
Perhaps if you look at your own country’s history of involvement in another key strategic region – the Balkans – you might better understand my point.
Sorry, I do not share your agenda. Not at all.
I suppose the animation is clever, in a way. I’m sorry, though … I can’t like it. History is more complicated than that. A lot more complicated. What the video says to me is “Can’t we all get along” and “All cultures are the same”. The answer to the former is “No. Not based on even the most cursory examination of History. Not unless you want to live under the heel of the first rat bastard who comes bouncing down the pike.”. And the latter is a flat out lie. I gather that the Israelis are abrasive, but they have an Arab/Muslim population that votes and has full civil rights. They do not impose anything remotely resembling Sharia.
We should have taken one look at Yasser Arafat, back in the 1970’s, said to ourselves “This vermin spent the years 1939-1945 inclusive with his tongue so far up Germany’s ass he could taste the Bratwurst.”, and shot him. It would have save endless trouble and thousands of lives.
What if they gave a war and nobody cam? Well, that’s fine if you can arrange it. But if “they” give a war and yours is the only side that doesn’t show up, then it’s 1939 and your name is Poland.
Christ knows whose arsehole you pulled your history book out of cp.
The Poles put up a gallant fight against impossible odds with no help whatsoever from the European powers who had pledged to protect them and a stab in the back from the Soviet Union.
Ever heard of the Battles of Kutno, Brzesk and Tuchola Forest?
The Polish Army then split into two parts, half going underground and continuing the fight against German occupation in a way the French Resistance only ever pretended to do while the other half made its way to Western Europe where it rearmed and provided air and armored units under British strategic command that had a significant impact for the duration of the war.
Not only that, it was the Poles who provided the initially uninterested Brits with the means to crack the German Enigma code – a development that quite possibly saved the British butt while the US was still sitting on it’s hands selling arms to both sides.
The 1940 French and British, OTOH, fielded a force that was superior to the Wehrmacht in every way except leadership and got themselves kicked into the English Channel for their trouble. If they’d fought like the Poles with the resources they had the war would have been over in 1941.
Regarding Arafat in 1939-45, weren’t those the years that the future leaders of Israel were in Irgun and the Stern gang committing terrorist attacks against civilians years before the PLO got into the act?
And where on earth did you get the notion that killing Arafat would have made the Palestinians bend over and take Israeli oppression? They don’t seem to have curled up and died in the years since Israel murdered him. In fact many had long ago thrown their support behind Hamas and breakaway radical former PLO factions because they saw Arafat as too accommodating of the Jewish State.
And those democratic rights for Arab Israelis? They’d be the ones in Israel proper, not the illegally occupied territories that Israel has annexed without granting citizenship to the people living there. Not to mention the many thousands of Palestinians from Israel proper who will never be allowed to vote because they were driven from their own country and now live in foreign refugee camps with no right of return.
Race based states like apartheid South Africa and contemporary apartheid Israel just aren’t viable in the long term. As demographic trends continue to run against Israeli Jews they will have to either abandon the notion of a Jewish state or abandon the facade of democracy. Doubtless Gaza and the tiny shreds of the West Bank Israel has not yet occupied are meant to form future Bantustans into which Arabs currently living in Israel can be driven.
Israelis better start praying for a Palestinian Mandela and Jewish leadership with the vision and balls to start negotiating seriously with the Arabs. Their full spectrum military dominance can’t last forever and if they continue to act like the racist Boers of the Middle East there will be hell to pay when the tide turns.
Poland is an interesting country; it didn’t exist between 1795 and 1918. It had been carved up between Germany, Russia and the Austrian Empire.
The borders of the countries in continental Europe changed frequently; it would be fascinating to see an animated map showing how things changed over the past millennium.
Gotta agree. Though arguments about the colour scheme might start another European war.
Poland’s another example of people pitching their tent in the wrong place (i.e. between Germany and Russia). Mind you, Polish leadership didn’t help matters. They stuck their necks out way too far in the years prior to The Deluge then no sooner did they get a country again than they stuck their necks out again trying to regain historical territories to the east. Little wonder they found few nearby friends when the Germans started tightening the vice.
But I guess you can put it all down to extremists. Celos would.
The (rather modest) tallest mountain in this country is named after the last great Polish general, Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
“Incidents of resisting arrest are down about 5 percent this year compared with 2013, but anecdotal evidence — particularly in high-crime areas — seems to indicate otherwise.”
Shorter version: Incidents of resisting arrest are down about 5 percent this year compared with 2013.
Most sensible explanation of the Nazca lines in in the Book of the SubGenius: they were trying to frighten the aliens away.
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