So, meet Lewis Gordon Pugh. I remember seeing him described as having done the furthest south swim ever (in Antarctica) and I pictured a guy in a dry suit. But then I saw the phrase 'nothing but a Speedo.'
I don't know how someone discovers they can regulate their internal temperature to a degree nobody else can. Diving into antarctic waters in a Speedo would be a pretty effective (and rapid and unsightly) method of suicide for pretty much everyone, so I don't know where Lewis got the idea he was exempt from reality but it turns out he is.
He's prepping to swim below Mount Everest in waters that will be 1ºC at roughly a mile above sea level. He says it is to draw attention to the problem of melting glaciers, and I guess to just how out-of-your-tree crazy you can be in this world and still cross international boundaries.
So I don't know if this was related to the article my brother sent me about what a bunch of yo-yos cyclists are. The short version, this dude fishes three or four feet of tapeworm out of his ass one day and doesn't go to the doctor. In point of fact, he doesn't notify the team doctor who's traveling with his cycling team. Or he doesn't until he also develops a fever and diarrhea on top of that.
Which leads into Lance Armstrong's famous testicle cancer, which presented itself when one of his nuts swelled to 'grapefruit' proportions and he didn't want to be a big baby and go to the doctor.
That to me is far weirder than the tapeworm thing, but maybe that's because I recently heard a This American Life about a guy who intentionally infected himself with hookworms to cure his allergies. And it worked. Which is remarkable, but not nearly as remarkable as how he got the hookworms in himself.
After failing to find a willing seller, even to laboratories, he traveled to Africa and traipsed barefoot through a few dozen village latrines, true story. The guy fled the US after the FDA tried to stop him selling his hookworms to others, but really. The dude came by them honestly, and does every fruitcake who wants to try 'hookworm therapy' have to go to Africa and jump in human shit? Something tells me preventing some guy from buying the worms from someone who did the jumping is not really protecting him. At least the lunatic selling his worms bothers to bathe the things in antibiotics so his customers aren't likely to get a little jolt of e-coli with their helminthic therapy.
And Googling hookworm therapy, I found a site that offers both hookworms and tapeworms, and even a combo package for those who want to take 'experimental' to a whole new level
But then, I've been doing the New York Times crossword lately, and some of those Sphinx-stumpers have me Googling the oddest things, trying to figure out what the hell the puzzler was getting at. Early in the week, I'm catching on, but a Thursday 'rebus' puzzle had me going for two days before I learned there are sometimes multiple characters to a box.
I could look at a key, but it's so much more fun when I actually learn something in the process, reading Wiki articles on various topics. Well, it's fun unless what I learn is that there are more than one character in eight of the boxes with no warning that this is the case. That's just dirty pool.
So what do these extreme oddballs have to do with anything? Well, besides me wanting you to know there's a freak out there somewhere who will put on a Speedo and dive in off an iceberg, and that sometimes having big balls isn't all it's cracked up to be? Besides that if nobody likes you, everybody hates you, you can always eat worms unless the government catches you at it?
I'm not sure. I've been thinking a lot about the nature of fitting in and conformity, societal norms.
I know Bruce over at Moon Marble, who's one of the odder ducks I've met in life (and I mean that in a good way) had a positive experience with scouting, and he's always shucking and jiving with the Cub Scout troops that come through the shop for a tour and demo.
For me, scouts was sanctioned child abuse. Well, there was the rocketry unit and the egg drop at Camp Nash, but basically, I wasn't allowed to quit until I made Webelo (and I was shaving by the time I managed that), and those two things are the extent of my positive scouting experiences.
At every turn my fellow scouts, who were also the kids who picked on me at school and on Soroptomist baseball the year I made the chump move to try out for that, made it clear to me that I was not welcome, not wanted, not one of them. The words alone would have sucked at that age, but the fists, the pile-ons, and the kicks to the nuts added injury to insult.
And the den mother who told me I got what I had coming because I was such an obnoxious weirdo, so what did I expect?
The question has a message in it: before you can be safe in your person from bullying and being generally ostracized by a group you supposedly belong to, you have to change the basic nature of who you are. You can't say what you think, you can't like what you like, and if you insist on those things, you have to kiss your nipples goodbye if the group decides it's a fine time for a titty twister.
And you can distill that message down to this: you have no inherent value as a person. If you did, you wouldn't have to meet certain conditions before you were safe from assault and ridicule. Not that meeting those conditions would save you, as soon as a clique has decided you don't fit, you will never fit. If they catch you trying to, they'll pour on harder. Voice of experience, trust me on this if you've never been on the receiving end.
How bad was my scouting experience? Bad enough I would never suggest to my own children that they join. So bad I'd balk if one of my kids asked to join. It might not have been the organization, just my bad luck of peers and their parents, but I was in my twenties before I found out (to my surprise) I could enjoy camping. And knowing a close friend who was sexually abused by his Scout Master only makes me feel I got off lucky, merely bitter at 40 about my tour as a Cub Scout and the fact that my parents couldn't see that opting out of such a terrible situation didn't make me a 'quitter.'
Here's the part I think the conformity gestapo doesn't get: I don't want you to wear flamboyant Hawaiian shirts if you hate them; I don't care if you see the beauty and functional genius of a front wheel drive recumbent bike; I don't care if you love Ornette Coleman or Willem de Kooning; I don't care if you prefer golfing to a model rocketry launch.
Go, do your thing, whatever that is, but don't try to make me like what you like or not like what I do. Everyone you know about but don't really know (which is to say famous people) is weird and unusual. Maybe not always in a good way, but people of accomplishment, people who change the world, they aren't ones who go along. Good thing, too, because if everyone was still trying to grow enough grain to stay alive with a horse-drawn plow and no herbicides or insecticides; most of us would be dead of starvation.
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