Man Eats Brain

How did I miss this? I didn’t, you could argue, in that I did stumble across the article, and am now reporting on it. But there was some lag time. I shoulda heard about it as it happened! There needs to be some kind of text update system in place for connoisseurs of the strange, bizarre, and morbid, some kind of early warning alert like they have for severe weather, so guys like me could get our creepy news in real-time. Anyway, on to the story. Reporter Reza Aslan ate a piece of human brain. Not surprisingly, he’s getting some heat for it, as is CNN, the network which aired Aslan’s documentary “Believer.” Some critics are calling the show racist, which is bullshit. Not everything is about race. It’s exploitative, yes, sensationalistic; in bad taste, perhaps. Potentially dangerous? Possibly. But not racist.

Aslan lived with the Aghori, a secretive sect in India that practices cannibalism, coprophilia, and necrophilia. Lotta philias going on with those folks. (In laymen’s terms, they eat human flesh and feces and have sex with dead bodies.) They are often found lurking creepily at cremation sites, where they smear themselves with the ashes from immolated corpses. Aren’t you glad they don’t go door to door in your neighborhood, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses?