"What If You Couldn't Just Say 'Cheese'?"

Oh! These photographic subjects have facial nerve problems. I thought they were completely normal people who resisted the manipulations of a professional portrait photographer.

"Angus was 21 years old and living in Michigan when she started noticing the effects of gigantism."

"Her svelte, 5-foot-8, 135-pound figure vanished, replaced by too-big hands and feet and tight pants. She shot up three inches, and even her head was growing."

"Via a psychedelic music aficionado acquaintance - Is this something you've heard of?"

A reader [ADDED: Hazy Dave] sends me this link and says:

As an old Audible Althouse listener, I can understand the appeal of having a friendly well-modulated voice in your ears (though I usually can't get through entire an podcast and I'm too impatient to listen to books, even while driving). But I guess I listen to music for the occasional goose-bumps or “bubbles in your head” experience. Listening to a young blonde whisper in your ear seems like cheating, if not outright pr0n... I may need to try this out with earbuds later, just to see if I get weirded out, or if it just seems funny, or what. "Unsettling" seems like a reasonable starting point, even (very quietly) through tinny office computer speakers.

Wow! I watched some of those ASMR videos, then went back to some Audible Althouse  — my 2005-2006 podcast project— they're all here [ADDED: or maybe not.] It really does seem like that ASMR stuff. Truly strange from that perspective!

This reminds me a bit of Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North" and my own practice of falling asleep and sleeping playing an audiobook, a book read by a man with a gentle voice (almost always Bill Bryson, David Rakoff, or David Foster Wallace).

At the first link:

If... you’re one of the people the video was made for—one of those people who experience Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response—you’ll probably find all six minutes incredibly satisfying, the video equivalent of a really nice, mellow kind of drug that leaves no aftertaste....

ASMR is a tricky feeling to describe, and I can only talk about it secondhand. From what I understand from conversations with ASMRers, it’s a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine....

Misophonia — "a newly recognized condition that remains little studied and poorly understood."

A newly recognized condition... or an old irritability with a name that helps irritable people feel less irritated by their own characteristic of being terribly irritated by other people?

Many people can be driven to distraction by certain small sounds that do not seem to bother others — gum chewing, footsteps, humming. But sufferers of misophonia... [are believed to have something that] is hard-wired, like right- or left-handedness, and is probably not an auditory disorder but a “physiological abnormality” that resides in brain structures activated by processed sound....

Misophonia (“dislike of sound”) is sometimes confused with hyperacusis, in which sound is perceived as abnormally loud or physically painful. But Dr. Johnson says they are not the same. “These people like sound, the louder the better,” she said of misophonia patients. “The sounds they object to are soft, hardly audible sounds.” One patient is driven crazy by her beloved dog licking its paws. Another can’t bear the pop of the plosive “p” in ordinary conversation.

"He's got the bunny outfit, a cowboy suit and a ballerina dress..."

"... but you don't see him except where he's tripping through his backyard... He's got a strange lifestyle at home but we all do weird things at home."

"Man goes to hospital with stomach ache, gets uterus removed."

"Needless to say, he was 'stunned.' Especially since he's all man on the outside and had even fathered two children. He 'has no problems whatsoever with his sexuality,' according to Dr. Pramod Kumar Shrivastava, a surgeon at Chhindwara district hospital, who spoke to The Telegraph about the case."

"Two adult brothers and a paternal uncle in the U.K. all appear to be normal males — but genetically are women with two X chromosomes."

"Both brothers are married to women, and they and their uncle have the sexual anatomy, behavior, growth, and skeletal development of males. All have normal health and intelligence.... While it's extremely rare for sex reversal to run in a family, it's not unheard of for genetic females to develop as men or for genetic males to develop as women."

Glenn Beck has a medical condition involving "small fibers"?

"We don’t even know what all of the symptoms are at this point."

Is it Morgellons disease? Which I'm pretty sure is a flat-out delusion. What are the chances that Glenn Beck is delusional?

He says it's been "very strange."

I've told you also that I have been diagnosed with macular dystrophy... And if you're a long time listener, you might be even be able to tell it I can just by listening to my voice now. There is something wrong with my voice, and we're not sure what it is.... I've seen five different doctors and I've got an incredible group of doctors who are, I think only one of them really hates me, and I have the other four watching that one. But they're looking one of them said to me the other night, we have to do all of these blood tests because we have to look for toxins and poisons, and that word stuck out to me. And it's not poison like you know...

The last 24 hours as I've been thinking about the doctors saying we're looking for toxins, we're looking for poisons in your body, I know what they are. For four years I have tried to understand the mind of what I believe are monsters. It started with Walter Lippmann....

I believe in the American experiment. But I also believe there are very misguided people, and I have been drinking that poison, which others may not find poison, but I do because it is exact opposite of me. And I have been "That which you gaze upon, you become."

So... studying politics has injected him with toxin, making him a monster... and he might be going blind... there's something wrong with his voice...

Yikes.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo (a doctor) says:

Yes, he's describing a neuropathy, hence the talk about poisins/toxins.

He ain't the Morgellon's type, IMO...

Small fiber neuropathy: A burning problem

"At first when the problem started I just wanted to have sex all the time, I thought I was a sex addict."

"But when I looked around the room and heard the stories other people told, about how desperate they were for sex, I realised I wasn't like them."