A Stint With Some Lint

I need to spend some time on oddities in other countries because quite frankly, if I keep focusing on the blatant idiocy over here in the US, I'm going to lose what small shred of hope that I have left. And there are odd individuals in other countries. Hoo-boy, are there ever! Let's go to Vienna to learn about one of them.

Meet Dr. Georg Steinhauser. Dr. Steinhauser is a researcher at the Vienna University of Technology, located appropriately in Vienna. Vienna is a good place to be for Dr. Steinhauser. After all, Freud was from Vienna. It's like the birthplace of psychoanalysis. I imagine the place is just swimming with psychoanalysts. And I'd like a team of those very psychoanalysts to tell me why it is that Dr. Steinhauser has spent the last three years researching what type of body hair it is that traps pieces of lint in one's navel, aka the belly button. Wait. What?

Three years. Three years studying and researching belly button lint. What the hell is wrong this man? He's a scientist, he's a DOCTOR for cryin' out loud! (Even though he looks like he's 12.) It's not easy to become any sort of doctor and being a scientist is no exception. Why on earth would you spend the time that it takes to become a doctor and then use the knowledge that you've gained and the training that you've had and spend your time pulling out belly button fluff? It seems odd, as I can pull out belly button lint without being a doctor! So I don't know why someone would, but I do know that he did.

According to the folks over there at The Telegraph (who have just been putting out fascinating stories lately, so thanks, Telegraph guys!), Dr. Steinhauser, "...made his discovery after studying 503 pieces of fluff from his own belly button." He also asked his friends, family and co-workers about their own belly button lint. (I imagine that's the sort of thing you only get to do once, as once you've asked anyone about their belly button lint, it's highly probable that they're not going to want to talk to you ever again.) OK, I really hate to ask this, but what constitutes "a piece" of fluff? I mean, if there are two pieces in there and they're pulled out and meld into one, is that still two? Or what if there is only one in there and it breaks on the way out, then what? One or two? I imagine it's questions like these that keep Dr. Steinhauser awake at night. (Me, not so much.)

He did a chemical analysis on the fluff (because that's what scientists are supposed to do! Chemical analysis! But not on belly button lint!) and what he found will shock you. Or it won't. (You could still be in awe that someone has actually taken time to do this. I'm still a bit stunned myself.) He found that the lint wasn't just "...made up of only cotton from clothing." ::::gasp!:::: That's right! He found that there "...were also flecks of dead skin, fat, sweat and dust." (Was this news to the man? Was he thinking, "If it only were not for the lint, it would just be PRISTINE in there! Damn the lint! Damn ALL the lint to hell!")

His findings were published in the Medical Hypotheses journal. How this qualifies as a "medical" anything is beyond me. He wrote that it's the "...scaly structure of the hair" which "enhances the 'abrasion of minuscule fibres from the shirt' and directs the lint towards the belly button." Basically, the hair acts like velcro. He also said he learned that "Abdominal hair often seems to grow in concentric circles around the navel." Concentric circles. Uh-huh. OK, well, good to know. That will help me...when? In case I'm ever on Jeopardy! one day? ("I'll take things only I know for $1000, please, Alex.)

So if you have a concentrically hairy stomach, you're going to have a linty navel. Sure you can shave your abdomen hair if you're really shooting for a "fluff-free navel", but that will only work until the hair grows back. (Again, something that I probably could have told you through casual reasoning and without a Ph.D.) He also mentioned that new clothes "can shed up to one thousandth of their weight to the belly button every year."So if your favorite sweatshirt seems to be getting smaller over the years, it might not be because you're getting fatter! It might be because it has just shed itself off and into your belly button, making the shirt seem smaller and you seem larger. So check there first before heading off to Jenny Craig or over to Kirstie Alley's house.

And although Dr. Steinhauser is a scientist, there are (sadly) apparently others who may not be scientists (and who could tell in this instance?) but who are also fascinated by the lint within one's navel. Take a one Australian bloke Graham Barker for instance. His belly button lint is usually red even though he rarely wears red clothing. (EWW! Do I have to guess why it's red?! I'm not gonna!) Graham is so fascinated with the fluffy stuff within his navel that he "...has been collecting his own navel fluff in jars every day since 1984." Um...1984? WTF? "The achievement has won him a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the world's largest collection of navel lint."

Was there a big field of competitors for that distinction? I don't think there was. And I don't know that I consider something a "world record" when it's extremely likely that you're the only one in the world who does that particular something on purpose! That doesn't necessarily mean that you're worthy of holding a "world record" as much as you are worthy of earning the distinction of someone who clearly needs therapy.

This isn't the only research project that Dr. Steinhauser has immersed himself in. Yes, there are others. Others that are equally fascinating! He did a year long study on how the abrasion of wedding rings causes trace particles of the gold to flake off. He conducted that study by weighing his own wedding ring once a week during the first year of his marriage. He now weighs the ring once every six months and says that he will publish a life long study at the end of his scientific career which he will call "the work of his married lifetime." (By the way, over that year, his ring became 6.15mg lighter than it was when he first started weighing it. He used that figure and applied it to the number of married couples in Vienna and calculated that "2.2 kg of 18-carat gold" were lost every year to abrasion. Ok then.)

