Bunch o’ stuff

Maybe that’s what I should call my linkdumps from now on. Welcome to Bunch o’Stuff, episoder 813.

First, I got three words for you :

Vintage. Victorian. Vibrators.

Yup. This is that Hysteria stuff. Curing women’s “hysteria” by a “pelvic massage” that amounts to nothing less than finger-banging them. Littlejean Jail Museum in the UK currently has am exhibition of the “ingenious” devices used to save those poor doctors from getting carpal runnel from clitflicking.

The devices uniformly look horrific and in practice they were not much better. This was well before such quaint notions as “safety standards” and “patents” and such. It was purely caveat emptor, which is particularly dangerous when both a) the purchaser is not the one it will be used on and b) you live in an era where women were not even considered people.

So these things were designed with all the warmth and care of a cattle prod.

Still, I love thinking about a time when the anti-sex people took their campaign of fear, shame, and ignorance to such a degree that people start having sex without knowing it because they have no idea what sex really is.

And at least some of the ladies got orgasms from doctors from it.

Next, a Good News/Bad News story.

The good news is, there’s a haunted house out there cool enough to let people run through it nekkid.

The bad news is, sadly, they caved to public ridicule and are not gonna go through it it.

Pennsylvania’s Shocktoberfest haunted house had already sold the tickets ($20, which is not half bad for a unique experience like that) when the word came down that the gubmint was taking out their public humiliation at the hands of the press out on these fixed attraction pioneers.

That’s too bad. Running naked through a haunted house sounds like good clean fun to me. Damn people and their weird hangups about genitals.

We all have them, dammit! Give them air!

Next we have your Holy Fuck video of the day : watch a jaguar take out a caiman.

Holy fuck…. there wasn’t even a fight! The jaguar just went CHOMP and got himself a very big meal.

A caiman is basically just a slimmer, sleeker version of a crocodile. So that is a video of a big cat versus crocodile kumite, and it wasn’t much of a match because it was over in two seconds.

I guess I always assume apex predators like jaguars and caiman avoided one another as more trouble than they are worth. So to see one take out the other with very little effort boggles my brain cells.

Guess we know who is top of the food chain there!

Next, we have an amateurish but still excellent bit of social satire from Gen Y.

Hey look, an embed!

I have a big space in my heart for these poor millennial kids, raised in prosperity, spoiled by their families, then suddenly thrust out into a world that is just plain broken.

Same thing happened with us Gen X types when we graduated college in the middle of the previous big recession in the Nineties. Guess what? Your degree is useless, your parents kicked out out of the house because there is only so long a Baby Boomer can go without reverting to primal selfishness, and the world’s attitude toward you seems to be “What, are you still here? Why?”.

But that is nothing compared to what kids today are going through. The recession is deeper, madmen and crooks run the economy, tuitions are way higher, and their helicopter parents have left them entirely unprepared to fend for themselves in a world far harsher than the one they were born in.

So sure, the acting in the above video is a tad weak and the phrasings need a bit of work, but it’s still the sort of thing that everyone needs to see.

This kids have it rough. They can have all the earnestness and pretension they wants.

Now, I am ashamed to say, we get serious.

This lady is so absolutely on the mark that I kind of want to marry her. She is the gettingest of it-getters. She knows her stuff.

I have to say, though, that I have never heard a teacher say horrible abusive things like that in my life. I am pretty sure that, at least back home on Prince Edward Island, that would get you fired real fast.

Maybe it’s a Canadian thing. Calling a student stupid in class would just be so rude.

So it saddens me greatly to see all the people in the comments saying that exact kind of thing happened to them. Before that, I held the possibility in my mind that it might not be as widespread as Doctor Brown said.

Nope. This really happens. And there can be no crime worse than a teacher bullying a child.

Don’t claim it’s for their own good. Tell me, is it working? Is the student improving? Have you even noticed? Do you even care?

Or would you prefer they didn’t, because then you’d just have to find something else to humiliate them about?

It’s bullying, and it’s made infinitely worse by the fact that it is coming from a person with great power over you against whom you can do nothing.

If I had a kid and I found out that was happening to them, it would take a lot to keep me from finding that teacher and beating the fuck out of them.

I mean, that’s the kind of thing that makes that boxing match bell go off in my head.

Finally, we have this moderately neato bit of music I did today.

Not entirely happy with it, but it’s still pretty good. Has an intro and a finale and all the instruments work well together, which is pretty amazing considering I got them all (well, all four of them) from instrument packs that were definitely NOT labeled “for making pseudo-Orientalish music”.

It’s a pleasant little ditty.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

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