sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really.
You’re being kind when you say “almost 100% fatality”. What people need to hear is: if you get to develop rabies symptoms, you’re dead. If you get heavy treatment after developping symptoms, you still need a miracle. Like, a real miracle, you should enter some religion if you escape that.
ALSO, I don’t want people feeling confident about petting stray/wild animals because there’s a vaccine available, either. I’ll explain why from my own experience (I’m not a doctor).
I got bitten by a wild tamarin once, on the pulp of my index finger. It drew blood, there are many wild animals in the area (tamarins, possums, bats, foxes) and it isn’t that uncommon to hear about 1 or 2 rabies cases every now and again (a puppy we gave to a friend got it, for instance), so I went to an ambulatory immediately.
Because I was bitten in an ultrasensitive area, I needed fast treatment. But it was also a small area, so the usual thing they do - inject the vaccine in the place - wasn’t a choice. They told me they’d divide the shot in 5 small ones, and inject me all over my body, so the antidote would get to my entire system fast.
Please stop for a moment and think that the disease is so worrysome that they’d rather needle me all over than to give me one shot and wait until it spread through my system.
Then they said that, okay, but there was a catch first. I needed to take an antiallergic shot. “Why?” “Because the virus is devastating, and as the vaccine is made from it, but weakened (like almost every vaccine) it will still create a reaction, and it’s a strong one, and it’s veru common for people to have strong allergic reactions to it.” YOU HAVE TO TAKE AN ANTIALLERGIC SHOT IN ORDER TO TAKE THE VACCINE COZ THE VACCINE COULD POTENTIALLY MAKE YOU REALLY SICK
ALSO IT WASN’T JUST “A LITTLE ANTIALLERGIC SHOT”
IT WAS ONE OF THESE FUCKERS HERE.
It was OBVIOUSLY dripped in my body and not injected because HAHAHAHA. Truth be told I was an adult already and I’m tall so I have a lot of mass but STILL.
So after I had taken the antiallegic and was starting to feel drowsy (as a side effect of it) the doctor came with the 5 shots.
- One in each buttock
- One in each thigh
- One in my left arm
They all stung like a bitch and I usually don’t care about shots.
“Okay so can I go home now?”
“No, we have to keep you under observation for 2h so we’re SURE the vaccine won’t give you any reaction.”
BINCH I WAS GIVEN A BUTTLOAD OF MEDICINE BUT THERE WAS STILL A RISK.
I slept through the two hours and then was liberated to go home. My legs, butt, and left arm hurt all over, like I had been punched there, for a few days. I also had a fever (not feverish, a fever)
BUT DID YOU THINK IT WAS OVER?
WRONG!!!
I had to take four reinforcement shots in the next month, one a week, so I could be positively be considered immunized.Every time I took a shot, my arm would swell and hurt like it’d been hit, and when night came I’d have a fever. Because that’s how fucking strong the vaccine is, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW VICIOUS THE VIRUS IS.
So yeah. DO NOT PUT YOURSELF IN RISK, GODDAMNIT. Rabies is a rare condition all over, THANK GOD, and 1 confirmed case can be already considered a surge and a reason for mass campaigning, AND FOR A REASON.
If you like messing with stray/wild animals, don’t go picking them up and be extra careful. Or just, like, DON’T - call a vet or an authority that can handle them safely.
I must add that I live in a country with universal healthcare, so I didn’t pay a single penny for my treatment. Is this your reality? If not, ONE MORE REASON TO NOT FUCKING PLAY WITH THIS SHIT.
Rabies is 100% lethal. Period. If you are scratched or bitten by an animal you’re not positive is vaccinated, you need to find treatment NOW. And probably go through all that shit I’ve been through (also if you are immunosupressed? I DON’T KNOW WHAT’D HAPPEN)
Stay safe and don’t be stupid ffs
Guys, I know this isn’t art nor anything like that, but I’ve been hearing about this rabies thing and ???? Look I trust none of you would risk yourselves like this, but maybe you can educate someone through my experience and stuff.
