Epistles from the Apostles
John Jay Ray's Piles is the name of a cartoon in the British comic Viz. It is one of the longest running strips, having been appearing with some regularity since the mid-1980s.
The central character, John, is an elderly man who suffers from chronic hemorrhoids. Some people have defended Viz from its critics by pointing out that it is far more sophisticated and subtle in its satire on society and current affairs than one might think; but John's Piles is very much a strip that is unapologetically the sort of silly schoolboy humour that earned Viz the controversy it has attracted in its quarter-of-a-century existence.
In each episode, John endures repeated abuse to his bottom by a series of terrible accidents that only serve to agonize his poor, hemorrhoid-afflicted anus. He has been impaled on a church spire after a parachute jump, had his hemorrhoids stabbed by the rock pick of a mountain climber, fallen into a skip full of broken glass (bottom first of course), and slid down the rusty metal bannister of a flight of steps after an ill-advised skateboard trick went wrong. Much of the pleasure of the strip comes from the anticipation created by the increasingly contrived ways in which these incidents are set up: a typical example might see John's wife trying to apply some hemorrhoid ointment to her husband whilst in a darkened caravan, and show her trying to distinguish between two otherwise identical bottles, one labelled 'Pile Ointment', the other 'Devil's Brand Hell-Fire Jalapeno Sauce - Bang! Bang! Molto Explosivo!' - with a predictable lack of success. Similar to a Tom and Jerry cartoon, John's agonies often cause him to shoot high into the air whilst screaming hideously.
Muchos gracias, @ndy.
Any idea where I might find one of these online?
I think most anthropologists would disagree that human races are biologically real. They are, of course, culturally real. This tradition goes back to Franz Boas, Ashley Montagu (Man's most dangerous myth: Race), and up to contemporary anthropologists like Jonathan Marks and C. Loring Brace. Human variation is just too complex to be pigeon-holed into something like "race". Any human population is genetically open, and that means that genes can and do flow across populations. And since populations are genetically open, any notion of a "fixed" "race" is a fiction.
This Ray fellow appears to be wrong on many, many, many points.
I read there are moves now to create a diagnosis for trolls called flaming personality disorder. To actually label it a personality disorder.
At my blog now, with my Egypt post, I've attracted yahoos like crazy.
On the Middle East, many on the left, forget about Israeli class struggle. On the right they don't even acknowledge Palestinians as existing. That is called ultra-Semitism.
Thanks TS & RE.
Ray must (or should) know that variation between members of the same 'race' is about the same as that between races, making race-by-race comparisons meaningless.
Perhaps Ray thinks that if he can biologise the argument, he'll than have sufficient scienceness to justify his positions.
Dr. Tingtong is ace.
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