An embarrassment of riches
Meh. Kind of got jammed up today. But I’ll never let you down — you, my imaginary friends who live in the computer. When I’m in a hurry and I need a dose of teh crazy in a hurry, I always turn to Pravda.
Yes, that Pravda.
Well, sort of that Pravda. The original house organ of the Soviet Union was shuttered by Boris Yeltsin in 1991. A few weeks later, the people who had written for the original registered a brand new paper, also called Pravda. Several years after that, there was a schism, and the majority of the original writers left the paper to start an online version, Pravda.ru. The paper and website currently have little to do with each other.
The website — which, glory be, has an English version — is a smorgasbord of crank and sleaze. Batboy would be embarrassed to appear in its pages. It is virulently anti-American and pro-UFO. Today, for example, I could choose between the following delectible morsels of cheez:
Huge oceans underneath Earth’s surface caused global flood in times of Noah… Soviet Union witnessed invasion of US-made UFOs in 1980s… George W. Bush may not live up to his mandate end due to Tecumseh’s curse… Man splashes sulfuric acid in his lover’s face, begging her to marry him… Virtual sex in Russia advances from silly chat rooms to USB vibrators… Two brothers get too drunk on their father’s funeral and forget to bury his body… Man dismembers his friend and sends his body parts to different regions… Five-year-old girl perversely murdered by elusive Siberian maniac… BBC: British Bullshit Corporation… Okay, I’m kind of persuaded by that last one.
The Opinion Page is so consumed with America hating, it’s actually running these two pieces consecutively: Is the USA a bully? followed by Is America a Bully? Seems to me there might be some editorial overlap.
Let’s go with Mysterious dwarfish alien brutally murdered in Russia’s remote village. It’s from their science page. There’s a flurry of stories on this one; I’ll see if I can piece it back together in chronological order.
An old lady named Tamara Prosvirina found a dwarf in the woods near the village of Kaolinovy. She named him Alioshenka. Her daughter in law saw this creature and described it thusly:
“I used to visit my mother-in-law twice a week. She was living on her own. On that day I brought her foodstuffs just like I did before. I was about to leave when she told me: ‘We’d better give some food to the baby too.’ Then she showed me to the bed. I took a closer look at it and saw him. He was on top the bed, squeaking some funny sounds. I could see his mouth shaped like a small pipe. His tiny scarlet tongue was moving. I also spotted two teeth inside. In a way, he looked like a little baby. His head was brown, and his body looked gray. I didn’t see any eyelids. He didn’t have any genitals either. His head looked like an onion. And the pupils of his eyes were widening and narrowing just like the cat’s eyes do when you turn on the light and turn it off again several times in a row. The fingers on his hands and feet were pretty long. I only bothered to ask my mother-in-law where on earth she’d got the monster from. She told me she’d found him in the forest. She kept calling him ‘Alioshenka.’ She gave him a candy and he started sucking on it. I thought it was some kind of animal.
[…]
“He was giving off that smell, you know, one of a kind. You can’t take it for any other smell. Actually, the smell was pretty agreeable yet somewhat nauseous at the same time. And he didn’t pass any liquid or solid waste matter. He was sweating, and that was all. I saw the mother-in-law wipe the sweat off his face with a rag,” Tamara added.
The old lady told her neighbors about Alioshenka, and they called an ambulence. Seems she had a history of teh crazy. The guys in white coats described her guest as a cat in a bundle of rags. They left it behind.
While she was in the nuthatch, her family leased her home to a Vladimir Nurtdinov. He found the alien, now dead, and thought it looked cool. Like an alien. So he put it on the roof of the garage to dry out. As you do.
Later he was picked up on suspicion of stealing wire, so he blurted out that he had a dessicated alien on top of his garage. As you do.
The authorities assumed what they had was just another a self-induced, late-term abortion and turned it over to a pathologist. At autopsy, he concluded that it had died violently from a blow to the head, and it was Not Of This World. Its skull had four plates and a human’s has eight. Plus, DNA confirmed it was some kind of weird shit.
Men describing themselves as ufologists introduced themselves to the authorities at this point and confiscated Slim Jim. Turns out they were…well, nobody knows, but they vanished with Alioshka and all that’s left is police videotape and a little piece of alien jerky that somehow fell into the hands of a Japanese film crew.
The old lady was due to tell her story under hypnosis when she was fatally run down crossing the street in a town that sees maybe one car a day. Her relatives are sure it was murder. Two men who investigated the scene have also fallen ill or died mysteriously. More here.
See also Russian fishermen catch squeaking alien and eat it. And Did George Bush bully squeaking alien and then eat it?
