All I know is that its highly unlikely that a normal (i.e., not related to Lady Deathstrike) human being could, over time, scratch a hole into their brain cavity using their fingernails (which, again, even over time, would be worn down to nubs in the face of bone) and cause inexplicably green brain matter to leak out. Especially since in order to leak out, it would have to be either melting from high fever, or under pressure due to internal swelling, and either way she’d likely be unconscious, if not dead. Again, the wound probably just got badly infected (with staph or similar) and pustulent, which is a perfectly good reason to send someone to the hospital, especially if they have HIV. Its even possible that between the infection, the external damage, and the HIV, the virus managed to make it to her brain, or trigger a heavy fever, causing the apparent brain damage.
M was probably just misunderstanding or misremembering the incident, which is understandable given the stress she was probably under at the time. Unless I see a medical chart with notes saying “perforation of the skull”, or perhaps a particularly impressive episode of Mythbusters, I’m not buying it.
Comment by Joe Shadows — June 25, 2008 @ 8:17 pm
While Mr. Shadows and I may have our differences — for example: he thinks me a gullible fool and I am fairly certain that he is a Communist — we can both agree that the only way to settle this is to get the Mythbusters on this conundrum post-haste. Hopefully they can construct an itch scratching machine, comprised of a hand made from ballistics jelly and bone connecting to a large motor, designed for the specific purpose of creating a perforation in a severed pig’s head.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2007 64% of high school graduates enrolled in college. For a multitude of reasons I have never been one of their ilk. Yet I’m told that college is a place to broaden one’s horizons; to learn new things and experience things you might not otherwise have experienced in your isolated pre-post-secondary schooling world, a place to question ideals long held as true and expand upon one’s own repertoire of knowledge. A kindergarten for the real world if you will, but with liquor and venereal diseases.
Apparently the hordes of apple-cheeked co-eds fueling this idea are all acting as agents of subversion and deceit; sowing falsehoods throughout society in an attempt to create a society of unquestioning automatons adequately prepared for the endless toil of an office. But only after being bilked out of thousands of dollars.
Thankfully, there are people like Miss Priya Venkatesan working from within the system to undo this previously obfuscated treachery.
Our deepest apologies, dear readers, for having fallen down on the job as of late in regards to one of our most sacred traditions. Needless to say, we are filled with a great sense of shame and assure you it will not happen again. If, in the future, one of us is unable to fulfill their obligations our newly acquired team of Korean animators will leap into action, producing original cartoons for your enjoyment, although in all honesty I personally cannot guarantee this. You see, by “team of Korean animators” I actually mean a Korean family that Eliza met — and subsequently forced into her windowless van — while running errands at Home Depot. They have tried to reason with her, explaining that they are involved in other professions, the father is a salesman for a lighting manufacturer and his wife works as a bank teller. The children are, well, children.
Eliza would hear none of it however, either assuming that they were lying or under the impression that all people of Korean descent have an innate ability to animate. The rest of the staff has done their best to ignore the situation, knowing full well that once Miss Gauger has set her mind on something, one has little chance of ever changing her opinion. It is for this reason that we do nothing when she insists that her aforementioned van has the ability to travel through time or that Qais is, in her words, “a spy sent by space Turks to steal her chocolate secrets.” Regardless it has been uncomfortable, the tired and nervous familial unit has taken up residence in our break room where they were horrified to find only four items : coffee, tea, pipe tobacco, and squid chips. It would be worse when they found out that these items were our sole sources of sustenance. The children, unsurprisingly, did not take well to the tobacco. Perhaps we should send out for food.
Ah well, I’m sure they’ll be fine, besides it’s cartoon time! Click through, loyal Ectomites, and witness their triumphant return!
P.S. Also, remember that if you visit the YouTube page for a particular video you have the option to watch it in high quality. Especially well suited to the anime.
No, sometimes it’s for xenophobia, the fear of strange things; like lampreys or the British. That is according to a wonderfully dark children’s book from 1974 entitled The Mime’s Alphabet Book which bucks the trend of most screeds dealing with teaching kids their ABCs by substituting insipid objects like ducks for real world truths, like dying:
Certainly a lesson that could only be realized with art of pantomime.
Yesterday I called into question the effectiveness of illustrator Rowena Morrill in capturing the likeness of Wilbur Whateley for the cover of the paperback edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. However, ectomite Nick Herold was having none of my shenanigans and, strapping on his neck-beard, brought the pain, pointing out that the fault did not lay with Morrill or her editor but with Lovecraft and my own, preconceived notions:
That’s actually pretty accurate to Lovecraft’s description of Wilbur Whateley. If I may quote:
“Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discoloration behind it. “
You smell that? That’s the burning smell of emasculating pwnage!
After a dozen years of tyrannical Prohibition, the people of our once proud and great nation had finally cracked. I know it sounds far fetched but bear with me, the mental decimation of North America at the hands of 12 years of sobriety at gunpoint and poisonous, bathtub concocted tonics explains everything.
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we have just made a shocking discovery: Ross Rosenberg, erstwhile Ectomo blogger, is a Jew.
DON’T PANIC. While this is pretty much the worst thing Eliza and I could have possibly imagined when we began the hiring process for part-timers, there is a contingency plan in place. But slathering all planar surfaces in raw bacon takes time. In the meantime, I’m sure you’re all wondering what you can do to prevent Ross from stealing your babies in the night and selling them for a profit on the Hassidic black market… a profit which will undoubtedly be used for the procurement of the most decadent and kosher of snortable nostrums. And I’m sorry to say, the bottom line is we just don’t know.
So we turn to Hamas in our hour of vulnerability. Like a vast army of Buffy the Vampire Slayers, Hamas knows a thing or two about fighting Jews, and through their avatar — an anthropomorphical rabbit named Assud with a jones for Mohammed — we can learn how to beat the Armies of Zion at their own game. After all, Assud’s got a point: Ross can’t eat us if we eat him first.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
