Across Difficult Country

In a bar to soothe my teeming brain with a ‘few’ highballs and in through the door strolls Professor Glen Morangie , recently returned from a scientific expedition to Srinagar, India to acquire a living specimen of the Giant Owl of Kashmir. “I’ve proven conclusively the Giant Owl of Kashmir is extinct,” claims Morangie. The Professor informs me with his Strigiformes research concluded, he’s turning to politics, and plans to run for President. His platform includes increased government funding for treating emetophilia (a condition he himself suffers from), holding an annual vote to let the people select which lucky country will be the recipient of our bombs for the entire following year, and replacing the bald eagle as national symbol with the extinct Giant Owl of Kashmir. “The kindest and most gentle of all known giant owls, which is probably why the poor creatures went extinct,” claims the Professor, slightly teary-eyed. I’m not sure how his policies compare with those taken by the l...

From Malaysia comes word of a " a hungry 25-foot python " (is there any other kind?) that’s eaten at least 11 dogs. Across Difficult Country foreign correspondent and native Malaysian Ismail Mat Taib remarked: “I thought at first the dogs might be victims of a mysterious monster which had surfaced unnaturally from the bottom of the sea,” said villager Taib, who had been herding cattle near the beach. “Humongous snake was my second guess.” In other Malaysian news, the Malaysian men’s ice hockey team beat Hong Kong 7-3 and made them cry.

A Michigan woman's home has been condemned because its interior is covered in a two inch layer of animal shit (dog and cat mostly). The woman notes her novel form of home insulation, produced by her 66 pets, is cheap, environmentally friendly, 100% organic, and has dramatically reduced her winter heating bills. If the global warming hysterics find out about it they will surely try to make it mandatory.

A school in Rhode Island is requiring students to remain silent during lunch . It seems the little blabbermouths are unable to stop talking while eating, resulting in an epidemic of choking incidents. As sensible as this rule is, since most schoolchildren these days are obese why not require the students to keep socks in their mouths except when called upon in class? Doing so would eliminate the babbling and the gorging.

"Conservatives, from Burke on, have tended to see the population much in the manner medieval legists and philosophical realists (in contrast to nominalists) saw it: as composed of, not individuals directly, but the natural groups within which individuals invariably live: family, locality, church, region, social class, nation, and so on. Individuals exist, of course, but they cannot be seen or comprehended save in terms of social identities which are inseparable from groups and associations. If modern conservatism came into existence essentially through such a work as Burke's attack on the French Revolution, it is because the Revolution, so often in the name of the individual and his natural rights, destroyed or diminished the traditional groups - guild, aristocracy, patriarchal family, church, school, province, etc. - which Burke declared to be the irreducible and constitutive molecules of society. Such early conservatives as Burke, Bonald, Haller, and Hegel (of The Philosophy...

Racial “progress” is everywhere one looks. For the first time ever, both coaches in the Superbowl are black, I'm told an Hispanic and a black are running for president, and in Puerto Rico a Mocha Vampire has been sighted. From Count Dracula to Nosferatu to Keith Richards, vampirism has been a lily-white field, but in 1972 Blacula shattered the vampiric color barrier. 1 Unfortunately, after that the trend toward greater diversity seemed to stall - until now: "[T]he Moca Vampire had its own agenda. On March 18, 1975, two goats belonging to Hector Vega, a resident of Moca’s Barrio Pueblo, were found drained of blood. Puncture marks on the goats’ necks were the unmistakable sign that the strange entity causing the deaths was still at large and hungrier than ever: it returned to Vega’s farm the following night to finish off ten more goats and wound another seven. The horrified farmer also discovered that ten additional goats had gone missing." 1 There is considerable conf...

With a stroke of President Felipe Calderón’s pen, the Mexican tortilla crisis has been, if not averted, since price controls never work, at least delayed until mañana. I’m no expert in geopolitics, but I think it sound as a general foreign policy principle to avoid entanglements with nations susceptible to widespread unrest anytime there are fluctuations in the tortilla supply.

I’ve learned some readers doubt the veracity of the story from The Tide reprinted below . Need I remind them The Tide (unlike certain prominent American newspapers which have famously printed fabricated stories) has “ a commitment to truth ”? As unbelievable as it may seem, except for being more frequent, in depth, and more stylishly written, The Tide’s coverage of the Nigerian university cult situation does not differ factually from what’s been reported in other sources. See, for example, “ War of the black magic cults brings death to Nigeria’s universities ”, from the Apr. 20, 2005 edition of The Telegraph UK : “In the last month alone, 13 of its students have been killed in clashes between cults calling themselves the “Black Axe” and the “Black Eye”. Professional mercenaries were allegedly hired to carry out some of the killings. The state governor, Lucky Igbinedion, was forced to intervene in the conflict.” Cult initiation rituals are way beyond fraternity hazing: "[Emmanue...

