Filed under: WTF...?
This, today, from Reuter’s:
MULTAN, Pakistan (Reuters) – Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass lightbulb in his anus.
Wednesday night, doctors brought Mohammad’s misery to an end after a one-and-a-half hour operation to remove the object.
“Thanks Allah, now I feel comfort. Today, I had my breakfast. I was just drinking water, nothing else,” Mohammad, a grey-beared man in his mid-40s, told Reuters from a hospital bed in the southern central city of Multan.
“We had to take it out intact,” said Dr. Farrukh Aftab at Nishtar Hospital. “Had it been broken inside, it would be a very very complicated situation.”
Mohammad, who is serving a four-year sentence for making liquor, prohibited for Muslims, said he was shocked when he was first told the cause of his discomfort. He swears he didn’t know the bulb was there.
“When I woke up I felt a pain in my lower abdomen, but later in hospital, they told me this,” Mohammad said.
“I don’t know who did this to me. Police or other prisoners.”
The doctor treating Mohammad said he’d never encountered anything like it before, and doubted the felon’s story that someone had drugged him and inserted the bulb while he was comatose.
I’m not exactly sure what to say about this story. Possibly it speaks for itself; I don’t really know. I think I’ll just let it stand alone in the “WTF…?” category of my blog as the idle amusement that it is. I will say this, however, slightly off-topic for the subject at hand: having one’s anus rampaged with a lighting instrument, willingly or otherwise, is a pretty fuckin’ horrible by-product of being jailed for FOUR YEARS FOR MAKING BOOZE. One minute you’re just tryin’ to make a little moonshine in your still for private resale, and the next your bum is being violated with a 150 watt GE frosted bulb? That’s just twisted, that’s what that is.
BIG, CLUMSY POSTSCRIPTS: I am gearing up for another tattoo. My fourth will be a wide banner, and will sit sort of under and around the two you see here…
I have several banners on my arms. I enjoy the idea of having personal messages in the artwork to remind me of the importance of things. The Latin phrase in the upper tattoo here translates into “fortune favours the bold”, which is there to remind me that you’re not likely to succeed in life if you’re not willing to take any risks (and as lame as it may sound, this message actually helped me get together with the woman I now call my wife). The “Fear No Evil” tattoo below that speaks to the need to be courageous, I like to think, as well as tipping a quiet cap to my favourite musician, Steve Earle. The new banner? “Rust Never Sleeps”. That one’s not really a tip to Neil Young, which I imagine people might think, and rather serves as a reminder that life’s short and if there’s stuff you want to do, you better get at them.
- BC
Filed under: WTF...?
I gave up watching professional sports a few years ago. The omnipresent corporate sponsorships, whiny players and owners, and the sheer length of time needed to watch an entire game of any kind always really bothered me. What cinched it for me were the strikes and lockouts, though, so when the baseball strike hit several years ago I happily quit watching and never went back. When the hockey lockout transpired, I proudly gave it up [and I live in Toronto, man. You don't watch hockey here, and you're a social pariah]. I never cared much for pro football, and I’ve never been interested in basketball. I’ll watch golf, but only if it’s a major tournament and only on the last nine holes of the last round.
That being said, I’ve found that I absolutely love the World Cup. I’ve never been a soccer junkie, but I got into watching Arsenal last season [go Gunners!] and now the World Cup is really holding my interest. There’s a TV in my office, so I watch at least one of the games every day. Yesterday, that game was Italy versus Australia. So because I enjoy this game, the world has decided to kick me squarely in the nut sack and hand me another reason to hate pro sports. This time, it’s because I think FIFA’s fixing the games.
I don’t know what they’re saying in the sports pages, because I don’t read them. But Australia absolutely dominated Italy, and for the referee to call a cheap-ass penalty like that and set up a penalty shot with twelve seconds left in the game is ridiculous. It’s more than suspect, too. While I’ve never believed that pro sports as a whole were fixed [with the exception of boxing, and does anyone watchthat anymore?], I’m positive that the referees in the World Cup have been told to give breaks to the big-name teams in order to draw greater ratings. I’m no conspiracy nut, but you don’t have to be Fox Mulder to think that the FIFA officials told their referees to give teams like Italy a break in order to prevent underdogs like Australia or Ghana from going through to the quarters or semis.
Eff you, FIFA. I was enjoying this up until now.
