Londinium or bust
What does the “or bust” construction mean, exactly? “If I do not reach my intended destination, I will physically explode in some way”? I don’t know. I’ve never known. Forget I said it.
I had hoped work would be a leisurely stretch before my holiday, but some stupid piece of shit job blew up in my face this morning and I chased it the rest of the day. Oh, well. A quick note before I retire, then.
Most Boston-to-London flights are overnighters, arriving right in the teeth of the London morning commute. That sort of flight is easier to catch on the Boston end, but hell on the London end. I don’t sleep well on planes; I showed up punchy and fizzy and spent the whole first day hoping that more than usually tactless things don’t come out of my mouth. Tactlessness is, as you might imagine, a problem for me.
Finally, we found a flight that leaves in the morning and arrives at Heathrow around nine at night. Perfect — just enough time to drive home, settle in, drink a bottle of fizz, eat a meal (toad in the hole. My favorite!) and fall into a deep, weaselicious dream.
But the Boston end? Not so nice.
Still, I prefer to front-load my pain. Who was it said that drunkenness would be moral if you could endure the hangover first? It wasn’t me, but I fundamentally agree: payment first. Then pleasure.
My flight leaves at nine. Not bad. But I have to get a bus to the airport, per their schedule. And I have to get a cab to the bus. And the cab company won’t let me pre-book because it’s a short trip, but they won’t guarantee me a cab because I don’t pre-book. (Yes, I have friends. I wouldn’t dream of waking them in the wee hours to drive me, which is partly why they’re still my friends. Despite that whole tactlessness thing).
So here’s how it goes down: alarm goes off at three in the morning. I get dressed, pack my toothbrush and call a cab for 4:30. The cats begin acting especially cute but very sad, the knowing little bastards, so me and my luggage move out onto the lawn to wait. The cab is late. It is always late. They didn’t take my number, so there’s no way I can know if the cabby is lost and I’m screwed. This is — this ALWAYS is — the low point of the day. I treat myself to a dram of stomach acid. And possibly half a milligram of Xanax.
The cab arrives and drives the short hop to the bus station. (A cab ride all the way in to Logan would add several hundred bucks to the round trip. I could do it, but it would hurt). The bus station is dark. There’s usually a moon. And a pair of young lovers, or a very old lady, or scruffy college students, or all of these things waiting for the Logan bus. It feels poetical. I miss my stupid cats.
The bus ride into Boston is dark but sparkly. I feel like That Girl. I take a lot of artsy, blurry photos out the window. The line at the ticket counter…well, this isn’t Christmas, so maybe not so bad this time. I’m starting to enjoy myself, but I miss my stupid cats.
I saunter around the Gate 33 area. Have a nasty cup of Starbucks airport blend. Borrow a cup of electricity from Massport to charge up all my shit, if I can find an empty outlet. Start to get excited. Miss stupid cats.
The flight East is magic: you fly into the planet’s rotation. The flight is six hours, but the clock says twelve. So the whole day is compressed into cartoon time. They feed us a lot; keeps us quiet. So we go from the rosy fingers of dawn to the scarlet imprint of twilight in less time than it takes to work the morning shift.
Get me! I’m a jet setter!
Miss my stupid cats already.
This is going to be great!
May 14, 2007 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 7
Notable by its absinthe
Hey, somebody in New York worked out how to make a street legal absinthe. Per their website (warning: tinkly piano music) they expect to ship the first bottles to New York City and the Hamptons at the end of this month.
Absinthe is made with wormwood, one constituent of which — thujone — is what makes the drink illegal in the US. Thujone is a GABA receptor antagonist; it causes convulsions at high levels and is regulated in most places. Absinthe with thujone levels below 10 parts per million is still legal in many European countries, and is imported pretty freely. This new manufacturer made absinthe per several 19th Century recipes and discovered that the thujone levels in the traditional article were really quite small. Once eliminated entirely the FDA permitted them to go ahead.
A lot of crap is talked about absinthe in general, and thujone in particular. The latter has roughly the molecular shape of THC and was thought to act similarly. It does not. Absinthe is supposed to cause drunkenness with clarity; visual saturation; hallucinations, even. I always heard it burnt out your optic nerves and you went bliiind. As near as I can tell, it’s all booollshit. Absinthe was just the Reefer Madness of la Belle Epoch.
