Build Date: Tue Dec 23 14:10:15 2025 UTC
If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
-- John Perry Barlow
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
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