Things you were shockingly old when you learned

If you inject whole villages into your arms aren't they going to come with a large number of impurities. Wouldn't think that very healthy like.
& might indicate your habit was getting out of hand, like.

wait does heroin kill coronavirus

I dunno ask tracer.
Didn't Burroughs say something about it killing the common cold?

haha wait a minute

say nothin tracer get a lawyer immediately

He's my go-to guy when it comes to minor ailments and illnesses tbf.

William S. Burroughs that is, not Tracer.

“New discoveries and products are suppressed because they threaten vested interests. The medical profession is suppressing Reich’s orgone accumulator and his discoveries relative to the use and dangers of orgonic energy. They are suppressing the use of massive doses of Vitamin E for the prevention of the heart disease, the use of massive doses of Vitamin A for curing the common cold. (I have used this simple remedy for thirty years and it works. […] At the first soreness in the throat which presages the onslaught of a common cold you take 500,000 units of Vitamin A. Vitamin A alone. Not Vitamin C which is quite worthless for a cold. At one time I had thought to market this remedy but was told it could not be marketed by because the American Medical Association is opposed to self-medication. The AMA is opposed to self-medication if it works.) The medical profession is suppressing the use of apomorphine for the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction and for the general regulation of disturbed metabolism. The medical profession has a vested interest in illness. They suppress any discovery that strikes at the roots of illness.”

- William S Burroughs, The Job

Not to praise the AMA, but that just makes Burroughs sound like a garden variety crank.

Which he more or less was?

"take 500 000 units of Vitamin A"
You might need to eat a few more carrots than Bugs Bunny has for his lunch to get that many units(?) in yourself.

p sure it's toxic in high quantities, some of the polar explorers died or became extremely ill from absorbing too much when supplies were low and they had to eat their huskies (inc.their livers in particular)

yes, also polar bears. Anything that eats meat has a poisonous liver.

yes (tho the ones i had in mind were in the antarctic, so no bears on hand)

Apart from the flying pink bears Scott was having a chat with.

xp sth sth sth can't get the wrappers off

well my comment was about Tracer saying inject this straight into my veins referring to comments about the village of Wendy, which is probably not a very heavy intravenous injection, like.

healthy like, not heavy. Though an entire village probably has weight.

"weight" as in

Trying to imagine how poisonous my liver is

Try to test me and we’ll find out

The Inuit will not eat the liver of polar bears or bearded seals. It has been estimated that consumption of 500 grams of polar bear liver would result in a toxic dose for a human.[9]

small portions then

Viz. is shorthand for the adverb videlicet. It uses Tironian notes, a system of Latin shorthand. It comprises the first two letters, "vi", followed by the last two, "et", using the z-shaped Tironian "et", historically written ⁊,[5][note 1] a common contraction for "et" in Latin shorthand in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe.

can't believe Dr Burroughs's medical credentials being impugned in this thread

LOL

I can't find it online, but in The Bunker book there's a great conversation with Terry Southern where he and WSB root around in a box full of prescription drugs. Burroughs tells Southern to always look out for the word 'pain' on the warning - that's the good stuff!

which itself is a contraction of the Latin phrase videre licet, meaning "it is permitted to see"

I'm going to feel a little power trip whenever using 'viz' from now on.

Not to praise the AMA, but that just makes Burroughs sound like a garden variety crank.

― A is for (Aimless)

one of the, uh, tipping points in terms of my relationship to Online Discourse was seeing one of my "friends" on facebook posting a meme wherein burroughs inveighed against the evils of gun control

HE FUCKING SHOT AND KILLED HIS WIFE

and my pointing this simple fact out prompted an astonishing variety of exculpatory "yeah, but...." responses

ah come on he was trying to miss

and instead he mrs

ah come on he was trying to miss

― clap for content-providers (Noodle Vague)

i shit you not that was a SERIOUS RESPONSE i got

:(

iirc the most widely spread meme with burroughs in it wasn’t even a quote from him, they just had his picture as a generic “cool looking guy with a gun” which made it even more ironic

that the word "vinyl" is derived from "vinum" ie wine, since the simple vinyl group is just an ethanol molecule with the OH group chopped off and slightly rewired to make the carbon atoms double-bonded.

iirc the most widely spread meme with burroughs in it wasn’t even a quote from him, they just had his picture as a generic “cool looking guy with a gun” which made it even more ironic

― mh, Sunday, 19 April 2020 19:29 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

semiotics is a virus

Fun fact I discovered just today about the casting of The Thinker that sits outside the Cleveland Museum of Art:

Vandals damaged The Thinker at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1970. It remains unrepaired. According to police, the perpetrators were a faction of the Weathermen, possibly the same individuals killed in a bomb-making accident in New York City

(See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20090925193028/http://206.180.235.133/jaic/articles/jaic37-02-002.html)

semiotics is a virus

^ underrated Laurie Anderson track

jokes are a flat circle

That this was almost a thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6eDkczp00

Bark Bent

philly is like only an hour and a half from nyc. like, they practically touch. ok, i exaggerate there. they don't wanna touch, and nobody wants to touch them. har har har.

yeah growing up in IL it threw me for a loop once I realized how close all the northeastern cities are to each other. I remember putting in different locations' driving directions to NYC shortly after googlemaps et al became a thing and going "no, that can't be right!".

likewise how close European countries are to each other compared to North America

how many countries there are within a day's drive/ferry/chunnel of each other is prob better way to put it

My father (a St. Louisan) was surprised to find out how close Washington is to New York, and asked why I don't go there every weekend.

Um.

xp. I've definitely recounted how my family drove from Glasgow to Genoa in 36 hours with a night's sleep in a hotel in France to North American people before and surprised them

Those were the days.

I missed a couple of games in the 1994 World Cup due to that drive but being in Rome for the semi-final and final was a very interesting experience for a ten year old

Xxp Contrariwise, western-US distances make no sense to this easterner.

A journey from DC to, say, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, or even Kansas City is basically comprehensible. You look out the window and see farms, fields, mountains, rivers. Basically recognizable landscapes.

Travel to Nevada or California and you traverse the surface of the motherfucking MOON. Hundreds of square miles of... rocks.

That's already weird.

Then you hear about western wildfires destroying 10,000 acres and... Three buildings. It's just an entirely different sort of space.

One time I idly thought I would take a trip to the West Coast to visit friends in Portland, Eugene, and San Francisco. At first glance it looks doable as a road trip, in the way a Richmond to Philly trip might be. Heck, why not just rent a car and...

omg holy shitsnacks it is nine. hundred. muthaflippin. miles. No thanks, I will take an airplane.

yeah I'm in north-central AZ and ppl will be like hey I'm gonna be in Denver, you should drive over and meet up. It's just the next state over, after all.
It's a friggin 12 hour drive!
My birthday is day after memorial day so I took that whole week off and thought I might shoot over to White Sands NM for a couple nights. Again, just the next state over, and White Sands is in the western part of that state. 8 hour drive!

but then again, my conception of long drives is based on starting in Chicago, which means hours and hours of mind-numbingly dull scenario before any hope of seeing something different. So a 6 hour drive out in that region is psychologically/morale-y equivalent to a 3 hour drive out West.