I had to have some. I bought a big pyramidal bottle of the stuff for stupid money in England one year. I was like, “get me! I’m the world’s tallest Toulouse-Lautrec!”
The absinthe ritual is very particular: an ounce of vile green liqueur is poured into a glass. A slotted spoon is balanced across the top of the glass with a sugar cube poised in the middle. Slowly, drop by drop, ice water is dripped over the sugarcube and into the glass until the contents go from green to swirly, opalescent white.
Screw that. It’s just liquor and sugarwater. I drank mine on the rocks.
Despite having ingested my fair share of illicit chemicals, I have the same reaction every time. The moment I swallow, it’s like, “Oh my god you stupid fucking monkey, what have you done? It’s inside you now!!!”
After a couple of ounces, I thought, “Heyyyy…I know this sensation. It’s…alcohol!”
Feels like booze, looks like mouthwash, tastes like licorice. Jesus, how I hate licorice.
Further reading: the Virtual Absinthe Museum is fun. Apparently, old bottles of pre-ban absinthe are forever turning up in Europe, and they will sell you an ounce or two. They don’t tell you what it costs, which tells you what it costs. These people are good, too. They run another pricetag free site that sells nothing but bottles of assorted hooch older than fifty years.
May 9, 2007 — 5:09 am
Comments: 11
Elderly Aussies build clandestine drug labs
They’re making Nembutal for euthanasia purposes.
Nembutal is a venerable barbiturate with a variety of uses, from sleeping aid to seizure control. It’s used to euthanize animals. Also people in Australia until ten years ago when, I gather, their assisted suicide law was struck off the books.
That latter fact is significant here, I suspect. Per the article, twenty Aussies chipped in $2,000 each and spent two years of painful trial and error learning to make the stuff. They have plans for four labs. They name the people involved and the location of the proposed labs. Why, after all this toil and sweat, would you nark your operation out the moment you achieve your goal? It smells of publicity stunt.
And that’s a shame. Because this is a significant conversation the West needs to have with itself, and we need to do it without posturing, bullshit or book burnings.
When I was younger, I was strongly pro-euthanasia. It was entirely selfish. I am a coward. I wanted to be sure there would be an easy way out if I ever needed it. Something that didn’t involve leaving behind a really icky tableau for somebody else to clean up. I still think the only moral dimension to self-murder is the mess you leave behind. If you don’t have ultimate ownership of your own life, what rights can you possibly have?
But I have changed my thinking about what constitutes a life worth living. I don’t have much experience of death, thank the whatevers, but I have seen a little. More than once, I have watched, amazed, as someone turned and fought keenly to hold onto a life I would have thought nothing but misery. My faith in the welcomeness of death has been somewhat shaken.
I once thought the only moral delimma surrounding euthanasia would be crafting the law controlling how we choose death for someone else. You know, “yeah, oh sure…Grandma always said she’d rather die than be an inconvenience. Trust me.” But there’s something else in this article that’s a real craw-sticker.
One of the illegal manufacturers, Bron Norman, said the drug should be available for those who wish to commit suicide when they have outlived their useful life.
Useful life. I fucking hate that expression, and not merely because I am, personally, useless. It’s like “giving back to the community” — it implies that a human being is a net negative until he proves otherwise. I cannot tell you how violently offensive and wrong I think this idea is. I’m an atheist; I’m not arguing from some traditional notion of what a God thinks life is worth. It’s entirely possible to develop a belief in human exceptionalism entirely by way of being one and observing others.
I might even go so far as to measure the worth of a society by how it treats its useless. Haven’t we dug up Neanderthals who were clearly so crippled they were in the care of others for years?
If we’re developing a climate in which people are encouraged to value their lives by the contribution they make, then I don’t think we’re ready for legalized euthanasia. We’ll have to wait until we level up to Neanderthals.
May 8, 2007 — 12:07 pm
Comments: 23
Bad day, defined
Okay, compared to this guy (man, that croc is an evil looking bastard, isn’t he? Photo via NZ Herald), my day was a dawdle. But I had to deliver the coup de grâce to an injured squirrel on my morning commute, and that’s never an auspicious sign. How come road-injured squirrels always lie in one spot jerking and flipping out like that wounded Daryl Hannah replicant thing in Blade Runner? Horrible.
