Heads will roll
By Jim Washburn
I’m pretty good at spotting trends. Like the profusion of really big meat in commercials lately. I mean, can’t they show a Subway sandwich anymore without it being some extreme close-up of sinuous folds of meat that makes you feel like you’re practically Muffuletta-diving the thing? Remember Bunuel’s Los Olvidados: “Mother, why do you never give me meat?” Well, here you are kid, buried up to your nose in it, in every damn commercial that can possibly have meat in it.
This doesn’t happen by accident. There’s too much money involved. Same thing with all the commercials that hinge on head trauma. They’re everywhere – cell phones bounced off foreheads, beer cans, baseballs – and that doesn’t happen without studies where they’ve hooked electrodes up to folks’ brains, so they’ve got graphic proof, on a graph no less, that something about head injuries makes us go, “Bonk! Ha ha, that must really smart. I’d better buy a pound of beef jerky.”
This week I can’t help wondering if there’s some planetary consciousness at work behind the big comeback in decapitations. The most recent occurred Aug. 3 on the otherwise picturesque Greek island of Santorini, when a reportedly jealous 35-year-old beheaded his twentysomething schoolteacher girlfriend. When your only tool is a knife, I suppose every problem looks like Medusa. Next, according to the BBC, the guy “paraded with the head.”
Do two people make a parade, particularly when one is just a head? Even 76 decapitated heads don’t make a parade, since the last thing on their minds is marching in formation. I used to be in a marching band, and you really can’t do the do without a torso and such.
At any rate, when police rained on his parade, the decapitator tossed the decapitee’s head into a police car, slashed a cop, stole a police jeep, and rammed two female doctors on a motorcycle before police determined they should maybe shoot the fucker.
Preceding that, on July 30 on a desolate stretch of Manitoba highway, 40-year-old Canadian paperboy Vince Weiguang Li allegedly repeatedly stabbed a stranger in the seat next to him on a Greyhound bus, then used a knife and scissors to behead him. Next, according to an intercepted police radio call, Li hacked up and ate parts of his victim. Exemplifying that Canadian dry humor, a police spokesman said the broadcast was “not meant for public consumption.”
It’s hard to write a dull headline with the word “beheaded” in it, and I’m partial to this one in the Melbourne Herald Sun: “Beheaded Canadian a Nice Guy.”
The victim reportedly had his eyes closed, listening to something on headphones when the attack happened. I’m always curious to know what a person was listening to in circumstances like this. Hopefully not Benny Hinn. As for the alleged killer, police negotiators coaxed him off the bus, once he was done eating.
Yet another Canadian may be beheaded soon, by our bosom buddy Saudi Arabia, where the government’s motto is “and leave the beheading to us.” They are one of two countries in the world, the other being Iran, where beheading is still the preferred form of execution. 2007 was a banner year for the Saudis, with a record 156 beheadings. They’ll behead you for murder and rape, while in a case last year a 19-year-old gang-rape victim was sentenced to 200 lashes because, when attacked, she had been in a car with a man who was not her husband. (The sentence was eventually set aside, on the reasoning that being raped seven times was punishment enough. The rapists only drew 2-to-7 year sentences, since their victim was “unclean” or something.) The Saudis will also give you the axe – actually a scimitar – for homosexuality, blasphemy, heresy, and drug trafficking, which pretty much takes it off my vacation list. A Turkish barber is presently under death sentence for uttering the equivalent of “god damn,” while the Canadian citizen, 23-year-old Mohamed Kohail, is appealing a murder conviction for a death that occurred during a schoolyard fight.
I have a friend who grew up in Saudi Arabia. When she was a little kid, she saw a crowd gathered on a square, and, thinking there might be a juggler or magician, she worked her way to the front, just in time to see a guy beheaded. The head rolls. Blood squirts from both the neck and head. You’d think seeing that would be horror enough for one lifetime, but today she works for MTV.
It’s not yet a neck-cleaving offense, but religious police of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in the Saudi capital city of Riyadh have just banned the sale and the walking of dogs and cats. The reasoning is that men use cats and dogs to make passes at women and “violate proper behavior in public.” Please don’t anybody tell them about gerbils.
The virtuous Saudis must have really held their noses years ago when they used their oil money to bail out drunk, callow, and coked-out young businessman George W. Bush from one of his string of failed businesses.
Quiz 1: Do you think he ever repaid them?
Quiz 2: Like by using your money to do it every time you visit a gas station?
New Hope for the Wretched
Even with newspapers becoming more inconsequential by the day, you’d think the L.A. Times would have devoted more than two wire-feed paragraphs on page A18 to a story that might portend a livable future for the human race:
In the current issue of Science, MIT researchers Daniel Nocera and Matthew Kanan report developing a new method of storing energy that scientists expect will revolutionize the use of solar panels. Inspired by photosynthesis, it uses simple materials to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen, which can be stored in fuel cells. They foresee that within a decade the power grid may be a thing of the past, with households powering their homes carbon-free 24-7 from their own solar cells.
I’ve interviewed scientists, from hacks to Nobel laureates. As a group they are not given to hyperbole, yet talking with the MIT News, Nocera gushed, “This is the Nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years” – and he didn’t mean Nevermind – “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”
Unlimited and soon. It has a nice ring, doesn’t it? Their development does dash hopes for an alternative method I’d devised, which involved mile-long trenches of GMO electric eel DNA, fed on human waste and after-dinner mints. It would seem a win-win – I never know what to do with those damn mints – but mutants have a habit of mutating, and next thing you know it’d want a diet of human heads, like Bush’s friends, the Saudis.
Published: 08/06/2008
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
"...which involved mile-long trenches of GMO electric eel DNA..."
HA HA HA HA -- I dig it the most... Well written. More please...