5 Coolest Suicides

 DISCLAIMER: WE AT JICAMA IN NO WAY SUPPORT SUICIDE, THIS ARTICLE IS SOLELY FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES.

Halloween will be here in just two days!  Holy radioactive garbanzo beans!

This is also Jicama's fifth post!  Trust me, I'm already throwing black-paint covered oranges at pictures of dodos as we speak.  What?  It's tradition.

Seriously though, in honour of this joyous c-c-c-combo-occasion, I've decided to give you 5 cool ways to kill yourself, in order of difficulty.


I.  Throw yourself off a 10-story building wearing a banana suit.
-We've all seen those dorky outfits in the Halloween costume aisle, may as well make it a piece of your final wardrobe.  Just imagine the looks on the faces of everyone trying to scrape your corpse off the pavement when they see that outfit!  Bonus points if you get to wear it at your funeral.

II.  Self-Immolate while sky-diving.
-A bit trickier, and I'm not entirely sure that the rushing air wouldn't just extinguish the flame.  Just to be safe, have a belt of incendiary explosives ready to go off on impact.  Make sure you land in a safe area, or at least a roadblocked-off area, wouldn't want to hurt anyone.

III. Hang yourself with your own intestines.
-I know what you're thinking, "How is this even possible?".  Oddly enough, it has been accomplished by determined individuals.  You have to act quickly, and wrapping the guts around your neck to actually die by asphyxiation takes immense dexterity and constitution.

IV.  Death by Chuck Norris
-The difficulty of this technique lies primarily in two factors: Finding Chuck Norris, and finding someone strong to beat you with Chuck Norris.  Your large friend must lift Mr. Norris into the air, and use his unwilling (or perhaps willing) body as a living club to beat you into being thoroughly dead.  Granted, this borders on the line of murder, but let's just call it assisted suicide.

V.  Launch yourself into the mouth of a living Tyrannosaurus Rex covered in a mechanical harness which surrounds you with orbiting ring of chainsaws.
-If you effectively build a chainsaw-belt harness, genetically re-animate a T-Rex, and load yourself into a cannon or catapult solely for this suicide, then I tip my hat to you sir.  I tip my hat.

Happy Halloween!

Image Courtesy of Doomser at de.wikipedia

Jhator

With Halloween just around the corner, the subjects of horror, death, and the mysterious are all over the place like a putrid gelatinous goo seeping up through the gutters.  For those who didn't know, this is one my favourite times of year!  All the ghouls and dark corners make my insides wiggle with glee.  So, I've decided to bring you something a bit on the macabre side today, all the way from Tibet.  Be warned, this is not for weak stomachs.

Once a person hits their expiration date, those still fresh are left with the means of disposing of their late companion.  Here in the West, burial, cremation, or sea-burial are the most common means of accomplishing this goal.  In Tibet however, there is a much more interesting practice known as "Jhator", or "Giving Alms to the Birds".

The family gathers around to watch as the body of the deceased is pinned to the earth, and cut into pieces by Rogyapas ("body-breakers") with a ceremonial knife.  Vultures then descend to promptly begin devouring the corpse.  The Rogyapas do not carry about their grim work with a solemn attitude at all, but rather talk and make jokes as in any other type of labour.

After the Vultures have worked at the body for a good while, the Rogyapas return to the body to continue working.  If the stomach is still intact, it is split open, and the Rogyapas take a moment to step back and let the smell recede.  Afterwards, any remaining bones (save the skull) are gathered up, placed on a flat stone, ground up, smashed, and mixed with flour and yak butter for flavour.  Again, the Vultures continue to eat away at the remnants of the corpse, which now tastes phenomenally better!

The top of the skull is saved, and sometimes used to make enlarged tea-glasses.

Happy Halloween!

Image Courtesy of FishOil at en.wikipedia

H₂stḗr

What do you call a giant ball full of the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen that is held together by gravity?

[Beautiful]

Every night, shining down from the sky above us is a sea of lights.  Stars.  It is absurd that every twenty-four hours, every single person on earth has had a field of these celestial wonders pass overhead, yet so few stop to marvel at their magnificence.

The word itself, "Star", is believed by etymologists to originate over 7000 years ago in Proto-Indo-European as "H₂stḗr", survivng largely unchanged.  From the dawn of our existence, we have gazed towards the heavens in wonder; And it was not until the last century did we finally begin to truly understand what stars are.

