This one's from ye olde YouTubes way back in aught-six -- but a friend just shared it with me tonight.
"I've been ready to explode like Mt St Helen's since the weekend of May 27th and 28th," says the bowl-haired and beturtlenecked gentleman with the stack of redacted documents. (thanks, misteryes!)
Researchers have grown replacement penis tissue for rabbits from the animals' own cells. The erectile tissue was then implanted and the rabbits apparently went on to screw like rabbits, successfully reproducing. According to the scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, this was t... More.
A new study on "partner abandonment" has found that a woman is six times more likely to be separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer or multiple sclerosis than if a man in the relationship is the patient. Link... More.
Michæl.Paukner's "The ancient Hebrew Conception of the Universe to illustrate the account of creation and the flood." Flickr link, but you really have to see it at the largest possible size.... More.
Yves Béhar (who is in an epic struggle with Marc Newson to claim the title of "sexiest industrial designer alive") designed this vibrator. It looks like a Miyazaki cartoon creature. The Form 2 takes a two-pronged approach to the vibrator, giving its user what they're calling "Sensation in Stereo.... More.
Michael Jackson's funeral cost one million dollars. His final outfit cost $35,000, and the flowers cost $16,000. Lord. Obviously I'm no MJ anyhow, but when I die, if there's a mil lying around? Feel free to bury me in nekkid dirt and use the rest to feed pie to starving kids.... More.
RSS Feed
There is Miss South Carolina stupid and I can laugh at that stuff forever. Stupid is funny.
Unchecked and unmanaged schizoaffective disorder is just sad. Behaviors that are a result of a disorder, no matter how surface funny, always carry with an underlying sadness.
You know you want him.
I live in Charlotte, NC. And I've never seen this. Thanks for sharing the lulz. I like Mccrory (the mayor shown) and his attitude.
Sometimes you feel like a nut.
I dunno, Xeni. Love your posts, almost to a one, but I just can't laugh at this.
And man, I laugh at just about everything. Hell, I make my living laughing at and getting others to laugh at some of the darkest things around us.
But I worry for this man; more to the point, I worry for those around this man. This is the guy who walks into a sub shop with a samurai sword. This is the guy who runs his car headlong into a crowd of pedestrians. This is the guy who, as he puts it quite clearly, is ready to explode like Mt. St. Helens.
Maybe, since this is from '06, he's since gotten the help he needed? He's on his meds and stepped back from the ledge?
Maybe I could laugh then.
Maybe.
I wish people like you would stop going in front of ordinary upstanding citizens and waving your crazy flag around like you think you own the place, Dad.
Old copypasta is still funny.
Relax EMG72, walking down the streets of Atlanta with its massive homelessness problem and widespread mental illness I can honestly say I've seen worse (i.e. seemingly more violent). People that are belligerent and abusive one day may be much more lucid the next.
He looks reasonably well-groomed and dressed, he's white, and obviously moderately educated based on his (admittedly garbled) diction. Chances are good he's just off his meds and there is someone out there to look after him.
Projection of one owns problems on others is most common. This is in an extreme form here, but we are submitted to it in milder, yet just as unrelenting, a whole lot, especially if we deal with the public or in with many co-workers. No matter how empathetic we are, there comes a time when we have wash it off us to keep our own sanity. For some people laughter is how to do it. It is reasonably innocuous although infuriating for the paranoid, since they want nothing more than being taken seriously. Which is even funnier, making them all the madder, which...
#1 is right in reminding us the real suffering that they go through. It is too bad for them that they can't cope without making every one else suffer too.
Stupidity is a disease, though the threshold is a bit fuzzy. Kind of like high blood pressure - there are standards but they vary from country to country or expert opinion to expert opinion.
@# 5 EMG72: Hell, I make my living laughing at and getting others to laugh at some of the darkest things around us.
Wow! Sounds like a great example of "do what you love and the money will follow", eh?
I think you are right though. Shades of The Fisher King in this case.
This one seems to be enjoying a comeback. This is the third time I've seen it posted to a blog, Facebook, etc. Nevertheless, it's indescribably awesome.
