Giant Fucking Spiders are NOT TO BE FEARED. Totally.

So one of my good friends recently moved to a new apartment, and we had a little housewarming party.

I, being considerate and kind, offered to make dinner. This meant that I made everyone hotdogs, because that’s the only food I can really make consistently. I mean, I’ve tried pasta before, but fucking Christ, that whole boiling the pasta till it’s “al dente”? The first time I tried, the meal was delicious, but the second time, it was sort of like eating cut up bits of hollowed sticks. But I make some killer hotdogs.

Well, anyway. We got around to talking about how due to her living on the ground floor, and not having a bed yet, she’d probably get some spiders. You know, no big deal. Just huge, gigantic spiders that would eat her face as she slept. Or something.

Needless to say, she was freaked out and yelled at us to shut up about the god damn spiders. So we stopped talking about the spiders eating her face, and talked about how rational it was to have a fear of spiders. I mean, most of them are small, harmless, and are generally afraid of you. (Or…so they say). They eat the other bugs in your house, and are basically doing you a sort of favor. So, how reasonable is it to be terrified by such kind and gentle creatures? So what if they can cause necrotic arachnidism?

There’s a pretty funny story that I’ve heard about a woman capturing a black widow, and being too afraid to kill it, she kept it in a jar in the kitchen, and waited for it to suffocate. Somehow, weeks went by and the thing was thriving and well, even with no air and no food. She was horrified and decided that clearly this some sort of devil spawn. But a few days later, she came into the kitchen at an earlier than usual time before work…only to find her husband cackling to himself as he unscrewed the top of the jar just a tiny bit to let in air. Her husband had been keeping the thing alive to freak her the fuck out for shits and giggles.

I don’t know the ending to that story (the husband is probably dead right now), but basically spiders aren’t immortal. They can and will die if you suffocate them, light them on fire, or squish them. So there’s no need to be scared at all. (Unless, like me, you saw Arachnophobia when you were a little kid, and keep expecting one to jump on you in the shower). We talked this all through, and we were pleased with how brave and mature we were being. We were finally growing up. Psh. Spiders. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

Two days later, my friend found a giant wolf spider just kicking it in her bathtub, and called me to tell me that she was still afraid of spiders. I laughed at her, and told her to grow up.

The next day, I found one in my shower, and I screamed like a little girl.

Motherfucking Karma’s a bitch.

PS Remember that “Bought a DOG” meme after the internet showed up as a special guest on Fox news, blowing up vans and shit? Apparently, spiders are so fucking badass, they’ll kick the dog’s ass.

Never mind that the dog probably died from something else, I’m telling you. They’re fucking out there. Waiting for you. Waiting in your toilet bowl, ready to attack.

But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Yeah.

Your MOM is the World’s Oldest Joke

According to the Brits, the “world’s oldest joke” has been traced back to 1900 BC.

You can thank the 19th Century BC for bringing us other such whacky hilarity as the rise and fall of several unpronounceable Pharaohs (where by unpronounceable I mean they all had the same name and I can’t pronounce it); the birth of Abraham, founding father of the Israelites (and that really annoying song about his many sons we used to have to sing in choir as a warm-up); a war or two, and an invasion of Greece by some other Greeks, presumably because they were attention whores and wanted an awesome blockbuster action movie to be made about them 40-odd centuries later.

Thanks to the research of the esteemed University of Wolverhampton, we can now add the birth of toilet humour to that list.

I’m not even kidding, it was a smut joke. Check this out for cutting edge Sumerian wit: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

Oho! Zing! Yeah, you uh… you tell ‘em. Did I mention the 19th Century BC also played host to the fall of the last Sumerian dynasty? Yeah. I think I can see where the downward spiral kicked in. It could possibly have had something to do with their civilisation being run by potty-training toddlers and giggling pre-teens.

But hey, who am I to judge? Us 21st Century-goers are the ones funding actual university programmes for intensive research into dirty jokes. Their final publication on the study was actually the “world’s oldest top 10 joke list”, which sounds like a Cracked article waiting to happen.

Landing a close second place a few centuries later was a gag about another unpronounceable pharaoh quoted as “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” Talk about eccentric. Apparently hiring a stripper was too easy for this guy.

Coming from the Brits in the 10th Century we have “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? A key!” Gosh! And here I was thinking it was going to be your penis! Oh those crazy Anglo-Saxons, they sure fooled me with their provocative irony and rebellion against taboo.

I guess what’s really more comical than the jokes themselves is that nothing has really changed in the last four millennia. But can we learn from our mistakes, people? You know as well as I do it was only a matter of time before the Ancient Egyptians started gluing captions to their cats, plus those Sumerians were probably right into the 2 Girls 1 Cup action, and look what happened to them.

Let us break the cycle, once and for all.

My Favorite Drink is … Wait, What?!