Also rabies does not necessarily cause frothing-at-the-mouth aggression in animals. Docility is also a very common symptom so any wild animal that is ‘friendly’ or ‘likes to be pet’ is suspect. Literally any wild animal is a vector.
Finally, you don’t need to be bitten. All you need is to come into contact with an infected animal’s bodily fluids through a cut that maybe you didn’t notice when you were handling it when it drooled on you.
Never touch a wild animal.
Infection with the rabies virus progresses through three distinct stages.
Prodromal: Stage One. Marked by altered behavioral patterns. “Docility” and “likes to be pet” are very common in the prodromal stage. Usually lasts 1-3 days. An animal in this stage carries virus bodies in its saliva and is infectious.
Excitative: Stage Two. Also called “furious” rabies. This is what everyone thinks rabies is–hyperreacting to stimuli and biting everything. Excessive salivation occurs. Animals in this stage also exhibit hydrophobia or the fear of water; they cannot drink (swallowing causes painful spasms of the throat muscles), and will panic if shown water. Usually lasts 3-4 days before rapidly progressing into the next stage.
Paralytic: Stage Three. Also called “dumb” rabies. As the infection runs its course, the virus starts degrading the nervous system. Limbs begin to fail; animals in this stage will often limp or drag their haunches behind them. If the animal has survived all this way, death will usually come through respiratory arrest: Their diaphragm becomes paralyzed and they stop breathing.
And to add onto the above, saliva isn’t the only infectious fluid. Brain matter is, too. If, somehow, you find yourself in possession of a firearm and faced with a rabid animal, do not go for a head shot. If you do, you will aerosolize the brain matter and effectively create a cloud of infectious material. Breathe it in, and you’ll give yourself an infection.
When I worked in wildlife rehabilitation, I actually did see a rabid animal in person, and it remains one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, because I was literally looking death in the eyes.
A pair of well-intentioned women brought us a raccoon that they thought had been hit by a car. They had found it on the side of the road, dragging its hind legs. They managed–somehow–to get it into a cat carrier and brought it to us.
As they brought it in, I remember how eerily silent it was. Normal raccoons chatter almost constantly. They fidget. They bump around. They purr and mumble and make little grabby-hands at everything. Even when they’re in pain, and especially when they’re stressed. But this one wasn’t moving around inside the carrier, and it wasn’t making a sound.
The clinic director also noticed this, and he asked in a calm but urgent voice for the women to hand the carrier to him. He took it to the exam room and set it on the table while they filled out some forms in the next room. I took a step towards the carrier, to look at our new patient, and without turning around, he told me, “Go to the other side of the room, and stay there.”
He took a small penlight out of the drawer and shone it briefly into the carrier, then sighed. “Bear, if you want to come look at this, you can put on a mask,” he said. “It’s really pretty neat, but I know you’re not vaccinated and I don’t want to take any chances.”
And at that point, I knew exactly what we were dealing with, and I knew that this would be the closest I had ever been to certain death. So I grabbed a respirator from the table and put it on, and held my breath for good measure as I approached the table. The clinic director pointed where I should stand, well back from the carrier door. He shone the light inside again, and I saw two brilliant flashes of emerald green–the most vivid, unnatural eyeshine I had ever seen.
“I don’t know why it does it,” the director murmured, “but it turns their eyes green.”
“What does?” one of the women asked, with uncanny, unintentionally dramatic timing, as she poked her head around the corner.
“Rabies,” the director said. “The raccoon is rabid. Did it bite either of you, or even lick you?” They told us no, said they had even used leather garden gloves when they herded it into the carrier. He told them to throw away the gloves as soon as possible, and steam-clean the upholstery in their car. They asked how they should clean the cat carrier; they wanted it back and couldn’t be convinced otherwise, so he told them to soak it in just barely diluted bleach.
But before we could give them the carrier back, we had to remove the raccoon. The rabid raccoon.
The clinic director readied a syringe with tranquilizers and attached it to the end of a short pole. I don’t remember how it was rigged exactly–whether he had a way to push down the plunger or if the needle would inject with pressure–but all he would have to do was stick the animal to inject it. And so, after sending me and the women back to the other side of the room, he made his fist jab.
