"The court heard how the defendant's 'Eunuchmaker' pay-per-view website advertised services including castration, penis removal and the freezing of limbs."

I'm reading "'Eunuch-maker' mutilator jailed for 22 years" (BBC).

I first read about this case in The Daily Record, and it was so ludicrously, shockingly lurid that I didn't think I could write about it. But then I saw the BBC was covering it, so it became bloggable.

But for the sake of decency, I will put the rest after the jump:

"In the weeks since his rowdy State of the Union speech... President Biden has shown a looser, more comfortable version of himself..."

"... cranking out memorable wisecracks, heartfelt moments and cringe-worthy gaffes in equal measure. He has needled his Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, with increasing frequency, presented his softer side on talk radio and repeatedly spun tall tales about driving an 18-wheeler truck, being arrested at a civil rights rally and having an uncle who might have been eaten by cannibals. In one memorable episode this week, Mr. Biden read aloud his teleprompter instructions, asking a crowd to imagine what he could do with 'four more years … pause.' The annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night could be another opportunity for Mr. Biden to be in the moment, in what might be the perfect setting for him to continue roasting Mr. Trump.... And on Friday, Mr. Biden made a surprise visit to 'The Howard Stern Show'... showing an emotionally vulnerable side to Mr. Stern’s large audience of middle-class Americans...."

Writes Chris Cameron, in the NYT.

It's a puff piece. What can you say? I'll just say I wouldn't have written "continue roasting Mr. Trump" so close to "eaten by cannibals."

Also: If you'd asked me what kind of people listen to Howard Stern, I wouldn't have thought of saying middle-class Americans. From yesterday's NYT article about Biden's Howard Stern interview: "Mr. Stern’s listeners are mostly white, mostly male and mostly comfortably middle class, according to figures shared by the Howard Stern Radio Network...." "Middle class" looked odd to me, perhaps mostly because it floated free of those other 2 characteristics: white and male. 

"They’re spread from south-east Asia to the Korean peninsula and Europe. What is [Biden] implying? All 79,000 that were never found were eaten?"

Said Michael Kabuni, a lecturer in political science at the University of Papua New Guinea, quoted in "'Lost for words’: Joe Biden’s tale about cannibals bemuses Papua New Guinea residents/President’s suggestion that his ‘Uncle Bosie’ was eaten by cannibals harms US efforts to build Pacific ties, say local experts" (The Guardian).

79,000 U.S. soldiers were never accounted for after World War II.

Why is Trump doing so well in the polls?

I'm reading "As Trial Begins, Was Trump Benefiting From Being Out of the News? His liabilities weren’t dominating the conversation the way they once did, perhaps helping his polling" by Nate Cohn.

Donald J. Trump appears to be a stronger candidate than he was four years ago, polling suggests, and not just because a notable number of voters look back on his presidency as a time of relative peace and prosperity. It’s also because his political liabilities, like his penchant to offend and his legal woes, don’t dominate the news the way they once did....

Really? I think he seems to dominate the news. But of course, he isn't President. The actual President does necessarily claim some space. In Biden's case, it's the least space I've ever seen claimed by a President. Because of all the prosecutions, Trump's first presidency is still immensely important daily news. And Trump also gets attention as the leading contender to be the next President. Biden is overwhelmed. What do we hear of Biden? He said something weird about cannibalism. He didn't wear a bow tie with his dinner jacket.

Nevertheless, Cohn seems to have convinced himself that Trump is lower profile in the news these days:

"Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber..."

"... and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne."

Just a fragment of "Moby Dick," pulled up this morning as part of a real-world conversation that I am too discreet to recount.

A royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros — that killed me.

"Actually, if you google the word senicide you’ll see that many parts of the world have a push/pull relationship with their older members..."

"... the push of veneration, the pull of elimination. The United States with its chrome-plated dreams of spit-shine modernity was never much for the admiration of its senior citizens. Way before taunts of 'Okay, boomer' and the calling of people with experience the pejorative term 'olds' this country has had a tendency to isolate the grizzled dotard, if not on an ice floe then in retirement camps where they could gum pudding and play bingo away from the delicate eyes of youth. It would be easy to blame the sixties, with silly slogans like 'Don’t trust anyone over thirty' or even sillier movies like Wild in the Streets, where anyone over thirty-five is herded in camps and given mandatory doses of LSD."

So writes Bob Dylan, in "The Philosophy of Modern Song."

So, of course, I google "senicide," and I'm reading this Wikipedia article "Senicide," while picturing 81-year-old Bob Dylan reading it too. Highlights:

David DePape — the man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi — has been "blogging for at least 15 years, with his views growing more extreme over time."

Rolling Stone reports. 