I dug out the old work laptop I use to test programs, plugged in the wifi dingus…and discovered I don’t have admin privileges on that machine. So I put it on the network and called the Helpdesk. It hasn’t been on the company net in a couple of years, so it’s all screwed up for updates. Turns out, that model was “retired” a while back and I was supposed to turn it in. I thought for a moment it was going to get confiscated, but someone dutifully picked it up for a re-image. I should have it back tomorrow.
Somehow making IS complicit in the circumvention of their own rules pleases me.
I wrote the above sentence about forty five minutes ago, then Damien came in and laid a large, fine woodrat at my feet. Pity it wasn’t dead. It jumped up, shrieked, ran across my feet and disappeared under the radiator in the livingroom. We could see it dashing back and forth underneath, the perfect cat-tease. Every time Damien hooked a paw in its direction, it would let out another squeak. Rodents don’t squeak like squeak toys. They squeak like forks raked across dinner plates. You hear it with your molars.
I held a cardboard box against the radiator with my knees, got a bamboo back-scratcher in one hand, an empty paper towel roll in the other, and tried to spook it toward captivity and ultimate freedom. But it was not to be. It leapt over my backscratcher and holed up under a big armchair, behind a pile of old comics. It’s quiet now.
Damien is curled up in front of the chair, placid as the Buddha. Fuck it. I’m going to drink. I’m not offing two adorable rodents today. Death is going to have to sort itself out this time. I just wish it wouldn’t do that whole “red in tooth and claw” thing on the wall-to-wall carpets.
April 30, 2007 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 11
Five thousand rabbits block Hungarian highway
Truck accident. They were headed to the abattoir. Five hundred were killed on the spot. Four thousand four hundred were rounded up on the scene, and another one hundred were given the gift of sweet, sweet freedom. But, being bunnies, they will undoubtedly wander onto the highway in the next few days and meet Rabbitgod.
What’s interesting about this is the place I found it: a Basque newspaper, a thousand miles away. Reinforcing my belief that newspapers all over the world employ someone whose main job it is to comb the wires for weird-ass stories from faraway places. If you want to know something bizarre about a nation, cruise newspapers halfway around the world. Bunnies on the highway is a relatively benign example; most of them are of the “Oh Those Silly People from Fillintheblankistan!” variety.
Americans who read the foreign press are all too familiar with this. When I’m in the UK, I don’t even recognize the America they describe. The Brits’ imaginary US of A is, like, fifty percent inbred Bible-thumping retards and fifty percent pornographers. I get the impression people from India aren’t too pleased with Western news reportage, either; all those stories from remote Indian villages about inappropriate people being reincarnated as inappropriate animals and genital-stealing monkeys and so on.
Now clearly I…me…S. Weasel, proprietor of this blog, cruise foreign newspapers looking for mischief. But I am a mere clown. I clown for you, my seven imaginary friends. I don’t claim to be a journalist. Not sober, anyhow. Assuming anyone sober could claim to be a journalist.
Don’t news organizations have an obligation to give us an accurate picture of the world? Aren’t they always banging on about how important they are in that respect? If they feed us a steady diet of stories about the world that are, strictly speaking, true but not at all representative, isn’t that an especially pernicious kind of lie?
April 17, 2007 — 6:45 am
Comments: 6
Hey, Pups. Let me buy you a drink!
Drink it fast or drink it slow,
But your lips have gotta touch the toe.
I can’t remember where I first read about the Sour Toe Cocktail, the liquorous specialty of Dawson’s Hotel in the Yukon. The original toe belonged to a rumrunner, Otto Liken, who got frostbite fleeing the Mounties with a load of merchandise. He and his brother holed up in a moonshine shack and Otto got blotto so Louie could amputate the frozen digit before it went gangrenous.
They put the toe in a jar of rum and let it mellow in the shack for, like, fifty years until the building was bought by “Captain” Dick Stevenson, a local fleecer of tourists. The cocktail was his idea. He loaned the toe to a local bar and dared tourists to drink from a glass filled with booze (of their choice) and The Toe as a way of proving themselves worthy of the Yukon. He was repaid in drinks.
About 30,000 suckers have “done the toe.”
The original toe — and several subsequent ones — was accidentally swallowed. But such is the generosity of the human spirit that surgically amputated toes are forever offered as replacements.
I consider it no accident that an article about doing the toe should surface in the Toronto Star just in time for Pupster’s 40th birthday.
Dude. Lemme buya drink. It was meant to be.
April 16, 2007 — 8:00 am
Comments: 14
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
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
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…
April 6, 2007 — 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