He missed the raccoon.
The sound that that animal made on being brushed by the pole can only be described as a roar. It was throaty and ragged and ungodly loud. It was not a sound that a raccoon should ever make. I’m convinced it was a sound that a raccoon physically could not make.
It thrashed inside the carrier, sending it tipping from side to side. Its claws clattered against the walls. It bellowed that throaty, rasping sound again. It was absolutely frenzied, and I was genuinely scared that it would break loose from inside those plastic walls.
Somehow, the clinic director kept his calm, and as the raccoon jolted around inside the cat carrier, he moved in with the syringe again, and this time, he hit it. He emptied the syringe into its body and withdrew the pole.
And then we waited.
We waited for those awful screams, that horrible thrashing, to die down. As we did, the director loaded up another syringe with even more tranquilizer, and as the raccoon dropped off into unconsciousness, he stuck it a second time with the heavier dose. Even then, it growled at him and flailed a paw against the wall.
More waiting, this time to make sure the animal was truly down for the count.
Then, while wearing welder’s gloves, the director opened the door of the carrier and removed the raccoon. She was limp, bedraggled, and utterly emaciated, but she was still alive. We bagged up the cat carrier and gave it to the women again, advising them that now was a good time to leave. They heeded our warning.
I asked if I could come closer to see, and the clinic director pointed where I could stand. I pushed the mask up against my face and tried to breathe as little as possible.
He and his co-director–who I think he was grooming to be his successor, but the clinic actually went under later that year–examined the raccoon together. Donning a pair of nitrile gloves, he reached down and pulled up a handful, a literal fistful, of the raccoon’s skin and released it. It stayed pulled up.
Severe dehydration causes a phenomenon called “skin tenting”. The skin loses its elasticity somewhat, and will be slow to return to its “normal” shape when manipulated. The clinic director estimated that it had been at least four or five days since the raccoon had had anything to eat or drink.
She was already on death’s doorstep, but her rabies infection had driven her exhausted body to scream and lunge and bite.
Because, the scariest thing about rabies (if you ask me) is the way that it alters the behavior of those it infects to increase chances of spreading.
The prodromal stage? Nocturnal animals become diurnal–allowing them to potentially infect most hosts than if they remained nocturnal.
The excitative stage? The infected animal bites at the slightest provocation. Swallowing causes painful spasms, so they drool, coating their bodies in infectious matter. A drink could wash away the virus-charged saliva from their mouth and bodies, so the virus drives them to panic at the sight of water.
(The paralytic stage? By that point, the animal has probably spread its infection to new hosts, so the virus has no need for it any longer.)
Rabies is deadly. Rabies is dangerous. In all of recorded history, one person survived an infection after she became symptomatic, and so far we haven’t been able to replicate that success. The Milwaukee Protocol hasn’t saved anyone else. Just one person. And even then, she still had to struggle to gain back control of her body after all that nerve damage.
Lads, I completely forgot to make a post about M.R. James on August 1st, his birthday and I aim to rectify this. Probably nobody following me knows who he is, so lemme talk about him a little because he is, along with H.P. Lovecraft, my biggest literary inspiration. And if you do know who he is, you’re in the cool club with me!
Montague Rhodes James, the most English name to ever exist, known to his friends as Monty, was a dean and provost of Cambridge and Eton colleges, a well renowned medieval scholar and writer of some of the finest fuckin ghost stories the English language has ever seen. First written to be read aloud during Christmas Eve gatherings of his friends in Cambridge’s Chit Chat Society (where gents got together to get drunk and wrestle on the floor), they continue the Victorian tradition of the Christmas ghost story. James eventually collected and published them in five volumes which are still re-printed today in single volume collections (please buy them).
His stories have a distinct air of fusty scholarship about them, containing a lot of antiquarian references, they’re quite cosy and deal with sleepy manor houses, quiet coastal towns or old Scandinavian towns, all of them filled with the gills with monstrous and hideous spirits, demons and elemental creatures. A monomaniacal consumptive ghost, a runic demon, manifestations of an ancient curse, dead sorcerors and more. James is well known for his jarringly visceral horrors.
