Goats, Guns, and a Mazda...Mit Commentary

Nigerian police detain goat over armed robbery

23 Jan 2009 15:40:22 GMT

Source: Reuters

LAGOS, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery. 

Vigilantes took the black and white beast to the police saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323.

"The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them. However one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat," Kwara state police spokesman Tunde Mohammed told Reuters by telephone.

"We cannot confirm the story, but the goat is in our custody. We cannot base our information on something mystical. It is something that has to be proved scientifically, that a human being turned into a goat," he said.

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in parts of Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. Residents came to the police station to see the goat, photographed in one national newspaper on its knees next to a pile of straw. (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://af.reuters.com/ ) (Reporting by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Katie Nguyen)

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But, as One Man in Baghdad points out:

“It’s obvious that you want to catch it unawares with a surprise question, like
that moment in ‘The Dirty Dozen’ when a Nazi cop says, ‘Hello, how are you?’
to the escaped American prisoner who is getting on a city bus.”

Yeah, F Train

So this guy was watching me as his girlfriend drunkenly collapsed on him on the F train to Brooklyn tonight. He was watching me watch these


WASPY girls who were actually sitting next to two people who you will see after you see


my hand, which I photographed in an attempt to show you that I was not utterly smirking at and photographing


this couple


who were awesomely engaged in an inappropriate lap dance.

Addendum to Below

I held the metal pole above my head on the 2 train tonight staring at this:


A plane in the shape of a fish. Granted, this one is in the East River, but planes in water seems to be the theme of January 15, 2009. So is survival, which all the passengers did. Motherholyfuck, for good measure.

Nothing Never Happens

You know you’re having an absurd day when you have just opened “Document 49” in Microsoft Word.

Oh, right. And a plane went down blocks from here into the Hudson River. The helicopters and sirens have been, let’s say, distracting.

And I can’t be the only New Yorker who nearly threw up and burst into tears when she heard the news.

They all seem to have gotten out okay. Imagine going down into that icy water, though, watching it surround your shitty ovoid plane window…holy motherfucking fucking crapping hell.

Back to work.

Onward

The other night I got a text from someone who I am still figuring out, text-wise. I decided not to respond, but wanted to. Part of me did. Next to me was a fortune cookie. Now, I’m not normally the type to go for signs and signifiers (not true: signifiers: yes) but I thought to myself, quite boldly, in bold-faced thought:

“I will reply if this fortune cookie tells me to in some way.”

I crackle open the plastic, I crack open the toasted cookie. Here was what my fortune said:

“They will be grateful that you call.”

Really.

So I did. And felt so completely good about it. And now I am considering consulting the occult more frequently.

Just now I found an unopened fortune cookie (yes, they are scattered around my kitchen for just such moments). I pondered the cheap plastic wrapping as a possible container to the harbinger of what will happen next, or should, in my life.

I opened it up and broke the cookie. Here was what my fortune said:

“Oops, wrong cookie.”

Live People

“We choose the dead because of our tie to them, our identification with them. Their helplessness, passivity, vulnerability is our own. We all yearn toward the state of inanition, the condition of harmlessness, where we are perforce lovable and fragile. It is only by a great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk. To behave like live people.”

—Janet Malcolm, “The Silent Woman”