Wizards & Warriors

When I read a depressing a New York Times article this morning, I had some reactions I’d like to discuss below. It was a grimly matter-of-fact article on child soldiers in Africa. Apparently several of the horrible wars ravaging the entire African continent are now being fought mainly by small children, brainwashed and pressed into service by amoral warlords bent on plunder. As if that weren’t bad enough, the article describes the children as really good soldiers, because they can be made to do almost anything and kill almost anyone, especially - and this is the part I’d like to discuss - if you wow them with tales of sorcery:

Child soldiers... are often drawn into these movements, or kept there, with magic and superstition.

In many armed movements, children are taught that life and death depend on spirits, which are conjured up by their commanders and distilled in oils and amulets. Magic can spur children to do unspeakable things. It also bestows otherwise lackluster leaders with a veneer of supernatural respectability. “The commanders would wear certain pearls and said that guns wouldn’t hurt us,” Mr. Beah recalled. “And we believed it.”

Later in the article:

Just this month, in a shantytown near Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, enforcers from a group called the Mungiki — essentially a street gang that uses teenage muscle — hacked up several opponents in an effort to control the minibus racket. True to form, their leader has told his young henchmen that he rolled to earth in a ball of stars.

You read that right. Ball of stars. So here were my two simultaneous, yet quite different, reactions:

Reaction 1) “That is so friggin cool.”

An amoral army of brainwashed child soldiers with machine guns, following witch doctors who control them with zombie oils and amulets. A minibus mafioso who claims he rolled to earth in a ball of stars.

Human behavior doesn’t get any weirder than that. That’s so beyond sick that it’s cool. An army of magically controlled child killers. It’s like something Conan the Barbarian or John Carter of Mars would have to deal with. Tarzan Versus the Witch King of the Mungiki. The whole thing is inhuman and horrible and messed up but damn if it wouldn’t be perfect material for a fantasy/sci-fi novel.

-This reaction came from the part of me that has been more or less the same since I saw the first Star Wars movie when I was 5 or 6. I know the difference between fantasy and reality, but when I read something like this I sometimes regress to the level of moral complexity that Spielberg and Lucas brought to Raiders, which is HURRR HITLER WUZ PURE EVIL LOL HE PROBLY HAD BLACK MAGIC DUDE THAT’S SO RAD. I still find cults, magic, religion, myth, and everything related to another world beyond our own to be fascinating on a fantasy/video game/role playing/adventure kind of level. I just do. Oh well. My second reaction was, I think, a little more mature.


Reaction 2) “So this is how every religion on earth began.”

This is the depressing truth about human religions. They ALL started in more or less this way. This is the burning bush. This is the voice from on high. This is how it worked, and how it still works: One man, slightly more clever than the other idiots around him, wanted to make his followers obey him more mindlessly. Wanted to make his soldiers kill more ferociously. Wanted to make his decisions unquestionable. Wanted everyone to WANT to give him their time and resources, no questions asked. So what does he do? He simply says something along the lines of “I CAME FROM THE SKY. I HAVE MAGICAL AMULETS AND OILS. DO WHAT I SAY."

And it works. Every time. It’s that easy. It worked when Abraham, Moses, Jesus, M_____d, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, and all the others did it, and it will continue to work until the last human beings starve to death on a planet filled with pigs because they’re not kosher or halal. Sometimes the warlord himself doesn’t create the myth himself; sometimes it happens generations afterward. Most of those men were charismatic geniuses, or at least their advisors were, and were extremely clever at concocting parables, poetry, magic tricks, scriptures and other props to keep their charade going, but as we see from this article, you don’t even really need that stuff.

All you need to do is have a tiny spark of charisma, gather a group of people, and say some variation on “I came from the sky. I have magical amulets and oils. Do what I say.” And people will flock to you and do anything for you.

I hate the fact that our ancestors were so stupid, and I hate the fact that almost all of us now are still exactly as stupid. Folks, let me lay it out for you right here: A petty African thug who says he rolled to earth in a ball of stars is lying. We can all agree on that, right? And guess what? Followers who claim that a Jewish wizard was beamed into a virgin’s uterus from the sky 2,000 years ago are lying. Why is it so hard to agree on that?