Yeah. I made the last one up.
April 11, 2007 — 6:39 pm
Comments: 5
What Easter means to me
That’s right. It means the Wizard of Oz on television again.
My original interpretation of the afterlife was eternity in a large, barn-like structure with picnic tables inside, where I hung out with my grandmother and ate icecream. That’s the best infant me could work out the “heaven” concept.
Then I saw the Wizard of Oz and instantly recognized it as the afterlife; it was a dangerous, sparkly place full of scary midgets and wingèd monkeys and evil green ladies in striped socks. Oh, it’s so obvious: Oz was in color, Kansas was in black and white. Dorothy gets smacked on the head, falls into a coma and is transported to a beautiful, horrible place. When she wakes up back home, Uncle Henry says, “we thought we would lose you.” Ergo, Oz is where you go when you go. Plus, they put it on at Easter (“…and on the third day, Dorothy arose crying, ‘verily, there is no place like unto home!’…”).
I never missed it. Never. Not once. It’s hard to remember the sense of specialness movies had in the days before VCR’s and DVD players. Most movies came around once a year. Some less. But Oz was a unique occasion, a religious holiday. I never got over a sense of trascendant awe on WoO day. I’m no friend of Dorothy, I’m an acolyte.
In college one Spring, I decided to treat my friends to an evening of Oz and LSD. Yes. That was every bit as bad an idea as it sounds.
Oh, Oz went fine. It was afterward that the flying monkeys truly arrived. I knew my party wasn’t going well when the girl from downstairs stood up and declared, “welp, I’m going to go nail myself into my room now.” Then we heard the sound of her footsteps and nails being driven into the doorframe.
Hoping to lighten the mood, I put on the soundtrack to the Sound of Music. For, like, eight straight hours. I’m pretty sure there are one or two people who still haven’t forgiven me for that inspired act of cruelty.
The hills. The hills are alive, man.
I permanently ruined recreational drug use for myself that night, but I didn’t ruin Wizard of Oz. Once, not long after, I even saw it on the big screen; a brand new print that had arrived at the theater that afternoon. It was amazing: you could see the strings holding up the Lion’s tail and those odd bird creatures in the background and everything. It was only when we got to the end that the projectionist realized the last reel was missing. Crucifixion without resurrection. Oz interruptus.
I kept up my annual pilgrimage to the Merry Olde Land faithfully for another five years, until I got my first VCR. Then, somehow…once I had it on tape, I never watched it again. It didn’t seem right that I could watch it any time I wanted to. It was subversive and dangerous. Once I had the lightning in a bottle, I was afraid of it. Afraid I’d wear it out. Afraid I’d hear the overture and not get all chuffed. If ever that happens to me, the last vestiges of my spirituality will be swept away forever.
So it is a Very Big Deal that I ordered the (three volume collector’s) DVD this morning. It’s been almost 25 years. I’m bringing Xanax. And a hanky.
April 10, 2007 — 12:13 pm
Comments: 10
Gruesome lesbian chainsaw murder shocks US
Oh, man, is that a fabulous headline, or what? It should actually be “gruesome deaf lesbian interracial chainsaw murder shocks US.” Or it would shock the US, I feel quite sure, if any of us had ever heard of it.
Odd, that. If you do a Google News Search on “lesbian chainsaw murder,” you get hits on the Age (Australia), the Independent (UK) and the Australian. Plus the story’s local paper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. But that’s all. Lord, does the international community love rummaging through each other’s dirty laundry.
Here’s the opening paragraphs of the story in the Age:
The trial in South Dakota of a deaf, black lesbian accused of murdering a rival and dismembering her with a chainsaw has shocked the rural midwestern US state.
Daphne Wright, 43, could become the first woman sent to death row in South Dakota, which has not executed a prisoner in more than 60 years.
Wright is accused of kidnapping and murdering a heterosexual deaf woman, Darlene VanderGiesen, 42, whom she thought was spending too much time with her girlfriend.
Emotional testimony and gruesome exhibits filled the first week of her trial, and worse is to come: prosecutors are expected to show jurors a video of a pig being dismembered with the same type of chainsaw Wright bought two days after VanderGiesen disappeared.
VanderGiesen’s mother sobbed and stepped out of the courtroom as jurors passed around her daughter’s charred brassiere on Thursday.
But she managed to sit stoically as a maintenance worker described finding her daughter’s head and navel wrapped in bags and bed sheets that other witnesses linked to Wright.
A navel? How the bloody hell do you find a navel? That’s like finding a nostril! Surely what they found was a piece of abdominal skin including said object.
