Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category
Saturday, September 4th, 2010Do you ever worry that your genitals are retracting into your body? Ever worry that your vitality might just disappear with your vanishing member? If so, you are not alone. Koro (as it’s known in China and Southeast Asia) is recognized as a kind of social or mass hysteria where individuals become convinced that their genitals are shrinking and will ultimately disappear completely, and seemingly may injure themselves trying to prevent that. Unsurprisingly, the Wikipedia article notes that this tends to occur among poorly educated populations who fear supernatural forces, and notes that in China mental health campaigns and improving economic conditions have reduced epidemics (Wikipedia cites to this study, which I cannot access).
Beyond the worry that someone might harm themselves, this condition can also potentially can create hostility against others accused or blamed for causing it. For example, this case recently reported in Nigeria demonstrates how penis disappearance will manifest in a culture that believes in witchcraft that can be used by one person against another. A report from Harper’s followed up by traveling to Nigeria to try to understand the belief that your penis is disappearing. He doesn’t do a bad job of it, but one wonders if he couldn’t have saved himself a trip to Nigeria and just watched this German remake of Jekyll and Hyde where Jekyll is a novelist who awakes to find that the character he created (Hyde) has stolen his penis. (No, I haven’t seen it. But yes, I want to).
Incidentally, if you’re curious how I ever came across Koro, I’ll just say it had something to do with this xkcd strip.
This is, sadly, almost exactly how I feel about networking.
The other day I was browsing books online (something I spend an embarrassing amount of my time on) when I discovered such curiosities as these. Curious about this publishing house I’d never heard of with titles that were either a) identical to those of movies, comics, music videos, etc., or b) nearly nonsensical chains of free association, I became suspicious about this imprint called Alphascript Publishing.
Briefly, a story. Ed Whelan, who apparently worked in the Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel, has been saying dumb things about Sonia Sotomayor. Eugene Volokh dismantled some of these dumb things, and publius from Obsidian Wings linked to the dismantling. Whelan took offense at this, and responded by publishing publius’s real name. Publius posted about why this is an odious thing to do.
This last post generated this awesome bit of wingnuttery:
An “unbelievable dick” is what I would call someone who takes pot shots using a pseudonym. You folks are like the fat guy who thinks he’s tough anonymously posting threats only to be found out and confronted in a Blockbuster parking lot, suddenly shrinking like a violet. [...]
Posted by: BigYap | June 07, 2009 at 12:44 AM
If I were awesome enough to be Scott Kaufman, and if this blog were awesome enough to be Edge of the American West, this would be filed under “SEK is shocked SHOCKED! to find that there is rightwing lunacy on the internet.” Unfortunately, none of that is true, so it’s just an isolated case study in stupid.
Remember my three AM visit from the Irvine Police Department? Apparently they get even friendlier by four AM.
This is a great clip of The Daily Show surgically dismantling the two-faced bullshit of right-wing talking heads. How anyone takes a guy like Karl Rove or Bill O’Reilly seriously is just way beyond me.
Meanwhile, you should check out this description of how the people at TDS put together these clips, which Adam linked to a few days ago. And while I’m here, I should say that I’m glad the people at TDS built their website so that sharing these types of clips is so easy. Way to embrace technology and free advertising, guys.
Neil Gaiman points to a podcast called The Moth, which consists of people on stage telling true stories without any notes. Neil’s is OK, but I laughed harder at the end of this story by playwright Edgar Oliver than I have at anything else in a very long time. It’s only about 15 minutes long, and Oliver’s storytelling voice is priceless.
Two bits of awesome from the internet, either of which you may already have seen. The first is really old; in fact, I’m upset that no one told me earlier that there’s a music video featuring the entire male cast of The Karate Kid. (Except, of course, for Pat “Mr. Miagi” Morita; his role is filled in admirably by Mr. Belding.) The song is pretty mediocre, but the conceit is perfect.
Second, I absolutely demand that you go and watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is (so far) thirty minutes of pure awesome. Awesome put together by Joss Whedon during the writers’ strike, and staring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. In Whedon’s words:
Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.
Go there, and don’t come back until you’ve gotten to the end of Act II and you know what the hammer is. It’s only available until Sunday, so go quickly.
Saturday, Belle Waring wrote,
Tonight I made the dough for cinnamon rolls in my Kitchenaid stand mixer so we can have our gay friends who are parents over for brunch, coffee, and some discussion of the Sunday New York Times while listening to indie music via our iTunes.
I read this, laughed, and then immediately joined Ruth in cleaning our house so that we could have people over for brunch on Sunday. Ruth made cinnamon rolls, but not in the Kitchenaid; I used the mixer’s bowl to make batter for pancakes. People were still talking about how good the coffee was the next day, in our graduate school classes.
Of course, there were some important differences between the Holbo/Waring brunch and the Johnson/Barrett brunch. We had sausage from Whole Foods, which they probably can’t get. Most of the vegetables in the omelets were organic, purchased the day before at the local farmer’s market. We were also poorly prepared, and had to send a guest out on my bicycle to get more flour. Our was a jazz brunch, so no indie music, and we use the much more awesome mpd rather than iTunes. Rather than the Sunday Times, we talked about our plans to travel this fall.