KEEPING IT REAL IS A VERY STUPID PHRASE

If you were ever into blondes, one show will traumatically put you off the type for good: The Real Housewives Of Orange County. I myself have never been to Orange County, and prior to being exposed to the show, had been under the impression that it was filled with Vietnamese people and Ronald Reagan. No more; I am scarred for life.

Orange County is filled with blondes.

Blondie, it turns out, is a vicious slag. With some dangerously huge bazoombas. I cannot tell which element is more appalling -- the ferocious boob jobs, or the cannibalistic me-first bitch quality. But no matter, these women are repellent vampire lizard queens.


My apartment mate likes the show, in case you were wondering.
She has always loved tacky white folks misbehaving.
Especially when they're mean and stupid.
It must be a Chinese thing.

Being kind of white myself, I am not so thrilled.

Maybe my whiteness is not the reason, though.

She also likes the Real Housewives of Atlanta.


I'm beginning to associate humongous tits with big egos, bad language, and horrible priggish spoiled brat attitudes. As well as vulgarity, wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.

It's modern television.


DID YOU BRING ENOUGH TO SHARE?

I wish the X-Files still existed. I'd even put up with the space aliens, Mulder's sister, and the Russians. Of course the best episodes were the ones with incredible weirdness, like the stomach acid cannibal, trailer park vampires, the chupacabra, and the gender-bending mutants.

And Chaco Chicken.

Years ago I was reading a lot about New Guinea while working at a computer company. Being at times talkative, I mentioned several fascinating facts to a blonde coworker. Penis gourds, tribal dancing, magic, poison packets used to lay a hex upon a person, fruitbats, Neo-Melanesian Pidgin (which I spoke fluently, having read the entire Bible in that tongue out of interest), Hiri Motu, ritual curses, and especially the degenerative disease once endemic to the Fore tribe in the eastern part of the country.
The disease ("kuru") was transmitted to new victims by ritualized funerary cannibalism, primarily among the women and the elderly. Reason being that men, as the hunters, and therefore having access to the limited supply of protein, weren't sharing nicely. Which meant that the women had to make do with what became available.
So they did.

[Kuru is a type of spongiform encephalopathy caused by prions. The natives thought that witchraft was to blame. See Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.]

My blonde co-worker didn't believe a word of it, and thought me a mighty queer fish. Which pleased me no end, as her blithery dingbat ignorance seemed so 'fresh', and so deserving of unpleasant waking up. More than anything else, I wanted her to realize that the world is a complicated place, with very strange things going on.
Blondes, because everyone always treats them special, and gives them passing grades, and then does all the hard stuff for them so that they don't have to worry their pretty little heads, or buy dinner, or ever even think about anything, tend to effortlessly rise to the high level of spambrain that their lack of talent and abundant inabilities naturally prepare them for.
It's a remarkable biological adaptation.

She pouted fiercely whenever I mentioned kuru.
And indicated that I was inventing stuff.
There couldn't be such a thing.
I was a very strange man.


The very first time I ever watched the X-Files, it was the Chaco Chicken episode. In which a cult of chicken ranchers in Arkansas ritually divide their victims, and religiously feast. I had heard the engineers talk excitedly about the show for weeks beforehand, and finally decided to turn on the telly and see what all the hoopla was about.
That did it; I was hooked.

When I came to work the next day I was filled with good cheer. My blonde coworker took one look at me and collapsed, whimpering.
She strenuously avoided me for the next month, fearful and convinced that somehow I had used voodoo to arrange something.
Black evil arts from the Fore Highlands.
She was next.

If I hadn't spoken of Kuru, it never would have been on teevee.

She disappeared in October, and nobody ever saw her again.
It wasn't me, I had nothing to do with it.



I tend to have that effect on some people, mostly the mental blondes.
See, I am a realist, and will gladly air disturbing facts and possibilities, operating under the assumption that a blithe la la la I can't hear you optimism is tantamount to being unprepared.



AFTER WORD

A friend mentioned surströmming recently, which is herring rotted in a particular way. It is described as having one of the most putrid smells in the world, a strong and overwhelming odour, part organic acids, part hydrogen sulphide. Swedes like to nosh on it as if it were party food.
As an accompaniment to schnapps and beer.
Many Swedes are blond.

Nothing can prepare you for surströmming.

But it prevents ritual cannibalism.

Or so I would guess.



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