Sue Myrick knows about this.
Thank You! I love you for showing me this
I'm a little disturbed this was posted here.
This is not an actor or comedian playing up to the camera for our amusement. This is a guy with a serious mental illness, one which can only be made worse by this videos distribution. I truly hope he is in a better place now, but can you imagine what him and his family would feel if he saw this and realised we are all laughing at his illness.
Is it socially acceptable to laugh at the mentally ill?
IamInnocent: You make some perfectly valid points about human nature. I don't like being accosted on the street by someone like this, however there is a difference between personally finding someone funny and publicly humiliating someone for internet lolz.
" ... you gonna pay for it!!! Suge Knight!! ... "
I like how so many things (like this post surely) on Boing Boing turn into "controversies" - and everyone goes back and forth discussing their opinions and dismissing other people's and it's just a recursive loop of touchiness and pretense. I can always tell when that's happened by noticing the number of comments. They enter the triple digits but the opinions just keep on coming and feelings get hurt and people get disemvoweled. It's such a carousel; I love it.
And then the post below it, about science or old comic books, gets like 6 comments, all of them completely innocuous.
Hey, isn't that Dale Gribble from Arlen
the non-sequiturs spouted by people with schizophrenia are funny because they're usually so unfamiliar. I thought this video was at least as interesting as it was funny, so thanks.
His diatribe indicates one of two options, hinging on whether there was a helicopter or not. Either way, the consequences are very negative, so, I hope someone looked into this.
I love the way his language flows. It does tickle a part of my brain and I know other people who have favourited this video for the same reason. Yeah this guy may have mental problems but his speech is brilliantly written and delivered.
So John Edwards knew all about this...
I hear that this guy is getting a show on Fox.
I can appreciate his use of language, I'm not saying the video isn't interesting, even entertaining. I'm just uncomfortable about my own instinctual reaction to it, which is to be amused. I don't think its fair to him, as a fellow human being, to make fun when he is obviously unwell. For some reason making fun of mental illness doesn't have the same social taboo as say, making fun of people in wheelchairs.
Saying all that, one of my friends is an ambulance dispatcher, he deals with people like this all the time. Often its black humour that gets him through the worst of it. Its a survival mechanism and to the casual observer he would seem extremely callus and even ghoulish. However, he also spends a good portion of his day helping each and every person that calls 999 (UK version of 911), no matter if they are polite or raving nonsense at him.
StRevAlex: I wouldn't say 17 posts is exactly excessive. Or that the contents are exactly antagonistic or inflammatory. However, for your amusement and entertainment I'm going to have a go at getting this into the triple figures.
Ready?
Apple sucks!
It'd be funny if there weren't people like him in politics, such as Michelle Bachman or, memorably, Helen Chenoweth. Anyway, he's no Francis E. Dec.
Is laughing at this guy any different than laughing at the Skoal Bandit dude yesterday?
Why do mentally unbalanced people get sympathy while the unintelligent get freely ripped?
@ #1:
"There is Miss South Carolina stupid and I can laugh at that stuff forever. Stupid is funny. Unchecked and unmanaged schizoaffective disorder is just sad."
But unchecked and unmanaged schizoaffective disorder with a dash of poetry is amazing. Why should the insane get a pass, anyway? Stupid is only funny to you because you're not stupid. Your righteous indignation is, however.
Besides, where is your evidence that this man is crazy? He seems perfectly sane to me. Perhaps he was even lying about the whole incident to get attention. Or maybe he's just stupid.
"There's boy scouts in the audience... and they might be getting scared."
Other peoples tragedies have long been fodder for humor.
I wonder if we can find a good video about some double amputee getting their wheelchair stuck in a revolving door. Too funny.
Oh, wait, I forgot...physical handicaps are off limits, it's only the mentally handicapped that are fair game. (Not as able to form an effective lobby, dontcha' know)
I'm thinking that the City Council must know what they're in for if the first thing out of someone's mouth is a request for more time.
The mentally handicapped do have an effective lobby; they just have a hard time finding effective speakers who aren't "lemon-headed pussies."