The BBC adapted some of his stories in the 70s and early 2000s called ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’, which were collected in a box set that is WELL worth it or you can watch them on YouTube. There’s also a podcast dedicated to discussing his stories by two British guys, A Podcast to the Curious.
If you want a good story to get started, I recommend ‘A Warning to the Curious’ highly as well as the very short ‘Rats’, they and all the others can be read legally online here. Give them time, settle into the mood, and, as James himself put it, ‘let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.’
In 1932, the musicologist Wilfrid Perrett reported to an audience at the Royal Musical Association in London the words of an unnamed professor of Greek with musical leanings: “Nobody has ever made head or tail of ancient Greek music, and nobody ever will. That way madness lies.”
Indeed, ancient Greek music has long posed a maddening enigma. Yet music was ubiquitous in classical Greece, with most of the poetry from around 750BC to 350BC – the songs of Homer, Sappho, and others – composed and performed as sung music, sometimes accompanied by dance. Literary texts provide abundant and highly specific details about the notes, scales, effects, and instruments used. The lyre was a common feature, along with the popular aulos, two double-reed pipes played simultaneously by a single performer so as to sound like two powerful oboes played in concert.
Despite this wealth of information, the sense and sound of ancient Greek music has proved incredibly elusive. Read more.
Although ‘Machiavellian’ has become synonymous with strategies based on deceit and manipulation, Machiavelli’s approach was actually far more balanced. He understood that the more the prince was perceived to rely on devious methods, the less likely it would be that they succeeded. The wise strategist would seek to develop a foundation for the exercise of power that went beyond false impressions and harsh punishments, and onto real accomplishments and general respect. — Freedman, Strategy: A History (via entjs)
I grew up in Cornwall, so I have plenty of places there. There’s this one layby which overlooks Watergate Bay where I spent too much time at peace growing up about 100 yards to the left of the image at this link.
I love the Lake District, for its stone circles, and I have a massive connection with Wasdale Head/Wastwater for some reason I can’t explain. Neither could my Mum, but she felt it too.
As for the username, well…It’s Cold Albion. What’s that?
Read on: Never the Muse is absent from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry and everywhere maiden choruses whirling. Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed in their sacred blood; far from labour and battle they live. – Pindar, Tenth Pythian Ode; translated by Richmond Lattimore.
There is a land lost to history, slipping between the cracks and into the depths of mind’s dark seas. An island citadel surrounded by roaring waves and girded by sea-serpents; an Otherland of dark forests and hoary stones raised for mysterious purposes. Ancient kings and mad wizards rub shoulders with outlaws who live like wolves, and horned warriors dance amidst rumbling storms as ancient long-barrows glow with weird and eldritch light.
Old gods linger at the crossing places and wild hunts careen howling across skies, all made of smoke and fury, while wise women stir cauldrons and fey folk emerge from hiding to play amidst the green. Mighty armies clash in battle, blood staining the hungry soil – earth now black with age and power as dragons coil about the hills and turn lazily in sleep, half closed-eyes burning with the light of the noonday sun.
Bottomless lakes and rushing rivers open their mouths to welcome wave after wave of newcomers, swallowing them up and softening their bones with moss and leaf-mould, nourishing ancient trees long gnarled with age. Deep holes are filled with metal blood and shining veins, their darkness anything but silent as subterranean spirits whistle and knock in the caverns of the deep below.
On the fringes of the world, at the edge of all things it lies – all unyielding. From the isle’s heart bubbles up a freezing draught so fierce in its bite that it stops the breath, and sends one down amongst the dead to learn their tales and their songs.
To some a sangraal, to others a cauldron and many more things besides, here and now we give it a name thick with meaning:
WYRD’S WELL
From this seed, this thing of root and branch comes a cold conception; a birthing nourished through the ages and aeons before language. Fetched forth from deep chthonic spaces, emerging through the labyrinthine pathways of the mind as a primeval force only discernible by obliqueness, by poetry, song and story.
It is a cold thing precisely because it can only be seen by absence; as temperature is measured in terms of heat, so coldness is only shown by its relation to heat. Yet anyone who has ever felt the cold knows that it is a thing in and of itself, alive and with its own agenda.