The Sioux Falls Argus Leader version is full of charming local color:
In the early afternoon of Feb. 3, 2006, Darlene VanderGiesen’s parents arrived at her eastside Sioux Falls apartment to search for their missing daughter.
Meanwhile, Daphne Wright bought a 1.5-horsepower electric chainsaw at an Ace Hardware and Hefty trash bags at a Walgreens.
It’s like you’re actually there, isn’t it?
The happy Sioux Falls reporter who filed this update pretty much used up his whole year’s irony quota in one cogent observation:
Jessica Lichty, forensic chemist at the Sioux Falls crime lab, observed the upper body at the scene. She told jurors she recognized the remains as VanderGiesen, who had gone missing Feb. 1.
Lichty said she could see the woman’s face through a clear, plastic bag, which carried a sticker that read, “Warning: Plastic bags can be dangerous. To avoid danger of suffocation, keep this bag away from babies and children.”
The trial is taking place in Minnehaha County.
Well, of course it is.
April 9, 2007 — 8:02 am
Comments: 9
Scary monster in the medicine cabinet
My house was built in 1942. You know how to tell? Take the lid off the toilet and look for a date stamped inside the tank. They don’t stockpile toilets, a builder told me; unless your home has been victim of a toilet-shattering catastrophe, it will have been built within a few months of the date stamped in the ceramic.
Nineteen fourty two jibes stylistically with the fixtures. Like my medicine cabinet. Inside, lurking behind the eyedrops and the cough syrup and the ten year old mystery prescriptions is the sinister object pictured above: a razor blade disposal…hole. I’ve used it myself; I once favored a safety razor.
Where do the old blades go? Down into the walls, I guess. You sometimes hear them tink once or twice on the journey. For all I know, that hole goes all the way down to the ground level.
So, maybe, somewhere in my foundations rusts a jagged pile of old razor blades.
Dear Powers that Be: in future, please be aware that I prefer my life metaphors with a little subtlety. Must try harder. Sincerely, S. Weasel.
— 7:19 am
Comments: 4
Friday, April 6
April 6, 2007 — 5:58 pm
Comments: none
Men from small towns are dumb
No, no…that’s the title of a pop song by Vaiko Eplik that’s taking Estonia by storm. In fact, he has a whole album about it.
Seems Estonia is having a bit of a redneck problem. Or, as they have it, a rullnokk problem (it doesn’t literally mean redneck, it’s a reference to the baseball caps they wear). They also pimp out their BMW’s, eat hamburgers, drink vodka, use vile language and cruise around looking for “hairies” to beat up.
Vaiko had a little trouble with them after his performance in the Eurovision competition. “I had a few incidents with rullnokks after Eurovision. I got punched a couple of times by these types of people after I didn’t do so well in the competition,” Eplik says.
“This subculture was born when I was in school. When I was 14 I almost became one of them. I thought it was pretty cool to go around drinking gin out of a plastic bottle, wearing these kinds of clothes. But thankfully my dad told me to get my ass back into line and go to singing lessons.”
Singing lessons. Hm. Yes. Watson, I may have deduced the reason rednecks beat this young man to a howling pulp.
You can hear Vaiko’s music (not sung by him) here. I haven’t made up my mind whether its funny bad or just bad. I know badness is part of the experience.
Which brings us to a short film about the rullnokk that’s become a viral hit. It’s called Tulnukas (Alien). It’s about an Estonian dude who gets smacked on the head with a shovel and wakes up with amnesia. His homeys try to re-explain The Life to him.
This one is almost funny enough to connect outside Estonia. I don’t know if you’ll think it’s worth twenty minutes of your life, but you can watch it in three parts (with English subtitles) here, here, and here. Extremely not safe for work, if your boss is Estonian. At the very least, if you listen closely, you can learn some wicked vile language in a foreign tongue. Which — who knows? — might come in handy some day.
Did “Tulnukas” hit its target? Would a rullnokk change his ways after watching the film? Probably not, muses Merivoo [the filmmaker], because the humor goes over their heads. “They don’t understand that they are watching themselves when they watch my movie. The laugh at the jokes and the things the characters do, but they don’t realize that it is about what’s wrong with them.”
Or maybe they do and they simply don’t care if some camera-waving artard looks down on their entertainments. Dudes! That’s us! Pass me a hamburger and some gin…
— 5:19 pm
Comments: 6
Skål!