I wonder what that means?
Wow! I usually only get to hear rantings this quality from the homeless guy named rainbow living down (on) the street. Frankly, this guy is doing pretty fine if he has a house to fly over with that damn helicopter.
Anyways, all you folks getting serious about this, think: if he was your family, would you laugh? I would. There's nothing like your crazy uncle unleashing his madness on the city council. Not laughing about this won't make this guy any saner...
Thank you for introducing "beturtlenecked gentleman" into my vocabulary.
Sarah Palin's mentor...
Now I'm in the firm belief that this has been posted here about a year ago, but since I can't find that post, it may just be a paranoid delusion on my part.
David Pescovits, the guy who MUST secretly hate you, posted this in 2006.
I found it interesting that the black helicopter was later "the same white helicopter"
well? which is it? and how did he know who was in it?
dude is freaking amazing in his perceptive abilities!
Boy, I'm gonna sample the living HELL outta this guy....I love wingnut rants. Francis E. Dec would've given this guy two thumbs-up.
@Anonymous 34, no way! Is he related to David Pescovitz?
How do we know he has a serious mental illness as there is no background information. Does he live at the end of a runway and is partially deaf? I understand that people going deaf can develop persecution complexes believing the others a talking about them in whispers.
Maybe he did piss of a helicopter pilot somewhere and the pilot managed to get his address and is persecuting him.
I can't laugh at this :( I was in a long relationship with a person who displayed schizophrenic tendencies, although he evaded diagnosis. It's a terrible thing. So no anonymous I wouldn't laugh. The person in my life has a good job and is doing very well for some one with that type of mental illness, but it is something that makes me sad and sorry for the man and his family, wife, kids, etc. I'm not criticizing anyone for finding it funny, but I can't erase my own experiences either. It's very painful to watch some one you care about become completely convinced by their experiences of increasingly unlikely things.
There is NOTHING funny in this. People with any form of psychosis suffer terribly because of their delusions (which for them are real) and problems with cognition.
This kind of thing (i.e. laughing at their expense) only makes it all much worse and is a part of a broader social stigma that needs to change.
Now, if you think I am being too serious, ask yourself: do you know anyone who is mentally ill and then ask if you would want them degraded in this way. What if it was you?
I really enjoy Boing Boing but I think this is a bad call. B.
Has anyone done a transcription of what this guy is saying?
You know, they say that 1 in 5 people has a mental illness. So look at your 4 best friends, and if they're OK, it must be you.....
Here's a transcript from:
http://thegoodreverend.blogspot.com/2006/07/rogue-helicopter-pilots-have-made-him.html
"I stood up here last time. I’m gonna ask if when I get in to this you can give me an extra minute or thirty seconds, and once I get into this . . . I’m here tonight to request John Walsh of the FBI’s most wanted to make public and request a number one—America’s number one public enemy. We have a rogue helicopter pilot on the loose inside this airspace. He’s also on the loose inside this country. And I am after this report right here which is a classified document from the Freedom of Information Act within the FAA. When I came down here to speak back in April about the bundling, I went home. I said something, because I had—I could back it up, because I went to the Smith Junior High meeting years ago and I reminded you of four things I said, which were no smoking, thirty thousand seats, sew the hot water panels on it, and put ice in the arena. And I told you why there’s no ice in the arena. I made a statement, and the statement was the reason there’s no ice in the arena is because somebody had their hand in the pie. He didn’t want ice in that arena because he knew down the road, just like the NBA adventure, the NFL and the NHL were going to expand. And if he allowed ice to be put in the arena that meant sometime down the road he’d have a competing tenant, which would lessen his bargaining power with the city of Charlotte. I’ve been ready to explode like Mt. St. Helens since the weekend of May 27 and 28, and what happened to me was the evening of the 28 I woke up in my house. It was late in the evening—early morning, A.M. And my house was shakin’, and it’s shakin’! and it’s just shakin’! and it’s shaking!—it shakes for over a minute to two minutes. It shook constantly. And it was the same white helicopter that I saw on Sunday afternoon that flew over my house when I walked from my part of the house to my garage.
