It’s about time we had an Open Thread…
Despite the title, this is not the story of the three months I had to share a toiletless bedsit with Mitt Romney in Paris in the late sixties. I know you would thrill to the tales of the adversity we suffered – like the time the Bollinger ran out and Mitt had to buy some more, or when the cook took time off for her mother’s funeral in Normandy and we were forced to live without her truffled coq au vin for three whole days.
However, I am on holidays and, like most people on holidays, I really just want to tell you what I have been up to. Moreover, jet lag has struck and I am wide awake when I should be having my pre-dinner nap. As such, as another quite warm Lisbon winter day draws to a foggy close, let me take the chance to tell you a little more about our visit to Tokyo.
As I may have mentioned, my nephew Charles and his husband Kevin are accompanying me on this leg of my Grand Tour. Kevin is a public health physician – an honourable career that seems to consist entirely of visiting foreign countries for conferences and (if Contagion is to be believed) occasionally peeling Gwyneth Paltrow’s face off her skull. Which is nice.
When I met the boys at our hotel in the Ginza, therefore, the first thing they wanted to do was whisk me off to the Meguro Parasitological Museum to look at worms.
I do warn you – some of the pictures that follow after the jump are not for those posessed of a weak stomach.
The museum is situated in a commercial district in one of those thin little office buildings that the Japanese seem to build everywhere. It’s only a small place, with just two floors of exhibits. There are a number of interactive displays about the life cycle and geographic spread of various parasites. Unfortunately most of these are in Japanese, but you are never too old to run around pressing buttons and making little lights light up.
The museum also includes the most extraordinary collection of preserved parasites, such as this little beauty, which I am reliably informed is an Equine Tapeworm (Anoplocephala magna).
It truly is a chamber of horrors in jars. There were dozens of things that live in intestines and which might persuade you to never eat (or leave the house) again. There were crustaceans that burrow into the gills of fish and stick their heads out while wiggling their mandibles and making the poor fishy look a bit stunned, and eventually a little bit dead. It reminded me for all the world of Callista Gingrich standing next to Newt. Take your pick which one is which.
There were the not-so-lovely Anasakis, who live in dolphin hearts and result in something that I suspect looks like Ron Paul when he’s not wearing his human suit:
On the brisk Sunday afternoon on which we visited, there was a constant stream of visitors. Most of them were teenagers (they may have been older, but at my age anyone under 35 looks like a teenager) and most of them seemed to be on dates.
A lot of young Japanese boys seem to feel there is romantic potential in taking your girlfriend to see a dead fox cub with a golfball-sized lump of parasitical goo growing out of its stomach – and given the amount of happy screaming and giggling and clutching of arms that was going on, they might be right.
The big winner among the crowd seemed to be the tapeworm (Diphyllobothrium nihonkaiense) seen here. On the wall next to it, on a hook, there was a length of bandage the same length as the worm, which could be stretched out across the room to bring home all the more clearly just how gross the thought of 26 feet of worm curled up in your stomach really is.
Best of all, there was a little shop, and I am now the proud owner of almost their entire stock of keyrings, each with a dead Anasakis embedded in plastic. That will make me popular with the grandkiddies, although I’m going to save a few for the Republican National Convention. I can think of several people who deserve the gift of an amoral, parasitic nematode that causes violent allergic reactions.
Next up, I’m going to try to do justice to a magnificent chef as I tell you about the best meal of my life.
Villago Delenda Est
Magnificent.
Have you considered writing to Glenn Kessler about his slavish devotion to the ghost of David Broder?
cathyx
This sounds like one of those annoying brag letters that people like to send out at Christmas.
Mnemosyne
It sounds like your nephew and his husband would quite enjoy a trip to the Mutter Museum if they ever find themselves in Philadelphia.
Baud
I for one welcome our new pigeon overlords…
rikyrah
the hilariousness of Senator Turtle waiting for Orange Julius to have his press conference, being all big and bad…
and then, coming out going ‘ Son, pass the f—ing thing’.
now, THAT is a shiv to the front. , Washington style
jl
My favorite horrifying parasite is the:
Sacculina carcini
A female sacculina begins life as a tiny free-floating slug [ed: it is a barnacle, not a slug, but the author is being poetic, I think]in the sea, drifting around until she encounters a crab… she finds a chink in the crab’s armor … she “injects” herself into the crab, sluicing through the dagger and leaving behind a husk…. She grows “roots” that extend to every part of the crab’s body – wrapping around its eyestalks and deep into its legs and arms. The female feeds and grows until eventually she pops out of the top of the crab, and from this knobby protrusion, she will steer the Good Ship Unlucky Crab for the rest of their co-mingled life. Packed full of parasite, the crab will forgo its own needs to serve those of its master. It won’t molt, grow reproductive organs, or attempt to reproduce. It won’t even regrow appendages, as healthy crabs can. Rather than waste the nutrients on itself, a host crab will hobble along and continue to look for food with which to feed its parasite master.
Six horrifying parasites
http://www.neatorama.com/2006/08/21/six-horrifying-parasites/
I think that if the unlucky crab is a man crab, the Sacculina snips off its balls right away, or whatever substitutes for balls on a crab, just to make very sure it doesn’t try anything.
Sacculina carcini is useful as a source for enlightening metaphors, which I will leave to the imagination of the horrified and enlightened Dear Reader.
