Cancel your trip to Africa! There are sorcerors stealing…personal items.

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Unfortunately, it’s not very funny since deluded people are blaming their tiny, impotent penises on random people and beating and lynching them.

Cancer: This is not a good day to molt—there’s a cephalopod with an eye on you. Hunker down beneath a rock with some ripe rotting fish and wait.

Well, at least you might think this was my mission statement if you were an incoherent, demented kook, anyway.

(Hat tip to Bay of Fundie)

I think this is my favorite newspaper headline yet: Priest attached to party balloons vanishes in Brazil. Now you know what to bring to the next party at your local church: a lawn chair, a bunch of balloons, and a helium tank. I am imagining a day when every priest in the world stands smiling beneath a great happy bobbing collection of many-colored balloons, and they all joyously loft themselves up, up into the sky, joyfully drifting away before the winds until they are just a tiny speck and then … gone. It will be a miracle.

This will be my new dream. It will bring a smile to my face as I fall asleep.

And as long as I’m dreaming, I’ll imagine myself with an ultralight aircraft and a BB gun, buzzing above a great Sargasso of wind-gathered balloons.

Apparently, it’s a religious holiday called Passover, which refers to some horrible, awful series of afflictions a god visited on some unfortunate people, but passed over some others, so the survivors celebrate. It seems terribly mean-spirited to me. Anyway, here’s something “fun”: Passover-themed gifts. In this case, a collection of plagues for children. A bag of plagues, plague fingerpuppets, chocolate plagues — there’s a frog in that one. Which made me think of…

Well, except for the grain silos, that is, but I don’t need to go in those. New York is a whole different story, though. This story about elevators is informative, because it tells you all about the construction and safety features, takes a tour of the Otis company, and even talks about the psychology of spacing oneself in a crowded elevator…but the part that will stick with you is the saga of poor Nicholas White, who was forgotten in a stuck elevator for 41 hours over one weekend — trapped in a small box for almost two days with absolutely nothing to do. I think I’d go insane.

Almost as painful: he was observed on time-lapse security cameras. Now you too can watch a man suffer extreme boredom and frustration. If this were a psychology experiment, it would never get past the review board, that’s for sure.

(via Kottke)

There has been a recent upsurge in email coming my way. Some of it is very complimentary, thank you very much to all who have written in to say nice things about the blog, and some of it is extremely nasty (no thank you, I’m not interested in being sent to hell right now), but others … others are just weird.

[Read more…]

(via My Confined Space)

This is kind of sad, actually. It’s a slick website from a guy in Utah who claims to have discovered pre-Cambrian dragons. Browse around his gallery, and it’s clear that what he’s got are pictures of random rocks, and that he’s seeing shapes in them like one sees shapes in the clouds. He reminds me of Ed Conrad.

His name is Mike Hallett, so of course this period of gigantic dragons is called the Hallettstoneion. He has also written a book, which has to be seen to be believed. I swear, I think it’s actually written in crayon. Here’s a sample, in case you’d really rather not download a 40MB pdf.

Ouch. I hope his family gets the poor man some help.