(Fifteen minutes ago)

Mind: JESUS H. CHRIST ON A CHROME-TRIMMED PENNY-FARTHING. IT IS ALMOST FEBRUARY. TAKE DOWN THE CHRISTMAS TREE.
Body: (goes limp)
Mind: What? What are you doing? Get up!
Body:
Mind: What the hell is this? Is this passive resistance? YOU ARE NOT GANDHI. GANDHI WOULD HAVE TAKEN DOWN THE TREE BY NOW. GET UP.
Body:
Mind: Oh I see. I see. The silent treatment, eh? Eh? Well two can play at that game, me old matey.
Body: (goes even limper)
Mind: If you don’t get up right this minute and take down that tree, I am going to, uh, I am… uh… well, you won’t like it, whatever it is.
Body: (starts munching carpet)
Mind: All right. All right! Take down just the stocking. Just the stocking.
Body: (sits up, evincing a flicker of interest)
Mind: OK! We have movement! We have momentum! Man the torpedos and scuttle the mizzenmast! One! Two! THREE!
Body: (reaches for stocking)
Mind: Oh, and don’t forget to get out the tree box. And the one for the fragile ornaments, and the one for the non-fragile ornaments. And the bag for the tree skirt. And the bubble wrap for the
Body: (crashes to floor again)
Mind: All right, all right. Forget the tree. This is obviously some kind of mental block, probably from our childhood, maybe it had to do with our mother, whatever. Forget the tree. Get up, let’s do a blog post.
Body: (blinks)
Mind: And if you cooperate this one time, we’ll go get some ice cream after tomorrow’s appointment, OK?
Body: (crabwalks to computer)
Mind: Thank you. Honestly, was that so hard?

Looking for a very specific photograph of a tree last night in my Photos folder, came across a million billion squillion forgotten photos. The thing is a treasure trove of weirdness.

Yarrrrr.

Particularly like the Buddhafish.

Things I did for my country.

In my typically poetic fashion I call this one “Uncle Karan and the Atlantic Ocean.”

So I’m at brunch the other day with a friend, LT, and her new boyfriend, BF, and halfway through our omelettes she turns to us and goes, “If you were given the opportunity, would you commit ethical cannibalism?”

OK, go ahead and answer that. Remember your answer? Now we continue the conversation.

Me: “Sure.”
BF: “Yep.”
LT: “Really? You’d eat somebody with their consent?”

Uh.

BF: “Oh, is that what you meant? I thought ethical cannibalism was like… you’re on a desert island, you have to eat somebody to stay alive.”
Me: “I thought ethical cannibalism was when the victim deserves it.”
LT: “No, it’s like… OK, first of all Premee, nobody deserves to be eaten.”
Me: “I can think of a couple of people.”

What we had, essentially, was a semantic discrepancy, which is why you should always clarify these things before you agree. (Not that my answer has changed, but we found it interesting that amongst three people we had three different definitions.)

I asked it again in the car the other day:
Me: (very casually) “So if you had the chance, would you commit ethical cannibalism?”
Carpool Boy: “You mean like… if I had been in a plane crash or something and the only way to survive was to eat someone who had recently died?”
Me: “Oh damn, you actually defined it first. So that’s a yes?”
Him: “Well if I was going to die.”

Then on Saturday I asked yet again, over cocktails and dinner:
Me: “Sooooo…if you had the chance, would you commit ethical cannibalism?”
Guy: “Yup.”
Me: “Didn’t give that one much thought, did you.”
Guy: “No need. In fact – ” And here he reached for a fork, presumably in jest, but I still flailed backwards into my side of the booth just in case.

Notice how he didn’t actually define ‘ethical cannibalism,’ thereby depriving me of the chance to add to my running count of definitions. It’s obviously one of those phrases not in sufficiently common parlance to have a universal definition, but we all know what ‘ethical’ means and we all know what ‘cannibalism’ means, so we make up our own on the spot. (Except for Friend #2 there, who doesn’t seem to have a definition for it inasmuch as he regards eating human as not much different from eating chicken or beef, God help me.)

Funnily enough, the consent thing never occurred to me as ethical cannibalism, even though I clearly remembered reading about that German guy who had eaten people he met online, with their consent. I think his consent was chat logs or something, but still – if it’s in writing, and it’s on the internet, you can’t un-say it.

Which got me thinking about the cannibalism taboo, and forgive me for not having done any background reading, but why are people (almost) always squicked out by it? Was there ever a time when you could say you had ‘long pork’ for dinner and have everyone nod instead of screw up their face in disgust? Was there ever a place?

About a year ago, I got a whole pack of hippy-dippy e-books online; I wanted the one about composting and wasn’t able to get it on its own. So as I was scrolling through the other titles (“Stupid, stupid, boring, stupid, boring, as if…”) I ran across one on butchering animals. And I stopped at that one, because one of my cookbooks has good instructions on taking apart a whole chicken but what if I had to do something bigger, like a deer? So I popped it open and yeah.

Butchering humans.

It’s so detailed that I assume it has to be an elaborate joke, but there are no overt traces of humour anywhere in it, and I really looked. And secondly if it is a joke it isn’t a funny one. Because I was sitting there looking at the different cuts going “Wow!” because I am certainly not taboo-free, I subscribe, in fact, to a whole lot of taboos, including some that no one in their right mind would see as a problem, such as eating chewy bacon. (VERBOTEN.) So yes, I have a problem with cannibalism, but I always had it more in the sense of “Please don’t eat me” (which should tell you something about the company I keep) rather than “It bothers me that you are eating him.” But this book, it was… OK, look.

See? Disgustifying. Repulsotronic. I’ve totally lost my appetite and will never eat another human again.

Readers, thoughts on the cannibalism taboo?

A while back, on a lark, I cut a couple of paragraphs out of a blog post and pasted it into one of those inner-net widgets that purported to analyze it for you; this one was for gender specifically, and it said I wrote like a dude, which, well, whatever. They didn’t explain how they had made the choice but since they had a 50/50 chance of picking the right one, if you believe in the binary theory of gender, then it’s OK that they picked wrong.

Then a friend of mine sent me a link to Typealyzer, which she had done on her blog as well, and she was like, “OMG this is so accurate!”

Yeah, uh… yeah. I put in MV’s address and got ISTP – The Mechanics. So that’s wrong too. Here’s what they said:

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment and are highly skilled at seeing and fixing what needs to be fixed. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

But unlike the other widget, this one shows you which snippets of blog it used to come to its conclusion. Including:
- Punt a kitten across the street
- Public will be chopped into bitty pieces
- Hello chasing engineers with a soil probe
- Which continues to strengthen my Douchebag Compatibility theory

This isn’t the blog of a mechanic. This is the blog of a mad-dog killer. ESCAPE WHILE YOU CAN PEOPLE.