Anglophile that I am, there are times when I think the United Kingdom might be more bizarrely insane that the Divided States.
Browsing the BBC News a few days ago, I ran across the following headline: “Designer vagina trend ‘worrying.’ ” Yes, you read that right. (However, even if you understood it correctly, you may not have read it correctly. Remember that the Brits would read “designer” with the last syllable pronounced –ah, so as to rhyme designer with vagina.) Yes, increasing numbers of women in England are getting cosmetic vaginal surgery—for “aesthetic reasons.” This ranks up there with lunatics who put various pieces of metal in and through their penises. Do these nut-jobs really expect many people to care that much about how their genitals look? Are they going to exhibit themselves or something? Do they think it makes them more sexually attractive? Aren’t we all attracted to guys with rings stuck through their dickheads? Imagine these guys going through airport security. The metal detector goes off near the crotch, and the security scanner looks quizzically at the proudly mutilated traveler. . . . A recent search on types of genital mutilation (don’t ask why I was searching this) turned up some absolutely horrifying examples of what people do to themselves—or sometimes have done to them by others. Enough to keep one awake at night. . . .
Almost every day brings me fresh news to convince me that I don’t belong on this planet. I was left here by some alien civilization as a punishment for some horrible crime I must have committed on my home planet, but I can’t remember what crime or what planet—maybe one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter. (My astrological sign is ruled by Jupiter; isn’t that proof enough?) Earth is to alien intelligent creatures what Australia used to be to Earthlings: a sort of penal colony. The Weekly World News (my former alternative reality source—now defunct) had a headline years ago that said aliens think Earth is a bad neighborhood; to which one might respond that a lot of Earthlings do, too. Related to this is the belief that Earth is under a quarantine enforced by superiorly intelligent aliens who will never let us get out to go to any other planet until we clean up our act here, with the implicit and reasonable expectation that we may exterminate ourselves as a species first. e. e. cummings ended one of his most famous poems with the famous line: “listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.” Count me in, edward. We can get through the alien blockade by telling them we’re aliens ourselves. Or the blockade may not apply to parallel universes because the lame-brains who’ve gotten us into this mess haven’t figured out how to travel between them. Sadly, neither have I, or I wouldn’t be here.
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