Last night, an ESL student came up to the front desk of my job and asked me if he could interview me. He specified that he needed a “real live American” to talk to. Well, who can pass up a chance like that?

The interview consisted of several questions asking about my name, favorite restaurants, foods and drinks. While one might assume that this means the student is perhaps studying foods and related items to expand their vocabulary, I think that these questions show what kind of image we Americans are giving off to the rest of the world. We have no other interests than food, and maybe our own names. Maybe.

Anyway, we get to question number 5 with no real problem (a few spelling errors here and there, nothing big), and the student reads the following:

“What is your favorite drink?”

I attempted to answer with water, but was informed that water did not count.

“Ok…um, how about coke?”

The student nodded in approval, and wrote down what I assumed was my answer. However, when I glanced at his notepad, I was met with the following :

“5. What is your favorite drink?”

“Cock.”

…

But it somehow got worse on question number 6, when I was asked “What did you have for lunch today?” to which I responded, “A turkey sandwich.” The student then told me that in his country, Turkey was a boys’ name, and that his younger brother was named Turkey. “Ha-ha, do you eat little boy sandwiches?”

I can’t tell you much more because at this point my head exploded, but it was an interesting experience. More importantly, it made me remember all the other ESL students that had come by the front desk in the past and raised a very important question. What the FUCK are they teaching them, anyway?

One student asked me to explain to him what was meant by the phrase, “Hey! I found another stiff over here.” (Cop A to Cop B). Another had asked me where the most “hip happenin’ cool” on campus was. And now here was a student innocently (or so we assume) writing down my favorite drink as being “cock” and concluding that I eat little boys for breakfast.

I realize that idioms and colloquialisms are hard to grasp, but if they’re going to try and teach them anyway, why not teach some useful ones? How likely is an ESL student to hear “I found another stiff over here”? Unless they plan on being the murdered corpse or one of the cops, I don’t see that knowledge being particularly useful. I haven’t actually even heard of some of these idioms that are being taught. Consider the following (Bill Nyeee the science guy style):

1. A Doubting Thomas (Fuck you Thomas.)

2. A Drop in the Bucket (Poo?)

3. Can’t Cut The Mustard (It’s a liquid)

4. Get Down to Brass Tacks (Yes…yes, we.. should?)

5. No Room to Swing a Cat (And I like to swing cats as frequently as possible, so this will not do at all.)

6. Pig In A Poke (WHAT?)

7. Queer the pitch (This sounds like a gay baseball joke, but I know it’s not. But it sounds like it.)

8. Use Your Loaf (…of bread.)

So, did you know what any of those meant? Because I don’t. All I know is, don’t say number 7 downtown unless you want to be beaten to death by the most stylish purses imaginable. Just sayin.

I guess I’m just starting to understand why every foreign student looks perpetually confused when they find that we’re not all wearing platform disco shoes, and using words like “groovy” and “far out”. Why does everyone keep saying how cold everything is?! WHY?! Let’s help them out a little bit. Teach them the worst first, so they know what shouldn’t be used (although they can, if they want). This will avoid that whole “Oh shit, I know that that’s a bad word, but you seem completely unaware of this fact” situation. C’mon. Give them a break already. No need to burden them more in their efforts to learn a foreign language, right?

Fortunately for me though, everything worked out in my story. We fixed the …problems in the spelling of coke, and my ESL student was apparently smart enough to be cracking jokes with me in English. After the turkey comment, at my horrified expression, he replied, “Ha-ha, no, no, don’t worry, I joke. That joke, I know that, the turkey, the name turkey, here is type of chicken.”

Is type of chicken is right, mother fucker. And don’t you forget it.

(My coworker is still insisting that I should have “corrected” c-o-c-k to s-e-m-e-n for the question and answer to really make any sense, but I refused.)

What Came First? The Chicken, the Egg or the… Gecko?

I literally came across the most disturbing news story ever on the ABC News website today. Not the violent or tragic or horrible kind of disturbing, as in some guy killing or raping a couple people, but the oh-god-too-much-information kind of disturbing more often associated with those commercials that come on late at night which seem perfectly innocent until they chuck the line “Now let’s talk about genital herpes” in there.

Some guy in Darwin, Australia, cracked open an egg while making dinner and found a dead gecko, a kind of lizard, inside. I wish I made that up, because it sounds like the beginning to the most awesome joke ever (with alternate endings where the lizard wakes up and says either “What, you have the technology to cook in Darwin now?” or “Hey, what’s the entire population of Darwin doing here!”)

Anyway, this guy happened to be the Northern Territory president of the Australian Medical Association, which is hilarious in its own right but I’m not entirely sure why. That’s not the disturbing part, though. Check this out:

[Darwin Guy] says he suspects the gecko entered the chicken before it entered the egg.

“Eggs are made inside chooks up this tube from their bottom.

“Now obviously this tube is in contact with the whole outside world.

