Winston Churchill & Spider Bites

Just some random stuff that i thought i'd share: The first involves a dream i had recently where Winston Churchill put in an appearance of sorts. As a boy, i grew up on the romantic notion of Churchill leading the mother-country democracy Britain standing alone with its fellow democratic former colonies, against the menace of Nazi tyranny, before being joined by the other great democracy, the USA to save the world. Now, my thinking is more reflected by the perspectives mentioned in this Glenn Greenwald post.

Be that as it may, i was dreaming that i was attending an important ceremony of some sort at a very old school, and that Winston Churchill was presiding over things. Churchill just had to sit there and hold a mace or something, he didn't have to talk, which turned out to be a good thing as I found out later when he joined my party at our table after the ceremony was over. You see, Churchill has been dead for about fifty years now and in order to get him to preside over the ceremony they had to reanimate his corpse. And while he looked a presentable figure sitting in his chair at the dais at the front of the room, it was obvious that his higher functions had been negatively impacted by time and events. It was obvious that he was brain-damaged. He looked a little sickly and I was told he would start looking worse over the next couple of days before he finally conked-out again. More, while he responded to stimuli (being nudged, being spoken to) it wasn't clear that he at all understood what was going on. All in all I found the experience a little macabre and unsettling.

As for the spider bites, ... well, I got on the bus with my little boy, and at the back there were two beautiful little school age white girls, giving their Filipino nanny a hard time. When they appeared to start getting completely out of hand I said something to the effect of backing up the nanny's words to try to help. I worried that I was either going to scare them and maybe make them cry, or that I was just rudely interfering. But, happily, it worked and they calmed down a little bit. Then they started poking their hands into the grate covering the bus's air-conditioner/heater thing and the nanny told them to stop, they might get hurt. Again they weren't listening so again i took a chance and said "Yeah. There might be a bear, or a raccoon, or a squirrel in there that could bite your fingers. You wouldn't want that to happen would you?"

The little girl smiled, while taking her hand away and then looked at the grate, and said: "There's no animals in there! It's just dark!" I said, "Yes. Raccoons and creatures like that like the dark." The little girl asked "Are there spiders in there?" I said, "Sure! Spiders, bugs, ... they could bite you too." The little girl shouted for the whole bus: "A spider bit me on my PRIVATE!" I thought to myself, "Okay, ... I'm done." She shouted "That's how I got my birth-mark!" I didn't want to know any more. But apparently it happened when the family had gone camping once.