He has also studied the amounts of barium and strontium in the snow before and after fireworks were set off and determined that since the barium levels were almost 500 times higher after the fireworks than before the fireworks and that high barium levels can really aggravate a person's asthma, that those with asthma should stay away from fireworks celebrations.

Dr. Steinhauser seems like a smart guy, but I fear he's just a bit too eccentric to be able to put his brilliant mind toward some sort of really important research. What's next for this guy? Which mushroom variety is toenail fungus the most similar to? How often to humans grow new nose hair? Is there a constant butt-crack length to butt-cheek width ratio? You never know. And you don't need to know! But if you ever do need to know, Dr. Steinhauser is your go-to guy for sure.

(Final Side Note: Good Lord, yes, there's more. :::sigh::: While scouring the Internet for pictures for this post, I ran across documentation of the pastime of the one aforementioned Graham Barker, collector of the navel lint. And I thought it just wouldn't be right to leave that stuff out, so here you go. Graham had a blog called My Navel. The site is still up, but it appears he has stopped updating it. There are several close up pictures of the lint he has removed from his navel. There is even a ruler in the photos so you can have some sort of a scale in your head as to the lint's actual size.

There is also the almost obligatory GrahamParker.com. There you can find links to other webpages of his as well as download his CV.

And Graham seems to have another site/blog entitled "Graham's Paddock". This has several subsections, not all of which are about the lint. It also seems to be current and up-to-date. There is more belly button lint documentation there, including photos of the lint stored in jars and separated by decade. There are also recipes for his favorite salads and soups. Go figure.)

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Shame On The Axe Murderer

No one really enjoys being embarrassed. It's not fun. But you know, it is preferable over some other things that one could be in lieu of being embarrassed. Take death for example. Death after being hacked with an axe for the purpose of sparing you 'embarrassment'. Yeah, that seems a bit worse than the embarrassment itself. But apparently not to the axe hacker, it didn't.

A one Reinhard Steinbauer of Austria had what I'll call fairly strong feelings about embarrassment, especially those feelings about his family members who would have been shamed and embarrassed due to his actions. See, ol' Reinhard there had lost right around €300,000 euros (That's $574,000 in US declining in value dollars.) by investing in high risk speculations. Therefore, he concluded that in order "to spare them 'the shame' " ('them' being his family members) the most logical thing to do was to hack all five of them to death with an axe (which seems like more of the 'high risk' behavior that got him to the place he was at in the first place). Wait. What?

Correct. Reinhard is described as a "freelance public relations consultant". He clearly could not have been very good at his job, as hacking your family to death with an axe isn't exactly a tried and true way of improving public relations. Ending them, perhaps. But, then again, it does say that he was "freelance", so perhaps that was the niche that he carved out for himself (oh, pun SO intended there. SO intended.). So on May 13th of this year, he went out and bought himself an axe. Then he used it (and not to chop wood). Five times too many.

Reinhard the Hacker went to his home first and killed his wife and 7-year old daughter. Before leaving to hack up other family members, Reinhard "called the Finance Ministry (where his wife worked) and told her bosses that she would not be coming to work due to illness." Of course, because he wouldn't want her employers to worry about her or anything like that. How considerate of him. (Due to illness. Um, yeah, she's had a, um, de-nogginization and really needs to rest.) Then, feeling the need to abolish shame and embarrassment everywhere, he drove about 111 miles to where his parents were. (So, that would be about 2 hours of driving. You've just killed your wife and child and now you're going to drive for two hours to kill a little bit more. That's dedication to your craft, I'll give him that. Lunatic.) Not wanting to continue on with the mayhem on an empty stomach, he proceeded to have lunch with his mom and dad and after lunch, the dessert was axe a la mode as he killed both of them as well. And let's not forget the extended family in this bizarre, travelling massacre! Let's drive a little bit further and axe up the father-in-law as well, shall we? Well, we shall not. Reinhard there shall. And did.

So now what? You've just killed all five members of your fairly immediate family with an axe.You've already eaten, so you're not really hungry, even with all of the exertion that it must require to kill five people with an axe all in the same day. So what to do, what to do? I know! How about you make a quick stop over at that brothel over there, Hacky? And so he did. He stopped in at the whorehouse, presumably got himself a whore, whored her, and then left. That's when he attempted to kill himself and failed. Wait. What?

So, he can hack five people to death with no problems what so ever. But trying to off himself? THAT is trickier? How so, you sick and twisted coward? How so? Axe a little dull after slicing through the flesh and bones of five others, is it? You, sir, are an ass, to put it extremely mildly.

When all of the killing of self didn't go so well, he went down to the police station, covered in blood, and turned himself in. A police spokesman, a one Michael Braunsperger, made this statement: "It is not possible to conclude whether he is suffering from some mental disorder, but one would assume that a normal person would not be capable of committing such a crime in cold blood.” Oh, you think?! Mental or not, I'm fairly certain that there's some degree of disorder present with this guy! But thanks for the update there, Captain Obvious.

