Day: March 29, 2005

This was a pretty interesting story from The Sunday Wichita Eagle Newspaper a couple of weeks ago. A resident in the area saw a ball bouncing around strangely in a nearby pond and went to investigate. It turned out to be a flathead catfish who had obviously tried to swallow a child’s basketball which became stuck in its mouth!! The fish was totally exhausted from trying to dive, but unable to because the ball would always bring him back up to the surface. The resident tried numerous times to get the ball out, but was unsuccessful. He finally had his wife cut the ball in order to deflate it and release the hungry catfish. You wouldn’t believe it if you didn’t see the attached photos.

What follows is the epic saga of a random instant message that came to me from a stranger this weekend, asking whether I wanted to be paid to write a college paper for her. Bitch didn’t know she was fucking with a comedy writer….

I had been convinced by my parents the other day to come home to Pennsylvania for Easter. After letting Mom feed me, and playing with her dogs, and all that stuff I have to do when I’m home, I go to check my email.

When I’m home, I connect to the Internet using the AOL account my parents have kept open for me since high school. And since I don’t use it except when I’m home, I just haven’t bothered to change the profile, where apparently, about 8 or 9 years ago, I had listed one of my hobbies as “Eating Hindu Sculpture.” That should be enough information for you to appreciate the instant message exchange that follows. Her instant message name has been changed to her real name, as has mine.:

It is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis.

The trouble with Las Vegas is not just that it is ridiculous and dysfunctional, but that anybody might take it seriously as a model for human ecology on anything but the most extreme provisional terms. That they do might in itself be proof that American civic culture has reached a terminal stage. Even the casual observer can see that Las Vegas is approaching its tipping point as a viable urban system, particularly in the matter of scale. In evolutionary biology, at the threshold of extinction organisms often attain gigantic size and a narrow specialty of operation that leaves them very little room to adapt when their environment changes even slightly. This is the predicament of Las Vegas. Its components have attained a physical enormity that will leave them vulnurable to political, economic, and social changes that are bearing down upon us with all the inexorable force of history.

Images from Japanese psychiatric medication advertisements : 1956-2003