d i z t o p i a

Harvest This

I was a demolition-derby-deprived child, and remain a similarly deprived adult. I caught one tiny glimpse of a demolition derby at the Alabama State Fairgrounds when I was about nine. Then I was hustled off to see prize pigs or some other agricultural abomination. For years after that, my only contact with demolition derby was via an eponymous video game that placed far too much emphasis on protecting your radiator rather than crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, hearing the lamentation of the women, etc.

I finally got a chance to watch the end of a derby in Spokane, WA, while in grad school. It was pretty glorious, as the competitors were a bunch of suicidal hillbillies in dreadnought pickup trucks. And no one seemed to mind when the winner drove his victorious clunker of  a Dodge into the broken spine of his last opponent, again and again and again. They had an amateur event as well, where two people got in whatever car they brought, with the driver blindfolded and the passenger shouting instructions and warnings and generally screaming in terror. I badly, badly wanted to do this. I almost put together a coalition of other grad students to buy an ancient hearse ($400) for use as our derby vehicle, but the cheap motherfuckers wouldn't pony up. The owner assured me the hearse would run for at least forty yards, providing we towed it to the arena.

My last attempt to see a demolition derby was in Birmingham, at those same Alabama State Fairgrounds. It had rained all day, so most of the entrants had not bothered to drive into town. That meant we had two cars: a lurching green Oldsmobile and a woody station wagon. Not much to go on, but I figured there would be a couple good slams. The two cars faced off, or rather, assed off, as they faced away from each other and prepared to zoom backwards to attack. The gun went off, they charged and hit with barely moderate force, and the woody stalled. End of show. Bring out the trophy girls, everyone go home. The two cars barely even broke their tail lights. What a waste.

All of which is why I'm excited by the concept of the Combine Demolition Derby, pictured above. These machines once brought forth life, but now they are devoted to destruction! This derby is also in (Lind) Washington and has apparently been running for years, making me depressed I didn't see it while up there. Oh well. Be sure to check out the rules:  "Iron spears or external iron used for aggressive action is prohibited. NO extra welding on the Cutter Bar Edge, NO welding Rock Guards and Header Bottom, and NO concrete in the platform auger." I guess I can see why they wouldn't want iron spears, but who could possibly object to a little concrete in their auger?

Getting Some Tail

Apologies for the man-ass, but I felt I had to provide this as part of my dedication to fair-and-balancedness. Little somethin' for the ladies! In response to Scott H's comment on the tarantulingus, it does in fact appear that the scorpion is acting in accordance with its nature,  though perhaps in a less natural position. Nevertheless, both have been revealed as the work of photog Dimitri Daniloff, and I recommend you view his entire advertising gallery for a series of similarly bizarro pics. Them Europeans. They's different.

Quickly! Suck Out the Venom Before My Husband Gets Home

Wait, is that a female spider? Is this ad condoning giant lesbian spider cunnilingus? Hard to tell. Appears to be part of a campaign for anti-AIDS outfit AIDES. Unfortunately, they're French, so I can't navigate their site to find the original. Supposedly there's also one with a scorpion. Would welcome and/or be horrified if anyone has more of these.

The Banshee Factor

Everyone who knows me in the world of flesh knows I've become moderately obsessed with the banshee lifestyle. This began when I was home for the holidays and a pal mentioned that he'd cut back on his smoking, because recently he'd really been "smoking like a banshee." I assumed he meant "smoking like a chimney," but the idea of a vengeful spirit screeching around a cigarette -- perhaps stopping occasionally to hack and cough -- appealed to me. (As did "screaming like a chimney".)

Employing the universally recognized and unquestionably authoritative journalistic tool known as the Google search, one can see that "like a banshee" enjoys a vivacious cultural currency. However, my nic-fit buddy is hardly the only one with some confusions about what the banshee ingredient means to any particular expression. Since banshees were traditionally female spirits that wailed under the windows of the dying in Ireland, the traditional slang usage describes someone screaming or wailing or shrieking or making a lot of noise.

But we Americans aren't going to be limited by some stodgy auditory sense of bansheedom. Our banshees think and live outside the banshee box. In addition to all kinds of noisemaking, the search above finds banshees laughing, snowing, fucking, having a fine motor, peeing and sweating, driving, scoring, appealing, blowing, reading, dancing, swearing, writing, and even voting, and so on for another 10,000 pages. That's after I tried to eliminate every noise-related search term, and yes, should you actually bother to click on any of those, find the damn banshee mention your own damn self.

