A tragic tale of a true louse.

Or not, as you shall see.

I was tempted, almost to the point of madness, to steal Bug Girl’s title; let’s face it, when you’re looking for eye-catching, it’s hard to beat

“Sea Monkeys in Your Pants!”

It really is.

How does this sad tale start? Where will it end? When do the Sea Monkeyscome in, and do they really look like those crowned, pink people in the cartoons?

It starts, as all great tales do, with a random email about pubic lice, and it ends…probably tragically, with Raid aerosols at dawn in the Quadrant. And they are supposed to come in the mail, but they don’t.

Unless…are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yes: MATANGO!

It starts with my friend Bug Girl, who is an entomologist, getting an email from a stranger asking about the latest fad: “Love Lice,” pubic lice you keep in your underwear as living love tokens and pets.

I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

My boyfriend is all excited about the love lice, pubic hair animal things and wants us to get them. I’m not sure this is such a good idea.

Speaking as an impartial and (possibly) somewhat callous bystander, I think it’s a SWELL idea. I think all exceptionally stupid people should send their money in to this website and purchase recreational blood-sucking vermin for their nether regions. If nothing else, it will mean that pointless marketing meetings will be shorter, as everyone there but me will have difficulty sitting still longer than five minutes. I am highly in favour of this. If the intellectually impaired refuse to remain in their designated containment sites (malls, character-based amusement parks, LiveJournal, and in front of the television) the very least they can do is visibly distinguish themselves from normal people by a scabbing rash and unrestrained genital scratching.

In a perfect manifestation of my thesis that everything has a fansite, there is (naturally) a site devoted to this peculiar aberration, Lovebugz.net, and surprise, surprise, it will, for a small price, make these crawling, blood-sucking escutcheons upon the family jewels available by mail order.

The dealio is special bred pubic crab louses from Japan (not the same as homeless people’s variety of lice exactly). First, they DON’T BITE, they just live off dead skin cells and such in your bush. Really, you’re cleaner with them there than without them.
Second, these babies are HUGE!!! Well, huge compared to regular lice. And they just live happily in your underwear. It’s so COOL! They grow, and have families.
You can feel em living and crawling around. It’s like having personal Sea monkeys in your pants.

Except, not really. As Bug Girl points out, there are no pubic crab louses, Japanese or otherwise, that do not live off the blood of their hosts. It’s not like having Sea Monkeys in your pants; it’s like having tiny vampire bats.

o hai, there might be a market for this in Gothdom, come to think of it. A tweak here, a re-edit there, a new black background, a couple of Vampire Lestat quotes, some red serif text and HEY PRESTO! Instant millionaire-maker.

Except the Goths I know don’t wear any underpants. Would that be a problem?

Bug Girl has cleared up the misinformation on her blog, coincidentally giving my soon-to-launch VampireBugsInYourPants.com its first independent testimonial.

Given the infinite ability of humans to get off on just about anything, I’ll grant that someone could fetishize having pubic lice (Phthirus pubis for those who want the taxonomic details). And it does have it’s own fetish name: pthirophilia…

…the idea promoted on LoveBugz that you can “easily” get rid of crabs is not correct. Additionally, the LoveBugz site suggests using Kerosene, which is about the worst thing you can possibly do (especially if you have open sores from the bites!).

Again, I have to disagree. The idea that hundreds of fad-driven dopes are pouring volatile, corrosive liquids into their seething, vermin-infested gotchies and onto open wounds delights me no small amount. I may have to take five for a giggle break here, and don’t pretend you don’t need one as well.

But wait! There’s MORE! Much, much more…Click past the jump to read it, including scanning electron microscopy of zombie mushroom vampire lice!

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I Have Pubic Lice in my Box

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the public laundromat…an intrepid (and apparently somewhat twisted; I like him already) reporter put his money where his dignity was (he won’t be needing that anymore) and sent off for some of these mail order vermin. The envelope was delivered to Bug Girl for content analysis and…well, let’s go to the transcript on this one, shall we?

I thought the site was just a creative ad-farm scheme, so said “Sure! Send ‘em to me!”
Because, seriously.
It had to be a a scam. Who is going to go to the Better Business Bureau and complain that they didn’t get the pubic lice they paid for?

I put the “specimen” in a sealed tupperware container with a moist towel, set it on my plant warming pad (since lice are triggered to emerge by moisture and heat), and took them to work with me the next day. Where 2 graduate students were fascinated, and 1 was pretty much traumatized by the whole concept and probably tried to autoclave herself after I left the lab.

[Also, a tip: if you walk into your new workplace brandishing a container of putative pubic lice and sand, you may want to provide a more detailed back story than “I bought them on the internet.” Just some advice.]

Anyway, we looked carefully under the scope, and aside from documenting that Mr. LoveBugz is (a) brunette; and (b) has pubic hair that is very smooth and well conditioned; we found no nits or lice.

But what she DID find is interesting: not just Mr LoveBugz‘ pubes, but also small capsule-like objects which were obviously plant material, rather than animal. Which brings us back to the beginning; it brings us back to Matango!

Seriously: is it so far-fetched that a man who incubates exotic Asian pubic lice in his underwear would have (deliberately or inadvertently) contracted the unspeakable, highly contagious, mutative fungus featured in that Japanese cinematic classic Matango aka Attack of the Mushroom People? Recall, if you will, that this fungus was first documented in William Hope Hodgson‘s horrifying 1907 short story The Voice in the Night, and that its ability to transform living animal tissue to undead plant tissue has been known for at least that long.

I’m sensing a Goth marketing powerhouse in the making. First we had the simple, innocent pleasures of Sea Monkeys in Your Pants, but now! NOW we have

Zombie Asian Fetish Subculture Vampire Undead Mushroom People in Your Pants!

I’m going to be a millionaire billionaire!