I can look up the cite if I have to(OTOMH it’s mentioned in Panatti’s Extraordinary Endings Of Practically Everything And Everybody.)
The doctor who introduced leeches as the perfect tool to balance the body’s humors had students. One of those students had a disagreement with those fools who maintained that some kind of invisible germ caused illnesses like syphilis. So he infected himself with syphilitic pus in front of an audience. Why worry? The oozing lesions were just a symptom of the imbalance in the humors, nothing some leeches couldn’t cure.
Naturally, the leeches were no help. The student lost all faith in bleeding and killed himself about two weeks later.
LSD- I admit that I have never heard a firsthand account of this story and that it may be a UL. A chemist named Hoffman was attempting to create a drug for the treatment of migraines by synthesizing ergotimine. He experienced some minor effects after getting a few drops of one experimental batch in a cut. He later deliberately ingested some and became the first man to drop acid.
Well, you know, in the past it was considered the only ehtical course of events to use yourself as a test subject for anything really dangerous, rather than trying to find some innocent volunteer to experiment on.
In the Roger Corman stinker “Terminal Virus” a military engineered virus that makes sexual intercourse between men and women instantly fatal to both parties. Result – birth rate drops to zero and men and women live in separate enclaves.
Young mad scientist invents cure. Kidnaps man and woman to test it on. Gives them the cure, then chains them by one ankle and leaves them alone in a room to test the serum by making love. So what happens? The man escapes successfully, the woman tries to escape but is caught.
I would have loved to have become a mad scientist if my guidance counselors had ever mentioned it as a career option. It’s a shame that there don’t seem to be any mad scientists in real life. I mean, there have been scientists who might have been mentally ill, like Nikola Tesla, but the scientist who tries to conquer the world with his homemade superweapons does not exist outside of comic books, etc. In real life, scientists who can make superweapons usually seem to wind up employed by persons who are not nearly as smart as they are, but much more rich and powerful, and who have their own agendas.
I mean, just imagine you’re a real-life mad scientist. You have worked all the bugs out of cloning, and now you’re going to create an army of gene-engineered, mindlessly obedient supersoldiers, and conquer the world! Only . . . where are you going to get funding for the project? Only a government has that kind of money! You’ll have to sign up with Saddam Hussein, or somebody like him . . . and then, when you finally produce your army of slave clones, it’s not your army, it’s your boss’s army!
Good point. But if you’re a mad scientist – not you in particular, BrainGlutton, I use the phrase merely in a rhetorical sense. If you are a mad scientist capable of thinking up something truly world-threating, you must be a bright person with many, many ideas. In that case, you could patent and sell many of your other inventions in order to fund your world-dominating goal. If you are particularly sadistic, you could invent things designed to incapacitate the populace and make them ripe for takover. Or you could invent things to torment and distract them. Come to think of it, this would be a likely explanation for rap music.
Other things that I suspect are part of this plan:
[ul]
[li]SUVs[/li][li]Jet-engine-level car stereos[/li][li]Xerox machines[/li][li]That European game where they kick a ball around[/li][li]Fans of the European game who kick each other around.[/li][li]Cinemax[/li][li]Howard Stern[/li][li]Friggin’ pixilation on Howard Stern[/li][li]Needing three remotes to watch one DVD.[/li][li]Toll booths[/li][li]After-market auto customizing[/li][li]Pickup trucks with spoilers[/li][li]The latest slang[/li][li]Older slang[/li][li]Daytime TV[/li][li]Nighttime TV[/li][li]Slooooooooooow message boards.[/li][/ul]
Speaking of Soylent Green–They didn’t realize it when they made the movie, but now that we know more about things like Mad Cow disease, this is actually a pretty bad idea…
“LSD- I admit that I have never heard a firsthand account of this story and that it may be a UL. A chemist named Hoffman was attempting to create a drug for the treatment of migraines by synthesizing ergotimine. He experienced some minor effects after getting a few drops of one experimental batch in a cut. He later deliberately ingested some and became the first man to drop acid.”
Sort of. Albert Hoffman did discover LSD-25 (it was his 25th attempt at islolating the drug and I believe his was working for the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Switzerland at the time), but it didn’t get into a cut - he just got some on his finger and then accidentally injested it. You can read all about it in his book “My Problem Child” or you can read Jay Stevens book “Storming Heaven.” In fact, I think you can find the first couple of chapters of Hoffman’s book on-line. He had quite a bicycle ride home that first day.
Hmm, Morrison probably did tell the story accurately and have Hoffman just get some on his finger. I haven’t read it in a while. I had assumed that the bike was Morrison’s creation. One of the characters reveals that it is imbued with the mindwarping, reality bending essence of the world’s first LSD trip. Mr Nobody incorporates the bike into a bus’ engine for maximum effect.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Satisfying Andy Licious *
**Or you could invent things to torment and distract them. Come to think of it, this would be a likely explanation for rap music.
Other things that I suspect are part of this plan:[ul][li]SUVs[/li][li]Jet-engine-level car stereos[/li][li]Xerox machines[/ul] **[/li][/QUOTE]
Wait a minute … Xerox machines? As in photocopying machines? How the hack to they make everyone’s life more miserable?
What about professor Robert White, he is into monkey head transplants, hoping to graduate to people soon enough. Personnally, I’m not with the torch bearing/pitchfork waving mob on this one and I wish him luck.
Trjckster—Agreed. I’d be first in line to help pour boiling oil over the castle ramparts onto the raving mob below, in order to buy enough time for the doctor to finish his work.
The people hawking this process seem to be blowing smoke out of their rears in an attempt to attract investors. I doubt their process will be anywhere near 1/100 as good as they’re making it sound.