Often it's obvious the similar-sounding "like a bandit" was really meant; but, while skilled at thievery, bandits don't have nearly the cachet of banshees when it comes to infusing anything with a sense of rabid excess. It's obvious that whatever banshees may do, they do it to the utmost. OED mandarin MIchael Quinion has a short bit about the banshee phenom, though his reference only dates its metastasizing into universal American slang to 1976. That seems a little shallow to me, research-wise, so maybe ol' Mike Q needs to buckle down and etymologize like a banshee. I myself have a schedule meeting to attend this afternoon ... normally dullsville, but I plan to banshee-fy the proceedings, and if that involves piercing screams, I'll just be giving voice to what everyone there feels on the inside.

Time Minus Context Equals Comedy

"Ooh" indeed! Give that green-suited nogoodnik the business, officer. No time to really post today, so instead here's a gallery of truly absurd cro-magnon Superman and Batman comic panels -- sent in by SH as usual, since he's basically running this place now -- from many decades past when Supes was a cruel bully and Bats an eccentric nonce. And free speech? Who even knew the meaning of the word? Withdraw your asburd demands!

Space Rock Aggression Must Not Stand

A 10-pound meteorite crashes in Cambodia. Proving that any event can be boiled down to contentious issue-driven debate, provincial police chief Sok Sareth (shown here with meteorite perp safely in custody) describes the results of a straw poll among local villagers:

"Some farmers are angry with the rock because it caused fires and destroyed several hundred hectares of their paddy fields." [...] "But others asked the police to leave it where it landed and put it on shrine to pray for peace."

Sounds like it's getting all blue state/red state over there in the former Kampuchea. Some farmers angry with rock! Others love rock! Space rock bad! Or space rock good? If only "Crossfire" hadn't been canceled. We need you, Tucker Carlson! No shrine for the rock apparently, as Chief Sareth is hoping it will bequeath upon him rad space powers. Sadly, that never happened to my fellow Alabamian Ann Hodges when the otherwise (and subsequently) unremarkable housewife got walloped by a meteorite in 1954 ... all she got was a big honkin' contusion. Such meteorite-on-human violence is extremely rare, and in fact meteorites seem to more often hit buildings, dogs, cows, horses, etc. Regardless, as Wil Milan noted dryly on Space.com, "But compared with the number of horses, dogs and housewives killed or struck by myriad other objects and collisions ... being clobbered by a meteor is an extremely remote possibility." No reliable data on bequeathement of rad space powers.

We Ain't Bustin' Jesus

Some might think I have a grudge against my ol' hometown rag, the Birmingham News, just because I've occasionally mocked their articles. But that simply ain't so. In fact, News reporters' near-Onion level of dry wit and excellent choice of quotes when covering local freakazoids are the best things about the paper. Consider several choice bits from today's delectable piece, "Leeds police order man off cross":

Leeds police forced a hairstylist who dressed up as Jesus and drenched himself in fake blood to come down off a 14-foot-tall cross he set up in front of his hair salon on Monday.

My God, could this be the most promising lede ever? Are there not at least four screenplays inherent in that one sentence? Let's continue:

Patrick Conaty, owner of Running With Scissors hair and nail salon in downtown Leeds, got up on the cross about 2 p.m., his bald head fitted with a long black wig and his waist wrapped in a sheet splattered with red stains. He declared it "Salvation Awareness Day."

Despite their newfound salvation awareness, workers at nearby businesses were unamused:

"I think he needs some clothes on," said Reda Wilson, who works at The Warehouse, a bargain store across the street. "I think he needs to get down."

"I don't know why it's in the middle of downtown Leeds," said Alice Crumpton, a Pants Store employee. "It's just one of those things."

"It's sacrilegious," said Steve McDaniel, owner of nearby Rock House Gym in Leeds. "If they did it in church, that's fine. Downtown's not the place for that."

The philistine citizenry were not alone in their discontent. Soon Caesar's man came to assess the scene, and he was quite prepared to have words with our messiah:

Leeds police Officer Wendell Carter ... arrived at 2:30 p.m. and persuaded Conaty to come down off his cross, saying he needed a demonstration permit.

"We called City Hall for a crucifixion permit," Conaty yelled down with his arms outstretched on the eight-foot-wide crossbeam.

After confirming that there had actually been no crucifixion permit issued, Officer Carter called for backup:

Police Chief Tony Hudson and City Manager Donnie Womble soon arrived on the scene. They noted that Conaty had blocked off parking spaces by tying a string from a tree to a potted plant to the back of a Ford pickup truck. "Blocking parking - not supposed to do that," Womble said.

"We ain't bustin' Jesus," Womble said. "We don't want to put Jesus in jail."

