My mind works in odd ways. I was wandering through the living room (all 8 square feet of it) yesterday while the S.O. was playing with the Amazon Fire Stick. We've had it for awhile now, but he keeps discovering new applications and updating old ones. He's managed to find quite a few viewing options through the Fire Stick, including many that let us watch stuff in real time instead of having to wait to stream it. If we want a news fix, for example, we can watch "The National" on CBC.
In any case, he had just installed something new and was cruising through the various offerings when he hit Penthouse HD. Being male and not dead, he had to click on the icon. Naturally, the first thing that popped up, so to speak, was porn. And not subtle porn -- we're talking porn so explicit there was no doubt whatsoever as to what we were seeing on the screen. Porn in High Def.
So what's the first thing I think? "Holy wah, isn't that some sort of workplace safety violation?" The setting was a garage floor, the naked dude was supine on a creeper (as in the device mechanics use to slide under vehicles, not as in the slimy dudes who slither up to women at inappropriate times), there was a car not far away. The dude is on a creeper! That implies the car is up on jack stands. Isn't it some sort of OSHA issue to have two naked people doing the nasty only a couple feet away from a vehicle that isn't solidly on the ground?
Second thought was, I bet that chick is serious about yoga. She was remarkably. . . limber.
And then I found myself wondering if the crab louse (Pthirus pubis) has made it on to the endangered species list yet. There were news stories circulating a year or two ago about how Western societies' obsession with removing body hair in general and pubic hair in particular was threatening the existence of the crab louse. Its preferred habitat, its specific ecological niche, was vanishing. What had begun as a few women worrying about their bikini lines had evolved into wholesale deforestation. The crab louse is an obligate sanguivore -- the only thing it can eat is blood -- that co-evolved with humans. It dines on blood and resides on body hair, preferably the hair found in the groin. Shave or wax the groin and you've just done the equivalent of clear cutting a forest and wiping out an ecosystem. Pity the ever shrinking populations of crab lice, done in not by the famous Blue Ointment (I wonder how how many people who used it knew it was basically a mixture of mercury and lard?) but by aesthetics. For sure no crab lice were going to colonize the couple on the creeper. They were both so thoroughly waxed that if there hadn't been obvious genitalia they would have looked as plastic as Ken and Barbie.
It is odd how a procedure once viewed as torture -- waxing an area that is remarkably sensitive to pain -- managed to morph into a routine trip to the salon that many people, both men and women, take for granted. Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away (Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1960s) my circle of friends included Jim and Margie. Jim was quite the young raconteur. He told remarkably amusing stories about the high jinks and mishaps of various acquaintances. This being Wisconsin at a time when 18 was the legal drinking age for beer, many of his stories involved pranks pulled on dudes who lacked the ability to stay conscious longer than their friends. A favorite prank, it developed, was The Torture of the Scarlet Scrotum.
I think the reader knows where this story is going. If some poor sap passed out at a kegger at the frat house, he wasn't likely to wake up a few hours later to discover a penis drawn on his forehead in permanent marker. No. What happened was that if he didn't wake up when his "friends" removed his pants or when they began dripping hot wax on to his junk, for sure he came to with a scream when they ripped that wax off. Hence, The Torture of the Scarlet Scrotum.
On the positive side, at least he didn't have to worry about dying from alcohol poisoning or choking in his own vomit.
As for the endangered crab lice, I also wonder if parasitologists are trying to maintain populations of them for research purposes. If they do, how do they maintain them? I have read of other researchers who deal with sanguivores who allow themselves to be dined on -- it's not an uncommon practice for scientists who work with leeches, bedbugs, and even vampire bats to offer an arm to their lab critters -- but it would take real scientific dedication to introduce crabs to one's crotch.
Lmfboff
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