Goats eh?

Know Your Goat, just, you know, not THAT WAY.

Know Your Goat, just, you know, not in THAT WAY

This is a totally, completely, utterly gross story and you will love it. You will curl into the fetal position and cup your hands protectively over your bits, but you will like this story.

It’s a true story. For once. It comes from my mother, who was in charge of medical records at the King Fahd Hospital in Riyadh in the 80’s.

Saudi males who are not married are not supposed to notice they have penises. Seriously, they’re supposed to just pretend it doesn’t exist. So when a Saudi male who was not married was admitted the the hospital where my mother worked and the diagnosis was “ruptured penis” naturally all the typists in medical records were DYING to know how it happened. They were all Westerners and somewhat starved for scandalous sex gossip of this type, or even the sight of a penis, if only in their minds’s eyes.

What made it even more bizarre and in-your-face was, the doctors told him he needed some exercise and so every day he would get out of his room and go for a s…l…o…w… walk up the hallway. Down the hallway. Up the hallway. Down the hallway. With a determined look on his face and his legs bowed as if he were riding a Percheron.

My mother was not a shy woman. She was not what you could ever have called retiring. Or bashful.

So, one day she saw the doctor in charge of that patient in the hallway and walked up to him and said, “Doctor So-and-So, my typists can’t even concentrate to do their jobs, they are so distracted by this. How did it happen?”

He was used to my mother. He knew those western women were crazy and my mother was the craziest of all of them and, thus, not to be trifled with.

He looked up the hall. He looked down the hall. He looked up the hall. He looked down the hall. He leaned in and whispered, “The goat bolted.”

Flamewar of the Day: Gawkers

Rear Window: no parking in rear

No parking in rear

This actually happened last week, which is right and natural when you consider what a shitstorm last week was: when ELSE would it have happened, right? Instead of our usual fun flamewars, toying with the early drinkers and short bus riders of the blogosphere, this one went a little bit sideways and turned into something akin to watching hara kiri right there in the comments section on Gawker. What people are willing to do in front of strangers, and blame upon those strangers, never ceases to fascinate me.

There’s no question I was guilty, but what of exactly what, nobody is quite sure, except for the victim, who is quite sure of many things despite being quite wrong.

What is pretty much certain is that some grownups still have to learn that lesson about when to keep your mouth shut, the one most of us learned around the time we first encountered those savvy genii of the interwebs, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, not to mention Socrates, who came later (what with him being an old man and all).

Judge for yourselves, as always. This is from the comments section of a Gawker post about a “Spiderman” who freeclimbed a 58-story building with suction cups and was arrested for trespassing once he got to the top.

If residents gave him water en route, he can persuasively claim to have been a guest who was there with their permission.

@raincoaster: How about the floors in which nobody gave him water? If I invite you to my apartment does that mean you get to visit all my neighbors? How about reckless endangerment of parked Dodges? How about his impending Darwin award nomination? Questions, questions for the jury..

Seriously, this will be only a misdemeanor, no? 

raincoaster promoted this comment

@lethedrinker: Presumably even if you don’t invite him in, if your neighbors are okay with him walking by, he’s allowed to walk past your door via the hallway. He didn’t invade the apartments.

@raincoaster: Well, he climbed past their windows without their permission. I’d consider that an invasion of privacy.

This happened to me a few months ago. I live in a high rise condo looking directly at a bay, so privacy is not usually a concern. It’s a 1BR with a window in the BR; the LR has floor-to-ceiling doors to the balcony.

I got a notice saying that the window washing crew would be there on a certain date, and that they did not clean the windows in the LR, so I shut the blinds to the bedroom and thought I was all set.

Imagine my surprise when I was seated in the LR wearing only panties, and the crew appeared in my LR window to clean the glass balcony! I gently sank lower in the chair and raised my kindle to try and hide the tits. Not that they are anything to look at, I just prefer that people don’t.

They took 30 minutes to clean the damn balcony, and I couldn’t move in all that time.

