SPORTS, LSD, and BAD GERMANS

SPORTS

To The Michigan Daily:

I love athletes’ names. Remember I. M. Hipp at Nebraska, or how about Elvis Peacock at Oklahoma? Now comes Shavodrick Beaver from Wichita Falls, Texas. Say what? I suggest he reverse his name and bill himself as the first black Ukrainian college quarterback, Beaver Shavodrick. Beaver’s a comin', hide your hearts girls. As an esteemed member of the prestigious institution Mr. Beaver will attend, my only advice is that he petition his advisor for a 4-year supply of HAGEN-Daz ice cream.

Professor of Bovine Engineering
Nancy X
Bruce State University

LSD

April 19, Bicycle Day

“PARIS—Albert Hofman, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102. Dr. Hofman first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.” Craig S. Smith, 4/30/08 NYT

What a coincidence, I too accidentally ingested LSD, about 100 times. Right, French? Ah, the good old days, when Dr. Hymbad and myself published an underground newspaper at Gwinn High School. It was called the Liberal Student Dispatch. I recently received an Email from CD Baby informing me that someone who had bought a FUBAR CD was wondering if I was the same Randy Tessier he had played with in a group called “Hare Pye.” Our only gig was at the K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base chapel annex.

BAD GERMANS!

What follows are excerpts from a conversation between Werner Herzog (filmmaker) and Errol Morris (documentarian).
This conversation took place at Brandeis University in the Fall of 2007.
Things they have done together:
Visited serial killer Ed Kemper in prison
Visited Plainfield, Wisconsin, to investigate the murderer Ed Gein
Dug up Ed Gein’s mother’s grave to see if she was still there (almost)

"EM: When Werner and I first met we went to visit this serial killer [Edmund Emil Kemper III] in prison in Northern California.

WH: Vacaville, yeah.

EM: There were three of us. To circumvent a lot of red tape, the lawyer identified us as psychiatrists.

WH: After reading all the transcripts of Kemper, I had the feeling that what was interesting was that the man, in my opinion—and I’m speaking of Edmund Emil Kemper—he made a lot of sense on why he killed and how it all originated.
And at the end, after having killed seven of eight coeds, hitchhikers, he killed his mother and put the severed head on the mantle and threw darts at it.

EM: He desperately tried to turn himself in to the police by making repeated phone calls from this phone booth. Now he would have a cell phone. So I guess it’s easier now for serial killers to turn themselves in.

EM: Kemper had killed a dozen people. He had killed his grandparents. He had been put away in a juvenile facility, released under California law when he reached eighteen, and then went on to kill eight more people. And Kemper described how these murders occurred. He would pick up women hitchhiking. He would be killing a women with a knife and talking to her, saying, ‘I hope this isn’t really unpleasant. I hope you’re not uncomfortable. I hope this is not too frightening.'

WH: There is something about Kemper and, of course, Ed Gein as well—we had a falling out over Ed Gein at the time

EM: Cannibals can turn friends into enemies. Go figure.

From The Believer (Film Journal)

“Former SS doctor Aribert Heim tops a list of most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminals released today. He is a man so brutal that witnesses remember him as the worst they saw though he was only at Mauthausen concentration camp for two months. Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched Heim kill a man. It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and a swimmer. Then, instead of treating the prisoner’s foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim’s head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display. ‘He needed the head because of its perfect teeth,’ Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in a 1950 Austrian warrant for Heim’s arrest.” David Rising, Associated Press, 4/30/08 Ann Arbor News

I know, I’m morbid, so call me Dr. Morbido.

Best – R.T.