Over the years I’ve lost a lot if not most of my respect for Salon.com. Camille Paglia was one reason, Horowitz another, and then annoying site redesigns, and various types of advertising and membership models and other shit. And then an annoying dogmatic coastal / big-city liberalism to much of what was published, and those who wrote “Letters to the Editors” — even worse.
But through it all their “cultural” articles (book and movie reviews, and occasionally interviews) remained great, and I’ve grown to like “Broadsheet” — the ‘feminist’ section, and what I rather like now is Andrew Leonard’s blog-ish contribution, “How the World Works.”
Today’s contribution? Battle-lizards of the Maratha, from which I’ll quote a paragraph or two (Leonard’s text and a quoted passage):
I must have led a sheltered life, because prior to today I was unaware that monitor lizards were once used as siege weapons in 17th-century India. But then again, there’s a lot I didn’t know about monitor lizards — including every single assertion in the following paragraph, taken from Daniel Bennett’s “Little Book of Monitor Lizards”:
Monitors can bestow bad luck on people in a number of ways. In Borneo they are sometimes depicted on the shields of warriors in order to strike dread into the hearts of opponents. If one crosses the path of an advancing army mutiny may result unless the battle is postponed. If one is seen at a wedding the union is presumed doomed from the beginning. In parts of Pakistan it was considered essential to keep your mouth tightly closed in the presence of a monitor lizard; one glimpse of the teeth and the reptiles’ spirit could infect your soul. If a monitor ran between your legs in Khazakstan your chance of having children in the future was rated as zero. In parts of Thailand some people dare not even pronounce the name of the monitor lizards, whilst others use it as a term of abuse. Further south, when the moon is full, some unfortunate people break out in scales and develop a long forked tongue. These “weremonitors” prowl about searching not for beetles and caterpillars, but for warm human flesh.
Weremonitors. Weremonitors!
Were- anything … great, I say, though if one goes too far with shape-changing lizards and a connection to “Aryans” of any sort one suddenly has a David Icke-esque alien-invasion-conspiracy and crypto-history thing going on.
At that point one should just subscribe to one of my favorite alternative science models, one so without merit that it should be obvious to most that it’s B.S., but that doesn’t stop people from writing about it: the electric universe model, the idea that electricity (and plasma) and not gravity is responsible for holding things together, making the stars work, etc. It leads its proponents to write long-winded anti-gravity articles whenever an award is given for anything relativity/gravity related, such as a Nobel Prize. These sorts of alt-science folks also post to Slashdot whenever an interesting astronomical phenomenon is reported on (such as a story on a symmetrical cosmic red square).
In the wake of Don Imus’s firing for his sexist and racist remarks regarding the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team that Russian icon of truth, Pravda, theorizes that Imus was fired so as to silence him because he knew the “truth” about 9/11.
Excuse me while I laugh …
hee hee hee …
Even better, though, is an image attached to the story and its caption: “Dwarfish Russian porn star knows how to entertain herself.”
Dwarfish. Russian. Porn star.
Excuse me while I laugh …
hee hee hee …
Tonight I’m finishing up the “Queen” part of “Q” — during the day I had more of Classic Queen and their Greatest Hits (the blue and red albums/CDs, you might remember). To think: it’s been 16 1/2 years since F. Mercury died.
To conclude with a couple useful stories from the NY Times:
Have Spatula Will Travel: “Insights that might never occur to you while eating hot yogurt soup in a restaurant in Istanbul suddenly take on a surprising clarity when making that soup yourself in a hotel kitchen there.” I then think of cold fruit yogurt soup in Budapest. yum.
Just Feist. Just Wait.: “On the way to the video shoot for a song named ‘1 2 3 4,’ Leslie Feist called her father on her cellphone, urging him to drop by the studio. ‘I’m going to dance like in “Fame,”‘ bubbled Feist, a petite 31-year-old brunette who uses her last name for her solo recording career. ‘I’m going to be carried around on the shoulders of 50 people, like Madonna in “Material Girl,” only minus the pearls and the back muscles.'” Sounds like decent music … have never heard her stuff, though.