Villago Delenda Est
@jl:
The crab sounds like a Teabagger. The parasite being a “job creator” of the top 1%, of course…
jayjaybear
*stares at the pictures*
Ooh…Republicans…
Judas Escargot
Just in time for 2012: Mayan ruins, 11 centuries old, found in Northern GA. Apparently there was a branch that lived further north.
Wonder if they’ll find a Stargate in the basement…
jl
As in, what brain eating parasite is making the House GOP humiliate and plausibly leading to it destroy itself in the next election, in front of the whole country? Is it the Sacculina carcini?
I notice that the quote snippets of Boehner on news reports are getting shorter and shorter. I guess playing whole sentences is just too horrifying for the story editors. I heard one today that cut him off in mid sentence, as soon as it became clear that what he was saying made absolutely zero sense.
Schlemizel
Sarah – I do not know you to be a prevaricator but your story is somewhat hard to believe.
No way Willard would give any of the help 3 whole days off simply to attend the funeral of a parent!
kerFuFFler
@jl:
Thanks for letting us know about this impressively awful parasite! :) I’ll be checking that link out post haste!
The Moar You Know
Hey all! Cathy and I just got back from our yearly promenade to the Opera Museum in Montenegro. Have you not been? Their restaurant is fabulous. I recommend the soba with fishcake marinated in ouzo, extraordinary. The cuisine on the continent has always made me feel that sometimes that our decision to make Manhattan our home base might have been a little shortsighted. Ah well, the price of youthful folly must always be paid. Jack is finishing his third year at Harvard, captain of the rowing team. Clarisse is in her last year at Sidwell, we’re looking forward to her valedictorian’s speech.
Cathy and I decided to do our part for the 99%, and we dumped all of our oil company stock. Painful, but partly mitigated by our purchase of matching Bugatti Veryons.
Happy Holidays, all! Do call if you’re ever in Manhattan.
Brachiator
Here’s a little tidbit on the importance of the upcoming election, from an Tax and Accounting web resource.
ericblair
That wouldn’t be the tapeworm, would it? I mean, this is Japan.
harlana
@jayjaybear:
i’m not reading the post or looking at the pictures but i’m glad i checked the comments because of this
Sarah Proud and Tall
@The Moar You Know:
What the fuck? Have you been intercepting my emails?
Punchy
Word on the street is that Barkley is staying at USuCk. Must be getting mad nookie to pass up first round scratch.
PPOG Penguin
Connoisseurs of this kind of stuff should check out Carl Zimmer’s deliriously disgusting book “Parasite Rex,” which cheerfully surveys all sorts of uglies, but also goes into how they work, what impact they have on ecologies and (to me the most unnerving) how they change animal behaviour to improve their own chances. Fascinating stuff.
wrb
Here is an interesting addition to the Drone threads. Turns out that the FAA currently has drones quite restricted but they are about to fix that. They will be accepting comments.
AND Lane Co Oregon (home of Eugene) already has a drone in the air.
My prediction: the ultimate drone Big Brother nightmare will be Google unless they are stopped. We’ll have live backyard view. Just follows from their model of collecting and selling total information.
Nutella
@Schlemizel:
I’m sure he made the cook fill up the freezer and teach the houseboy how to do service a la Russe before he let her leave town.
matt
The photographer reflected in the Anasakis’s case isn’t how I envisioned Sara.
The Moar You Know
@Sarah Proud and Tall: We twirl in the same circles. I thought I saw your name on their mailing list.
Nutella
@Judas Escargot:
Their only source link is to examiner.com, whose only source link is to a site with a lot of woo, so I’d like to see a little more evidence of the Mayan connection. There a lots of other ancient mounds all over the south and midwest and it’s not clear if this one proves anything new about them. I hope this publicity leads to some investigation at the site.
Morbo
Is there some other significance of that phrase, or did you just become 1000% more awesome?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Schlemizel:
The explanation is obvious enough; Willard was young and naive back then and didn’t understand the working class is willing to kill family members just to take a paid day off.
Brachiator
@wrb:
Fixed.
It wasn’t that long ago that Mark Zuckerberg noted that “the rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy.” Who needs drones or even google when you got some variation of Carrier IQ on every smartphone and tablet and everybody is on Facebook?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Nutella:
Not to mention in the comments of the article the archeologist they quote is saying the article is all BS and he links to the report on the site were he describes it as normal Indian settlement in an odd location.
Morbo
Aw nuts, are youtube links moderated now, or was there another spam filter victim in that?
Sarah Proud and Tall
@matt:
I have a little man to do those kinds of menial tasks for me…
Sarah Proud and Tall
@Morbo:
Some old guy called Bill who wrote some plays.
Litlebritdifrnt
“A little shop” Ha. One of my favorite Dr. Who scenes is when he (Tennant) and Rose go to the New Earth Cat Nurses Hospital and he wanders around saying “where’s the shop, I always like a little shop”
maya
I’ve have this bloated, crowded feeling in my stomach for the past few days. Uh, SPT how many feet a day can that Diphyllobothrium nihonkaiense grow?
Matthew Reid Krell
@ericblair:
As in, the chef? Or the meal?
Stentor
@Brachiator: I’m not on FaceBook for precisely that reason.