And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #105: Torche guitarist v bat piss

By | Published on Thursday 5 April 2012

Torche

This week’s Beef Of The Week all begins with a frantic Facebook status update by Torche guitarist Andrew Elstner, saying: “OK so… A bat peed in my eye. Whether or not you think I’m telling the truth is irrelevant at this point. What I’m worried about now is rabies. A bat. It pissed into my eye. God help me”.

Torche are a metal band, so you’d probably assume this is just a hazard of the job, but no. This doesn’t happen often. Not even round Mazza Manson’s house. Although Elstner was seemingly staying in quite a spooky property at the time the bat piss incident occurred.

In a later update, he added: “For those unaware, this house was built in 1824 and rests on 70+ acres, and my old roomie who still lives here leaves the back door open so his dogs can roam at will … I switch on the overhead light/ceiling fan combo and what I think at first is a shadow being cast from the spinning fan blades turns out to be a freaking bat. It circles the room a few times at light speed, and on one of the turns, dive bombs my head and squirts a little nervous pee into my eye”.

It doesn’t sound that bad when put in context. I mean, it still sounds fucking horrific, but at least he’s not actually going to get rabies. As he pointed out to concerned followers later, “you can’t get it from faeces or urine” and anyway “the percentage of rabies-infected bats in the US is around 1% of the total population”.

But the mind runs wild, doesn’t it? “Now I’m imagining a crazed, salivating bat and further, imagining that it angrily spat into my eye”, he said. And if there’s one thing we all know, it’s that crazed salivating animals that spread rabies. Oh god, oh god, oh god.

No. Calm yourselves. It’s fine. But just to be on the safe side, Elstner contacted the Center For Disease Control for advice. “OK, creepy follow up”, he wrote shortly afterwards. “Rabies Control and CDC people are telling me I need shots, specifically for the reason I imagined: it could’ve been saliva AND I slept in the same house with it – [it] could’ve bitten me in my sleep! What?! I wish I was making this shit up. My info and story were just now faxed to the CDC in Atlanta”.

I think the moral of the story here is that you should never ever go to the countryside. Or be in a metal band. I bet being in a metal band didn’t help. That said, Elstner didn’t even think to bite the bat’s head off. Ozzy must be spinning in his grave. Or he would be had he died from rabies after biting a bat’s head off. I bet Ozzy never called the authorities after that little episode. Honestly, metallers today.



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