But city officials did make Conaty clean the fake blood stains off the new sidewalk, which Leeds had spent $381,000 to upgrade this year. Conaty, wearing a crown of thorns, poured bleach on the stains and used a push broom to clean them off. He said he got the blood from a party store.

O God, hear my prayer: If I could have just one photo magically sent to me depicting any moment in time, it would be this moment, when Your Son is sweeping party-store blood off a new sidewalk in central Alabama. Thank You, Lord. Flannery O'Connor never had it so good. And I'm afraid I will be risking a libel suit by using Donnie Womble's real name in the movie version, because you just don't pass up a gift like that.

On an unrelated note in the same paper: State school superintendent proposes better education for invisible children. "We will, I think for the first time in the history of this state, turn the page in history where we no longer have invisible children," quoth the superintendent. I strongly agree. I been tellin' the police for years about those invisible children gettin' into my tomato patch. They need to go to school and get off the streets. Maybe next they can do somethin' about those damned invisible spiders that keep layin' eggs in my brain. Hurts somethin' awful.

Ape Shall Not Sucker-Punch Ape

Monkey Week brachiates into its second day with this criminally underreported story: Orangutan boxing suspended in Thailand. Note that it's not because anyone in the government questions the moral defensibility of orangutan boxing; rather, there are suspicions the orangs might have been smuggled into the country from their native Indonesia.

The fine folks at Safari World ("The World of Happiness"), the Thai zoo-park in question, seem quite proud of their orangutan boxing, and why shouldn't they be? "Your closet cousins will tickle you with their fine sense Of humor and dazzle you with their mathematical gifts. It is non stop entertainment at its best as orang utans dish out trick after trick, from engaging the swing bars to engaging a coconut!" And this is just the warm-up routine before the boxing.

I'm not sure that orangutans really are my closet cousins -- and what does that mean anyway, cousins who don't want to admit they're related to me? But I must admit that I've waited my whole life to engage a coconut. And I absolutely refuse to die without first witnessing orangutan boxing. OK, not really, it's cruel and inhumane, but then so was Lance Link. If Charlton Heston and Russell Crowe can wrest gladiatorial dignity from the roar of the arena crowd, who are we to deny our closet cousins the same opportunity?

Er, but I must admit, the monkey "ring girl" with the round card is a little much ...

And in an update to yesterday's monkey missive: child-chomping macaque may have violated house arrest rules. The NY Post gets in on the action with a terrifying photo of the angry monkey peering out the window, and they also provide what Gothamist correctly identifies as the best quote to date from this primate imbroglio: "it is inappropriate to take a macaque into the cereal aisle." Closely followed by the frontier simplicity of "This man does not need a monkey." Possible lost Johnny Cash track?

Monkeys Demand Right to Shop, Bite, Bear Arms

Gothamist points out this NYDN article about a disabled man's "helper monkey" biting a child in a grocery store. The facts of the case are in dispute, as in, did the six-year-old boy provoke the monkey by pulling its hair, did the monkey attack without provocation, or was the monkey simply tired of surreptitiously gnawing off the dead tissue of its owner and longed for warm man-flesh? (As I said, these facts are disputed by some.) Anyway, what struck me was the admonishment by Judi Zazula, director of Helping Hands, a helper-monkey ranch: "Monkeys are not shoppers. They don't have a role in a supermarket."

No shop I, say the monkey? Don't tell that to Shopping Monkey, Coupon Monkey, Monkey Bargains, or any of the other monkey-fueled mercantile endeavors out there. It's clear that we, as a culture, see monkeys as ideal servants that can fill in for the tentacled androids and headless clone bodies still in development.

Nevertheless, I don't think I could ever be comfortable with a monkey in the house. I mean, they're cute and all, but you did see Monkey Shines , right? That monkey Ella seemed like a swell pal at first, but she turned into a total psycho bitch at the end. Incidentally, the IMDB has a bio page for Boo, the monkey that played Ella. The bio, in its entirety, consists of "Is a monkey."

Corbis has a fine collection of monkey pictures, which I skimmed for this post as you can no doubt tell by the above watermarked photo. However, while doing so, I also encountered this, which may be one of the most depressing photos I've ever seen. And then there's this, which is by turns weird, funny, depressing, and a little too close to home.

Paulina Peeks at 'Putin's Pickled Pecker

A day both slow and fast, so this is what you are unfortunate enough to receive: Rasputin's pickled penis, here viewed by a quizzical visitor to the "first Russian museum of erotica" in St. Petersburg. Now go home tonight and tell yourself once more that technique and sincerity are what's really important, tiny.