Aggregator? I just met her.

No original thought here, I just wanted to share some fascinating interweb finds from the past 2 weeks. Some of them are kind of long reads (like this post) but there's no fluff. 100% satisfaction, 100% of the time, that's my motto!

First a pretty short one - This article from the NYTimes about the dying, rural, northern, Albanian custom of women who swear a vow of celebacy and become the man of the house is one of the most interesting things I've ever read, ever. Def check out the slide show.

'Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,' said Ms. Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of raki.

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Actually, likewise this article in the New Yorker about itching. Well it's about itching but mostly about a new way of looking at how our brains percieves visual, tactile, aural...information and turn it in to what we consider our 'perception' of the outside (and inside) world.

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

That may all sound like a lot of blah, blah, blah... but there's also a story of a woman who has a phantom itch soooooo bad that one night while sleeping she scratches right through her damn skull TO HER BRAIN. Then, because they can't find anything physically, medically, wrong with her scalp to explain the itch, she ends up spending 2 years in a locked medical ward sleeping in a foot ball helmet with white mitts taped on to her hands!!!! Now 7(!) years later,

...she has gradually learned to protect herself. She trims her nails short. She finds ways to distract herself. If she must scratch, she tries to rub gently instead. And, if that isn’t enough, she uses a soft toothbrush or a rolled-up terry cloth. "I don’t use anything sharp,” (BUT)...Still, the itching remains a daily torment. "I don’t normally tell people this," she said, "but I have a fantasy of shaving off my eyebrow and taking a metal-wire grill brush and scratching away."

The article is 8 pages long buy how can you not read it?????

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Behold!!! The most thought-provoking article you'll ever read about real dolls. Seriously, ah-mazing. It's from Salon from a couple years ago but I can't imagine much has changed besides some of the technology. I've been talking about this with anyone who will listen all week, and here's a little gem my boyfriend have been acting out ad nauseum all week-

"He asked me if I could make him a silicone dog, because he was a breeder, and he didn't want to hurt his dogs anymore, he said. He talked like right out of the movie 'Deliverance.'" ..."'Aw, I don't want to hurt ma dawgs, I like ma dawgs ... kin you make me one so ah kin still use it fer the sex?' And when I realized that he was legitimate, I was shocked. And I just politely said no, I'm sorry, gotta go, click."

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The Washington Post has a great article about the burgeoning use of ecstasy to help treat post traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is one of the hidden costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the Pentagon acknowledges that at least 50,000 soldiers (4% of those deployed) are affected, and their care, long term, is extremely expensive. PTSD sufferers make up only 8% of veteran's medical claims, but receive 20% of all payouts. Also, their therapeutic use could hasten ecstasy's legal, recreational use. Yay for all of us!

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The pregnant man gave birth!!!!!!!

Any excuse to show Oprah.

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In honor of 4th of July (which is already over, I know) here's a totally rad article from the Atlantic about competitive eating.

“Nostradamus, born in the early sixteenth century, actually mentioned the Grilled Cheese Championship in his poetic yet cryptic quatrains,” George Shea says. “He said, ‘And at one point under the bright sky they shall gather to eat, they shall gather to eat the cheese that has been pouched in bread and grilled!”

Yes it's competitive eating season. This article is also a little old but what the hey, you'll never have to read another article about esophagus stretching again, it's the definitive one!! Please, please, for my sake take a moment to really apreciate the seal of the International Federation of Competitive Eating. I don't know what genius created it but they have officially sold me on the 'sport'.

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One time 2 of my friends and I were doing a township clean up in high school for some extra money but there were so many ticks they let us go home early. Ticks are freaky. We went to a dinner to get grilled cheeses and check ourselves in the bathroom for hidden ticks - I had 9, and my friend Robbie had one on his junk. Lymes disease is no joke people, didn't you watch Real World Seattle??????

So, the secret life of a tick from slate, with this gem about how ticks make bacon -

The male approaches from below, then uses his mouthparts to pluck a packet of sperm called a spermatophore from his genital pore. He delivers the packet into his partner's genital pore with his hypostome, the same barbed hollow needle that he sticks into mammals....After the female drops to the ground, full of blood and sperm, she lays her eggs, and then the fun is definitely over. She begins to atrophy. Her intestines spill out in a yellow blob.

All this talk of genital pores is getting me kind of hot.
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This last one is just disturbing, read at your own risk.