Well, well. I always thought Americans were the only peoples goofy enough to attempt a ban on sweet mother hooch, but it turns out we weren’t even the first. Iceland was dry from 1915 to 1922 (and beer stayed banned until 1989), Norway was sober from 1916 to 1927 and Finland was thirsty from 1916 to 1932. By contrast, we didn’t climb on the wagon until 1920 (mark your calendars — next year will be our 75th anniversary of the repeal of 1933).
Iceland, Norway and Finland. Jesus. Three places where there’s got to be sweet fuck-all to do but get pissed as a newt and pass out in a snowbank. I bet they were all, like, “dudes. Let’s go to Denmark for the weekend and par-tay!”
Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of prohibition in Finland. A European would write the date as 5/4/32 — the “countdown” date was supposedly chosen deliberately. And appropriately — wannabe drunks were lined up ’round the block at the new, government owned and charmingly named Alko stores.
The US still has a patchwork of state regulations. I grew up in a dry county. Beer was allowed, but not liquor. My mother called it the Bootlegger Protection Act. The next county over was wet, but liquor stores were allowed to sell liquor and nothing else, presumably for fear some innocent might wander in for a Coke and stumble out a skid-row bum.
In some states, alcohol is sold by the government in Alcoholic Beverage Commission stores (a friend of mine once humiliated her family by reciting “ABC-Store-EFG” in kindergarten, in all innocence). Whereas in louche Louisiana, liquor is sold in the grocery store. Selling liquor on Sunday was forbidden in Massachusetts and Rhode Island until a couple of years ago. Not that yours truly is ever in danger of running low. I gots backup for my backups.
Anyhow, what got to Finland at last was the depression. No, no…not the perfectly natural depression that would derive from living sober in Finland, I mean the global economic depression of the 1930s. Finland’s sauce-producing trading partners to the South were not happy with prohibition and threatened tariffs on Finland’s…wood. And lumber. And timber. And that liquor tax money began to look pretty sweet.
A rare occasion when the venality of government served freedom.
Skål!
April 5, 2007 — 9:36 am
Comments: 6
Speaking of Global Positioning Systems…
I just read a weird article in the International Herald Tribune about global positioning systems. Russia, among others, intends to throw up its own GPS satellite network to compete with the US system.
MOSCOW: The days of their Cold War may have passed, but Russia and the United States are in the midst of another battle – this one a technological fight over the future of America’s Global Positioning System, or GPS.
Fight over the future? Say what? Russia is putting up more satellites. More satellites means more accuracy and better coverage (if handheld makers choose to add a chip to read Glonass signals). Multiple systems happily coexist.
But what is also behind the battle for control of navigation technology is a fear that the United States could use its monopoly – the system was developed and is controlled by the military, after all – to switch off signals in a time of crisis.
Well, I guess. Before 2000, the US military did alter the signal, making civilian receivers less accurate than military ones. But today — as the article observes — GPS navigation has become vital. It would have to be a gigantic crisis before we did something that impaired the navigation of our own ambulance crews and search-and-rescue operations at home. If we were in a crisis serious enough to fuck with the whole world’s GPS navigation, that’s probably a crisis serious enough for all sorts of scary shit to shake loose. I don’t see it happening short of Armageddon.
When that happens, countries that choose to rely only on GPS, he said, would be falling into “a geopolitical trap” of American dominance of an important Internet-age infrastructure. The United States could theoretically deny navigation signals in countries like Iran or North Korea not just in time of war, but as a high-tech form of economic sanction that could wreak havoc on power grids, banking and other industries, he said.
I know of no way satellite signals can be selectively denied within specific geographic boundaries. We could mess with the whole signal, as was done before 2000, or a whole hemisphere, I guess. But I don’t know how you’d blackout one country. It’s everybody or nobody, and blocking everybody would be huge. [Correction: McGoo says it can be done over selective regions. And he actually seems to know what he’s talking about, which is a little spooky.] But I love the description of our era as the “Internet-age” — yeah, say, where did that Internet thing come from again?
The Russian project, of course, carries wide implications for militaries around the world by providing a navigation system not controlled by the Pentagon, complementing Moscow’s recently more assertive foreign policy stance.
You mean the purpose of the system is to provide signal to countries at war with America. Swell. It’s a good thing the whole article is nonsense. [Except apparently it isn’t nonsense, so this is even sweller. Here’s why the Russians and Chinese have a hair across their collective ass.]
The United States formally opened GPS to civilian users in 1993 by promising to provide it continually and for free around the world.
You’re welcome. Oh, wait…that wasn’t a thank you? Okay, this is like that Internet thing, isn’t it? We build it and pay for it and give it to you for free, and you bitch and whine that you don’t control it. Trust Russia instead. Good plan. You know they’ll do the right thing in a ‘crisis.’
