A Russian man has married a pizza.

Before the ceremony, the unnamed 22-year-old told those gathered together that while "love between two humans is a complicated wild thing," pizza "would not reject you or betray you, and speaking quite frankly and sincerely, I love it.

"Your love for a person is a temporary affection," he reflected. "However, love for food is eternal, and stays with you till your last day."

The groom was kind of slobbed-out, but the bride wore a nice white bridal gown; the couple posed, touchingly, behind a large heart set aflame.

This took place in Tomsk, which is in Siberia, which means it's not really in Russia. Civil authorities there would not sanction the marriage, and neither would the grump-beards of the Russian Orthodox Church. But a local pizzeria obliged with an official-appearing wedding license, a veil for the bride, and a place to get out of the cold; on the couple's wedding day, it was roughly 9 degrees.

It is said that on their wedding night the groom ate the bride. Which is a not uncommon occurence on such occasions.

Some might call such a union unnatural, or assert it can never last. But in the true-life documentary film The Princess Bride, the fairest Princess Buttercup elects to stumble, over many years, towards the altar, with a bumbling farmhand who keeps going mostly dead. While in the ur-creation tale A Midsummer Night's Dream, the fairy queen Titania enters into blissitude with a donkey-man.

So, who are we to judge?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfqhEU7HyNM]

Besides, this seems like it might be becoming a thing.

A Canadian lass has announced her engagement to a pizza—"I just want you. Nothing else, just you"—while a lovestruck San Francisco man is betrothed to a steak burrito.

People who want to get jiggy with foodstuffs are called sitophiliacs. I did not know that until this day.

If you prefer your sexual congress with trees, you are known as a paraphiliac.

And here I thought you were just called a hillbilly, as set forth in the true-life documentary film Deliverance.

Learn something new every day.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not currenty married to anyone, not man nor beast, woman nor foodstuff. He once had a wife, but she got lost. Thirty years the two were together, and theirs sounds like the typical long-term marriage: she called him a vampire, while he stated that anyone who could put up with her for three weeks was a hero who deserved a monument. In 2014 they officially called the whole thing off; he continues to run the country, while she obsesses over people who want to change Russian spelling.

But Putin may not long be single, now that one of the innumerable varieties of the Kardashian fungus has posted to her Instagram account a photograph of a body double of her, nude, on horseback. Both Kardashianologists and geopolitical strategists believe this to be a naked attempt to attract the attention of Putin, who is well-known for his penchant for disrobing, to various degrees, and then riding some trusty steed across the tundra.

Of course, Putin has also been known to ride bears, sharks, meteors, large birds, skydivers, seashells, and kittens. As seen below, he also once, in honor of the Sochi Olympics, rode a unicorn into space, in order to pass the Olympic torch to an orbiting spacecraft.

But it is the ponies he really loves.

And so, goes the Theory, the Kardashian fungus wishes to entice Putin into joining her in au naturel equestrianing. The Kardashian fungus wishes to blanket itself across the entire globe, kinda like Ice-nine, and it is not at present content with its Russian penetration. So, figures it, why not spread from the top? The fish, as they say, rots from the head.

So. We shall see.

Despite the occasional lack of horse sense in allowing such as Kardashians and Putins to ride them, horses, as even the Science Men now admit, possess consciousness.

Interesting piece there, a conversation with Wendy Williams, who has recently published a horse-book, one that concerns, in part, the evolving Science Man theory of animal consciousness. She reflects therein on Donald Griffin, a neuroscientist who increasingly became convinced that animals possess consciousness—just like humans—until in 1976 he wrote a book, Animal Minds, that flat-out said it.

At which time he was thrown out of the Science Man fraternity. Because, at the time, all the Science Men, they just Knew, that animals possessed no such thing at all.

When it first came out, Don got a great deal of flack. There were people who called it the Satanic Verses of the animal science world. But as things progressed he came to be known as a leader in the field of consciousness in animals. He died about a decade ago. I wish he were around to see how widely accepted his ideas and books are now.

Williams also observes, correctly, that:

[E]volution and biochemistry have given us an affinity with other animals. People who live in cities and don’t have animals in their lives, I think, are lonely for them. I know I am when I don’t have animals around me. I feel lonely and ill at ease. We have this biochemistry that makes us like to have a lot of life around us.

I had a wonderful experience once in a camp in Zimbabwe. I woke up very early one morning, not because I wanted to but because there were so many noises outside my tent. The whole world was this amazing symphony of sound I’d never heard before. The baboons were very loud but there were all kinds of other animals out there too, like monkeys and birds. It was overwhelming; a quite beautiful feeling. And I realized that’s the world we evolved to hear. But so few of us get to hear that wonderful sound.

There is a reason why this below is the most-shared video ad, among humans, ever:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnVuqfXohxc]

This week potentates from all over the world are blowing volcanoes of carbon to come to Paris and there blow volcanoes of carbon about how people should stop blowing volcanoes of carbon while meanwhile in the streets people are blowing volcanoes of carbon protesting that the potentates and their peoples are blowing volcanoes of carbon.

The world's most remote inhabited island has a volcano right at the center. It is Tristan da Cunha, eight miles wide in the south Atlantic Ocean, 1743 miles east of Cape Town—a journey that consumes seven days by boat; air travel is not possible, as there is no airstrip on the island.

There are no restaurants. There are no hotels. Credit cards are not accepted, the beaches aren't safe for swimming, and every month brings between 17 and 26 days of rain.

There are 269 people living there. All of them are farmers. In 1961 the volcano on the island shivered and shook the place, and had a bit of a spew. All the inhabitants were evacuated to Cape Town; from there, to England. But two years later they came back. They had heard London calling. And they just weren't interested.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8kmvQORjrA]
∞
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgTgledCjOI]

In Biloxi, Mississippi, a man entered a Waffle House. This House is a chain. Some links in the chain allow smoking. This link did not. The man lit a cigarette. A waitress told the man that in this Waffle House smoking was not allowed. So the man reached into his waistband and took out a gun and shot the waitress in the head and killed her.

This is now the default reaction among the Americans. Faced with opposition, over anything, opposition however slight: take out the gun, and shoot.

The dead woman, Julie Fowlis, I mean Julie Brightwell, returned to that Waffle House after it had reopened in 2014. Having been flattened by Hurricane Katrina. Once, down around Biloxi, Julie, she was a pretty girl, dancin' in the water. A sister of the ocean. Now she's a corpse with a hole in her head. The boy, he filled his pail, with salty water. And the sky is red. From off toward New Orleans.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFdiYDzbodM]

GOP presidential candidate Nebby Meeko has decreed that if your brain has an affliction that bubbles up that there is a mean and nasty god, and your brain-affliction further bubbles up that this mean and nasty god has a Law, but a government or a people has a different-one Law than the brain-affliction-bubbling-up mean-and-nasty-god Law, then it is required that you trashcan the government or people Law, in favor of the brain-bubbling-affliction-that-hallucinates-for-you-the-mean-and-nasty-god Law.

Pronounced the clinically insane Meeko:

"We are clearly called, in the Bible, to adhere to our civil authorities, but that conflicts with also a requirement to adhere to God's rules," he said. "When those two come in conflict, God's rules always win. In essence, if we are ever ordered by a government authority to personally violate and sin, violate God's law and sin, if we're ordered to stop preaching the gospel, if we're ordered to perform a same-sex marriage as someone presiding over it, we are called to ignore that. We cannot abide by that because government is compelling us to sin."

It is expected that this shall be the defense offered at trial by the metal-roof man who shot up the Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic.

Maybe, even, too, by the Biloxi brain-blower.

The Hairball capped a week in which he cruelly and publicly mocked a crippled man (and then, like the lowest and most craven coward in or out of Christendom, denied it), repeatedly and shamelessly lied that he had in real-time viewed television footage of "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey ebulliently ululating in come-pants pleasure at the 9/11 fall of the Twin Towers, and said it was sure tough-titty about those dead Colorado people, but "I see a lot of dislike for Planned Parenthood," "tremendous dislike," "a tremendous group of people that think it's terrible," by releasing a map that reflects his understanding of the world, a map that he shall have plastered across the walls of every classroom in the nation, once he is crowned king of the country, the country which he shall immediately and at once, by imperial order, rename Trump Country.

Supporters of Uncle Ben Carson announced this week that they are starting a subscription drive to raise sufficient funds to hew into solid rock a mammoth monument akin to Mount Rushmore, that will instead be monikered Mount Dumbmore, and that shall feature the visage of Uncle Ben, together with those of Goober Pyle, Charlie Gordon, and Lennie from Of Mice And Men.

"In today's post-racial America, a black man can be every bit as titantically stupid as a white man, and Uncle Ben Carson is living proof of that," explained Uncle Ben campaign director Mort Kleeb. "Uncle Ben is dumb as a rock, and therefore rock is the only medium that can truly capture his ineffable dumbness. Mount Dumbmore, once it is completed, shall become a shrine to which every American—yea, verily, and upon their knees—shall flock to, and, there, genuflect."