I won’t raise my voice. That’s fine, they have a right to be scared, because that’s why I’m here tonight. I was scared, I was endangered, and I was threatened. My life was in danger because we have a helicopter pilot that flew twenty-five to thirty feet above my roofline between the magnolia tree and the property line for one to two minutes, and then he bailed out. And I followed him, and I tracked him down through the FAA because I made an official report. Sue Myers knows about this, the FBI knows about this, John Edwards knows about this, the Criminal Intelligence Division of the Charlotte Metropolitan Police Department knows about this. I want this pilot. I want—it’s a matter of national security. Wherever you are, Mr. Helicopter Pilot, come out of your hole. And you too George Shin because you’re in that helicopter pilot—you’re in that helicopter, and you’re nothing but a chameleon, lemon-headed, coward, terrorist pussy! And I’m coming after you buddy! You’re gonna pay for it! Goodnight!"
Fan myspace pages are fun too:
http://www.myspace.com/davidthompsonforfreedom
http://www.myspace.com/mrhelicopterpilot
The George Shin that he mentioned was the owner of the Charlotte Hornets, at the time an NBA basketball team. There was controversy over the city building an arena for the Hornets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner_Cable_Arena#Controversy
Don't be so quick to diagnose this man's plight as plain old mental illness. How would you feel if you woke up late in the evening/ early in the a.m., with a white helipcopter 20-30ft. above your house, between the magnolia tree and the property line, for 2-3 min., and it was shakin', and it was shakin', and it kept shakin'?
"This is the guy who walks into a sub shop with a samurai sword. This is the guy who runs his car headlong into a crowd of pedestrians."
emg72 is the guy (or gal) who pushes the stereotype of mental illness being equivalent to a predisposition towards violence. The reality is that people diagnosed with schizophrenia who follow treatment and avoid abusing other substances are statistically more likely to be on the receiving end of violence from "average" non-schizophrenic people, than to be on the delivering end of violence. [citation needed, I suppose.] If he were mentally ill, he might have more to fear from "us" than we have to fear from him.
Meanwhile, the guy lost his cool, but is he mentally ill or even paranoid? Dear readers, please reconsider whether you or anyone commenting here is qualified to diagnose mental illness based on less than 4 minutes of video footage. Then consider whether medical professionals or psychiatrists or anyone is qualified to make that kind of diagnosis, especially something as specific as "schizoaffective disorder." I notice that Xeni didn't specifically diagnose the guy as mentally ill in her text. Good on ya!
He gets angry for a few minutes, but is there evidence that he has a mood disorder on top of delusions or hallucinations? The only delusional thing I hear is "chameleon", if you take him 100% literally. It sounds figurative taken in the context of "lemon-headed coward terrorist pussies." He doesn't say the FBI or FAA is coming to get him. He doesn't say it's a black helicopter transporting drugs from Clinton's stash in Little Rock to the Glenn Beck Memorial Detention Camp where all the good citizens will be rounded up. (And even hardcore conspiracy theorists aren't necessarily "paranoid schizophrenic" or in imminent need of psychiatric treatment.)
It's almost delusional for him to think that a local city council or John Edwards or FBI would be helpful about tracking down some pilot that buzzed his house, or that the govt will release more info from a censored report anytime soon.
He's angry, holding a grudge, rambling about graft at some arena, trying to solve it in venues that probably won't be helpful, and not afraid to lose his composure in public. Which of those is evidence of mental illness?
"I've been ready to explode like Mt. St. Helen's..." zomg, only mentally ill people talk about getting angry.
Find a copy of the 5 Jan 2008 issue of The Lancet, a fairly well-respected medical journal, and read the short article on "The Ethics of Passer-by Diagnosis" by EW Mitchell.
Sleepybat: "Is it socially acceptable to laugh at the mentally ill?"
Unfortunately it is socially acceptable to be an internet armchair pop psychiatrist and diagnose strangers as being mentally ill. It's nice that you have some empathy for "the mentally ill." The next step would be to recognize the stereotype you've bought into, that expressing anger and talking funny indicate mental illness.