Category: Out there

Got to check another line item from my “things to do before I die” list. Amy and I bought a few packs of ear candles several months ago and finally got around to using them. Punch a hole in a pie tin, insert ear candle with tip sticking 3″ below. Lie down, encircle ear with moist towel, snugly insert business end of hollow candle into ear, have your partner light it on fire, and lie there listening to it crackle softly. Kind of soothing, like having a miniature, non-threatening roaring fire inside your head.

About five minutes in, I heard a gurgling, then a kind of soft “whump” sound. Afterwards, found several globules of ear wax sticking to the inside of the candle, a few inches up the remnants of the tip. Not a huge amount, as I’ve heard some people experience, but enough to impress my date, er, wife.

What’s amazing is that it works at all. I mean, I understand the physics of it, but to see wax dislodge, enter the tip of the candle, wander straight uphill three inches, and re-harden again on the inner wall of the candle, is quite amazing. As if the stuff had legs and a desire to get the hell out.

Beyond the magic of the uphill wax walk and the soothing aspect, we weren’t overly impressed, probably won’t do it again. Can’t honestly say I could hear better afterwards. What I want to know is, who ever thought of doing this to begin with? Clearly this wasn’t one of those “accidental discoveries” – someone had to have really sat down and wondered how to extract deeply lodged ear wax, then thought, “I know – gentle heat and a soft vacuum, plus a jigger of capillary action… a hollow candle lighted in the ear would be just the ticket!” Truth is stranger.

Most threads die almost immediately after scrolling from the bottom of this page. But every now and then, a post develops a spunky afterlife via Google searches on some topic or other.

Last February I posted about my delight at discovering the utterly surreal and imaginative children’s show Boobah. It never crossed my mind that the show was so creatively produced that it would inadvertently inflame the senses of fundamentalists and nutjobs across America. There’s nothing even vaguely religious or sinful about the show, but something in it seems almost to offend the rigidly minded. The thread there is fairly long, but a comment received from “Learell” tonight was so over the top loopy I just had to share. Dude performs a truly paranoid semantic breakdown of the playful opening Boobah chant, finding in it connections to zombies, evil spirits, and supernatural powers.

The chant says a few different words including, “Humbah”, “Zumbah”, “Jumbah”, and “Booh”. This may freak some people out and then others may think it is nothing more than a coincidence. The word “Humbah” is very closely related to the word “Humbaba” which means, “river of the dead”. The word “Zumbah” is very closely related to the word “Zombi” which means “supernatural power that may enter & reanimate a dead body”. … My child will not watch this show and until PBS investigates and monitors its programming more carefully, PBS will be blocked from my TV. I think others should join me. We wonder why our kids love games and movies that promote violence and killing. I believe it starts here.

The mind reels.

What is it about prisons that causes guards to turn so sadistic? Eleven workers (three of them managers) at a chicken processing planet that supplies poultry to KFC have been suspended for brutally abusing live chickens. We’ll call this the Pilgrim’s Pride prison abuse scandal — the Abu Ghraib of the chicken world:

… grainy videotape was released over the Internet by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals showing employees “ripping birds’ beaks off, spray-painting their faces, twisting their heads off, spitting tobacco into their mouths and eyes, and breaking them in half — all while the birds are still alive.”

(Yes, we’ve talked about prison guard syndrome here before). Speaking of sadism, why is the story about women and young boys being raped in Iraqi prisons not getting more press?

The women were passing messages saying “Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened”. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it’s going to come out.

Arthur C. Clarke proposed the idea in his 1978 book Fountains of Paradise — build a 50km tower on Earth near the equator, put a big mass (like a tamed asteroid) into geosynchronous orbit, and connect the two with a massive cable. The whole assembly stays upright, essentially attached to space itself. Run electromagnetic elevators up and down the cable, and you can lift payloads or people into space for a fraction the cost of rockets or shuttles. Amazingly, NASA is now taking the idea seriously, although the idea is going to take a while to get off the ground (think late 21st century).

Because he’s sunk billions into programs that are in lock-step with various aspects of the neocon agenda (such as his program encouraging abstinence, wherein participants are required to drink cups of one another’s spit to demonstrate how foul is the exchange of bodily fluids), the U.S. Senate hosted a gleeful coronation ceremony for cult leader Sun Myung Moon one day last March. Moon, a founder of the American Family Coalition as well as being a multi-billionaire ex-convict:

…has views somewhere to the right of the Taliban’s Mullah Omar. Moon preaches that gays are “dung-eating dogs,” Jews brought on the Holocaust by betraying Jesus, and the U.S. Constitution should be scrapped in favor of a system he calls “Godism” — with him in charge.

And he was coronated in our very own Senate. At least one congressman (out of 81 total attending) claimed not to have been present at the ceremony, until pictures were produced. Believe it or not, the story gets weirder. And the media missed it.

Die Duckomenta features dozens of famous museum pieces spanning ancient history to modern interpretive abstraction, each with Donald Duck transposed into the theme. No cheap Photoshop tricks – these are real works, artfully created and beautifully collected. What makes it work is that they took such a seemingly trivial idea so seriously – went all the way. Don’t read German, but think I get the idea. Disney’s lawyers have got to be breathing down their necks right about now, but this will certainly qualify as satire (not that the obviousness of that fact ever stopped Mattel’s raging a-hole lawyers from attacking Barbie art).

In an excellent synopsis of why the utopia of the Semantic Web will never work (Metacrap), Cory Doctorow points out that, at the time he wrote the piece, a search for “plam” on eBay produced nine results for “Plam Pilots,” all of which of course were hidden from everyone running a normal search on the string “palm.” Hidden, and therefore barely bidded on. Need to find a good deal on eBay? Try searching on misspelled versions of the thing you want.

So guess who’ll be keeping his tattoo for the rest of his life? When I was 19, I had a 2″ question mark tattooed on my right ankle. I still stand behind the question mark as a symbol; no regrets there. But it was done in a kind of balloon-y, cartoonish style. It’s not terrible, but in recent years I’ve gotten tired of it, finally decided I wanted it gone.

Waited three months for a consultation, only to learn today that the fact that it’s comprised of mixed blue and green inks (the lasers are targeted at specific pigments) and is 20 years old means I would need 12-15 laser treatments at $650 each!!! In other words, $40 to have it installed, nearly $10,000 to have it uninstalled. So it’s staying put. Unless I can convince Amy we need to sell the Subaru…