So it is with COLD ALBION, a kind of silent monolith amidst roaring seas of dream. It lives and breathes, populated with those things half-seen out of the corner of the eye, irrational and wild.
If it has a language, then that speech is black and made of the tongues of birds, the whisper of the wind in the trees, the rushing of rivers and the howls and hoots of beasts. The slow creaking of mountains and the roar of waves against jagged rock is its tone of voice. Its secret names are written in the curtains of rain and iron-grey skies, in the damp green of leaf and thorns hungry for blood; the granite thrust up to break the surface in times long gone is abruptly revealed – born from the broken skin of sleeping giants.
From that wellspring come the weird words; the freezing waters which excite and chill – sending shivers up the spine, shocking us from the everyday. If the primeval tongue be unspoken and occult – hidden from normal eyes – then what are we left with except for the words which reveal it, and in some way become suffused with it?
Ordinary language becomes dismembered and rendered extra-ordinary – the evocative power of the sorcerer-poet in every word; the deep reflexes hidden inside humanity stimulated by a word or phrase. Stories, narratives, all born of those deep places from before ‘human’ existed.
COLD ALBION is indescribable and indirect. Its shape and borders are inviolate because they are incomprehensibly vast and small enough to be encountered through two words. Additionally, it is capable of sustaining myriad interpretations, and this means that it generates those interpretations on contact!
Its kiss against your mind is almost imperceptible, the seeds nestling there, passing all unremarked. Each movement engenders more, until their absence is keenly, terribly felt. Because of this, because of the fact that a hunger has awakened, is it it any wonder that you greedily accept it deeper into yourselves, as it alternately soothes and excites the craving?
Each mind that touches it may find itself co-opted, colonized and reawakened to the strange vitality which rests sleeping beneath the human world.
HERE BE DRAGONS
COLD ALBION is the land of the witch, the warlock, the werewolf and the giant. These were never human, always and ever something else. It is a land of “Once Upon A Time.” A land which exists in parallel to the human, and must do so because any other alternative is unthinkable, because otherwise it, and more importantly Them are already here and always have been.
To suggest such things exist amidst the world of humanity is heresy, almost an attack on reality itself. So such things exist in an ‘unreal’ otherworldly place, because they are themselves otherworldly, their existence becoming mythologized to the point that it is impossible for them to exist within the world of mankind.
But for those of us who draw draw strength and inspiration from such things, and have noticed that strangeness goes hand in hand with the impossible, we experience a fierce joy and exultation. Soaring as eagles, with shining heads and gleaming feathers, we burrow into secret places, wiser than serpents and nine times more venomous than wyrms.
Let us be clear as crystal, and twice as cold:
COLD ALBION is not within the lands of humankind. It is unbound and uncompromising, beyond any map or territory. Its vitality is incomparable and peerless, and those that feast upon its flesh and drink its mead are forever changed into things made hoary with newness.
To all but a few they appear inhuman and insatiable, inexorable and severe in focus. Are you aware, do you recall those times when some instinct screamed from a million years ago? When some familiar thing in life became strange and the unease that wrought upon you then, and now – as you realize slowly that you comprehend the implications of these words.
Or as it seizes you suddenly in daily life, when next you look in a mirror or taste the bitter tang, you are drawn back to the moment of understanding. It comes like a lightning flash, spoken in the voice behind the blackest of thunder as the wind howls and the rain lashes down, as the sun beats on your flesh or the cold begins to creep inside your bones and chill your skin.
When the unaccountable dread arises from nowhere, you can allow yourself the last comfort, a final hope that exists only for a moment, before being swept away by a raging torrent bursting up from realms before language and thought were ever born:
to make a sharp, bat-like squeal, used especially of the ghosts in Homer. It is unclear if the squeaking is animalistic gibberish or a language of the dead, understood by the deceased, but incomprehensible to the living.
τρίζω can also refer to:
1. Shrieks made by sparrows, the sound of swarming locusts, the squeak of mice
2. The twang of a string
3. The hiss and pop of a body burning on a pyre
