…be looking shife / so I look shife back
“If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formallythe disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.”
There’s a crocodile autopsy playing on Animal Planet, and Indian TV is blurring out the crocodile’s heart, though not any of its other innards, nor the anesthetized spread-eagle monkey’s testicles that AP is using as a teaser for some other show. Nonviolence?
Thanks to an odd turn of events, I went yesterday evening to India’s first professional skateboarding exhibition, featuring Tony Hawk, Andy Macdonald, and dudes I’d never heard of because I haven’t watched the X Games since I was 12. The crowd in the VIP section, to which we had access through a coworker’s diamong-earringed luxury apartment broker, was probably 50% hyperprivileged Bombay teenagers and 50% 20/30something nightclub scene types (dudes had long hair and deeply unbuttoned shirts, ladies were mostly models and would-be models).
The heat, humidity, and jetlag really took their toll on the skaters. Tony Hawk kept trying for “the 900,” a 2.5x aerial spin that is apparently his signature move, but he couldn’t stick the landing. Each time he wiped out and dragged his face across the pipe, the horrible announcer kept saying things like “Don’t worry, we won’t let him leave until he gets the 900” and trying to pump up a crowd that didn’t care much about skateboarding (why would they? there’s no place to skate: the sidewalks are crumbling and covered in shanties / feral dogs / out-of-control scooters). After the seventh or eighth tumble, a very sweaty Tony lay face-down on the pipe for a minute or two while the announcer kept promising he’d try again. The awfulness ended when he did a cool somersault dismount and graciously said his goodbyes, the First Indian 900 unattained.
There was also techno music, lots of it. I sniped a pic of an BomBro wearing a dirty UGA baseball cap (Fig. 2). That girl in the foreground wearing the blue top looked like Kaavs and was wearing diamond earrings the size of small grapes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diclofenac#Ecological_effects
Ecological effects
Use of diclofenac in animals has been reported to have led to a sharp decline in the vulture population in the Indian subcontinent, 95% decline in 2003,[22] 99.9% decline as of 2008. The mechanism is, it is presumed, renal failure, a known side-effect of diclofenac. Vultures eat the carcasses of livestock that have been administered veterinary diclofenac, and are poisoned by the accumulated chemical.[23] At a meeting of the National Wildlife Board in March 2005, the Government of India announced that it intended to phase out the veterinary use of diclofenac.[24]Meloxicam is a safer candidate to replace use of diclofenac.[25] It is more expensive than diclofenac, but the price is coming down as more drug companies begin to manufacture it.[26]
“The loss of tens of millions of vultures over the last decade has had major ecological consequences across the Indian subcontinent that pose a potential threat to human health. In many places, populations of feral dogs (Canis familiaris) have increased sharply from the disappearance of Gyps vultures as the main scavenger of wild and domestic ungulate carcasses. Associated with the rise in dog numbers is an increased risk of rabies”[25] and casualties of almost 50,000 people.[27] The Government of India cites one of those major consequences as a vulture species extinction.[24] A major shift in transfer of corpse pathogens from vultures to feral dogs and rats can lead to a disease pandemic causing millions of deaths in a crowded country like India; whereas vultures’ digestive systems safely destroy many species of such pathogens.
The resulting multiplication of feral dogs in India and Pakistan has caused a multiplication of leopards feeding on those dogs and invading urban areas looking for dogs to prey on, resulting in occasional attacks on human children.[28]
The loss of vultures has had a social impact on the Indian Zoroastrian Parsi community, who traditionally use vultures to dispose of human corpses in Towers of Silence, but are now compelled to seek alternate methods of disposal.[25]
Notes from Last Night’s Drive Down to Nariman Point