Debauched as student life at American universities typically is, there's no comparison with the campus hijinks occurring in Nigeria. The Tide Online provides the shocking details (what follows is the complete text of its report): A legal practitioner in Umuahia, Abia State capital, has called on the federal government to urgently save Nigerian Universities from sliding into anarchy as a result of cultism. Barrister Uwandu Onyenakom who spoke to The Tide in Umuahia lamented that no week passed without institutions of higher learning recording casualties of cultism. “Worst hit are schools like Imo State University, Abia State University, Abia State Polytechnic among many others. “Cultism, at the rate it is going will succeed in destroying and uprooting foundations in our institutions of higher learning. Something needs to the done urgently to check the slide towards anarchy” Onyenakom said. According to him, the cultists who seem to be Lords in campuses harass, intimidate and most ...

ANDRE KERTESZ. Washington Square, New York . 1954.

I saw footage of the Steve Jobs Apple iPhone demo , and it was shown one of the things you can do with iPhone is upload photos to it, then by touching the screen make them larger and smaller. Am I the only one reminded of the moon landing? Larger, smaller – by touching the screen. I'm thinking of how stout Cortez must have felt on that mountaintop. Larger. Smaller. By touching the screen . The gizmo is causing excitement around the globe. Across Dificult Country foreign correspondent Ismail Mat Taib enthused: “I thought this may be back engineered from mysterious technology developed by the ancient Atlanteans before that great kingdom submerged unnaturally to the bottom of the sea,” said villager Taib, who had been herding cattle near the beach. “Larger, smaller, by touching the screen? Holy crap, are you kidding me?” Obese teen Shauna Gerow paused between bites to observe, “It’s almost something to do rather than eat. Almost.” Oddly named Madagascar wildlife researchers Félix ...

Most people assume bats can’t be any more disgusting than they already are, which is probably how a family of bats 1 in Madagascar was able to evolve sucker feet without anyone noticing 2 until it was too late to stop them. For the time being the bats seem content to use their sucker feet to adhere to the surfaces of the leaves on the Traveler’s Palm and other similar broad-leaf plants, but it won’t be long before the bats realize (if it wasn’t the plan all along) they can stick just as well, if not better, to windows, windshields, laptop computer screens, and bald men’s heads. When told of the revolting sucker-footed bats, Across Difficult Country foreign correspondent Ismail Mat Taib observed: “I thought they may be mysterious bats which had surfaced unnaturally from the depths of a cave,” said Taib, who had been herding cattle near the beach. 1 Myzopoda schliemanni. 2 The sucker-footed bats were discovered by scientist Steven M. Goodman, whose name seems far to ordinary for an a...

"While examining the teeth of the shark, Steno was struck by their resemblance to certain stony objects, called glossopetrae or "tongue stones," that were found in certain rocks. Ancient authorities, such as the Roman author Pliny the Elder, had suggested that these stones fell from the sky or from the moon. Others were of the opinion, also going back to ancient times, that fossils naturally grew in the rocks. Steno's contemporary Athanasius Kircher, for example, attributed fossils to a "lapidifying virtue diffused through the whole body of the geocosm." Steno, however, argued that glossopetrae looked like shark teeth because they were shark teeth, that had come from the mouths of once-living sharks, and come to be buried in mud or sand that was now dry land. There were differences in composition between glossopetrae and living sharks' teeth, but Steno used the "corpuscular theory of matter", a forerunner of atomic theory, to argue that fossil...

A sad day in our nation’s capital, as for the first time in American history a lady, Nancy Pelosi, is sworn in as Speaker of the House . Worse, it would seem she’s adopted the disgusting Third World practice of using children as human shields to deter assassination attempts. I suspect we are entering an era of Gynarchy, and it’s too late to do anything about it, but if we are to be ruled by women is it too much to ask they be a bit juicier? I suppose it is. Watching the cermony Across Difficult Country’s new foreign correspondent the Malaysian villager Ismail Mat Taib remarked: “At first glance I thought she may be a kuntilanak or even a Langsuir , who had had arrived unnaturally from across the sea,” said Taib, who had been herding cattle near the beach, “Then I realized it was only that congresswoman with the bad plastic surgery.”

Fig. 1 According to Chinese reports the U.S. and Japan have genetically engineered calves immune to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE. We truly live in wondrous times.

A strange beginning to the New Year in Malaysia, as a pair of huge anomalous objects materialized in the sea off the coast : “I thought they may be mysterious islands which had surfaced unnaturally from the bottom of the sea,” said villager Ismail Mat Taib, who had been herding cattle near the beach. Not an unreasonable guess, but after they washed ashore the fanciful cowboy realized the curious objects were 200 yard long, three story high barges. So far no one has come forward to claim ownership of them.

"Although as to other foreigners it is thought better to discourage their settling together in large masses, wherein, as in our German settlements, they preserve for a long time their own languages, habits, and principles of government, and that they should distribute themselves sparsely among the natives for quicker amalgamation, yet English emigrants are without this inconvenience. They differ from us little but in their principles of government, and most of those (merchants excepted) who come here, are sufficiently disposed to adopt ours." --Thomas Jefferson to George Flower, 1817. "[Is] rapid population [growth] by as great importations of foreigners as possible... founded in good policy?... They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop...