Come with me on a little journey.

Let’s say you take an earwig. You know the earwig, right? Little cockroach-colored, pincer-butted freak bug?

You’ve heard the rumors — earwigs like to burrow into people’s ears, lay eggs in the brain, build condos in your cerebral cortex, and so on, and so forth.

You think those rumors are bunk, bupkus, total hoodoo.

So, you take an earwig, you scoop him into a tube, and then you upend the tube into your ear.

Welcome to Bite Me with Dr. Mike.

Last night: Mexico episode. In the course of an hour, Dr. Mike shoves an earwig into his ear canal, handles fistfuls of screwworm maggots (they’re maggots that aren’t content to eat dead flesh and are plenty happy to eat live flesh, particularly, yours), searches for botfly larvae in goats, dicks around with a tarantula that can fire needle-like hairs from its legs into your eyes and mouth, lets a Kissing Bug cavort around his faceparts, tickles stingrays, and purges his body of parasites by chowing down on a mouth-scorching habanero pepper from a local market.

Now, the “Dr. Mike Tortures Himself” Schadenfreude scale was fairly low on this one — heck, last episode, the man let himself get stung by a box jellyfish, and then rolled around on screen for the better part of two minutes, crying and gritting his teeth. (In that episode, he also went  swimming with a funnel web spider; tortured himself with the tiny hair-like needles of the Gympie Gympie plant until he threw up; and ran from the World’s Most Dangerous Bird, the cassowary.)

Still, when he chews on a habanero, it goes fine for the first five seconds. Then he goes nuclear. His head looks like it’s about to rupture. It’s all sweat and terror. And he keeps eating it until he has to run to the back and chug a gallon of milk from the market’s fridge.

So, what I’m saying is, it’s basically Jackass for smart people.

Which, y’know, is okay by me. I learn things about all the parasites that might try to eat my body, and I learn these things because Dr. Mike… lets them try to eat his body. Good times, America. Good times.

What’s the point? Well, you’re smart. I know you are. And I know you enjoy watching other fine folks submit themselves to pain and misery for your entertainment. I can smell it on you! It smells of pine, and vinegar, and misery. So, check out the show. Travel Channel, 10pm, Tuesdays.

Now, other updates!

First, what are you still doing here? Are you daft? We’ve got the next installment of Shadowstories: The Infi-Net Revolution up. That’s right, it’s Chapter 2: The Celestial Chorus.

Okay, you’re back? Good. Goooood. Now you’ll want to ping Eddy Webb’s The Whitechapel Project. Episode 1, The Cell, is up. You can read it, or, by the magical voodoo wonders of technology, you can listen to it. I don’t know how he did it. I assume Druid magic and steam.

Finally, DIY Days went well in Philly. I did my little fireside chat with Lance Weiler, a talk about The Future of Storytelling. Seemed to go over well. It’ll be up online at some point in the next couple of days — keep checking back at DIY Days conference link. You can, at present, check out the Douglas Rushkoff keynote, which is a hoot to watch (the male orgasm narrative arc is worth the price of admission).