Evangelicals on the content of spirit revelations.

I was reading this one anti-cult book from the 70s by an evangelical, and it quoted another anti-cult book from the 70s by an evangelical, and it said that the content of spirit revelations to people are infallibly about the afterlife and lead away from biblical notions of sin, final judgment, heaven, and hell -- that is, the book implied that spirit revelations are by evil spirits, and they try to trap us into thinking that heaven and hell are nothing like what Christians usually think, and so they make us complacent in our sins and thereby trap us into hell.

White guys in shorts when it's cold out.

This one Mexican student told me that when it's really cold out and you see an undergrad walking around campus, it's always some white guy, and never a hispanic or black. I think he's right.

International potpourri...!

In Senegal if you compliment babies, you can't say nice things since it draws the attention of evil spirits who might then harm the baby, so the trick is to go up to a cute baby and in a fawning voice be like, "What an ugly baby, won't she have a hard time finding a husband!", to ward off the evil spirits with the words, while the tone tells the mom that you actually find the baby really cute.

A couple centuries ago, the big anti-Irish slur by the British was "the Irish who can't blush" -- i.e., you couldn't see them blush through because of the amount of dirt that's constantly caked all over them and their unwashed faces.

An Indian guy was telling me that before companies started selling smaller-sized condoms because of demand from the Japanese, in some regions of India you'd get a rubberband with your condoms if you bought them at the pharmacy, because some Indian teens from small-dicked ethnicities had started using them so they wouldn't fall off in sex, and then the practice got formalized on the buying-end of things.

Trashiness / Life After Death.

My one friend yesterday when we were out drinking was saying that she had to get home to watch Celebrity Rehab, because even though she was recording it and it was on then, she wanted to watch it as soon as possible. "Isn't that the trashiest thing you've heard all day?", she was like, and I actually had to disagree, since just an hour or two earlier a black friend had been telling me that that pimp book I have is representative of a whole genre that black kids pass around in fourth or fifth grade, and he remembers reading that and a memoir by the pimp Iceman Slim.

He also said there's this whole memoir genre of black women's stories that's even trashier than the pimp stories, and to look out for them in bookstores. They're a lot of survivor stories with titles like "Daddy's Girl", that deal with incest and molestation and pole-dancing. He said they're just nuts.

On another note, I've been reading the classic near-death experience books lately, and I read a little bit more of the 1975 classic "Life After Life" yesterday before bed. Everything I had been reading was happy, but yesterday the shit could have given me nightmares... The tunnels people were going through were these large voids which they were pulled through against their will, and many people had this loud uncomfortable buzzing in their ears the entire time, and when people saw themselves being resuscitated, the procedures they saw happening to their bodies were really really awful (e.g. paddles applied to their chest and their bodies jumping while their bones crackle). Fortunately, I had no nightmares, though I could have.

Had beets yesterday.

I had a lot of beets at lunch yesterday. My shit around 5pm had a pink underside to it, and my piss that night was all cloudy like I was a diabetic or something and I was worried, but my piss this morning was all cloudy like it was last night but pink to boot, and so I realized that the cloudiness last night was from when my body was already starting to digest the beets but without yet processing the color.

Hobbies of a King Pimp.

This is a big refrain that Alfred "Bilbo" Gholson uses in his The Pimp's Bible: The Sweet Science of Sin whenever he describes the hobbies of a king pimp (slightly rephrased from p. 52):

"A king pimp has eight hobbies - rest, dress, read the funnies, count the monies, get the honey, golf, craps, and go on shopping sprees."

Every once in a while his lines have the ring of something well-rehearsed that he pulls out when talking to people, like this one does in its rest-dress and funnies-monies-honey rhymes.

No toilet paper.

I haven't had toilet paper since Monday, and the dollar store downstairs has been closed by the time I've been getting home in the evening, so since Monday I've been wiping my ass with paper towels (though not whole ones, bits I tear off of them, I mean).