[In his] subscription-model blog... he vented rage over Covid-19 precautions and espoused beliefs shared by the conspiracist QAnon movement. The page also includes dedicated sections for Holocaust denial, climate change denial, transphobia, racism, misogyny, voter fraud conspiracy theories, Second Amendment absolutism, screeds against groomers and “pedos,” and trashing actress Amber Heard, the ex-wife of Johnny Depp....

In an Aug. 23 post on his personal blog, DePape wrote, “How did I get into all this. Gamer gate it was gamer gate.”

Things I found on Twitter after the sidebar told me "No. They" is trending.

oh no, they’re on to us pic.twitter.com/ccGfI3YLXx

— ari💫 (@gaypilled) August 8, 2022

NO... THEY GOT JIMMY... pic.twitter.com/7qgrTnVqlW

— Nexat 💣 Onion Fam (@NexatG) August 5, 2022

I have no idea what got the algorithm to identify "No. They" as a trend, but I can see that it automatically picks out posts that has "they" separated from a "no" that is followed by a punctuation mark. This is such a common occurrence in casual English that this "trend" works to make Twitter look more random. Randomness is more amusing than most of what goes on in Twitter, so I'm up for the "No. They" trend... at least until I hear that it's actually something disturbing/depressing/annoying/agitating like just about everything else that's a Twitter trend.

"Bill Schutt, the author of 'Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History,' says that fictional plots about eating human flesh are as old as literature itself."

"Pointing to examples that include the man-eating Cyclops in Homer’s 'Odyssey,' he said the taboo has artistically been used to horrify for centuries. 'When you take something that is so horrible and put it through this lens of fictionalization,' he said, 'we get charged up about it, but we know we’re safe.' At least most of the time: Mr. Schutt only made it halfway through Hulu’s 'Fresh' before he had to stop the movie. 'It was almost too well done,' he said. [Photo caption: 'In 'Fresh,' a woman becomes charmed by a man she meets at a grocery store, whom she later discovers is involved in an underground human flesh trade.']"

From "A Taste for Cannibalism? A spate of recent stomach-churning books, TV shows and films suggests we’ve never looked so delicious — to one another" (NYT).

"You could go from vegetarianism to cannibalism in one fell swoop."

 I wrote, here.

A fresh keyboard.

How long do you put up with an old keyboard before you face reality and order a new one? I've seen keyboards fail before. It's always one key or 2 or 3 keys that get balky and then don't work at all. I once had a keyboard that failed beginning with the space bar. You face up to that really quickly. Another time, the "u" failed. That too is hard to work around. But this time it was the square brackets. For months, I have been working around the lack of square brackets keys. I need them whenever I'm shortening quotes and must supplement words or adjust capital letters. But what I've been doing is going to another document and cutting brackets out then pasting them into the new document. It's absurd how many times I have done this before taking 2 minutes to order a new keyboard. Now, the keyboard is here and I can handle quotes with ease once again. Let me try:

Human meat was typically prepared two ways: roasted or boiled.... [B]odies [were cut] into quarters with a bamboo knife, severing the head and the limbs from the trunk.... "The head is first carefully shaved . . . then boiled, as are the intestines, in ceramic cooking pots. Regarding the meat proper and the internal organs, they are placed on a large wooden grill under which a fire is lit.... [T]he meat... is divided among all those present. Whatever is not eaten on the spot is set aside in the women’s baskets and used as [food] the next day. As far as the bones are concerned, they are broken and their marrow, of which the women are particularly fond, is sucked."

That quote, like the quote in the post 5 posts down, is from the book I'm reading David Grann's "The Lost City of Z."

"An Oklahoma man who was released early from prison broke into a woman’s home this month, cut out her heart, cooked it and tried to feed it to his relatives..."

"... and then killed two of them, the authorities said this week. The man, Lawrence Paul Anderson, who has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the killings, had been sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2017 for a probation violation in a drug case, but public records show that he was granted clemency last year by the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board as part of a mass commutation program."

The NYT reports.

"In her teens and twenties, she tried embracing conventional notions of womanhood just to avoid what she calls 'social harassment' before abandoning it in disgust."

"'I pretended to act the way I thought a cute woman should act, with an excess of femininity, but it was a horrible experience. I felt like I’d lost my will,' she says. In a relationship with a convenience store manager 15 years her senior, she found she was expected to cook morning and evening and do his washing. 'It felt like being physically and mentally exploited. I mean, I hate food and cooking – I keep a vase on top of my cooker,' she says, laughing.... Murata says she starts with her characters and doesn’t know the ending of her novels until she writes them. That might explain why Earthlings turns from whimsy to surrealist horror."

From "Sayaka Murata: 'I acted how I thought a cute woman should act - it was horrible" (The Guardian). I've finished the book now, so I'd like to discuss the ending. I'll put the spoilers — which are extreme — after the jump. Please consider reading the book — "Earthlings" — before reading more of this post.  Or skip the next section — the indented part — and the stop reading when I give the next big spoiler alert. And don't read the tags.

