For a long time, I took taekwondo. I had a lot of fun with it, too, and despite being a bigger guy, I was quick and graceful and a pretty decent little fighter. There was a guy in this class who was, for want of a better term, a cock. Honestly, the guy was a cock. I remember specifically being disgusted by him one day during testing. His girlfriend was testing for her belt and was quite a bit behind him. Nobody else was testing for the same belt, so the instructor asked him to spar with her for that portion of the testing.

He proceeded to absolutely humilliate her. He was not being tested, he was just keeping her in her place, throwing things at her she had no way of defending against so that he could look good. Eventually, the instructor paused the fight and with much exasperation explained that the purpose of the test was to see if the girl was able to attack and defend at her level, and that he was preventing this from happening. And remember, the girl he’s doing this to is his girlfriend.

Yeah, he’s a cock.

So the cock develops testicular cancer which spreads and he dies. A few months after the funeral, some of the people from class were talking about how he was truly a great man and had done so much for so many. There was no evidence of this, and the only reason they said it was that fear of talking ill of the dead. But me, I like to confront silly superstitions head on, so I told them he was a cock and that while he didn’t deserve to die in pain, that hardly made him a better person. Naturally, they all freaked out about bad luck and lightning bolts from heaven. Idiots.

So today, that resonated with me when I was reading Orac’s most recent post about the death of Hulda Clark. She was¬†a woman who wrote a series of books, the most notable of which is entitled The Cure For All Cancers. She insisted that modern medicine was a lie and a hoax by Big Pharma to kill off whitey (or some such babble) and that she possessed the real live actual cure for cancer. It was a machine called a Syncronometer.

Guess how she died?

You already know in your heart, don’t you.

I don’t even have to say it. But I will.

It was multiple myeloma. A type of cancer.

Sometimes it’s funny when irony kills, isn’t it? When the cancer quack dies of cancer or the cock dies of testicular cancer? I know, you feel wrong admitting it, but that hardly makes it less true.

So I mentioned this irony to the lovely Gizzy Boner, my colleague and friend, and she responded with “You mean that drag queen?” You can imagine my confusion. Hulda was no looker, but she didn’t seem to me to be avec wang if you catch my drift. So Gizzy showed me this clip from CBC’s Marketplaceabout yet another flinger-of-woo, Bill Nelson aka Desir?© Dubounet, the Canadian inventor of the EPFX machine. Particularly frightening is near the end of the interview when the scary drag queen voicce comes out.

Enjoy!

Jim