If yesterday the solution to financial crisis seemed to be placing a ban on all ungodly behaviors and manners of the world, and instead of a bailout Wall Street needed more Bibles, today we woke up with the announcement that higher levels of testosterone lead to riskier investments. Once again, science proves to divorce from religion.
We bears (and gays) have been hearing fundamentalist Christians arguing against gay marriage for a while. One of the reasons they usually point out is that "marriage can only take place between a man and a woman" and if we allow other genres to marry, such would lead to a weird what's next, as in "humans marrying their pets" et al. Another feature of born again Christians, like president George W. Bush, is their abhorrence of alcoholic beverages.
Well, I have eventually found the proof that they are really right in their appreciations. See what a combination of liquor and free marriage can lead to:
Times Online brings forth again a freedom of expression limits in the Netherlands. An Iranian artist has seemingly "photographed gay men wearing masks of the prophet Muhammad" and was "forced into hiding and her work removed from a museum exhibit." The journal says: "Speaking on the telephone from an unspecified location in the Netherlands last week, the artist, an Iranian exile who goes by the pseudonym of Sooreh Hera, said she had been threatened with “execution”. She accused the director of the municipal museum in The Hague of cowardice for caving in to Muslim extremists."
My opinion here is two-faceted. First of all, it looks exactly like any other art case involved with religion, no matter which religion: artists that, it appears to me, want to gain hype and recognition just by messing with, be it evangelicals, ultracatholics, islamists, or whatever other fundie religious group. That sort of publicity is free, and though we have in many cases advocated freedom of expression, I should say that, for all those cases and artists, it's a funny thing that you first go and choose your "art" subject then claim that you didn't intend to hurt no religious feeling. Of course you intended, Mr. and Mrs. Artist, and that's precisely where your possibilities of making the headline in The Times, the New York Times or whatever other respectable newspaper are. But you don't want to face the consequences of your action, huh?
Now in this case, there's a second lecture for us Muslims: just because someone claims that some given mask is that of Prophet Muhammad are we going to believe it? Where in the world is there any painting, drawing, or whatever, that accurately depicts which factions and appearance Prophet Muhammad had? Nowhere, right? So when any of these 15-minutes-of-fame-seekers claims that "the mask is that of the prophet Muhammad" how do they know? Because they had a revelation in a dream? Come on, brothers and sisters, if any of you is reading this: that's just provocation, and we'd better not respond to such gross intents. As for the "gay men" part, I didn't know till today that in the Netherlands, there was some sort of certificate that shows one's gay.
I could as well take a picture of someone wearing a mask of Daffy Duck and write over the photograph: "This is a gay man and the mask depicts prophet Elijah". And gain my 15 minutes of shame.
Around early September, 2006, ABC news said that four prison inmates in El Salvador were discovered with mobile phones inside their anal cavities, according to Slate (the original ABC link is no longer working). That prompted Slate to wonder (and answer too) how much stuff a person could handle up the anus. The writing is way too interesting and enlightening to leave it away, though found in a moment of procrastination. Since Slate tends to keep their old articles for quite a bit of months, here's the link. But the answer, for those who don't want to browse there to find out what you can and what you shouldn't stuff up your ass, is this:
In general, it takes a fair bit of training to conceal something that's more than a couple of inches in diameter. As a general rule, the medical literature on "retained colorectal foreign bodies" considers anything bigger a "large object."
For the full fun, of course, go to Slate and read the full article.
At the Museum of Hoaxes there's a section called "The 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time" which includes the one giving title to this entry, ranked at number 4:
In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered that the septal region is the feel-good center of the brain. Electrical stimulation of it produces sensations of intense pleasure and sexual arousal. They demonstrated their discovery by inserting wires into a rat's brain and then showing that when the rat figured out it could self-stimulate itself by pressing a lever, it would maniacally bang on that lever up to two-thousand times an hour. (The image at the very top of this page, third from the right, shows one of Olds and Milner's rats banging on its lever.)
In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University dreamed up a far more novel application of Olds and Milner's discovery. Heath decided to test whether repeated stimulation of the septal region could transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual.
Heath referred to his homosexual subject as patient B-19. He inserted Teflon-insulated electrodes into the septal region of B-19's brain and then gave B-19 carefully controlled amounts of stimulation in experimental sessions. Soon the young man was reporting increased stirrings of sexual motivation. Heath then rigged up a device to allow B-19 to self-stimulate himself. It was like letting a chocoholic loose in a candy shop. B-19 quickly became obsessed with the pleasure button. In one three-hour session he pressed it 1500 times until, as Heath noted, "he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation and had to be disconnected."
By this stage of the experiment B-19's libido was so jacked up that Heath decided to proceed with the final stage in which B-19 would be introduced to a sexually-willing female partner. With permission from the state attorney general, Heath arranged for a twenty-one-year-old female prostitute to visit the lab, and he placed her in a room with B-19. For an hour B-19 did nothing, but then the prostitute took the initiative and a successful sexual encounter between the two occurred. Heath considered this a positive result.
Little is known of B-19's later fate. Heath reported that the young man drifted back into a life of homosexual prostitution, but that he also had an affair with a married woman. Heath optimistically decided that this showed the treatment was at least partially successful. However, Heath never did try to convert any more homosexuals.
Stephen Tyrone Colbert had some words on gay marriage on MSNBC Meet the Press. Here's the link
to the video at NBC (not able to embed, first plays a commercial, then the interview. Colbert said: "I only got married as a taunt toward gay men because they couldn’t." It is not clear whether Mr. Colbert is eager to engage on any other of the many varied activities gay men can't do. For instance, I myself can't hold my breathe for more than 15 minutes, neither I can do scuba diving on a liquid nitrogen pool.
Mr Colbert is said to be running for president of the United States of America in what appears to be a remake of Man of the Year. Who's running the voting booth machines?
The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, has been awarded the Ig Nobel Price of Peace, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other. The reference work: "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.
Such "gay bomb" would fall into Cathegory 3 chemical weapons: those which "affect human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely affected. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."
Apart of the joke of gay bombs, gay sprays or whatever you might consider, what's clear from this work is that by 1994 at least, the USA Air Forces, or at least some of their personnel, were trying to find new ways on chemical weapons, while some years later accussing other countries of their own procedures. Now who's got WMDs?
31 August 2007
SALAMANCA – A man cut off his own penis and threw it in a toilet ‘so he would stop sinning’.
And we thought we were accustomed to weird stories. Anyway, the news don't describe what type of sin he was engaged into.
A flash about what's weird in the news lately. Take a look at the world, and notice that you're not weird. Or at least not the weirdest.
