Induced Coma (7 page)

“What were they doing in the men’s toilet?”

“Romping.”

Lured by its sandy beaches, turquoise waters, and ancient minarets, 23 million tourists visited Turkey last year.

Nuns on Bikes

Two Dutch nuns wearing habits & riding bikes chased a thief through Amsterdam.

On Saturday eve, one of the sisters thought she recognized a man as the thief wh
o’d
stolen 360 euros from the chapel two weeks before.

She asked a fellow nun to alert police, then invited the thief inside for a glass of Dutch gin. The man, suspicious, downed the gin, then fled the chapel, snatching a bike from a passer-by.

The nuns mounted their bikes & gave chase. They nearly nailed him, but he managed to escape into the labyrinthine Red Light district.

Guinness

An 18-year-old girl suffering from a psychological condition ate her hair, forming a massive hairball in her stomach.

The teenager went to her doctor after complaining of stomach pains & vomiting. She’d lost 23 pounds over a five-month period & had a large bald spot on the left side of her scalp.

Doctors carried out a scan & were astonished to find a huge mass of hair blocking her stomach; they removed the enormous hairball by surgery.

The hairball measured 15 inches by 7 inches, just one-eighth of an inch short of equaling the Guinness World Record.

Guinness

A 29-year-old paramedic from Atlantic City set a Guinness Book of World Records mark that may never be surpassed.

Struck in 2003 by a car traveling 90 mph while assisting accident victims along an Interstate, he was flung 139-and-a-quarter feet, setting the record for “Greatest Distance Flung in a Car Accident.”

He suffered a broken jaw, neck, back, pelvis, and tailbone, spent four months in the hospital, six months in rehab, and will be disabled for life.

His ER physician submitted paperwork for the record, which Guinness officially recognized in 2007 and cited in its 2013 edition.

Hot Sauce

A posse of Tampa cons is offering a taste of what jail is like.

No locks, bars, shackles, anal rape . . .
 

None of that.

But you’ll need a brave stomach to swallow even a dash of their “Jailhouse Fire Hot Sauce.”
 

Minimum-security Hillsborough County Jail inmates offer their sauce in “Original,” “Smoke” and “No Exit” varieties, all made from jail-grown chili peppers.

They came up with the recipe and started selling it on eBay in 2009.
 

Since then, they’ve made $10,000 in profit. Each bottle costs $7.

The profits go to the prison to purchase “basic supplies.”

Marcel

was adopted as a “therapy cat” at a nursing home for the elderly.
 

When Marcel was five months old the staff noticed he would curl up with patients about to die.

In one instance preparation was made for the death of one patient but Marcel chose the bed of another; the person he lay with died first, taking staff by surprise.

About Marcel’s uncanniness: one theory is he is responding to a pheromone inaccessible to humans. So far he has accurately “predicted” 79-and-a-half deaths.

Marcel remains unchanged by his celebrity, spending most of his day snoozing / snorting catnip.

DIY

When Wu broke his left leg in an industrial accident 10 months ago, surgeons implanted a steel plate in his leg.
 

This year at his medical check-up Wu’s leg seemed to have healed enough to remove the plate. But he refused the procedure because of the expense.

Instead, inspired by an American movie in which one of the characters successfully operates on himself, Wu used a kitchen knife, a screwdriver, pliers, and cheap liquor to remove the plate in his leg.

Snake eyes. He ended up back in the hospital where his leg was amputated above the thigh.

Futurismo

In the Thirties, the Russian-born philosopher Alexandre Kojève taught a seminar on Hegel. He explained how Hegel’s discovery of the motor of history—the struggle for equal recognition among individuals—led to the discovery that history was about to end in what Kojève called a “homogenous universal state.”

This state would be a set of global administrative and economic institutions run by technically competent technocrats free from
 
traditional politics.

At the social level it would mean the disappearance of most of the human characteristics that drove history in favor of the cultivation of consumption, erotic satisfaction, sports, and virtual entertainments.

Brainwave

A “Tantric master” broke his own world record by standing engulfed in ice for 72 minutes.

Moses Moon, 48, stood on a Manhattan street in a clear container filled with ice for an hour and 12 minutes.

Moon controls his body temperature through Tantric meditation, a spiritual discipline associated with Buddhism.

Moon previously set the world record for full body ice contact endurance in 2004, when he immersed himself in ice for an hour and 11 minutes.

Moon’s feat kicked off
BRAINWAVE
, a month-long series of spectacles in New York exploring how art, music and meditation affect the brain.

Boot

A man has been accused of locking his two sons in the boot of his car while he visited a sailing shop.

Police say the man left the children alone in his Pontiac Trans Am for 23 minutes.

The man claimed the children, aged three and six, enjoyed “playing in there.”

The man pleaded not guilty to two counts of assault and reckless endangerment of a child and was released on bail.

The children have been placed in the custody of their mother.

The man’s lawyer told the judge that his client “loves his children and is extremely distraught.”

Cucumber Coffin

Paa Joe, of Ghana, designs the coffin his customer requests. It could be in the shape of an airplane, rhinoceros, cucumber, lobster, black mamba, bright orange Mercedes Benz, or Coke bottle.

“The lobster could be for a fisherman, the cucumber for a grocer, the Benz for someone who worked in the automobile industry,” Paa Joe explained.

Paa Joe said the idea hit him when a customer requested putting his dead grandmother in an airplane-coffin to transport her to heaven because the grandmother, alive, had never left her village.

