If you click this here link, you’ll go to a page on the hilariously awesome site The Oatmeal which tells you way, way more than you have every wanted to know about the complex and horrifying life cycle of a particularly nasty kind of parasitic flatworm known as Dicrocoleum dendriticum, or the Lancet liver fluke.
This unbelievably villainous creature has a spectacularly gross life cycle that goes more or less like this :
1. Be born in cow poop. Wait for a snail to eat you. (Snails eat poop covered parasites all the time, I guess. Isn’t nature fun, kids?)
2. Drill into the snail’s guts and live off the snail until you reach adolescent stage.
3. Exit the snail via one of the slime balls they regularly secrete. (So that’s where BP execs from from. )
4. An ant then happens along and drinks the slimeball with you in it.
5. You make your way to what passes for a brain in an ant, and TAKE COMPLETE CONTROL OF ITS MOTOR FUNCTIONS. Yes folks, brain-controlling parasites really do exist in nature. That’s freaking nasty.
6. In your new life as a demon possessing a hapless ant, you act all normal and antlike during the day, but at night, you leave the colony, go find a blade of grass, and climb to the very tip. If you did this during the day, you’d fry from the heat. But at night, you can safely pursue this bizarre and seemingly random task.
7. It’s only when a cow comes along with the midnight munchies that the true genius of your evil plan becomes clear. The cow eats the grass with you on it (why? Because cows just don’t give a shit, that’s why. ) and you thus infiltrate the cow.
8. You then make your way to the cow’s liver, where it’s party time. You live large and have extremely disgusting hermaphroditic worm sex (also known as “doing the hermy wormy”with the rest of your crew,
and have lots of little horrible babies.
9. These babies exit the cow via cow poop, and we’re back to step 1.
So in your career as a terrifying life form, you’ve lived in poop, been eaten by a snail, lived in slime, been imbibed by an ant, TAKEN OVER THAT ANT’s BRAIN and basically worn the ant as a disguise, pretended to be an ant during the day but snuck out of the colony like a freaking ninja to await the Coming of the Cow, been eaten by a cow, then taken up residence in a cow’s liver, where you breed and die.
Being the massive nerd that I am, I can’t help but project this nightmarish life cycle into science fiction alien race terms. Imagine if the ants in that staggeringly complicated equation were replaced with human beings. We’d find these blobs of a harmless-seeming alien substance on some planet somewhere and discover that it actually tastes quite good to us and gives us quite a euphoric kick too. So this stuff rapidly becomes quite popular. But the people who drink it start behaving in odd ways. They start being attracted to high places. People who previously had a terrible fear of heights sudden start climbing anything they can find, the higher the better, and especially outdoors. By the time this becomes evident, lots of people have begun enjoying this new drink. And they all start climbing things, and they all insist on having their own peak or apex from which to just look up at the stars at night… waiting.
Waiting for what, people ask. We don’t know, the victims reply. But something is coming, and it’s going to be the most wonderful thing ever. We’re going to move on to the next level of existence. We’re going to transcend humanity. Something’s coming, and when it does, we’re going to Heaven.
And this turns out to be horrifyingly true, because these giant spacefaring creatures start showing up and messily devouring the victims and any other humans who happen to be nearby. Scientists discover that these people are emitting a signal into space, and the monsters are responding to that signal. It’s not the human beings who are going to the Promised Land, it’s their brain parasites, who have influenced them into doing exactly what the brain parasite needs them to do in order to move on to its final host, the space monsters, and the Promised Land of their livers (or whatever) where the creatures will breed and die.
The human beings with the parasite are just a snack for the monsters, a way to get them to eat the parasite, like hiding a pill in a sausage to get your dog to eat it.
Obviously, we humans would figure this out, and come up with a cure and/or fight off the angry hungry space monster or whatever.
But it would make quite the plot for an episode of Star Trek or Stargate or the like, wouldn’t it? In retrospect, it would be simpler if the whole plot took place on the one planet. Having giant flying creatures that somehow also go through space is a bit much and entirely unnecessary.
To me, as a writer, the most interesting aspect would be not just the horrifying plot, but within that plot, showing how these parasites influence us as if they are appealing to our highest ideals of transcendence and spiritual growth, when all they really want is to get us eaten. I would definitely have at least one character, a victim who is cured before he or she completes the cycle, who is incredibly angry, well past the point of mere rage, at this most horrible and intimate betrayal. They thought they were going to Paradise, and all they were getting was being food. Tragic.
Hmmm. Are there any planet-exploring science fiction shows in production right now? Because I might just have an episode to pitch them.
We’ll just leave out any elements that rely heavily on poop. No need to go there except maybe very obliquely, near the end, as a cheap joke.
“And how do the baby parasites get from the monsters back to the planet’s surface?”
“How do parasites generally exit a host?”
“Well, they…. EWW GROSS!”
Something along those lines.
It amazes me how kittens just climb all over each other and get stepped on by each other and don’t really seem to mind. Occasionally you’ll get an adorable little tiny meow or squeak in protest as someone steps on a tail or a nose, but for the most part, they accept being stepped on by other kittens trying to get into the snuggle pile position with remarkable equanimity. 