“The network must be impeccable, better than GPS, and cheaper if we want clients to choose Glonass,” Putin said last month at a government meeting on Glonass, according to Interfax.
Cheaper than free? How does that work? It’s worth mentioning here that the Europeans embarked on their own version, Galileo, but abandoned it when the financiers decided they wouldn’t get their money back. Yeah. They were going to charge for it.
Look, I’m flailing around for a way of describing how stupid this article is. GPS satellites don’t “compete” in any meaningful sense. We’d be out nothing if the makers of GPS receivers decided to switch entirely over to the Russian system instead — other than being held hostage to a similar “geopolitical trap,” this one under the control of a sociopathic thug. We don’t make anything off providing the positioning signal. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The people who do make money — the manufacturers of GPS receivers, most of whom are American — benefit from an increased number of satellites in the air, assuming the extra accuracy and coverage is worth incorporating the chips needed to read new signals. It’s certainly a net plus for consumers (remember those blank spots in my breadcrumb trail?) It should be easy enough to build receivers that will read signal from all the navigation satellites, if the owners allow it (the Chinese are working on a system, too). The only possible advantage to do-it-yourself global positioning tech is the military one, and it’s lame.
April 4, 2007 — 10:11 am
Comments: 15
Ben sez: None of your beeswax
Okay, one more coin. This is the Continental Dollar; the very first coin of the brand new United States. It was designed — couldn’t you guess by looking at it? — by Ben Franklin.
The motto “Fugio” (I fly) together with the sundial means “time’s a-wasting.” This motto also appeared on the penny at right some years later; it’s often called the “Fugio” penny. Check out the goofy little R. Crumb face on the suns.
It isn’t certain whether Ben meant “Mind Your Business” as in “you there! Look to your factories and your warehouses, Sir” or “sticketh not thy snout where it should’st not be.” With Franklin, it could go either way.
April 3, 2007 — 11:58 am
Comments: 19
Gaia stole my new tripod!
See, on Saturday, Weasel really does go for a little tramp in the woods. This is made possible by a hand-held GPS device — I own the same make and model those British sailors apparently had, but let’s not talk about that or I’m going to want to nuke somethin’ — without which I can get lost on the way to the little stoat’s room.
Mine is set to record a ‘bread-crumb’ trail as I hike. I usually upload this and superimpose my path over Google Earth when I get home, to scope out what the hell just happened to me. So it is that I can tell you right when Gaia hooked her sticky fingers in my pack and stole my brand new tripod on its first outing.
I know where I stopped to take a picture of my butt in the woods, like I promised you guys (I erased it. Only thing worse than a picture of one’s butt in the woods is an unflattering picture of one’s butt in the woods). I jammed the tripod in one of the water-bottle pockets of my pack after that.
The gaps are where I spread my stoaty wings and flapped serenely into the warm upcurrents of a Spring morning. Or maybe where the GPS lost signal. Lousy signal day, this. That angry knot at the top is where I left the path and attempted to bushwhack across to another path. It isn’t marked “swamp” on the topo. But it is one.
Have you ever hiked swamp? Uff. Little humps of soggy sphagnum moss, each with a sickly tree in the middle, separated in the winter by ice, in the summer by stinky puddles, and in the spring (what it is now) by puddles of stinky ice. Navigation is by island hopping, judging distances and leaping from one quivering, insecure hummock to another, clutching at trees that won’t take your weight and landing on solid ground that isn’t and won’t, either. Rot-nourished scrub everywhere, grabbing your jeans, pulling off your hat, tearing at your pack.
My pack…
Somewhere in that vile soup an innocent-looking young rhododendron shoot wrapped a tendril around my gorillapod and nicked it. I started to re-trace my steps, but my heart wasn’t in it. I felt like I had just had an all-body floss with a blackberry bush. Stupid, spiteful nature.
Want a free tripod? Go to N41.93488, W71.75488. Wear good boots.
Mobbed by tits
On my way back to the car, a little bird landed on a branch right at my elbow. I stopped and stared at him. Another, identical bird landed next to him. I lifted my camera slowly, and two more landed on the ground to my left.
Soon, six or eight of them had gathered. I stood still, and they hopped and twittered all around me. I suppose it might have been some kind of territorial aggression, but it didn’t look it. It looked like plain old curiosity. Or the sheer pleasure of being a gang of small birds in the woods.
So, what is this? A tit? A chickadee? I swear I’m not asking so I can keep saying “tit.”
April 2, 2007 — 11:41 am
Comments: 12