Paa Joe’s workshop processes orders from all over the globe.

Funkee Hairstyles

An Islamic council in Indonesia has issued a fatwa on females who practice yoga and/or straighten their hair, which they describe as “inviting moral danger.”

The same religious body is reportedly issuing a fatwa
banning dreadlocks, mohawks, punk haircuts and “funkee hairstyles.”

Contemptible? Consider the competing religious orthodoxies.

Hypo

China has warned anyone found guilty of hypodermic attacks such as were employed in protests in the northwest regional capital of Urumqi would face the death penalty.

29 people have reportedly been detained over the hypodermic attacks in Urumqi.

Chinese officials blame Uighur Muslim separatists for the incidents.

A Chinese

naval vessel came perilously close to a US warship during a tense exchange in the South China Sea.

USS Cowpatty, a guided missile cruiser conducting war games, was forced to maneuver to avoid colliding with the Chinese ship, which inexplicably had crossed in front of it and halted.

Galina Korzhova

was arrested in the southern town of Volzhsky on suspicion of hypnotizing a bank teller into giving her more than 2.6 million rubles. She is suspected of having robbed 14 other banks in a similar manner.

During the bank’s lunch recess, Korzhova introduced herself to the teller in the commissary, promising to get her profitably married, while actually hypnotizing her:
Teller will place rubles in a leather satchel then meet after closing time outside the bank on Communist Street.

There the bewitched teller gave Galina Korzhova the rubles.
 

There the police, hot on Korzhova’s tail, apprehended her.

Mephisto

Kool kicks. Black-on-black monk strap. Doc Marten?

Mephisto
.

Does anyone still read
Faust
?

Doubtful.

Mephisto. Outsourced to Indonesia, right?

Due south of Indonesia.

You don’t mean . . .
 

I saw the lasts. I met the maker
.

You met Mephisto?

Correct.

Who else did you see down there?

Blake. Artaud. Yukio Mishima.

You spoke with Blake?

No.

You spoke with Mephisto?

He spoke.

What did he say?

Do what you’re doing.
 

Meaning your writing?

Correct.

What in your writing does the fiendish shoemaker approve of?

Comforting the afflicted.

Ah.

Afflicting the comfortable
.

Mephisto prefers the latter, obviously.

Maybe
.

One Stolen Shoe

When
a shoemaker with failing sight found a single shoe missing from his shop in the western Belgian town of Maldegem, a Gypsy amputee was the immediate suspect. Authorities were alerted and straightaway apprehended the man who fit the shoemaker’s description. The shoe was not recovered.

Smoothie

A Vernal, Utah woman was being held on an attempted murder charge Wednesday after police say she spiked her roommate’s mango smoothie with antifreeze six-and-a-half years ago.

Shannon Jane Plack, 37, was arrested this week in Eugene, Oregon where she remained jailed pending extradition to Utah.

Police say Lester Fraumeister, now 59, nearly died when Plack bought him a smoothie at a convenience store, dumped half of it and poured in antifreeze.

The 2008 case went cold until a jilted boyfriend of Plack’s, awaiting trial on an unrelated case in Arizona, came forward with new information, authorities said.

Testicle

A female ripped off her ex-boyfriend’s testicle with her bare hands.

She became enraged when he rejected her advances during a house party.

She ripped off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out.
 

A friend handed it back to the male saying: “That’s yours.”

The Almost-Planet Pluto

Champion skater Taig Khris wowed thousands of onlookers in Paris when he attempted to set a new world record for the highest roller skate jump, leaping from the third floor of the Eiffel Tower
. . .

Eiffel Tower ain’ nuffin’. I watched some shaved head loon rollerblade off the almost-planet Pluto and land intact smack dab in the “Mall of America,” over there in Minnesota. You know what he done? Removed his skates, bought some state-of-the-art doodad in the Apple Store then stopped for a quadruple mocha decaf latte with low-fat rice milk at Starbucks.

Dialogues with Death

Did you purchase those white wingtips from J. Peterman?

Why, yes,
Death whispers.
 

Recent purchase?
 

Yes.

There is a rent on the left side of the left shoe.

Really? I’m not surprised.
 

One must expect inferior quality from J. Peterman.

But don’t you just adore his prose?

*

Is this the end of the end?

It is the end of your debauched cycle.

Will
Yourself
reappear in whichever cycle succeeds this?

Depends on technology
.

Your Techno-Reich means to live forever
.

Or at least for a thousand years.

If that’s how it plays out, I will consort with virgins.

Noir

Layin’ in my blood waitin’ on the medics.
 

What’s takin’ so long?

Don’t make no dif to me, Jack.

Jus’ me and them lights.
 

Death, right?

How you say it? Beckoning?

I like that.
 

Don’t feel no pain.

Maybe I’m already dead.

Jus’ my heart, man.

It still ain’t quit.

INDUCED COMA

SOURCES

Bangkok Post

BBC

CLG

Al Jazeera

Le Monde

La Prensa

El País

Japan Times

The Free Library

Yahoo & Google

The NY Daily News

The Half Moon Bay Review

The Huffington Post

The Independent UK

The Guardian UK

Mr. S Leather

AlterNet

The Village Voice

The Progressive

Erowid Psychoactive Vaults

Multiple miscellaneous sources on- & off-line

My epigraph is a treated version of a Peter Ustinov quote.