Kleeb stated that Mount Dumbmore shall be carved out of rock in the state of Utah, in honor of the (rendered below) monologue—"you ever feel as if your mind had started to erode? ever been to Utah?"—delivered by J. Frank Parnell, lobotimized nuclear scientist, in the true-life documentary film Repo Man, Parnell the man Uncle Ben has credited, in amongst his various revelations concerning storing grain in the pyramids to feed the dinosaurs while Thomas Jefferson in the Sphinx scribbled the Constitution, as his first and finest mentor.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VKzqAefBVY]

Recently a Russian aerial death machine for a brief time crossed Israeil "airspace." The Israelis managed not to shoot it down.

"Airspace" is an ape notion rooted in what Orwell correctly identified as "nationalism—that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige."

In the lunatic illusion that terrestrial dirt may not only be parceled out into "nations," but that these "nations" may then not only rule their dirt, but also the air above it.

Musing on this screamingly insane nutbarness, I wondered if the "airpsace" claimed by the dirt-patches, it had any limit; if, say, a Tralfamadorian spacecraft, traveling some eleventy-billion parsecs away, but technically above the dirt-patch of, say, Turkey, might then be said to be "violating" the "airspace" of the dirt-patch of Turkey, and thus be subject to Turkish termination with extreme prejudice. . . though it might be carrying but a coded message of "Greetings."

And I found there was no real answer. That there is no real agreement among the current ape-lords of the present earthly dirt-patches, as to where "airspace" begins and ends.

And what, I next wondered, about digging beneath the dirt? For we know that occasionally an ape-lord will order a tunnel built beneath a neighboring ape-lord's dirt-patch. So how far does the subterranean "wormspace" extend? And: no apparent answer to this either.

We do know that the deepest hole yet dug into the earth by humans is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which the Soviet Union for 24 years drilled into the planet, in an attempt to get to the center of the earth. Below is what the end-cap of the thing today looks like. Pretty sad. Ugly rusty junk.

We also know—not least from this Kola Superdeep Borehole lunacy, and what we must assume was its US equivalent—that there is plenty of stuff below the surface of the earth that is not yet ready for the humans to get to it. Because the humans are as yet too irresponsible and stupid.

Like the six quintillion gallons of water beneath the earth's crust. That water is simply not going to permit humans to suck it up. Any more than are the various waters on worlds in space. Not until the humans grow up.

It is all very wearying. Because all this nuttery is going to go. Nations, "airspace," Mean Gods, "warriors," money, cities, jobs. They're all over. And it's already happened. It's just a matter of waiting for the time to catch up.

To, for one thing, the fact that the world, as it is—as Lew Welch, among many others, Saw—is actually a pretty fine place.

Notes from a Pioneer on a Speck in Space

Few things that grow here poison us.
Most of the animals are small.
Those big enough to kill us do it in a way
Easy to understand, easy to defend against.
The air, here, is just what the blood needs.
We don't use helmets or special suits.

The Star, here, doesn't burn you if you
Stay outside as much as you should.
The worst of our winters is bearable.
Water, both salt and sweet, is everywhere.
The things that live in it are easily gathered.
Mostly, you can eat them raw with safety and pleasure.

Yesterday my wife and I brought back
Shells, driftwood, stones, and other curiosities
Found on the beach of the immense
Fresh-water Sea we live by.
She was excited by a slender white stone which:
"Exactly fits the hand!"

I couldn't share her wonder;
here, almost everything does

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbnlhCizyj8]

This is the first day of December.

There is at present a Portlandia band called The Decemberists. Which "travels exclusively by Dr. Herring's Brand Dirigible Balloons." Which works, now and again, to give little maybe-enlightening shocks, to the human system (as in, say, marrying a pizza). And which is named, in part, for the "melancholy" that the band members, they understand, is inherently imbued in the month of December.

Below is four minutes or so of that melancholy. Based on the Japanese folk-tale "The Crane Wife." Wherein a man marries a woman, who is in fact a crane, disguised as a human being. But the man doesn't know that. To bring money into the man's household, the crane-woman begins secretly plucking her own feathers, to weave silk brocade, which the man sells. He becomes increasingly greedy, for the profits from these sales; he demands more, and more, and more, and ever-more; she becomes increasingly drawn, and gaunt, and ill, in producing. Until one day the man, in express defiance of her one-ever request, peeks into the room, where his crane-wife is at work. And that is the end of that. She. flies. away.

each feather
it fell from skin

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93__Ir44q2M]