News : Pole Dancing for preteens
Jul 31
Posted by MegaWordMan in News | No Comments
Specifically, girls nine years old and younger.
That’s the plan for a class at a Vancouver area exercise studio called Tantra, who also have a studio in Langley. There’s even talk of offering a “mommy and me” version of the class.
But I’m not so much interested in the specifics as I am at addressing the issues inherent in this phenomenon. These sorts of classes are springing up all over and so this is going to keep popping up in the media as people take their turns getting offended by it. So I figured I’d take a crack at it.
It’s not in dispute that the idea of little girls who are not even tweens yet taking lessons in a form of dancing invented by and associated primarily with strippers. In the sexual hierarchy of society today, strippers are considering to be only half a step above prostitutes, who, of course, are thought of as only one step above the bottom of the female sexual world, sluts. Loose women. Etc.
So any juxtaposition of strippers and children is going to set off a lot of taboo alarms in people’s minds, especially in this era where child sexual abuse, and by extension child sexuality and sexualization, is the moral panic du jour and pedophiles (and by extension, anything that seems like it might appeal to them) are considered to be the worst people around, bar none.
But taboos are not rational by nature, and are sometimes completely arbitrary or even harmful, so we have to ask ourselves : In the clean clear light of reason, do these classes harm the girls taking them? Is there anything worth worrying over, or is this just a lot of moralistic squawking with no basis?
I think it’s clear that the classes can do no direct harm to the girls. The pole is just another piece of the jungle gym to a little girl, no more inherently sexual than anything else in their basically innocent worldview. If they enjoy it, and get exercise from it, and aren’t asked to do anything but dance and have fun, then obviously the activity is as harmless as the advocates say it is and the fact that it offends our taboos by juxtaposition is irrelevant.
But that’s purely in terms of direct harm. There’s a lot more than direct harm in play here, and we can’t pretend these things are not there merely because they are unpleasant.
Sure, to the little girls themselves, it seems like a fun, harmless, nonsexual activity. But others are not going to see it that way and these girls are going to sense that. Kids have very good antennae for picking up how people feel about things, and often can perceive far more than they can understand about the world. They can’t grasp sexuality in an adult sense until they themselves go through puberty, but they can certainly pick up all the messages from adults in their lives and how pole dancing is portrayed on television to understand that there is something “weird” about all this, something sexual, and this could cause them considerable confusion and stress that a comparable course in, say, tapdancing or aerobics would not.
Also consider the way these classes are marketed to adult women : they are clearly marketed as something sexual, naughty, something to make you feel sexually empowered while getting a good workout. These messages will not somehow fail to reach the little girls as well, and while they might not understand it, they will still get that this is a sexually-related activity.
A lot of people are going to claim that these classes would somehow be a “magnet for pedophiles”. I’m not too worried about that. There might be a few unwholesome types who would lurk around and watch the classes if you let them, but otherwise there is no danger that somehow these classes will whip the local pedo population into a baying howling frenzy and they will descend upon the girls like rabid hounds. Most sexual molestation happens between a child and someone they know, someone with regular access to them, like a parent, a relative, a babysitter, or a teacher. Strangers who abduct children who do not even know them rarely enter the picture, despite what some sensationalistic media stories would like to tell you, and so the classes would have no particular impact on the likelihood of this happening. Add in the factor that pedophiles have a tendency to be attract to perceived innocence, and thus little girls who pole dance might, in fact, be less attractive to pedophiles rather than more, and I think we can safely ignore this factor as having little or no impact or relevance.
I do wonder, however, what happens when these little girls grow older, pass through puberty, and then look back on their dances of sliding up and down the pole in dancing class. Are they going to be embarrassed by all they innocently did in those classes? Teenagers are notoriously sensitive to any sort of humiliation, real or imagined. Are they going to wonder why their parents let them do something like that? All it takes is one insensitive question from a peer (along the lines of “Why did your parents make you take pole dancing?”) and it could be quite the traumatic thing between a mother and teenage girl.
To me, it seems like there is a small but real cause for genuine concern about indirect repercussions about this particular form of exercise for kids. Seeing as there’s a lot of other forms of exercise for kids that does not carry this sort of baggage, the simplest solution, I would think, is to avoid the pole danging issue entirely and simply sign them up for something else.
It does not, however, warrant government action. Perhaps, if there is professional association for exercise instructors and/or gym owners, that body could recommend against offering this sort of class. But that’s as far as I am willing to go.
But before we leave this topic entirely, I have to address this excerpt from the article in the opening paragraph of this essay :
That statement is so appallingly irrelevant and ignorant that it literally made my jaw drop. Then I laughed. I mean, I know fitness instructors tend not to be taken from the brighter end of the gene pool, but this person has got to be a real prizewinner. Only someone of a certain special mentality thinks “Can you do this physical thing? No? Then I win the argument, so there. ”
Some people peaked in gym class.
Tags: children, exercise, fitness, pole dancing, sex, sexuality