Same with a certain gentleman of Arabic descent who will remain unmentioned here, and the same goes for the polygamous American crystal-ball treasure hunter, and all the rest. Obviously, I like a lot of religious ideas and art, I approve of many of the moral teachings passed down by many of these magicians, etc. etc. This post is just to point out the disgusting, manipulative “big man” complex that spurs on almost all prophets. In terms of their ultimately selfish motivations there’s really no difference between one prophet and another, aside from the longevity of their absurd ego trips, which depends on how convincing people find their confabulations. The African guy’s ball of stars story will probably only be believed for a few years...

...unless he gets a good writer to start on the Gospel of The Minibus Racketeer. Add a couple miracles involving AK-47s and rocket launchers, tack on few outlandish laws about how to properly treat pigs, foreigners and women, and hey presto a new faith is born.

Wicca

Since around 7th grade, I have been hearing about “Wicca”. The new age movement of modern day here and now witches. Except that they don’t want to be called witches, they want to be called Wiccans (with a hard ‘k’ sound). At the time, I thought, OK, that name is dignified. They must be serious. Wiccans. Like African-Americans. It is quite a dignified upgrade.

Seventh grade was a long time ago. I have a revelation to share with every Wiccan on the planet.

MUFUKKA, “WICCA” IS PRONOUNCED “WITCHA”. IT IS THE SAME WORD, PRONOUNCED THE SAME WAY. A WICCE IS A WITCH.

Here it is in the dictionary. Wicce was a female witch. A wicca was a male witch. Wiccecraeft was... well, you figure it out. All pronounced more or less like we do now.

A lot of times, old English words were spelled with a slightly different system than we would use today, especially for sounds like “j” or “ch”. “Ecg” meant edge, and it’s the origin of the phrase ‘egg someone on’. Pronounced ‘edge someone on’, as in poke them with your sword until they get pissed off, but it just happened that nobody says it that way anymore. See how it’s the same word? And wicc- is witch. IT IS THE SAME EXACT WORD. I was bullied into calling one of my stranger classmates a ‘Wiccan’ in 7th grade; never again. The entire Wiccan movement is just a bunch of silly people who don’t understand that historical spellings weren’t necessarily the exact same as modern ones. Poseurs. Somehow I doubt they can understand the depths of ancient wisdom if they can’t even comprehend their own name from a few centuries ago.

Ismail Ax

One of the side stories I’ve been following that emerged from the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech is the mysterious signature in a note and written on the killer’s arm, described in the news articles as “Ismail Ax”. Maybe I shouldn’t get caught up in such a minor detail when something this horrible has just happened, but I find it interesting that with the entire world speculating on the meaning and posting online about it, no one has come up with a good explanation yet.

It’s fascinating in a disturbing sort of way that even after what happened, even with the combined Googling and cogitation of millions of people, no one can figure out yet what this psycho’s thought process was when he put those two words together.

My guess at this point is, he’s a student - maybe it’s actually “Ismail A+”, but this will probably be proven wrong once I get a little more information.

Judging from his demented plays, in spite of all his angry-old-coot denouncing of “charlatans” and “debaucheries” this guy was not as bright as he probably thought he was, so I doubt it’s a complicated literary or Koranic allusion that he came up with himself, as some have posited. I would tend more to think it’s from some obscure rap song or video game. I guess we’ll see. Apparently there is some Koran story where Abraham smashes something with an axe, and some Fenimore Cooper story where a guy named Ishmael has an axe... But again, I doubt that this kid did a lot of direct scriptural reading in the Koran. I would think it’s a lot more likely there was some low-brow intermediate source, some song or Warcraft guild or Japanese cartoon or something that he was referencing.

Update (April 22)
It seems that the early news reports got the spelling wrong, and that it was “Ismael” or “Ishmael”. That’s a lot less interesting and much less random. It was probably inspired by whatever weird blend of Christian beliefs Korean people have, or by Moby-Dick. Ho hum. The thing that really made Ismail Ax so fascinating to me in the first place was the extremely random Arabic spelling. Oh well.

