Wednesday Weirdness

• Zygotes are people too! If the anti-choice movement has its way, the moment one sperm eats its way through an egg's outer shell would be the last moment in human development that wouldn't be covered by the Constitution. Unsurprisingly, it's a rather lucrative racket. Rates high on the "Oh Brother" scale.


• Whole Foods is the Wall Mart of "organic foods," and its "concerned" CEO John Mackey wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal decrying Obama's health plan. and he even quotes Margaret Thatcher. According to Mackey, if we could all just afford to eat organic food from Whole Foods we wouldn't need health care. Or something like that.


• Feeling depressed? Well, Mark Morford says that very soon now, maybe three, four or 30 years hence, just about every American and most of the planet, too, will be on some sort of narcotic, behavioral med, modifier, zinger or zapper or calmer or leveler designed to mollify or numb or dry up all your saliva, give you some really weird dreams and make you never want to have sex. Now, don't you feel better?


• Going Weird in the Middle East Dept.: Arthur gives us senior class chum Vinnie Grace Holderman who has her own web page, mp3, and radio show. Arthur explains: "she was much into theater, and hoped to have a career on the stage but that ultimately was not to be. She then became an evangelical and is now beaming ham radio messages of peace and reconciliation into the Middle East, which I rather suspect are used by Hamas as either recruiting tools or as a means of torture." We listened to a couple of her Mp3 recordings and found them not only delightfully weird, but actually somewhat disturbing. Click here.


• Wow. A large number of big-name advertisers have dropped Glen Beck's show like a frozen dog turd. Who's left? Penis enlargers and egg cookers. Here's the latest list of Glen Beck advertisers.


• Today's picture is of a tobacco smoke enema device, a remarkable device that...well, I'll let Wikipedia explain: The stimulation of respiration through the introduction of tobacco smoke by a rectal tube was first practiced by the North American Indians. In 1745, Richard Mead was among the first Western scholars to recommend tobacco smoke enemas to resuscitate victims of drowning. One of the earliest reports of resuscitation by rectally applied tobacco smoke dates from 1746, when a seemingly drowned woman is reported as being successfully revived after, on the advice of a passing sailor, the stem of the sailor's pipe was inserted into her rectum and air was blown into the pipe's bowl through a piece of perforated paper. Now given that someone tending to a drowning woman would seek advice from "a passing sailor," one can imagine the ensuing conversation. "Help, my wife is drowning!" "Drowning, is she? Arrgh. Turn her arse over and lift her skirt, I've got an idea!" Now envision the husband being restrained as the wizened old sailor deftly thrusts the stem of his Meerschaum into the helpless damsel's nether region. The stuff of legends.


• It never gets weird enough for us, but it's getting close....