The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Here’s a link that’ll make your days a bit more bearable: the Botany Photo of the Day, sponsored by the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research.

I stumbed across the site this afternoon while home in bed with stomach troubles, and thought I’d pass it along. (The site, not the nausea. I’m giving that to my co-workers.)

Over the years, I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon: the only time a painful accidental death is actually funny is when it’s the direct result of the victim’s own mind-boggling stupidity. For example, a horrible death by fire is not funny. A horrible death by fire caused by lighting farts in the vicinity of an open container of gasoline? Pretty damned funny.

Which brings us to tonight’s post. A Seattle man died of acute peritonitis when his colon was perforated during sex with a horse. This was not your garden-variety red-state barnyard dalliance, mind you; the horse rode him hard and put him away wet. As my twisted friend John Campbell put it, “Oh, Wilburrrrrrrr…”

Apparently a rented farm near the town of Enumclaw, Washington was advertising in internet chatrooms for people that want to get down with a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there. The victim, whose name is not given in the story but good lord I hope it’s Philip (Greek for horselover), had purchased a Thoroughbred stallion earlier in the year. As the spectacularly-worded news story puts it:

The man told his relatives he boarded the animal with some friends in Enumclaw.

While the man’s relatives were unsure how many horses he had boarded at the property, one Enumclaw neighbor said the Seattle man was keeping two stallions there.

I’ve never read Seattle Times staff reporter Jennifer Sullivan’s work before, but I’m now a fan for life.

Well, that’s about all I’ve got to say on it. I know this post is kind of rambling and disjointed, but anything more structured would require me to think about the events in some detail, and I just can’t. Fair enough?

Note: Yes, I’m the one that wrote the disgusting little verse on the tombstone. I’m expecting hate mail, and maybe some marriage proposals.

Visitors to my sub-site Eccentric Orbit will find a few things that have changed. Instead of using static hyperlinked images, I’m now using the Google Maps API*. In plain English, now it’s interactive satellite imagery that you can drag around and zoom in and out of. Some people are easily amused, I guess.

I’ve also fixed a few long-standing bugs on the site, most notably the line-spacing problem. The line-height css tag should be outlawed. I have yet to find a line-spacing difficulty that can’t be fixed by just ripping out all the line-heights in the style sheets.

* It’s also my first WordPress plug-in. After this shakedown cruise I’ll make it available for download.

For the second night in a row somebody has called my house with a wrong number. For the second night in a row the caller has refused to believe that it is, indeed, a wrong number. Last night the guy suspected I was one of his apparently obnoxious friends playing a prank. Fair enough.

But tonight’s caller, a woman who seemed to be in her twenties, thought she was dialing a pharmacy. It took me several minutes of denials before she finally hung up, and I got the impression she still wasn’t completely convinced.

What the hell?

Did I miss a news report or something? Is there some diabolical drug store out there routinely yanking people’s chains? Do the pharmacists at Walgreen’s and CVS pretend to be insurance salesmen when elderly Aunt Meg calls them for a refill on her heart meds?

Sometimes you just have to sit back and remind yourself that the average IQ of 100 means that fully half the people you meet are even dumber than that.

To celebrate Independence Day, I’m going to pass this article from The Nation along. Read it, and you’ll understand everything you need to know about Republican “troop support.” Here’s the money shot:

By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. “The people opposed to the war aren’t putting their asses on the line,” Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn’t he putting his ass on the line? “I’m not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country,” he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, “and I wasn’t going to pass that up.”

And besides, being a College Republican is so much more fun than counterinsurgency warfare. Bray recounted the pride he and his buddies had felt walking through the center of campus last fall waving a giant American flag, wearing cowboy boots and hats with the letters B-U-S-H painted on their bare chests. “We’re the big guys,” he said. “We’re the ones who stand up for what we believe in. The College Democrats just sit around talking about how much they hate Bush. We actually do shit.”

Good thing the Founding Fathers didn’t feel that way, isn’t it? Chicken-shit hypocritical bastards.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I actually did enlist in the Navy, in 1977. I washed out of boot camp. It’s one of the biggest disappointments of my life; I really wanted submarine duty. But it’s possible to try as hard as you can and still fail, and I have an honorable discharge to show for it. Unlike, oh, say, Vice President Dick “other priorities” Cheney, for example.