Donkey Kong in Post-Its

I never liked Donkey Kong that much as a kid. It was too easy to die, the barrels were too unpredictable, and it was annoying how you had to line Mario up exactly with the ladder before he’d start climbing it. I also remember being vaguely disconcerted that the title character was a) not a donkey in any way and b) evil. I much preferred Burgertime, where it was much easier to stay alive and which didn’t have a brain-bending name. Nonetheless, this is like the coolest thing ever and I love it:


The UCSC Engineering building is currently hosting this... er, work of art constructed from some 6,400 Post-Its. Check out the site; there’s quite a bit of neat info about the project. I do find it disturbing that most of the students at this school were probably born long, long after the game was popular, and that this was essentially an act of reverence for an ancient and dimly-known idol. I guess some of the older ones might remember it from the annoying yet sort of Keanu-“whoa”-style mind-blowing part of Donkey Kong 64 where you had to actually play the original game on an arcade machine within the game.


Speaking of which, I think the whole idea of virtual machines and emulation of one computer or video game system within another is really cool. I use a program called Mini vMac to simulate the Mac Plus computer we had when I was a kid, and just the fact that the old computer is essentially a tiny program running on the new computer is still really fascinating to me. Note that while emulators like this are often used to play copied games, most of the things I play are games I already own, or which are so old there’s no way anyone is still trying to make money off them, or both, as in the case of Zork here, which I’ve bought several times over the years and which was made shareware by the publisher during a promotion for a new game a while back. In fact, you can even play this and a lot of other similar games online in a Java applet, which is pretty dope.

Köttur ættleiddi mús: A Mammalian Mystery

Every once in a while I check an Icelandic newspaper’s site, just to see if I can understand the headlines. Unless it’s something like “Bush Visits Camp David”, I’m usually in way over my head, especially since I’ve been lax in my Germanic language studies lately now that I work next door to my apartment and have no commute. I now realize that before we moved here, I did most of my linguistics reading on the tram. No commute equals no book-learnin’. I is dumb and they be stealin’ my bucket.

So anyway, on the Icelandic news site I saw the headline “Köttur ættleiddi mús”. I figured that here was a nut I could crack. CAT SOMETHING MOUSE. How hard could it be? My first clue that this was not going to be easy was that it mentioned its source as the kínverska eftirmiðdagsblaðinu Yanzhao. That I could decipher: Chinese evening newspaper Yanzhao. What on Earth would a Chinese evening newspaper have to report about a cat and a mouse that would be picked up by the Icelandic press? I tried to read the story, and gave up. I just didn’t know the crucial verbs about what the cat was doing to the mouse. My best guess, before giving up and searching for the English version of the story, was that the cat was afraid of the mouse.

WRONG!

The truth was far more terrifying.


And far, far sexier.

Turns out the cat loves the mouse, according to what I think is the English version of the same story.


On the morning of April 11, a woman surnamed Zhao said that the cat in the warehouse of her unit had caught a mouse outside and kept the mouse and her kittens together after her birth.

The cat was brought to the warehouse specifically in order to catch rats, as rats were very rampant in the warehouse. Just three days ago, the cat caught a grey mouse, but surprisingly, she didn't eat it, instead raising it with her kittens. Seeing this, a staff of the unit threw the mouse outside the warehouse, but the cat got the mouse back and put it in her net again.

What's more, the cat pays special attention to this small mouse. As long as the mouse is not within the scope of her vision, she will immediately stand up to look for it anxiously.

Experts say this cat's behavior is certainly a special case. They point out that many animals will present some changes in behavior and character during breastfeeding.


Well, I’ll be. There you have it. The most trivial, retarded newspaper story in history, with suspiciously anonymous pictures that may or may not have been staged after the fact by devious Chinese journalists, and I got suckered into it by a partially-deciphered Icelandic headline. And this hopefully ends my unbroken string of posts about cute animals. I don’t know what happened. I hate cute animals. Well, I don’t hate them all but I find the idea of blogging about them nauseating. And yet I keep writing posts about them, one crappy animal post after another. Hopefully this offensively cute story will be the digital enema that finally blasts the cute animal incrustations from the innermost twistings of my brain’s colon.