"If you ever find yourself stuck on an uninhabited island in the Pacific, it turns out that writing SOS in giant letters on the sand works."

"At least, it did this past weekend for three men whose small boat had run out of fuel and drifted off course among the hundreds of islands and atolls of Micronesia.... Writing huge letters in the sand has proved helpful to travelers stranded in the Pacific in the past. In 2016, three men whose boat was overturned in Micronesian waters swam two miles to reach a tiny island, from which they were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after writing 'HELP' in the sand.... Later that year, two other people who had been missing for a week were rescued from a Micronesian island after they wrote SOS in the sand...."

From "3 Men Marooned in the Pacific Are Rescued After Writing SOS in the Sand/Three days after their boat ran out of fuel and drifted off course in Micronesia, the men were found in good condition after a plane saw their giant plea for help spelled out on the sand" (NYT).

ADDED: My first question was: Did the "Gilligan's Island" castaways ever write "SOS" in the sand? Someone at Quora once asked: "If the castaways on Gilligan's Island had spelled out 'SOS' on the beach, with rocks, how long should it have taken before planes had noticed the distress signal?" The question suggests that they did not try this method! Click on the link if you want to read speculation about where the island was and how often planes might have flown over back in the 1960s. Or click if you want to see the many other "Gilligan's Island" questions people have asked, such as: "If the professor on Gilligan's Island can make a radio out of coconut, why can't he fix a hole in a boat?," "How did the Gilligan's Island survivors live on the island with no resources for several years?," "Why was Gilligan's Island named after Gilligan?," "What is something from Gilligan's Island that is really kind of dark, but gets ignored?"

And my favorite: "Why wouldn't the other men on Gilligan's island just kill Gilligan considering that he was constantly putting their lives in danger and he foiled every attempt they ever had of being rescued?" I like that somebody answered that question:

"Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds."

"Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras. But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand, dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens."

From Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick."

"For an hour on Saturdays, a British supermarket chain is introducing a weekly 'quieter hour' aimed at helping people with autism have a better shopping experience by easing sensory overload."

"The move by the supermarket, Morrisons... has been welcomed by the National Autistic Society, which says that even small changes can make a big difference in the lives of people with autism and their families. Morrisons’s effort is part of the National Autistic Society’s 'Too Much Information' campaign: Last year, more than 5,000 retailers across Britain participated in 'Autism Hour.'... Movie theaters in Britain have also introduced similar initiatives, hosting 'autism-friendly screenings' by reducing stimulation and sound...."

The NYT reports.

From the store's website, here are the changes during "Quieter Hours":

Dim the lights
Turn music and radio off
Avoid making tannoy announcements
Reduce movement of trolleys and baskets
Turn checkout beeps and other electrical noises down
Place a poster outside to tell customers it’s Quieter Hour

I wonder how many nonautistic customers would prefer to shop in the quieter, dimmer environment? The people with autism have a higher sensitivity level about something that might be stressful and burdensome for all of us. I'm not autistic, but I'd prefer to shop during the Quieter Hour, described above. Notice that they don't exclude the nonautistic. They just acknowledge that their normal shopping environment is very noisy, confusing, and ugly, and are doing something about it, every once in a while.

By the way, what are "tannoy announcements"?

Tannoy Ltd is a British manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems.... The term "tannoy" is used generically in colloquial English in some places to mean any public-address system or even as a verb - to "tannoy", particularly those used for announcements in public places; although the word is a registered trademark, it has become a genericised trademark...

Used as a verb, the internal word "annoy" is even more obvious. And it's not as though the company is named after some person named Tannoy. It was made up out of tantalum alloy (a material used in manufacturing the product). There must be better ways to abbreviate those 2 words, but maybe they did want their customers to think about using a PA system to annoy people.

Tantalum, the element, is named after Tantalus, the Greek mythological figure who is known mainly for his eternal punishment:

Tantalus was initially known for having been welcomed to Zeus' table in Olympus.... There he is said to have misbehaved and stolen ambrosia and nectar to bring it back to his people, and revealed the secrets of the gods. Most famously, Tantalus offered up his son, Pelops, as a sacrifice. He cut Pelops up, boiled him, and served him up in a banquet for the gods....

Tantalus's punishment for his act... was to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded before he could get any....

That's the source of the word "tantalize."

"The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth."

That's an example of an insult from cannibalism days on Easter Island, brought to us by NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof, who flew all the way to Easter Island to be there to recount the history of Easter Island, which anyone can read without actually going there. Big statues of heads, long-ago deforestation wrecking its capacity to support the people who were advanced enough to make those big-head statues... you know the story. It's not news. Indeed, Kristof serves up readymade quotes from Jared Diamond pop-science book "Collapse' (2005). He does offer 2 sentences of on-the-scene reportage:

Easter Islanders themselves aren’t thrilled about being reduced to a metaphor. They rightly feel great pride in their earlier history and see the collapse as more complex and uncertain.

