The World Keeps Getting Weirder

Between the platypus & now, poison birds... If it wasn't in the Nat'l Geographic, I'd think I really was mad. Completely starkers. Usually I take my NG's to work & leave them to edify the masses, but this one I'm keeping - it's about poisons. And I do like poisons.

There are poisonous birds.

As stiff as toys
And tall as men
And swaying like the wind torn trees
She talked about the empty world
With eyes like poison birds

She talked about the armies
That marched inside her head
And how they made her dreams go bad
But oh! How happy she was!
How proud she was!
To be fighting in the war
In the empty world!
- The Empty World, by The Cure

Honest-to-goodness fer real poisonous birds. Crows may actually be one of them, as well as Kingfishers, Birds-of-paradise... a couple of South American birds. And most notably, two species from New Guinea. One of them has a name like the sound you make when you spit - the hooded pitohui (patooie!), also known as the wobob. It's quite striking - orange & black. Both male & female of the species have the same coloring, & the neurotoxin homobatrachotoxin, also found in Poison Arrow frogs & similar to tetrodotoxin ("Don't let them bury me. I'm not dead."), is in their dander. It probably acts as a deterrant to snakes & also is an insecticide & insect repellant. Makes the birds taste very bitter & has a numbing effect on the human fingers, tongue & lips.

  

The other New Guinean toxic bird is the Ifrita, which looks kind of like a female grackle, in brown & black - but they're considered more toxic by the natives than the pitohui.

The platypus is really starting to bug me. It's got a beaver's tail, lays eggs, has webbed feet, has x-ray vision in its duck's bill, the males are the world's only known poisonous mammal (they've got toxic spikes on their hind legs used for mating season - and in a human causes intense pain & localised swelling - the medical world is looking into it for chronic pain relief & to treat high blood pressure) with no known antidote, and now Nat'l Geographic tells me they have 5 pairs of chromosomes to determine their sex, compared to a regular mammal or marsupial's single pair... and their sex chromosomes are similar to both mammalian & avian chromosomes. It's just getting more & more wrong by the minute.

My NG also had an ad for Ambien - apparently, it takes more than 400mg of the stuff to effectively OD - and people have recovered from taking that much. I only get 300mg a month. Damn! And I'm already building up a tolerance - have to take 2 to actually get drowsy.

Watched "The Exorcist: The Beginning" tonight. I was going to have an Exorcism marathon but Rob left the twofer coupon at home. It was a 3-Meh movie. I sat thru most of it trying to remember the damned demon's name. Pazuzu, Sumerian demon king of the wind demons. In some versions of His mythos, Pazuzu protects mankind from wind-borne plagues & malaise, and is the enemy of the lamashtu, female vampire-demons who preyed on newborn babies & pregnant women. In other versions, Pazuzu is the bearer of plague & destructive windstorms. I guess it depends on which side of the windbreak you're on as to whether or not Pazuzu is the good guy. Right now, it sounds like He's plenty busy outside, anyway. Some of the imagery made me wonder if perhaps Pazuzu wasn't Merrin's arch-enemy after all, but the Lamashtu instead, and all that time he'd been trying to exorcise the wrong entity. Rob wasn't impressed, either, but all the sweat & blood & oozing sores grossed him out pretty good. I kept trying to tell him that no one knew about the many blood-borne diseases in 1949 like we do now, but it wasn't helping him any. And then when I went looking for Pazuzu on the 'Netronomicon', thinking He was a bit of clever fiction, & instead found out He was a real entity, and the Lamashtu, of course, having ties w/Lilith/Lilitu, that really didn't make Rob feel any better at all. And the more I said 'Pazuzu' (because it's fun to say), the more the wind picked up until it finally has creeped me out, too. Rob went to bed about 1/2 an hr. ago - I took 2 Ambien. I'm like, "Oh, yeah, dumbass - creep yerself out so ya can't sleep. Nice.

It did prompt me to look the name up in the Necronomicon - it's not in there. But I feel like a dumbass now because if I had read H. P. Lovecraft at 9 or 10, seeing the name "Cthulhu" all over the place (or Shub-Niggurath... or Shoggoth, for that matter) would have clued me off at that point that the book was in actuality written by Lovecraft & not by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazrad.

Well, I'm sitting here wishing old friends well in their court day outcome & hoping Miranda can drink enough water to offset her low amniotic fluid problem in the next 2 wks. Yuck. Listening to Pazuzu rattle my chimney. Now that I have a name & a face for it, the wind noise is not so ominous. I really wanted to watch the original again tonight, but maybe it's for the best that I didn't.