Speaking of lotus pods, there’s a toad (Sulinam toad?) that carries its tadpoles in little holes on its back. Squick squick major squickiness.
For surgery, I can’t stand anything to do with eyes or tracheotomies.
I can’t find it online, but when I was a kid I had a magazine that had a picture in silhouette of a scuba diver in front of a (sperm?) whale. The diver was maybe the size of the whale’s lower jaw. If that. I like pictures of them, but I can definitely see how their sheer size would freak me out if I was in the water with one.
Pictures of sharks do bother me a little bit, though. Only slightly. I’ve watched Shark Week all my life so it’s not that bad, but (even though I know it’s fake) that picture of the great white jumping for the guy on the helicopter ladder with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background freaks me out a bit. A few other pictures I’ve seen of great whites do this, too.
YES. I know exactly what you mean, and yes, SQWUK. I think the lotus pod %^&*#iness might actually come from this rather than vice versa.
Question: someone must’ve know the lotus pod would freak lots of people out, or they wouldn’t have made the boob picture, and it wouldn’t (IIRC) have a disturbing image warning on snopes. Why is it so terrible to us?
Lobotomyboy 63…I know a good cure for horseshoe crabs, you dust it onto your pubes for a week and, poof, they’re gone.
I was looking at this one picture of a guy trapped in a narrow hole filled with tarantulas. He couldn’t move so they tied a rescue apparatus around him at the armpits and lifted him out. Unfortunately, it ripped off his arms, popped his eyeballs out of their sockets and ripped open his stomach so that his intestines fell out, lying on the ground (I think he had stew for supper). When he fell onto the ground his head hit a rock and his brains spilled out.
Have you folks considered professional help>
I love spiders, and I have to make sure to move any spiders living in my house into the garage or outdoors (weather permitting) when I expect guests.
On the other hand, leeches freak me out. I can’t even think of the word.
Rattlesnake. For some reason, magazine editors get a huge charge of showing a gape-mouthed rattlesnake in mid-strike. Brings back very old, very bad memories of a day at the Denver zoo.
I can watch surgery (on TV at least) all day…except for eye surgery. For some reason I can’t deal with that. shudder
Way back upthread The Second Stone said tarantulas don’t freak him/her/??? out because they’re big and hairy. That is exactly what freaks me out about them, besides the fact that eyes should only come two per critter, be it arachnid, insectoid, or mammalian. shudder again
This guy. Freaks me right the hell out. There’s a backstory but I can barely stand to tell it.
Lantern fish and owls. shudder
You cannot say “this guy” in this thread. It could be a guy with a tarantula tattoo on his left eye and a lotus pod for a right eye for all we know. Description, please.
Childbirth. Nope, nope, nope.
You’re right. It’s Struwwelpeter from the children’s book by Heinrich Hoffman. No tarantulas or eye infections or lotus pods…just my own little phobia.
Snakes. When I was a kid, my cousin C.B. used to LOVE to chase me with old National Geographics that my grandfather had lying around.
Cute, cartoony ones I can handle (like Sir Hiss in Disney’s version of Robin Hood)-and stuffed animal snakes are cool. But real ones have me screaming and running. I once chose to have a time out in first grade, rather than read an article in our science class about snakes.
(And the weird thing is, I don’t want to see people mistreat snakes, or wipe them out-if you have pet snakes, that’s cool. Just don’t let me see them.)
I’m the same way about sharks. They terrify me, but I feel extremely protective of them. I hate shark-fishing, sharkfin soup, shark cartilage “supplements”, etc. And really, I don’t want to see any animal mistreated or wiped out, not even tarantulas. One of the huge breakthroughs I had with tarantulas was while watching an episode of Jackass (or Wildboyz, one) where they were throwing tarantulas at each other. I know they’re delicate and I felt really bad for the little guys. At that particular time, I looked at them and felt sympathy instead of terror.
I used to be absolutely terrified… to the point of literal paralyzing fear of anything U.F.O. related as a child. In the daytime once I read a book on U.F.O. stories when I was probably in 3rd grade… I was terrified of the subject after that. That show Unsolved Mysteries? Whenever it would come on I’d be fine with the cheesy ghost stories and reenactments of murders… No problem. But even probably until High School if a story of U.F.O.s came on any T.V. show or if I was reading something related to someone’s experiences of it I would go into near shock.
Now… Doesn’t bother me. But I do remember being too scared to get up off the couch and turn off the T.V. or change the channel. I would just clench a pillow or blanket close to block as much of it out.
Same here. My dad and my sister are the same way, so I suspect it’s genetic.
You’re a much higher-functioning needle-phobe than I am. I can’t give blood. I can’t understand people who can give blood or get allergy shots and then go back to work afterward. If I have to do anything involving needles, I’m pretty much hysterical (I don’t faint, but I do shake and cry), then when the adrenalin wears off I crash, hard. I’m worthless for the rest of the day, pretty much.
Can someone spoil/explain Lotus Boob for me?
I really don’t want to google it.
No. But I do get seriously squicked out looking at pictures of eye and/or skin diseases or eye injuries. (Cuts to skin don’t really squick me so much.)
Google lotus pod. It’s just a plant with a bunch of holes in it. Then imagine it photoshopped onto a woman’s breast.
Harlequin babies. I can’t even look it up. I think it’s spelled correctly.
But that’s about it.
Actually, here is the Urban Dictionary entry. No pictures, but apparently I am not the only one not willing to look it up.
When I was a kid I had a natural history book containing a picture of a frilled lizard displaying. For some reason I found it so disturbing that for years I was careful to look only at the front and back parts of the book, coming nowhere near the picture. (And don’t ask why I didn’t just tear out that page… I guess defacing books in that way was just not imaginable!) Eventually I did look at it again (probably when I was about 15) and it was no big deal.
Another disturbing image I remember from childhood was in a Bell Science Series special with Dr. Frank C. Baxter (anybody remember those?) called “Gateways to the Mind”… they used to show them in science class. This one had a segment on sensory deprivation, and they used Chuck Jones’ studio to animate some of the hallucinations described by experimental subjects… that freaked me right out. In fact, I had something of a hallucination phobia for awhile (along with various other phobias… I was the sort of kid who was scared of being scared). This year I finally got me a copy of “Gateways” and took another look… I can definitely see how it might seem creepy to an elementary-school kid (at least back then… the level of kids’ exposure to scary stuff has increased a lot since, I think)… but I certainly had no desire to run screaming from the room. But… I remember a few years ago seeing something about a virtual reality program that simulates the experience of having paranoid schizophrenia, and it was seriously creepy… I really didn’t want to be alone afterwards.