Happy Post-Memorial Day Weekend Link Round Up!

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

+ Japanese man cooks and serves his own genitals, charges $250 per serving. How was your Memorial Day Weekend BBQ? Pictures NSFW but, I mean, obvs. (Newser.com)

+ Anthropologist exploring remote Venezuelan jungle “weds” 12-year-old girl, brings her to Pennsylvania, is epically awful:

After David was born, Kenneth attempted to settle Yarima into modern American domesticity, with a sprinkling of celebrity treatment: Around that time, a reporter at People magazine caught wind of their story, and in January 1987, Kenneth and Yarima — who spoke no English, no matter — were profiled in a feature called “An Amazon Love Story: Romance — and a Jumbo Jet — Took Yarima from the Stone Age to Philadelphia.” Then came the book deal, the movie options, the wooing and flattering. “CBS wanted to do a miniseries,” Kenneth says. “I said, ‘No. I don’t watch television. I want the big screen.’”

He begins to raise a family with her but, after years of misery on her part — no friends, no understanding of money or numbers, and also her husband is a human boil — brings her back to her tribe. One of the sons develops anger and drinking problems and finally rejects the Western capitalist model for his mother’s way of life:

It took David three years to raise the money for a one-way, $700 ticket to the Amazon. It also took about that long for him to summon the courage to go. His siblings don’t quite understand yet and still want nothing to do with their mother. … David stayed with the tribe for two weeks and made a monthlong return trip late last year. He doesn’t travel with anti-snake venom because he can’t afford it, but he also enjoys immersing himself in the culture he rejected for so long.

“My dad tells me not to walk around barefoot in my underwear, but I want to,” David says. When he’s in the jungle, he eats what the tribe eats: grub worms, termites, boa constrictors, monkeys, armadillo. He has contracted parasites; gotten food poisoning; had mosquitoes attack all of his nether regions, and still he’s happy there. “I really want to be Yanomami,” David says. “I want to trek through the jungle like they do.”

If you can stomach the racism and imperialism, the amazing full story is at NYPost.com.

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