You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 6th, 2008.
Carol Ann Carnese never considered herself an anxious person. Except when it came to wet wood.
Does this small creature terrify you? You might have sciurophobia – the fear of squirrels.
“If I saw someone lick a wooden spoon, I had to turn away,” says the 41-year-old massage therapist from Portland, Oregon.
“I’d break out into a sweat … and I’d just get sick to my stomach. I could not even look at someone with a toothpick in their mouth.”
It wasn’t just looking at wet wood that freaked her out. It was touching it, too.
“I could not eat Popsicles to the end,” Carnese explains. “As soon as I got close to the end, I would give it to my kids. I would not even own wooden utensils because I could not wash them. Not even in the dishwasher because they would still be damp when they came out.”
I post this for personal relevance. I’m pretty arachnophobic, but the fear goes towards a large number of insects and other arthropods. Spiders are the worst, though; I find them profoundly unsettling. Giant mosquitoes are high up there, too, as are, um, ghosts and alien abductions. Not that I worry too much about the latter two, but they’re certainly concerns, and used to seriously terrify me when I was a kid.
For comparison, the collapse of Western civilization doesn’t scare me as much as a spider the size of a quarter.
I haven’t seen it, but apparently the new Knight Rider is incredibly bad. Bad in a way shows aren’t even bad anymore.
Pretend you’re a TV screenwriter. You’re writing an episode of a cop procedural, involving the murder of a washed-up ’80s TV star. The opening scene of the episode is a scene from his former hit action show. You want to make it cheesy, bad-syndication-drama cheesy, Exposé cheesy. There will be a talking car, of course. But there will also be Schwartzenegger-reject one-liners, a retro command center complete with computers with big flashing lights and a lame excuse for the female costar to strip to her underwear.
NBC’s remake of Knight Rider is that show.
