Goddamn Brownies

Recently in Gastonia, North Carolina a couple was arrested after being found "going at it" in a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Sex acts in public are nothing all that new, but the age difference between the couple is the kicker. The mugshots paint a pretty picture too.



It turns out Asia Marie Howard, 25, was paid $20 to blow Mr. William Walter Stephens, 83, in his Buick. You expect prostitutes to troll truck stops and seedy areas, but I never figured a Wal-Mart parking lot the place for working girls. Though I'm not surprised.

The officer on the scene stopped them as they were leaving the parking lot, after they had been seen having sex in the aformentioned car. At least he let them finish, I'm sure that is not a sight one would want to see up close. You would think the charge would be prostitution since Howard admitted to being paid for the oral sex, but not in North Carolina. The charge - crime against nature. Yep, in some states certain sex acts, other than missionary I presume, are still illegal. This includes anal, oral, bestiality, necrophilia and in some cases homosexual acts. I understand not wanting to see anything like this in a public place, but if two consenting adults want to have a little ass sex, what is the big deal?

I remember around the time I graduated from high school there was a sexual arrest made in the parking lot of Wal-Mart in Burleson. A nineteen year old guy, who I knew, was caught getting hot and heavy with a thirteen year old girl in his car. Way to screw up your life for some action. He is still registered as a sex offender, as confirmed by the website, and just went in for his yearly check-in and photo update on his 30th birthday last week. How can you ever enjoy a birthday again when you know you have to go have your new sex offender picture taken?

What interesting story do I find from Reuters when I get home tonight?

"Vampire" unearthed in Venice plague grave

It seems they found a female skeleton with a brick lodged in her jaw. This was done to keep her from feeding on plague victims during the 16th century. This is a very interesting aspect to the beginning of the vampire mythos in the world. Between the tales of blood drinking (which have been around for ages), Countess Bathory, the disease porphyria (where subjects are extremely allergic to sunlight and are healed by ingesting blood)and now these findings it is easy to see where the vampire came from.

It is a very interesting story about how these "shroud-eaters," as they were called, were perceived by gravediggers during the plague years. Read on for the full scoop.



By Daniel Flynn ROME (Reuters) - Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

"This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire," Borrini told Reuters by telephone. "This helps ... authenticate how the myth of vampires was born."

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 -- in which the artist Titian died -- on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three km (2 miles) northeast of Venice and was used as a sanitorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse's teeth, and vampires became known as "shroud-eaters."

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the "undead" were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

"To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there," said Borrini. "It's possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized."

While legends about blood-drinking ghouls date back thousands of years, the modern figure of the vampire was encapsulated in the Irish author Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula," based on 18th century eastern European folktales.

Source: Reuters UK