- BC
BIG, CLUMSY POSTSCRIPTS: Silver Toad promises to email me a picture of his kidney stone for posting. I await this with a strange anticipation. Also, if you like to read something out of the ordinary and can pull off 800 pages, you’ve gotta pick up Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanah Clarke. I just finished it, and I loved it.
Edit: I edited this because I felt I got off the point with the predictions. I went 1-1 on them, in case you were wondering.
Filed under: The Saga of Silver Toad
So I have this friend who’s getting the hell out of a bad marriage, and subsequently staring divorce in the face. And while many of us can relate with the pain that brings, I can almost guarantee you that not one of you out there has experienced the trials and tribulations this man has had inflicted upon him in the past few months. What he’s gone through is so… so utterly bizarre that it’s worth reporting, and as I’m sure he can use a little levity and humour injected into his situation right now I’m going to do just that [he reads this blog and he needs the laugh]. Because his life is essentially a never-ending soap opera, I’ve created a category just for him, too… and in order to keep him somewhat anonymous just in case, I’m going to call him SILVER TOAD [it doesn't matter why. He knows why].
Toady’s a fun-loving guy in his early forties who’s laid-back, super-friendly and surprisingly hip. He’s into modern music, loves his gadgets, likes to work out and keep active, and does all these things without that desperation forty-somethings have. Toad doesn’t keep young because he’s afraind to be old – it’s just the way he is. Somehow, he’s managed to like comic books and computer games without becoming a geek, he’s maintained his cool factor very nicely, and the chicks have smiled favourably upon him in his first four decades on the planet. All in all, Toady’s a good man.
The Silver Toad is married to Betty. That’s not her name, but it amuses me to call her that because her real name is so not ‘Betty’. Where Toad is a free spirit, Betty is strongly rooted in the earth: she’s a religious junkie with strict Coptic beliefs, and someone who believes strongly in prayer, family, and responsibility. Toady is a grasshopper, you see – not one free of responsible thinking, but still a grasshopper – and Betty is an ant. While I’m sure the pair had happy moments, the truth of the matter is that when they got married I scratched my head and quietly wondered what they saw in each other. But they got on for a few years, had a daughter together, and then proceeded to fall apart.
This isn’t the story of what happened up to Toady that made him end up with the most fucked up life on the Internet, however. Instead, this is the story of his life now, so suffice to say that things didn’t work out between Toad and Betty and one day Toad told her it was over and that he was throwing in the towel on thier marriage. That’s where we’re going to start… because that’s where Betty went completely mental.
Most of our ex-wives, when we get divorced, cry when it goes down. Some of us men do, too – I was one of them back in 2003, when my first marriage ended. It’s expected, and while it’s sad and maybe hard to take it’s something we can endure. I’m sure Toady was expecting the tears, and maybe some screaming and name-calling and a slap across the face or three, but I imagine he was somewhat alarmed when she began emptying the cupboards in order to fling their contents at his head. Dinner plates, glasses, and a cooking pot of unknown size were all flung through the air in an attempt to decapitate our hero that evening, and it was a pretty dark scene. One can only imagine that it became an even darker one, mind you, when Betty kicked him SO HARD IN THE BAG THAT HE GOT THREE KIDNEY STONES FROM IT.
A quick recap, for the slower of you: man meets girl. Man falls in love. Man and girl get married. Maarriaige fails. Man tries his best to save it, but finally gives up. Girl KICKS MAN IN BAG AND MAKES KIDNEY STONES. Man, of course, eventually passes one on the john in a pride-swallowing, penis-ripping moment of agonizing pain that he shall never forget.
Perhaps that would be alarming enough, if it had been the end of the matter. Unfortunately for our good Toad, it was not. It was, in fact, only the beginning of an epic tale that continues to this day, and fills his life with misery at every turn. The kicking, the punching, the spitting in the face, the insane letter, the girlfriend, the Six Private Investigators That May Not Exist… these things hound our man Toady to this day. Every few days, I’ll advance some of this story… and you, gentle reader, can therefore be uplifted in knowing that no matter how bad your life is, at least YOU AREN’T PASSING KICK-INDUCED KIDNEY STONES.
******
BIG, CLUMSY POSTSCRIPTS: I got my wedding photos from my Mom this past weekend. Here’s the first. It depicts me with Liam, Hailey, and a woman who hasn’t hoofed my in the sack and made kidney stones claw up and out my penis yet – my lovely bride Tania.
- BC
