WhiteBoard News for Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Sitiawan, Malaysia (Bernama):
A Malaysian man sliced off his own penis, then fried and ate it after taking hallucinatory pills that caused him to hear voices urging him to mutilate himself.
The 34-year-old man claimed he only realised what he had done when he saw blood oozing from his crotch, said a police spokesman in the town of Sitiawan, 190 miles north of Kuala Lumpur.
The man had taken hallucinatory pills before sleeping on Friday and awoke hearing voices telling him to chop off his genitals and devour it.
He is now in a stable condition in hospital, the national news agency Bernama reported.
The man had recently been released from a drug rehabilitation centre.
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Tiberias, Israel (Ananova):
An Israeli woman has swallowed a fork while trying to retrieve a cockroach from her throat.
The insect reportedly jumped into her mouth as she was cleaning her home in a village in northern Israel.
The 32-year-old tried to scoop the cockroach out with a fork, but ended up swallowing that as well.
Dr Nikola Adid, of the Poria Hospital in Tiberias, said: "It's a bit of a strange story. This is the first time I've ever encountered anything like this. None of my medical colleagues have heard of anything similar either."
He operated on the woman to remove the fork from her stomach, but said the bug had already been digested.
An X-ray showed the fork, lodged sideways in her stomach. Adid says the woman is recovering well.
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Wuppertal, Germany (Ananova):
A masked man who tried to rob a German cafe at gunpoint fled when he was pelted with apples.
Police in Wuppertal say the man walked into the cafe in the Elberfeld district dressed in black and with his face covered.
He drew a gun and demanded money but the 43-year-old woman who worked there wasn't intimidated by his threats.
She took a bucket of apples and hurled them towards the robber who fled empty-handed.
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Andahuaylas, Peru (Ananova):
A surgeon in Peru uses builders' tools to operate on patients.
Doctor Cesar Venero says his hospital, in Andahuaylas, does not have enough surgical equipment.
"It is not that I am eccentric, the hospital simply doesn't have proper surgical equipment and people need to be treated," he said.
Dr Venero recently carried out his fifth operation using building tools when he used a hand-borer and some pliers to carry out a surgery.
A spokesman for the hospital says all of the equipment is sterilised and described the doctor's methods as "efficient, cheap and creative".
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Crowthorne, England (Ananova):
A pensioner found a burglar with his testicles impaled on a broken window in her bathroom.
When the man screamed he was dying, Joyce Edwards replied: "Good."
The 80-year-old had been woken by noises from the bathroom of her home in Crowthorne, Berkshire.
When she went to check, she saw the man dangling on shards of glass in his groin, says The Sun.
She said: "He cried out to me, "I'm dying, please help me". But I was so cross I shouted back "Good" and ran out of the house."
The pensioner alerted neighbours who called police and an ambulance. It's believed the man may have lost four pints of blood.
He was treated in hospital, but medics refused to say whether he had lost either of his testicles.
A 35-year-old man from Finchampstead, Berkshire, was later arrested and charged.
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San Jose, California (The Mercury News):
A lizard lover from Alabama won an annual contest celebrating bad writing with a ghastly simile comparing doomed romance to processed cheese.
Mariann Simms of Wetumpka, Ala., won $250 in the 22nd Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a parody honoring the writer of the worst beginning to an imaginary novel.
"They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white ... Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently," Simms wrote.
The contest, sponsored by San Jose State University, is named after the oft-mocked British novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" began, "It was a dark and stormy night."
Simms, 42, who purchased an Australian Bearded Dragon from a reptile breeder last weekend, took a break from feeding crickets to the juvenile lizard, named Zippo, to discuss the epiphany behind her winning entry - which, like the majority of pathetic ramblings submitted to the contest, was characterized by ridiculous whipsawing between unrelated concepts, as well as a profundity of commas and an extreme verbosity, which manifested itself in sentences frequently exceeding 50 words, many with multiple restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.
"My kids eat twisted cheese, and I don't want the cheese people to sue me for this, but basically the white part and the orange parts just don't taste any differently, and that got me to thinking about lovers entwined," said Simms, an amateur comedy writer who has won four T-shirts in David Letterman contests.
San Jose State English professor Scott Rice, who runs the contest, praised Simms' mockery of a literary faux-pas.
"It's an example of a writer who gets off task - you start off with steamy sex and end up with stinky cheese," Rice said Tuesday, when he announced the winners.
The 2003 contest, which attracted thousands of entries worldwide, was unique for its large number of entries from Americans with military connections, Rice said.
Simms is the wife of an Air Force retiree. Runner-up John Dotson, whose painfully putrid prose described the font of a "V" formation of geese, is a naval officer. Two "dishonorable mentions" went to veterans.
"It suggests we have some level of literacy and humor in the U.S. military," Rice said.
Many entries evoked processed foods - possibly reflecting America's widening girth.
Albert T. Keyack of Ambler, Penn., described similarities between lips and garnishes of Shirley Temple cocktails.
"Bill shifted uncomfortably on his stool looking at the topless blonde bombshell on the bar, but the first thing that struck him was the pulchritude of the exotic dancer's lips, which glowed like maraschino cherries, that is, pitted cherries macerated in an almond-flavored syrup then heated to boiling in an alum-containing brine full of carcinogenic red dyes," Keyack wrote.
The winner of the "Dark and Stormy Night" category referred to a high-protein snack.
"It was almost a dark and stormy night - not dark or stormy enough to be called that but just the kind of sweaty night that makes your shirt stick to your back and make you wish you were still at home with the air conditioning and eating pig skins and watching the Martha Stewart trial on TV.," wrote Sarah Harris of White Rock, N.M.
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Chow
SuperChef
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