So, with respect, your defense fails.

raincoaster promoted this comment

@Registered: Isn’t there some merit to the argumenet that by keeping the blinds up or door open, one implicity lowers the threshold for reasonable expectation of privacy. According to my lawyer friend, cops often use this excuse (made up or otherwise) to get around fourth amendment restrictions – not directly relevant to the privacy argument..

@lethedrinker: I don’t know about open front doors – they’re against the fire code here, must close automatically – but if I live in, say, a 26th floor condo that faces directly onto the ocean (or bay, in my case; you’d need the Hubble telescope to look in unless you are on a scaffold cleaning the windows ) then I would say the police lose their case.

Also, are you suggesting that people should live in caves with the blinds shut and the doors closed, or else lose any right to privacy? Bushish. 

raincoaster promoted this comment

@Registered: I said reduced not lose any or all. Bushish? I bet such dubious arguments existed long before either Bush and will continue to be used till 2084.

Anyway, it was a generic comment not specific to the 26th floor dwelling, bay watching, automatic door closing kindle readers.

@Registered: If you got a notice that the window washing crew would be there washing your windows on a certain date and you’re sitting in your apartment topless in your panties, SOMETHING ain’t an accident. And it ain’t invasion of privacy, either.

Quiz: What part of Thanksgiving are you?

We’re not being premature here: we’re being Canadian. Very few people outside of my mighty nation-state know Canadia has their Thanksgiving in October, before the Great Ice Spirit moves in and crushes us all to the ground, all but the mighty Ice Truckers. But it’s true.


You Are The Cranberry Sauce


A little sweet, a little sour – you’ve got the flava!

Though, you do tend to squish in people’s mouths…

As to that last bit, well, you’ll have to ask my last boyfriend…if you can dig him up (uh, I mean find him).

Oh, Ship!

Cthulhu sez wutz goin on in this boat

WE NO HAZ UR BUKKIT DOOD!!!

It’s not all fun and games out there on the deep blue sea.

That’s CCTV footage of the giant cruise ship the Pacific Sun, being shaken up like a snow globe by the powers of wind and water or perhaps something a little more sinister. If you cruise around LiveLeak, Break, or YouTube you can find any number of videos entitled “DEADLY 20 FOOT WAVE” and so on, but really, a 20-foot wave is nothing. For devotees of Cthulhu such as my fine self, we don’t even notice anything under “Cyclopean” unless, that is, it’s non-Euclidean.

Non-Euclidean waves will always have a special place in my heart, as will the HPL geek who wrote this spell-checking program and included the word non-Euclidean therein.

If you’re a sea geek like me, you probably watched, though claimed not to enjoy The Perfect Storm, but of course you had the book years before. And from that book, you probably remember many terrifying oceanic factoids, such as the fact that waves far higher than the theoretically possible maximum of 150 feet are routinely spotted via satellite imaging, and that a rogue wave once blew out the pilothouse windows on the Queen Mary, and further you remember that the pilot house windows on the Queen Mary are – get this – 92 feet above the water line. The wave was so tall that, even at an altitude of 92 feet, it was sufficiently thick and powerful that it crushed steel-framed, reinforced glass.

So yeah, enjoy that cruise vacation.

Dolphins KNOW, man. THEY KNOW

They're actually saying Iä! Iä! Iä!

Sesame Street Sob Story

Ever wonder where Oscar the Grouch came from? Seriously, if ever I saw a character with a backstory, Oscar is it.

Grover paid his dues the old-fashioned way, starting as a shoeshine monster and making his way as a waiter/comedian on the mean streets of Queens, until the day he was talent-scouted by the youthful duo of Ernie and Bert, auditioned for a new television project of theirs, and his fortune was made. Big Bird lucked out and made it on his first audition, if you believe the official storyline; unofficially, it’s believed that his never-seen but well-connected (Bunbury-ish?) Granny Bird had something to do with getting the clueless yet appealing big lug such a high-profile gig.

Elmo? Well, we’ve discussed Elmo.

Oscar’s story is a little different, a little more universal, a little more … dare we say it? Tragic.

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