Cranky Hobbit's Rants

Wut, wut

2012-01-14T22:42:00.000-08:00

My friend A. just sent me this email:

So what does a person do when she comes home from a long, happy day, and checks her e-mail, and checks her bank account, and checks Facebook, and then looks at weather.com, and sees a headline that says "Man Forced to Eat Cocaine From Brother's Butt, Dies?" What, I ask you?

And I was all like, WTF, so I typed "Man Forced to Eat Cocaine From Brother's Butt, Dies" and found this article:

A South Carolina man's brother died after police said he was forced to eat cocaine hidden in his brother's backside.

Both brothers were taken into custody on allegations they had drugs in their car.

But police told Charleston, S.C., TV station WCIV there were additional drugs hidden in 23-year-old Deangelo Mitchell's backside.

Officers said Deangelo Mitchell convinced his brother, 20-year-old Wayne Mitchell, to swallow the ounce of cocaine to hide the evidence. He died soon afterward.

"It's sickening," North Charleston Police Chief Jon Zumalt told WCIV. "I got upset when I saw the thing. I was pretty shocked on it."

Deangelo Mitchell already bonded out of jail on the drug charge, but now police are looking for him again on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

Blink, blink.

Seriously? So then I'm on CNN and damned if I don't run across this:

A man suspected in a series of buttock slashings in Fairfax, Virginia, has been captured in Peru, authorities said.

Johnny D. Guillen, known as the "Corta Nalgas" -- or "butt cutter" -- was captured Friday in Lima, according to Jair Quedas, system operator for Interpol Peru.

Authorities in the United States were looking for Guillen for allegedly cutting the buttocks of 13 young women, according to America Noticias, Peruvian local television.

Wow. Just wow.

WTF is wrong with people, Episode 1

2012-01-13T05:40:00.000-08:00

Okay, seriously. I just read this online:

Elizabeth Vargas will report on a new development in artificial insemination–anonymous sperm donors on the internet.

It seems that women are going out there and soliciting semen donations from strangers online. IN WHAT FUCKING UNIVERSE DOES THIS EVEN BEGIN TO MAKE ANY GODDAMN SENSE AT ALL????!!!!????!!!!

So, I wanna have a baby real bad, and for whatever reason, my husband/partner/sig-o/next door neighbor's teenage son/whatever is unable to rise to the occasion, as it were. So I'm just gonna post a message online saying "Send me yer spooge"?

Does one then go to the recipient's house and perform the horizontal mambo? Does UPS deliver jizz packages? Does one just wank into a cup and leave it on the doorstep? What is the protocol for receiving random strangers' gifts of spooge, outside of the milieu of a singles bar?

Uh, is there some screening process? Does one take the baby-jelly to a doctor and say "I got this from some guy. Can you check it for the following twelve diseases and various genetic disorders?" Does the spooge-checker then fix you with his or her gaze and ask "Are you fucking deranged?"

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people?

Here you are

2012-01-12T07:34:00.000-08:00

Sometime roughly around 5 or 6 billion years ago, a star that had lived out a full life died in a blaze of glory. Its death spewed a whole host of newly-created atoms out into the incredible vastness of space. The incomprehensibly powerful shock wave from its death triggered the collapse of a huge nearby cloud of mostly hydrogen gas and a proportionally few dust particles not too far away. The result of that collapse was the formation of a new star and its host of planets. One of the new atoms created in that fiery furnace was an iron atom, and that iron atom by chance got caught up in the formation of a small lump whirling around the forming proto-star. That same iron atom is now sitting at the heart of a hemoglobin molecule that is in one of the roughly 30 trillion red blood cells circulating through your body as you read this. You would not be here today were it not for that cataclysmic explosion in that immensely long-ago universe. You are literally the stars, and when you look up at the sky, you are the universe contemplating itself.

"...assured by every sun that burns/ The dust to which this flesh shall return/ It is the ancient, dreaming dust of God..."

Fucking bullshit. People suck. I was reminded of that when I went driving among them.

Sorry, little iron atom, that you ended up in a person. Maybe next go-round you can be part of a slime mold, or something interesting and useful.

Do enjoy the video, though. It's a good song.

Majestic eagles

2012-01-11T07:08:00.000-08:00

Living in Sunnyside is ... interesting. The time down here amongst the gumbo-limbo trees is always half past weird-o'clock. Sunnyside and its environs seem to have a population comprised of way more than their fair share of odd ducks, and not just Muscovies.

Recently, I took a short road trip up to a nature preserve in Culo Rata. It was a gorgeous day, rare for the season, but freakin' hot. The heat was made worse by the fact that I was walking on a raised boardwalk through wetlands, so humidity times a billion. Also bugs. I saw roughly a million kinds of birds, though -- gallinules and great blue herons and cattle egrets, oh my. Amazing stuff.

