Snake Food

A friend of ours, while on a temporary hiatus from vegetarianism, once hiked into the Uruguayan (Paraguayan?) jungle with some hunter and gathers, who, nearly starving to death, killed a gigantic snake, cut a pig out of its belly, found a fetus in the partially digested pig, and ate the fetus, which was cheerfully shared with our friend.

Wait!

I may have lost the object of that sentence. Just to be clear: our vegetarian friend ate a pig fetus from a pregnant pig that was removed from a gigantic snake's gut by hunter and gatherers who were nearly starving to death. Our friend was also starving, and was, temporarily, not a vegetarian.

Clear?

Here, for example, is an anaconda (?) regurgitating a tapir (?) after being harassed.



To be fair, this snake may have previously eaten humans. I'm just sayin' ...

Catch a falling star

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal first appeared on our radar screen months ago when much ado was made about an article he'd written in 1994 about witnessing an exorcism. (LoS wanted to profile the man at that time but nothing came of it.) The article is quirky, but it seems to end with some doubt as to what he'd actually witnessed, a fact not mentioned--much to their discredit--by most people who refer to the article.

Did I witness spiritual warfare? I do not have the answers, but I do believe in the reality of spirits, angels, and other re­lated phenomena that I can neither touch nor see.

Hell, even we believe in phenomena that can neither be touched nor seen. Radio waves....love....Spidey senses....

Given the attention focused on Jindal as one face of the future of the Republican Party leading up to his (now widely panned) response of Barack Obama's Sate of the Union address, we thought it was time to shine a lamp on him and see what strange shadow puppets we could cast on the wall of the Laws of Silence.

Judging by the responses we've read to articles about his rebuttal, one of the things that seems to anger people about Jindal (other than his hard right positions) is his seemingly wholesale rejection of his ethnic heritage.

First of all, there's the name. Legally, he's still Piyush Jindal, son of Indian immigrants. But since the age of four after he named himself after Bobby Brady (Brady Bunch) he's been Bobby Jindal. Now, if this story is true (and we don't say "if" to cast him as a liar, but we've gotta cover all the bases; damned sure not going accept this story as true based upon the endless repetition of it by the media), it's no big deal. Deciding that one would go by Bobby as an adult facing a political career is not the same as renaming oneself as a four year old. In both cases it boils down to just wanting to fit in, but in the former it's coldly calculating. In the latter it's more innocent, even touching. Kids are cruel and Bobby fits in a lot better with the Johns, Michaels and Christophers than Piyush. It was, after all, 1975 in Louisiana. Besides, immigrants from all walks of life choose new names for themselves. We've known Chinese immigrants who go by Tony, or Anna. A lot easier to get by than with Yu-Wei.

The second is his religion. Apparently he left Hinduism for Catholicism in high school. "Long before he embarked on a political career...." Uh, not really; he must've graduated in '89 or so. By '96 he'd been appointed secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. Was he being shrewd in his choice, already gunning for political office and changing his faith in order to fit in? LoS tends to shy away from this kind of "secret Muslim/Hindu"-type banter. He seems to have been covering all bases though, studying biology and public policy. Accepted by Harvard Medical and Yale Law schools, he chose instead to study political science at Oxford. So one might speculate that he adopted Catholicism as an astute (evidently brilliant) young man in order to make things easier for his if he decided to run for public office. A good Catholic named Bobby, why not?

Which brings us back to the exorcism thing. Unless he was aiming for the hardcore religious right vote, this article he wrote would hardly be the thing to write if he was cynically rearranging his life to be a more appealing candidate. If that were the case he would have come out pentecostal and focused his writings on the evils of abortion. No, we feel his faith is genuine, his name not unreasonable.

Other bloggers have derided his "obviously" phony accent and delivery. We object. The man was born in Louisiana after all, and grew up there. The accent is real. There is a kind of decollage, however, between that voice and delivery--a bit patronizing, half Mr. Rogers/half Suday school teacher--and the look of Jindal. This dusky fellow with the too-large jacket, the angular cheek bones, the dimpled smile which seems a bit strained....he's an odd-looking figure. And very smart. Which puts a damper on the old liberal truth that right-wingers are all a bunch of ignorant morons.

Not that LoS gives a flying fuck about right-wingers or Bobby Jindal. He's just a curious specimen is all. At one year younger than both Daurade and The Gid, he's just a tad bit more accomplished.

And on June 25, 2008, he signed the "Sex Offender Chemical Castration Bill", authorizing the chemical castration for those convicted of specific sex offenses.

All of which begs the questions:

• Is Bobby Jindal a cannibal?
• If you happened across a fat anaconda, slit it open and Bobby Jindal popped out, still living, what would you do?
• Why is is so fun to sing "Bobby Jindal" to the tune of Shelley Fabares' 1962 hit "Johnny Angel"?
• Are Jindal and General David Petraeus clones from the same mysterious source?
  
• Are volcanoes more whimsical than hurricanes? and
  
• If they are in fact equally innocuous, should we abolish the National Weather Service?

The Ballad of the Singing Loo

There is, at work, a toilet that for several years has periodically sounded a sort of whistle, somewhat like a bagpipe, only more singular and somewhat more cheerful like a toy tugboat whistling while working or a teapot on a chilly day, and so somewhat unlike the more baleful and duplicitous unharmonies of the bagpipe, but sharing a certain timber nonetheless.

I once mentally composed a silly about "The Ballad of the Singing Loo" but forgot it while washing my hands.

Anyhow, I brought my guitar tuner to work today. After a cup a coffee I hit the facilities and waited for the whistle, tuner in hand.

It starts around a "C" and gathers steam before blowing a perfect "D."

Whoooo-EEEEEEEE!

Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too

In Japan, you can go to a restaurant and dine on a faked human corpse that bleeds when cut and contains anatomically correct organs made of sushi.

For more money, you can "pork your pork": approximately $7,000 U.S. dollars lets you "have your way" with a chicken, dog, pig, or goat which is then cooked up to your preference.

Elsewhere, you can get penis and balls served up from horse, pigs, goats, dogs ... even cock's cock.


Meanwhile, skeptical anthropologists are casting doubt on the reality of cannibalism outside of nut-jobs and starving desperation, which leads us to wonder: Has capitalism reached such decadent lows that it about to recreate horrors that never existed?

In a time when artists eat fetuses, is life imitating myth?

Horse Tails

The Man is baffled by the mysterious swiping of horse tails. The tails, we're told, could take 10 years to grow back, which equates to a lot of mosquito bites on the fanny.

In England, they blame a cult of "horse rippers" who have, after cutting tail, bled horses to death and left stones arranged in as Satanic symbols.

We have our own theory after learning of a hair weave that stopped a speeding bullet.

Meanwhile, we'll leave you with this thought from an old time horseman: "If they were mean horses, [the thieves] would have never gotten away with it."

So what's your take?

* Violin bow makers?
* Rump shot affectionadoes?
* Bullet proof wig makers?
* Mistaken for a goat?