First off: I updated my previous entry several times over the course of the day (because it's hard to Photoshop when you're running a fever and talking to Newfoundlanders, damnit), so if you've already read it but found it a) oddly unsatisfying, b) riddled with broken image links, or c) kicking up a stink like sewage and geraniums after a wild rainstorm, please visit again. I promise you an experience utterly unlike anything you've had before. Unless you've been to my site, or used the internet before, or ever read anything. Now on to another unique experience, starting but not ending with some questions.

Wouldn't cryptozoologists be putting themselves out of work by studying mysterious life forms? Will there come a day when Dmitri will turn to Sven and Car�lyne (all of them, I assure you, highly qualified cryptozoologists) and say: "Looks like we've classified the last freaky animal. It's a super-intelligent leopard adapted for life in the methane rings of Rigel-5. Back to my job hawking bulk cornstarch at Costco, I guess".

Does anybody else think that the term "nudibranch" sounds a little bit obscene?

No? Okay, how about Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me?" Well, how about Elton John himself?

And since I'm in my interrogative mode... I'm going to stop. If ever you wondered why Sinead O'Connor ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live (I recall Phil Hartman on the Tonight Show or David Letterman soon after, sounding as sententious as one his characters, gravely intoning that O'Connor "killed the comedy for the second half of the show". I watched that episode, and I must tell you: that was zombie funnies already), here's an answer: the Catholic Church has been spreading about the story that the microscopic holes in condoms allow HIV to pass through and infect people. It's a lie. The WHO has found that HIV may get through via slippage and tears in latex condoms, but not through microscopic holes. Given correct condom use, effectiveness can be 90%. Which is better than, say, zippo percent. The Church seems particularly eager to spread this paste of gall and bullshit most thickly in Africa, where honest information is desperately needed. The Archbishop of Nairobi is actually on record as saying that "AIDS... has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms". Yeah, I see the cloven hooftracks of that argument: make condoms available and it just encourages more sex, right? I can only conclude that Karol Wojtyla and his costumed army of genuflecters and child molesters are interested in having African people die slowly and horribly. Sometimes I'm amused by the fusion of 21st century geopolitics and medieval morality that the Catholic Church likes to practice. But not today.

I'm thinking that Dune is probably the only place I can encounter the line "We have wormsign the likes of which God has not seen," and not feel extremely uncomfortable.

EPILOGUE: THE ROBINOPTICON

A couple of days I ran into Robin's Donuts to grab some cash for the waiting taxi. Their ATM is one of those freelance money boxes that takes half of your account with each transaction to spend five minutes deliberating over whether to give you the measly fucking twenty dollars you asked for. The only thing I do like about them is the card reader, which doesn't suck your card away from you for the duration of the transaction, reminding you of the fact that your bank card is actually the property of the bank (did you know that? Check the contract and you'll find it's so). It's a clean dip, a nice rhythmic insert-and-retract with a touch of unconscious muscular finesse.

On that morning, though, a guy in a bomber jacket and a baseball cap stuffed over messy dark hair clearly didn't have that minimal myoelectric grace. He was shoving the card into the reader repeatedly, spastically, pausing a few beats before ramming his (bank's) card into the reader slot five or six more times, cursing each time. The money box was going into spasms, making these syncopated beeps. Overall it sounded like this: (beat)(beat) Whamwhamwhamwhamwhamwhamwham! Beep-bee-b-beep-beep-beeep. (beat) "Fuck". (beat)audible sigh... (beat)(beat) Whamwhamwhamwhamwhamwhamwham! Etcetera. Eventually he gave up and handed off the machine to me, saying: "Good luck with that thing there, buddy".

I was a bit amazed by his confusion. Unless the guy was on a 9:00 AM crystal meth binge (which, given the nature of that drug, is not unlikely), I can't imagine that there's anyone left in this country who hasn't at least once used one of those squat little money thieves. I should have hit him over the head and dragged him to the nearest cryptozoologist, where he could be properly categorized by Dr. Carülyne as one more and one less mythical creature.

parode - exode