“It has to be that the gecko climbed up inside the chook and died up there while the egg was being formed before the shell was put on it.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but a chicken’s ass isn’t the kind of place I’d wanna go for a summer vacation. I can see the gecko now: “Oh hey, a chicken orifice, I’ll just check out what’s up in here… wait, I… shit, what’s the… shit! Fuck, not again. Mum warned me about this!”

That’s so insanely fucking creepy, though. This lizard actually crawled inside a chicken, figured that perched on top of an embryonic KFC drumstick seemed as good a place as any to kick the bucket, and promptly got itself encased in carbonite an egg. At what point during its trip up a farm animal’s derrière did the gecko think this was a good idea? At what point during letting a small reptile CLIMB UP ITS ASS did the chicken think “Sure, why not?”

“Certainly the gecko wouldn’t have been ingested by the bird. It would be physically impossible for it to make its way from the digestive tract into the area where the egg is formed.

“So it’s a case of the gecko actually making its way through the cloaca of the bird and onto the developing egg.”

So. Freaking. Wrong.

Now, I should point out here that the reason this is considered newsworthy, other than the fact that it’s sure as fuck nothing else ever happens in Darwin, is because this kind of thing (you know, geckos regularly chilling out inside chickens) could be responsible for infecting eggs with salmonella and provide an explanation for how the potentially deadly bacteria is transferred – then presumably find a way to, um, stop it from happening. The fact that it was the NT’s Australian Medical Association PRESIDENT who happened to discover this incredible world first is apparently a huge immaterial coincidence and probably not at all related to any AMA funding for salmonella research which could come out of this incident. Either that or people finding geckos in chicken eggs is just really common in Darwin but no one thought it was weird until this fancy schmancy educated guy came along. Or no one else in Darwin even knew what a gecko was.

Either way, the whole thing was worth it just for the article’s lead in sentence: “The Australian Egg Corporation has expressed surprise at the discovery of a gecko inside a chicken egg.” – There’s also an Australian Chicken Corporation, but the two companies are currently locked in a deadly high-stakes lawsuit over which was established first.

More Superstitions – Asian General (Part 1)

So the last superstition article seemed like a relative success, so I figured I’d do a follow up. I polled all of the Asians that work with me, and gathered some more tidbits of information. So here they are.

1. (Malaysian) Don’t Talk Badly About People On Friday Morning/Thursday Night.

Apparently, talking trash about people at this particular time is like inviting a “visitor” to you. While I wasn’t told what exactly they DO to you, it doesn’t sound very fun. The story related to me was of when my coworker broke this golden rule, and was talking shit to a bunk mate of hers, who later woke up in the middle of the night to find a girl in a long white nightgown and loose black hair covering her face standing over the foot of my coworker’s bed. That’s fucked up.

2. (Indonesian/Singapore/…Malaysia?) Pontianaks are fucking BAD NEWS

There are several legends concerning this creature, who is described as anything from a stillborn child to a woman dying in child birth. Saying the name allowed is said to bring the ghost to you, and it’s said that the smell of a certain flower will mark it’s arrival. This is one ghost you DO NOT WANT to fuck around with. It’s way more violent than Korean ghosts, in that the stories I’ve heard involving it, it tends to rip people’s heads off, and drink their blood, etc. It’s extremely violent, and is something like a female vampire. The way to scare it away is apparently to expose your breasts to it if you’re a woman, as their breasts are on …their backs. If you’re a guy, you’re fucked. Sorry.

I’ve heard conflicting reports, but I believe it’s said to live in trees.

3. (Malaysia) Respect the Jungle/Forest/Woods or they will fuck you up

The woods are filled with spirits in Malaysia, and there are several rules you need to follow. If you need to pee in the woods, you need to ask permission first. If you’re on your period, you need to dispose of the blood properly, or else be haunted. Please and thank you seems to be the general rule.

4. (Japan) Various Ghosts

Kuchisake Onna
Said to be a beautiful woman who approaches you and asks if you think she is beautiful. She is wearing a face mask. You answer yes, and she takes off the mask. …Her face is split from ear to ear, and she asks you once more, “Am I beautiful?” Whether you answer yes or no, she will kill you. So what can you do to survive? Your answer: “So-so.” Or “You’re average.” She’s known to target young men and elementary school students. Watch out.
Hanako-San
A ghost girl that haunts the third stall of the girls’ bathroom in school. Terrible things will happen if she appears.

(There will be a post with more details on all of these ghost stories, so be sure to check back…)

5. (Japan) Don’t Close Your Eyes For Too Long In The Shower

It’s said that if you close your eyes for more than 12 seconds when washing your hair in the shower in Japan, when you do open your eyes and look in the mirror, a ghost will be behind you.

….And, to be continued on a post sometime in the future. There are a few more promised to me at a later date, as well some European superstitions I want to share. Hope you enjoyed this week’s installment, and see you next week.

The original post can be found HERE, Korean Superstitions – AND YOU WILL DIE.