And yet he fully intends to step on that pride and offer up Easter Island as "A Parable of Self-Destruction." Why go there if you only want the metaphor/parable version of the place anyway? I'm asking a question that encapsulates the message of "How to Talk About Places You've Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel," by Pierre Bayard.

But Kristof did go there:

I came to Easter Island while leading a tour for The New York Times Company, and those of us in the group were staggered by the statues — but also by the reminder of the risks when a people damages the environment that sustains it.

That brings us to climate change, to the chemical processes we are now triggering whose outcomes we can’t fully predict. The consequences may be a transformed planet with rising waters and hotter weather, dying coral reefs and more acidic oceans. We fear for the ocean food chain and worry about feedback loops that will irreversibly accelerate this process, yet still we act like Easter Islanders hacking down their trees....

How on earth — a place we've all been — did Nicholas Kristof think he could get away with that sanctimony?! DO NOT LECTURE US! Let your example come first, and then you can talk. You flew to Easter Island — you led a tour, enticing others to fly to Easter Island — so obviously, you think nothing of your carbon footprint or the carbon footprint of all those other people who jetted out there with you. When your actions are so radically different from your words, I don't believe your words. The depredations of global warming may be coming, but I don't believe that you believe it.

Yes, I know I have alternatives. It's possible that Kristof is an idiot, incapable of noticing or understanding the radical disconnect between his words and his actions. And it's possible that Kristof is a raging elitist, who thinks that he and his close associates needn't stoop to the hard work of self-limitation that he feels fully empowered to impose on others and who thinks that all the people whose opinion matters will share this despicable elitism.

IN THE COMMENTS: JPS said...

"so obviously, you think nothing of your carbon footprint....When your actions are so radically different from your words, I don't believe your words."

It's like this:

Trump, Bjorn Lomberg or other AGW semi-skeptics: "Why should we limit our use of energy? It won't make the slightest bit of difference as long as India, China and everyone else go on burning all the fossil fuels they want!

Concerned AGW believer: "This is the problem! You are the reason we're not making any progress toward averting this obvious disaster!"
______

AGW semi-skeptic: "Wow, look at you, lecturing us all about our carbon footprints while you jet all over the world."

Concerned AGW believer: "Look, come on. If I cut out everything I do, it wouldn't make any difference as long as you're all free to go on burning fossil fuels like it doesn't matter."

The "cannibal cop" wins in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

"This is a case about the line between fantasy and criminal intent. Although it is increasingly challenging to identify that line in the Internet age, it still exists and it must be rationally discernible in order to ensure that 'a person’s inclinations and fantasies are his own and beyond the reach of the government.'... We are loathe [sic] to give the government the power to punish us for our thoughts and not our actions.... That includes the power to criminalize an individual’s expression of sexual fantasies, no matter how perverse or disturbing. Fantasizing about committing a crime, even a crime of violence against a real person whom you know, is not a crime."

"Despite what you've heard, tenure is unchanged."

Explains Christian Schneider in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This piece begins with some funny — funny now — material:

A century ago, the American Association of University Professors issued its famous "declaration of principles" in response to several high-profile faculty firings. These principles, such as insisting that only faculty members may judge one another, were meant to protect academic freedom within university systems.

What immediately followed could be considered the Golden Era of Terrible Research. In 1916, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Michael Vincent O'Shea developed a child development theory that said children shouldn't be scolded for having dirty hands and bad table manners, and that 16- and 17-year-old boys shouldn't be allowed to show interest in girls. University progressives were busy working their eugenics theories, which they believed would create a master race if the feebleminded were sterilized.

That same year, UW-Madison medical school professor H.C. Bradley gave a speech in which he extolled the nutritional virtues of cannibalism. Bradley said the "ideal food would be man flesh" and other meats are indigestible when compared with "human steak."

Schneider's key substantive point — which I've blogged already — is that "tenure will be alive and well, it just will be the responsibility of the regents, not state law." This protection at the state level (which goes back only to 1973) is unique in the nation.

Meanwhile, at Talking Points Memo, "Josh Marshall Says Goodbye To One Of America’s Great Public Universities" is the front-page teaser, going to a piece titled "Goodbye, Madison," which NOWHERE mentions that the change is only moving tenure from the state statutory level to the regent level, putting Wisconsin in the same position as everywhere else. This deceptive article is illustrated with a photograph of Governor Scott Walker looking like an idiot who doesn't give a damn.

You know, it was just a year ago that liberals were getting upset about Michigan taking a decision away from the state university's regents and putting it into the state law. If the level at which university decisions are made matters, which way does it matter?

Beware, Duke.

Beware, Duke. #Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/jRfDuyPclK

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 5, 2015