Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes were having lunch together — now there’s a lunch date from hell — when someone recognized their villainy, yelled at them, and poured water on them, as one righteously does. The two scumbags just laughed it off, though.

Mr Yiannopoulos said it was only with water which is so lame.

Well, gosh, I guess there are standards. Next time, use salad oil, or soy sauce, or mayonnaise — those are often handy in restaurants. Raw eggs or an open tin of surströmming would be even better, but you’d have to come prepared. One can always fall back on the old standby of simply puking on them.

I can imagine even worse things, but you have to leave room to escalate for when you encounter Henry Kissinger or Dick Cheney in public.

A quote from J. K. Huysman’s Against Nature:

Does there exist here below a being, conceived in the joys of fornication and born amid the pangs of childbirth, whose figure and whose form is more dazzling, more splendid than that of those two locomotives adopted by the Northern railway line?

One, the Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, her long delicate body imprisoned in a glittering corset of copper, as supple and sinewy as a stretching cat, a showy, gilded blonde whose extraordinary grace is frightening, when, stiffening her muscles of steel, beginning to sweat on her warm flanks, she sets in shuddering motion the immense rosette of her slender wheels and springs forward, eagerly, across hill and dale!

The other, the Engerth, is a dark and monumental brunette with a deep husky cry, her brawny loins constrained by a cast-iron girdle, a monstrous beast with a dishevelled mane of black smoke, and six low, coupled wheels, what a crushing force she has when, making the earth tremble, she slowly, ponderously pulls the heavy tail of her goods-wagons! ‘Certainly there’s nothing to match such delicate slenderness and terrifying force in the dainty beauty of the blonde and the majestic beauty of the brunette; one can surely say that man, in his own way, has done as well as the God in which he believes.

(From Helena Constantine’s MeWe page, which is not at all safe for work)

Seriously, dude, no one should get that hyperbolically erotic about anything that isn’t a spider, but you be you.

Guess who came out on top in a list of Every State, Ranked by How Miserable Its Winters Are? You guessed it. Although the psychoanalyzing of Minnesotans is way off the mark.

1. Minnesota
To think of the generally cheerful brood of Nordic-bred people being the winners in any sort of a contest of misery seems downright crazy. But for all those adorable don’tcha knows, we think something else is going on. We think beneath that eternal Nordic happiness is some inner pain, trapped below the surface like a Grain Belt dropped into an ice fishing hole, a cauldron of hot anger ready to spill out like a cut-open Jucy Lucy.

How can you remain so upbeat when you get all the winter weather patterns? Alberta clippers? Sure. Panhandle hooks? You betcha! Parts of northern Minnesota see up to 170in of snow in a winter. One hundred seventy inches! That’s like two and a half times the height of Kent Hrbek!! It can get down to -60 degrees, a temperature at which frostbite can occur in fewer than five minutes. There are no chinook winds or moderating oceans to temper things outside of a small area by Lake Superior. Your sports teams never win championships. All of your good high school hockey players end up starring for NHL teams in other cities. Ice fishing can’t be that cool, really.

And so we think that — despite all appearances — Minnesota does in fact have the most miserable winter in the United States. So to all the Eriks, and Astrids, and Christens, and Bjorns, and Brynjars, it’s OK to show a little displeasure at the clusterfuck of a meteorological hand you’ve been dealt. After all, don’tcha know emoting is good for the system?

No, no, no. This is precisely wrong. Minnesotans wallow in their gloriously bad weather. You would not believe how many times I’ve heard residents brag about the Halloween blizzard of 1991 — and I kind of feel bad that I didn’t move here until 2000, so I can’t contribute to the myth. Every winter I, and every other Minnesotan, check the weather reports religiously, because otherwise we wouldn’t have anything to talk about, and besides we’re hoping for another day of record breaking cold. Bring on the polar vortex! We’d be heartbroken if we had weather as boring as, say, Iowa’s.

We’re all frost giants up here, and proud of it.

Karen Stollznow has written some and is selling them on Amazon. These are variations on the kinds of modern myths you may have heard as a skeptic many times, but they all have slight twists, which means we’ll probably be hearing these as True Facts™ sometime. Don’t Leave Me, Unforeseen Circumstances, Welcome Home, I Am Me, and The Dark Road are all available on Kindle right now. Download and read them at the Halloween party tonight! They’re all short stories and perfect for a creepy session around the fireplace.

You do realize that doubt has been a central theme in philosophy for ages, right? Do you think certainty is an improvement, especially when it’s unwarranted?

I stumbled across the story of the Cat sìth.

The Cat Sìth or Cat Sidhe is a fairy creature from Celtic mythology, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its chest. Legend has it that the spectral cat haunts the Scottish Highlands. The legends surrounding this creature are more common in Scottish folklore, but a few occur in Irish. Some common folklore suggested that the Cat Sìth was not a fairy, but a witch that could transform into a cat nine times.
…
The people of the Scottish Highlands did not trust the Cat Sìth. They believed that it could steal a person’s soul, before it was claimed by the gods, by passing over a corpse before burial; therefore watches called the Feill Fadalach (Late Wake) were performed night and day to keep the Cat Sìth away from a corpse before burial.[1] Methods of “distraction” such as games of leaping and wrestling, catnip, riddles, and music would be employed to keep the Cat Sìth away from the room in which the corpse lay.[1] In addition, there were no fires where the body lay, as it was said that the Cat Sìth was attracted to the warmth.

And then I looked down at our cat, which has been a major pain in the butt while my wife is away, and realized…solid black cat with a white spot on its chest.

Goddamnit, it’s been trying to steal my soul all this time.