They must do things fairly quickly over there in the Austrian legal system, as The Lopper was found guilty today and sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence which he had asked for himself. (I'm guessing that was a pretty easy request to accommodate.) At some point during the sentencing phase, the prosecutor, a one Michael Radasztics, told Reinhard, "You had neither the right nor the obligation to kill them. You take yourself for a god in whom you don't even believe." Um, what? I am familiar with the usual courtroom berating speech of "You had no right..." Yeah, yeah, we know that. I'd like to know more about the circumstances in which someone would have "the obligation" to kill someone else. Or five someone else's. The number isn't so much the issue as it is "the obligation" which, apparently, might have been an option over there! Is there paperwork involved with that obligation? I'm so confused.

So, what have we learned? The world is full of some sick and twisted individuals. What else have we learned? A lot of them live in Austria where there may or may not be an obligation for one individual to kill another individual or five. I think we've also learned that shame or embarrassment, no matter how great, isn't really all that bad when compared to getting hacked up by a family member. Bring on the shame!

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Alcohol Was NOT A Factor

And in today's "True, But Still Ironic" category, we have this bit from the Sydney Morning Herald that tells us that Josef Fritzl (the 73-year old Austrian guy who imprisoned his daughter, Elisabeth, in the cellar under his house for 24 years and repeatedly raped her through which means she ended up bearing seven of his children) has met with a court appointed psychiatrist who has determined that he was sane when he was committing what can only be described as 'the completely unthinkable'.

The sick pervert has confessed to most of the allegations. I cannot imagine which ones he did not confess or admit to. What? Out of the thousands of times that you raped your daughter, you're going to quibble over whether you actually raped her on April 15, 1993?? As soon as you pull your head out of your ass, you may commence F-ing yourself, sir.

The psychiatrist said that he was neither mentally ill nor "could he have been in a permanent state of inebriation over 24 years." You needed a court appointed psychiatrist to tell you that? People have tried that. I'VE tried that. It's hard enough to be in a permanent state of inebriation for 24 hours, let alone 24 years! Yes, I'd have to agree that being inebriated did NOT contribute to him doing the most unthinkable thing I can imagine for 24 years! This is the only time when the phrase "Alcohol was NOT a factor" can be applied.

So he is sane after all. Yep. Because nothing says 'sane' like locking your 18-year old daughter in the basement and then raping her for 24 years and getting her pregnant 7 times and having her bear 7 children and continuing to keep her and the children locked up in the basement while you live your life out upstairs. Yep. Sane as can be.

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Austrian Audacity

Some people just don't get it. Case in point: Josef Fritzl. Fritzl (who needs to buy another vowel), is the 73-year old Austrian a-hole who kept his daughter locked in the cellar for 24 years whilst he raped her repeatedly and fathered her SEVEN children (all given birth in the basement prison). Three of the children had never seen daylight before they were finally rescued a couple of months ago. (By the way, "never seen daylight" doesn't mean "never went outside". It means, literally, what it says. They had spent their entire lives in a windowless basement and had never seen daylight. That is a concept that I highly doubt any of us could even remotely envision.) Austrian a-hole is really the mildest moniker I could come up with and it doesn't even come close to how I really feel about the dude.

Anyway, Fritzl has been under arrest for the past 2 months. Correct. TWO months. TWO months ago he was arrested. TWO months ago he was jailed. TWO months ago he was jailed for keeping his own daughter locked in his basement continuously for twenty four years. Well, after TWO MONTHS, he's decided he's had enough. According to the fine folks across the pond at The Telegraph, Fritzl "has asked permission to leave his prison cell after admitting he can no longer stand being cooped up." If someone could please hand me the World's Smallest Violin, I can take it from here. Are you kidding me, dude?

Even though Fritzl has a fear of being attacked by other prisoners (that is probably a reasonable fear to have), he has demanded his right to exercise 30 minutes every day. He has also been held in a cell that usually accommodates two, by the way, yet he is the only one in there. So he has a larger than average cell and yet he's feeling "cooped up". Um, WAH.

According to a prison source of The Telegraph, "He usually sits there watching television all day, especially news programmes about him." Watching TV shows about himself. Huh. What else? He also "has been making copious notes ready for the interview, as he will be present when Elisabeth speaks via a video link up and will be allowed to ask questions via his lawyer." OK, then. I've heard enough.

Yeah, that must be rough on him. In a cell larger than other individual cells. All cooped up like that. Only allowed outside 30 minutes a day. Oh, and all of this WITHOUT someone raping you. Yeah, um, that sounds like you have it, um, "rough" (which is actually how you should be raped, by the way).

This really shouldn't surprise me or anyone else, and I don't know if it does. It sure does piss me off, though. I guess I should just assume that someone that could act in such a heinous fashion for so long would naturally be a selfish bastard. Oh, and a coward. (Not so tough with the big boys, eh, Joe?! Not so tough when it might be YOU getting raped, eh, Joe? You asshole.) Below is a graphic of how his makeshift prison was laid out. (You should be able to click on it to enlarge it to a full screen view.) 24 years he kept his own daughter locked down there. 24 years. He's been in jail for 2 months and he's feeling "cooped up"? Yeah, burn in hell, dude.

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