Dispatch from the Median Strip, Ant Highway

I have an ant problem.

Normally, my desktop is topped by the bottom and top of this laptop and its virtual desktop, that is to say, the top of my lap habitually rests slightly below the wooden top of the upper desk whereupon the top of my laptop... I’ll start again. When we recently went on vacation, I whisked my valuable laptop into its prophylactic sheath slash carrying case and thus left my actual desk’s top temporarily bare and void of electronic equipment. In other words, a week ago I shut this damn computer up like a bad clam with avian flu and crammed it into a crappy satchel. Then we went on vacation.

Little did I know, at that time, looking back, the repercussions that this would, as time went on, have, in the future, on the history of the desk, and upon its present, which is to say, the future, and current, present, condition of that desk. It was a fateful decision which would change the life of my desk, and of myself, for ever.

During our 6-day absence, a colony of ants apparently used the middle of my desk for an essential conduit from their sleeping quarters en route to their formicious workspaces. There is clearly no way that this aforementioned colony of ants can survive without making the trek from... wherever they come from... past the center of my desk. They must have found some rich and yielding foodstuff or ant booty of some sort somewhere beyond my desk, and chosen my desktop as Highway One to Ant Economic Development Site Alpha.

By returning from vacation, unsheathing my laptop and installing it on my desk’s top, I clearly destroyed the ants’ rich culture of highwaymanship, vis-a-vis my desk. Generations of ant had used this desktop to roam freely in search of ant treasure, only to now be cruelly rebuffed by the vast detour of my laptop’s gleaming, translucent, rectangular hull. But no mere plasticine hull can quell these ants’ unquenchable moxie. These ants are young, they’re driven, and they’re ABSOLUTELY SURE that the path to ant greatness lies on the other side of my desk. And so they’ve chosen, like the intrepid pismires they are, to CHARGE mightily up and over the obstacle, damn the consequences, and to continue to seek the hidden treasure which lies beyond.

SO, FOR THE PAST 48 HOURS, ONE ANT HAS CROSSED MY KEYBOARD EVERY TEN SECONDS. I CAN’T F*CKING STAND IT ANY MORE.

Why must I be forced into the role of genocidal maniac? Why must these ants test my gargantuan largesse? Why must I watch weeping as they fruitlessly zig-zag through the labyrinthine keys of my laptop before, at their tortuous journey’s end, encountering my implacable thumb? Why must so many thousands suffer so that one highway is diverted a few inches in some other direction?

Ant Queen, if you’re reading this: B*TCH TELL YOUR F*CKING DRONE PEONS TO QUIT WALKING ON MY F*CKING COMPUTER. I WILL SQUISH EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM. FOREVER. UNTIL THE MULTITUDINOUS SEAS RUN INCARNADINE WITH ANT BLOOD. IT’S YOUR MOVE. IT IS CURRENTLY GO TIME.

THIS IS SAVING PRIVATE ANT. THIS IS ANTLER’S LIST.

THIS... IS... SPARTANT!

I, Pilipino Varmint Detective

Well, we’re back from almost a week on Boracay island, in the Philippines. It was extremely beautiful and relaxing; however, the trip there and back was a little rough. To get there we had to take a taxi ride, a plane ride, a bus ride, another plane ride, a tuktuk ride, a ferry trip, a long ride in a jolting, dust-choked, rattling, swerving motorcycle sidecar, and finally a steep trek on snaking paths through a weird cliffside construction site.

It all took slightly more time than going to the moon, only it was less fun than a real moon trip because astronauts get to do cool things like poop into a vacuum tube. Man, if Kim didn’t have this weird hang-up about leaving me alone with the Electrolux, I’d be kickin it astronaut style right now.

