Considering the new face (or non-face) of the modern orator, how to piss people off at bars, and my "trip" phollowing phish to Wisconsin via the Mars Cheese Castle.
Yes you may think I'm at the butt end of a telephone game experiment and purple monkey dishwasher has already been done. You wouldn't think that the 3 words: Mars, Cheese, and Castle could go together.
When I think Mars, I tend to think of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Marvin the Martian, or a delectable nougaty chocolate confection suitable for frying by Scots.
When I think of Cheese, I tend to think of pizza, sense of humor, and boxes of Cheez-its (which I think used to be called Cheez Nips when I was growing up, but maybe someone complained about racial intonations).
When I think of Castles, I tend to think of chess, Harold and Kumar, and Nathan Fillion.
What I don't do is think of the three words together, yet driving at a snail's pace o'er the construction-laden interstates approaching Milwaukee, Wisconsin yesterday, I saw what I saw (and my friend Steve can back me up) and that was a larger than life sign which read MARS CHEESE CASTLE.
Now, of course, I was intrigued, but not enough to stop the car from our 5mph pace and find an exit ramp... perhaps I was thinking of the unlimited possibilities of the concept of a Mars Cheese Castle with Marvin the Martian as sole proprietor echoing the best lines of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch when I got pulled over in Waterford, Wisconsin at 1am for speeding.
I got caught doing 20mph over the speed while travelling at 45mph... you do the math folks. That means the speed limit was 25mph. I was passed by a turtle and a snail out for a late night stroll when I got back on the road again.
The cop was actually very nice. He gave me a warning but told me my Windstar's license plate had come back with a citation on a Crown Victoria. I thought I had the plates new when I first leased a van nine years ago. If I had to guess however, I'd like to think the previous owner of my plates got caught storming the Mars Cheese Castle which was ably-protected by the Swiss Guard.
I would also like to think that if one got caught by the guards, they would throw you in the Mars Cheese Castle dungeon with limburger carpets. The only way you could get out was to eat the only thing that wasn't made of cheese - headcheese.
When I read scary news stories, I often shudder, I sometimes twitter, I may even email a link or two. It has been a rare occurance that I have found myself blogging about a story. I suppose that when something strikes me as so horrific that it borders on the absurd, especially when the details therein expose the savagery of humanity, I feel thankful of where I live and the ability to not fear.
So what inspired this blog entry? The incredulous "wow" rating. The following quotations from a single story out of Malaysia:
"Police detainee A. Kugan was beaten to death over a six-day period which also saw him being "branded" 20 times." - wow.
"He died of kidney failure caused by muscle injury." - wow.
"The report also revealed intensive haemorrhage in several internal organs including the gall bladder, pancreas, adrenal glands and inside his skull." - wow.
"The report stated that Kugan's death was because of rhabdomyolysis, the rapid breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue caused by injury. The destruction of muscles lead to the release of the breakdown products such as myoglobin, which may cause acute kidney failure." - wow.
"the report also showed that Kugan's stomach was empty at the time of his death 'probably due to the fact that he was starved during six days of interrogation.'" - wow.
All of these facts come out under a headline that reads: "Beaten, branded in police custody" ...as though the six day duration ending in death wasn't important enough to make the headline. It boggles the mind and leaves me with my common syllable of incredulity: wow.
In an effort to cover up the beating, I suppose the doctor doing the autopsy must have been on the take as "the first post-mortem only examined the body from the chest up." - wow.
The follow-up autopsy, which I'm guessing is a common practice in a place where like doctors must treat broken ankles by trimming a patient's hair, revealed "the second, which examined the entire body, found 42 other marks, burns and contusions from the sole of his feet right up to his head. The pathologist declared, based on the post-mortem, that Kugan was beaten so badly that his tissues broke down and his kidneys failed." - wow.
Oh, by the way, the police were interrogating the man. Apparently they thought he must have known a shitload of information that they couldn't have got out of him after 72 or 96 hours of starvation and beatings.
This story gets 8 wows out of 5 on a rating system that makes more sense than the Malaysian police.