As I traipsed along, I noticed that I was being followed by two women whose main modus operandi seemed to be talking REALLY LOUDLY, thus startling all wildlife within a forty-three mile radius into flight or immobility amongst the tall reeds. Hence, our ladies weren't really seeing much in the way of birds and such, and they were making their displeasure known in grating, aneurysm-inducing voices. The two of them sounded like Mrs. Bighead and Harvey Fierstein. I honestly did not care about their madcap lives, but I learned all about the "teh-rible nusses at mutha's assisted liv-een facility" and how if those incompetents didn't get their shit in order, and that right early, Mrs. Bighead was going to "instigate [sic] a teh-rible lawuh-suit that's go-een to leave them without a dime to theh names." Seriously, I dunno how to even begin to approximate their accents. Horribly affected stuff--imagine the worst stereotypically nasal Bronx dock-walloper accent, only said dock-walloper is trying really hard to sound like posh Brit, but can't quite master the nuances of the Queen's English. Try really hard to hear this in your mind: Harvey Fierstein playing a Hudson River dock worker imitating Margaret Thatcher. It cramps the brain, but it really is the closest approximation to how these two women actually sounded. It disquiets me no end that there are real live human beings out there who sound like these ladies, but I've been told by more than one person that Culo Rata and its vicinity are chock-full of 'em. (Once, I was doing my best imitation of the accent to a new acquaintance, without having told him where I heard someone speaking this way. "Oh, you must have been in Culo Rata," he said.)

The two beldames were dressed alike, in garb that can only be described as Cleopatran funky--gold lame and loose white cotton-poly blend and gilt sandals.

Less midriff and more clam diggers, but you get the idea. The shoes are dead-on, though.

As we rounded a curve on the boardwalk, off to one side of us, at the end of a small slough (pronounced slew, for those of you who aren't intimately familiar with all things swampy, and meaning "a stagnant swamp, marsh, bog, or pond, especially as part of a bayou, inlet, or backwater" -- now you know) was a pile of dead fish, maybe twenty or thirty. A few large black birds were on the ground, enjoying the free seafood buffet, and a half-dozen or so more of the birds were circling lazily over the pile of fragrant fish.

"Oh, my gahd, Madge, look at the eagles. They-uh so majestic."

Oh. No. She. Didn't. My new friend had just misidentified the birds. Thems was not eagles, thems was vultures.

This:

Not this:

Or even this:

Now, I will concede the point that not all of us are ornithologists, but I thought H. sapiens-type people were just born knowing that "big ugly-ass bird with drab black lusterless plumage" plus "bald, not just white-feathered, head" plus "scarfs hell out of really gross smelly extremely deceased possibly squishy things" equals "vulture". Alas, learning new things sometimes hurts. I mean, if the birds were soaring way off in the distance over a craggy peak, one could certainly confuse an eagle and a vulture, but many of these things were on the fucking ground not twenty feet away. Le sigh.

Due to my beneficent nature and love of my fellow humans, I could not continue going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it without fixing this. So I turned to Funky Big Head Cleopatra Fierstein the First and said, "Miss, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but those aren't eagles. They're vultures."

Expressions of shocked horror and betrayal crossed both ladies' visages. "Oh, my gwahd," said Funky Big Head Cleopatra Fierstein the Second. "Ah yew se-rious?"

"Yep. Those are black vultures."

"Jesus Christ!" muttered Funky Big Head Cleopatra Fierstein the First. And then, in utter bemusement, she asked "Do you think someone should call ay-nimal controwuhl?"

Great gods protect and preserve us. I did not laugh. "Not at all," I said. "They're just doing their jobs, sort of like sanitation workers."

"Well, I guess that's all right then," said the Cleos, and that was that.

Verily, I say unto you "There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen." (Job 28:7, KJV)

Pope Benny can blow me

2012-01-10T08:38:00.000-08:00

So, Pope Ratzi the Nazi has spoken out against gay marriage. Seems them ol' sodomites "threaten humanity." My reply to Benedict the Awful? FUCK YOU, YOU CORPULENT OLD QUEEN. Stop worrying about what consenting adults do, and start worrying about your out-of-control brigade of priestly pedophiles.

And Mary, that is a fab chapeau.

Given that religion in general and the papacy in particular piss me off, today's super terrific thing is a blog. I give you ATHEIST CAMEL.

It's effing cold, plus the first SUPER TERRIFIC AMAZING THING

2012-01-04T05:49:00.000-08:00

Seriously, here in Sunnyside, the temp dropped into the high 30s last night. No prob, since I spend 83.64% of my time bitching about the heat and humidity here, right? EXCEPT the furnace went "queep" and died. Since the whole AC unit thingy only dates from July 15 (dies irae, dies illa), our first full day inhabiting this lovely patch of Earth somewhere 'twixt Gehenna (in Jerusalem, natch) and Homesick (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), one is a trifle vexed to have to be calling on the AC repair guy. Really, he should just make a second home here at this little house. (The whole Saga of the AC will be the subject of a future flashback post.)

So, enjoying the inside of the house at 54 degrees, I sit in chilly splendor. OTOH, it beats the living hell out of normal Sunnyside weather, which is 92 degrees and torrential downpours.

However, here is today's SUPER TERRIFIC AMAZING THING. The artist is The Knife, who have taken the Scandinavian art of musical weirdness to stunningly beautiful heights. The song is "Marble House". Enjoy its bassy goodness, and this singularly SUPER TERRIFIC AMAZING video which makes me nostalgic for childhood, even though it (the video, not my childhood) is bittersweet.

I'm back

2011-12-31T18:44:00.000-08:00

Like the phoenix from the flames, I have returned to the blogosphere. Lessons learned, things changed. Resolutions resolved. Fear me!