ANYWAY, interestingly (for me), the Philippine language had a lot of words in common with Malay. Some of the basic numbers, colors, animals, vegetables etc. seemed to be almost the same. I don’t know what percentage might have been borrowed from modern Malay and what percentage might have gone back to a common ancestor, but even I could hear some similarities. Another cool thing can be seen in the picture above: all the boats around Boracay had outriggers or whatever they’re called, side thingys, which made them look sort of like they might be able to fly or transform into giant spiders or something, which I liked.

Anyway, it was a great trip and all sorts of interesting things happened, but I’ll just briefly describe one, the mysterious incident that just caused me to spend at least an hour of fruitless googling: The Nameless Varmints.

As we were lolling indolently in our bamboo beach chairs and stuffing our greasy gobs with great oozing slabs of pork and mahi-mahi one balmy evening, I noticed a commotion down the beach. Several people were crouching excitedly in a circle in the sand. Heaving my sun-blistered pink bulk slightly to the side and squinting Costanza-style until my vision was at least 20/20, I could perceive two small dark shapes swirling and spiralling around the people’s bodies, like the psychotic Jewish ghosts from the end of Raiders or the CGI scarabs from that mummy movie. This called for closer investigation.

Approaching the group of people, I saw that it consisted of several cooing German tourists and a small local family who had apparently brought two wild jungle animals out onto the beach, possibly to sell them to German tourists. They were small and ferret-like - the animals, not the Germans - with soft, jet-black fur, cute little foxy faces and long, fluffy tails. I preliminarily diagnosed them as seeming to fall within the spectrum of ferrety, mongoosy, stoaty, marteny, minky sorts of creatures. “What are those? What are they called?” I asked the man who had found them, he said, in the forest near a construction site. “Wild cats?” he offered, but without the air of zoological certitude you’d like to see in a case like this. He sounded like he was just making the name up on the spot. I nodded and returned to my chair.

The fun was not over, however, for the family sitting next to us had seen the critters and one of the women borrowed one of them. So for the rest of their meal I got to observe the little beast crawling all over the torsos of the people sitting next to us, licking their faces, sniffing their ears, and so on. It was really quite cute and apparently harmless and unafraid of people, but I was a bit disturbed that they’d brought an unknown feral jungle creature to the dinner table with them.

My guess that it was a mongoose was met with grunts of indifference from the family, who were more interested in taking pictures than comparative zoomorphology. I guess anyone stupid enough to allow a wild animal to cavort around their dinner table is probably stupid enough to be content with the idea that it’s some kind of very small, thin cat. I was sort of relieved when they returned the furry organism to its finders. It seems extremely likely to me that they contracted badger AIDS or something from the mystery weasel, and I pray that their deaths will come swiftly and painlessly.

So, back here in my command center and with the vast and naughty resources of the Internet at my beck, I assumed that I’d be able to ID the hairy little objects with scant difficulty. I was wrong. Dead wrong. (Note that I didn't say “... at my beck and call”. Just beck. Why does call always have to be included? I think we should bring back beck.)

After hours of surfing the closest I came was that the things remind me of martens, a North American version of which you can see above, cavorting in the snow. I think Organism X looked just like that picture, except with black fur and no snow. But I’m not sure they have martens around Boracay, and unfortunately the closest-looking animals native to the area seem to be the following two sad specimens:

1) The horrid, scrawny, coffee-pooping musang or civet cat, seen above glaring off into the distance in psychopathic rage, and which seems too short-haired, nasty and spotted to be our culprit, and

2) The revolting, burly, whiskery, slothy binturong or bearcat, a wretched, scruffy beast which looks like the deformed lovechild of a dying koala bear and an obese wolverine, and whose curiously intelligent, baleful eyes seem to be begging the viewer to put it out of its misery. If there’s any animal which I despised the instant I saw its picture, it’s that accursed binturong thing. I’m probably going to have nightmares about it.

So I’m no closer to cracking this case than I was before; the critters were probably some sort of marten or stoat but that’s as far as I think science can take me. And now I’ve got the ghastly, indelible thought that some fine morning I’ll throw open my bedroom window and there’ll be a binturong staring in at me. God that thing gives me the willies.