Build Date: Wed Mar 5 19:20:15 2025 UTC
Seeing your baby's face each morning would only be a cruel reminder of the nice person you used to be.
-- Mr. Bad
Terror in the Central Market
1999-06-08 21:12:58
An innocent trip to the Central Market resulted in a severe attack of arachnophobia (and a meal) when a depraved street kid set her vicious pet spider on an unsuspecting shopper.
The shopper, yours truly, was selecting a new book when his arm and heartstrings were tugged by a doe-eyed beggar child. With my wallet out to pay for the book, I couldn't really ignore the malnourished youngster and I gave her a few hundred riel.
Turning back to complete my purchase, the tugging on my arm continued so I turned round to see the child giggling from a safe distance and a gut-twistingly evil spider on my arm. It was black and hairy and its fangs were dripping with poison. Its mesmerising movement was taking it up my arm… towards my face!
I must have mumbled some confused, high-pitched babble in my panic, but it quickly became clear that the devious arachnid was in cahoots with that sly beggar-girl vermin and I had better watch my wallet while fending off the eight-legged monster. I braced for a sideways sweep of my free arm that would knock it off and simultaneously project it into stamping distance, but the urchin deftly picked it off me and ran off with it, no doubt to scare the pants off some other foreigner. My wits slowly returned.
Everyone nearby was looking. The woman I'd been buying the book from shouted something stern at the child which seemed to satisfy everyone: The event was over, so checking that my wallet was in place, which it was, I headed to the Foreign Correspondent's Club for a restorative.
The next time I went to that market there were stalls selling the same hairy buggers deep fried in batter. I savoured a moment of satisfaction knowing what fate had claimed the savage beast and allowed myself a fiendish cackle. Deep-fried hairy spider tastes of fishy cauliflower, and apart from the crunchy exoskeleton, is soft like Mr Whippy.
Oliver
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
There are two kinds of Assmen in this world. Wild, hairy assmen, who put stickers that say things like "Why Be Normal?" all over their trucks and drink Corona beer and wear fezzes at parties for attention; these are the Assman Desperados. Our job is to ferret them out and expose them. (More...)
Skunk School -- Learn Why Not To Keep Skunks As Pets
There is an alarming trend in pet purchasing habits this fall. People inspired by the WWII film, "Life is Beautiful" -- the one with that annoying Italian guy -- are buying descented skunks by the millions. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Brother Wayne Lays Down the Truth
Flesh interviews Wayne Kramer of MC5. (More...)
Poor Metallica. All they want is to continue to put out the same weak "Heavy Metal" they've been churning out since the "And Justice For All" days? and make gooey wads of cash in the process. The problem is, people aren't buying their bound for the heavy metal scrap heap, over-produced, uninspired, tired crap. And let's face it, their various commercial endorsements won't pay for the lifestyle they've become comfortably accustomed to. Resorting to lawsuits makes perfect sense, when you need spending money. But just one lawsuit isn't going to pay their bills. So, to aid Metallica, I've composed an open letter to the boys in the band, with suggestions as to whom else they might sic their lapdog lawyers on... (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