Born from a dramatic collision between galaxies or a massive stellar explosion, the Star forms in a collapsing mass of dense gas and dust.  Over 90% of a Star's lifespan is spent in a high-temperature, high-pressure state of nuclear fusion.  The gravity generated by a Star is constantly pulling in on it, trying to collapse it; Simultaneously the tremendous amount of force generated by the fusion reaction at the core holds the stellar-membrane in place.  It is this push-pull effect that eventually leads to the death of a star.  A star will either shrink down to a White Dwarf, burning away at its fuel for some 10 Trillion years, or blow-up into a huge Red Giant and eventually Supernovae!

Most Stars fall between one-billion, to ten-billion years old.  Now, cosmic proportioned amounts may be expected with cosmic subjects, but take a second to fathom how long that is.  5000 years go, there were no Pyramids.  Some of the earliest records of writing only dates back to 6600 BCE, or about 8600 years ago.  Most Stars are between 1,000,000,000 years and 10,000,000,000 years old.  All our history is like a speck of dust in the lifespan of a Star.

The biggest stars get as hot as 50,000 Kelvin, and our Sun is about 5777 Kelvin.  To again reference how incredibly hot that is, let us convert to more customary units to put these unreal balls of light into perspective.  Our Sun, a moderately small star, is about 5777 Kelvin.  That's also 6000°C or 11000°F.  100°F is a hot day in South Texas, and 140°F weather fries us like ants under a magnifying glass.  11000°F?

The light from a single Star will travel trillions of miles before it gets to our eyes.  The Star could have died eons before the dawn of civilization, yet we are still bathed in its posthumous glow.  Scientists estimate that there are between 200-400 billion Stars in our galaxy alone, 500 billion galaxies in the universe, and therefore some 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Stars in all (that's two-hundred sextillion for those who were counting).

So, the next time you walk outside at night, take a few minutes to look up, and appreciate the incredible marvels that are above your head every day.

Okapi

In the family of Giraffidae, there are only two members.  The well-known Giraffe for which the family is named, and the unsung hero, the Okapi.  The Okapi, also known as the "African Unicorn", stands as yet another testament to how bizarre nature truly is.

Like its douchebag glory-stealing cousin the Giraffe, the Okapi is also native to Africa.  It is a strange animal, resembling a cross between a deer, giraffe, zebra, and a horse.  In fact, it's kind of like evolution wasn't sure what to make of it, and just threw a bunch of DNA into a blending machine in hopes of creating a delicious fruit smoothie.  These large animals can grow to be 8 feet long and 6 and half feet tall.  The Okapi's neck is much shorter than the Giraffe's, and it has a foot-long tongue it uses to clean inside its eye sockets and ears.

Okapis are reddish-brown, but their back legs are white with black zebra-like stripes.  Scientists theorize that theses bright, monochrome stripes somehow work like camouflage in their native rain forest habitat (which is green and brown).  Okapis live alone almost all of their lives, coming out of their solitude only for mating.  Like dogs, they will sometimes mark their territory by urinating, although they tend to use a sticky tar-like substance emitted from glands in their hooves for this purpose instead.

During the attempt to put Okapis in zoos, it was discovered that they are terrible sailors.  When trying to move them thousands of miles in a ship, they just kept dying from "rigors and stress".  However, more recent attempts to transport Okapis by plane has been more successful, proving that Okapis are totally cool with flying.

So, if you ever see a six-foot tall horse-thing with the legs of a zebra that's spewing black goo from its feet and trying to board a plane, you can properly note to your terrified companion, "That, my dear sir, is an Okapi, better known as the 'African Unicorn'".

The Birth of Jicama

What exactly is a Jicama?  Is it contagious?  Is it a philosophy?  If you hurl it at an aircraft will you begin to grow an assortment of off-smelling flowers from your armpits?

I know these questions must be burning in your wrinkly-fleshy masses of organs called "brains", so I've decided to answer them!

The Jicama is a vegetable hailing from South America.  It's something of a cross between a yam, a turnip, a potato, and a pear that shoots 15-foot vines out of the top of it.  The root (the turnipy-part) is edible, sweet, and can make some wicked Jicama-Fries or perhaps a light salad.  Oddly enough, the rest of the plant is highly toxic.  The seeds are used to poison insects and fish.  Jicama is not only used in South America and Mexico, but has also become widely popular in Southeast Asia, spreading as far as Bangladesh and India.

If you consider it's widespread growth in popularity, spanning across three continents to constitute as being contagious, then it most certainly is.

Jicama has, from a culinary approach, united groups of people from radically different backgrounds.  This new-world freak-vegetable has brought together people from opposite ends of the planet, uniting mankind around the dinner table.  In this way, Jicama represents unity, compassion, and understanding; It is this philosophy that brought this very blog into being.

And finally, "If you hurl it at an aircraft will you begin to grow an assortment of off-smelling flowers from your armpits?"  I doubt this theory has been scientifically tested.  But I assure you, our top raptors are on this right now.