Don’t forget your sheepskins
Monday, November 30th, 2009Today is the last day of November, and I think we all know what that means. That’s right! Only five more sleeps till December 5th, so go grab your sheepskins, masks, bells, and chains and put them somewhere easily accessible so you’ll be able to find them once you are all liquored up. Normally I’m the type of guy who sees Christmas decorations in the stores in November and get all grinch about it. But this year I’m feeling in the spirit and I can’t wait to get out on those streets, scare the children, hassle the pretty girls, and beat the not so pretty ones with a stick.
Wait, what? You mean you aren’t from a batshit crazy part of the world (I’m looking at you, Alps) and have no idea what I’m talking about? Id like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Meet the Krampus.
The story goes that Krampus travels around with old saint Nick doing things that range from mischievous to downright evil, but only to the kids on the naughty list. A couple examples include stealing all their presents, and putting them into a bag and kidnapping them(I wish I could tell you where he took them, but the Krampus is a slippery devil and who knows where he goes).
Of course, we as humans couldn’t let Krampus have all the fun. It has become a tradition in the Alpine towns for the young men to don the Krampus masks and furs and raid the town drunk while swinging chains, sticks, and bells. Technically this could happen at any point in December, however the 5th is when it is turned up to full steam and the young women are warned to stay indoors. But as backwards as it all seems, it holds a valuable message: if you don’t want to get messed up by a scary demon, just be nice.
-Wolverox
-lionsteeth
“Sure,” you may say, “but how many people really suffer from this madness?” Well let me tell you. In 2003 the Third Annual Body Integrity Identity Disorder “Stepping Into The Future” conference was held at Columbia College in New York. The very first speaker Dr. Micheal First spoke about the 52 patients he alone has dealt with in his career as a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. This guy is legit; he also coined the term B.I.I.D. This disease is not new; prior to Dr. Right B.I.I.D was referred to as ‘apotemnophilla’ or the sexual desire to be an amputee. Now don’t jump to any conclusions; sufferers of B.I.I.D will readily tell you that this has nothing to do with pleasure or sexuality, more so it is a desire to be whole, to be who you really see yourself as and that is something I feel like I can understand. Many more sufferers of B.I.I.D will tell you that they’re desire is no more strange than a sex change and when it comes down to it, I agree. In our modern world it seems people are finding it harder and harder to really be themselves. The main problem with this disorder is that no doctor in North America will preform an amputation on a perfectly healthy limb. This leaves the sufferer with a huge dilemma: what can you possibly do when your obsession can never be fulfilled? You have a few options: live with your disorder and try and cope with the constant pain in the back of your head nagging at you that things just are not as they should be, try and find some sort of doctor off the beaten track who will preform surgery on you off the radar, or, the most unfortunate of all, preform your own surgery. The last option is by far the most gruesome, although botched medical surgery can also be fatal or at least extremely painful. In my studies I found stories of victims laying themselves out on train tracks to remove legs, men getting drunk and sawing off their hands and, more often, people doing enough damage to their desired limb so that a doctor has no choice but to remove it for them (possibly by crushing it with a set of weights, ugh). So if people are so willing to do such terrible harm to themselves to get what they seem to need, why are we stopping them? Unfortunately I believe this is a case of where to draw the line. What is to stop a doctor from giving a man gills because he wants to be a fish? (Please, save the South Park references for another time.) I also believe that soon enough, most likely in the near future, this will be as normal as a man becoming a woman and vice versa. The victim is choosing their fate, picking their burden and they are prepared, or so they say, to live with it. Who are we to stop them?
At the tender age of 18, tragedy struck. Deep into the night a fire caught withing Django and his wife Florines caravan. Reinhardt received 3rd degree burns over one half of his body, rendering his right leg immobile and paralyzing the third and fourth finger on his left hand, it was said he would never play guitar again. However shortly after Django recovered his brother bought him a new guitar in hopes of Reinhardt playing again. Having to completely relearn the guitar Django took to using his first two fingers for solo work and the paralyzed fingers only for chords. What came from that gypsy camp where Django was born and the fire that rendered his hand almost useless was a man who would revolutionize jazz and create a genre to which he was the sole player, Gypsy Jazz. After World War II Django moved to America to study and play under some of the biggest names in jazz, including; Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He died in France of a brain hemorrhage in 1953. Many of Reinhardts songs are jazz standards today, including Minor Swing, Djangology ect. And when you hear that guitar shredding away in the next two songs, think about the fact that it’s just one man, with two fingers.
If you were to walk through the rainforests of New Guinea or northwestern Australia you’d probably never lay eyes on one of these cockatrice-like monsters, since they prefer to work incognito and will stealthily split when they hear a human coming. Well, most of the time they will split. If one chooses to stick around you can consider yourself unlucky enough to see firsthand why the Cassowary is notorious amongst the locals for having a very short fuse. In fact, they hold the world record for being the most dangerous bird alive today (by today I mean 2007). One little tidbit I got from the wikipedia page, where I admittedly got most my information on this bird, says that during WWII, troops stationed in New Guinea were told to stay away from the Cassowaries because of how aggressive they can be. These are fully grown men with guns that are trained to kill other fully grown men with guns, but they better stay away from old crazy eyes over there or shit is going to get real ugly real fast.
