A fantastic week in death

"I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell."

Whew, it's good to be alive!

As I was preparing to head on over to Chuck's for an early Thanksgiving dinner (schwing!), I happened to catch a commercial for "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving." And guess what? I can feel the ol' holiday spirit coming on! Yay! I am so frigging gay for the holiday season, it's kind of ridiculous. If I could take it, transmogrify it into solid form, then somehow build a vagina into it, I...well that got weird. And I think I mixed my metaphors with the whole gay/vagina sequencing, so moving right along...

I don't know if you noticed, but some people died this week in some really abnormal ways. (The rest of this post is a bit morbid, so if death-blogging isn't your cup of tea, then allow me to suggest this wonderful site dedicated to the beauty of horses. Don't forget to read the comments!)

First off: God's Cruel, Cruel Sense of Irony.

The headline of this story is "Widow Killed by Husband's Coffin." Wait, what? How the...?

"A widow has been killed by her late husband's coffin in a freak accident on the way to his funeral.

Brazilian Marciana Silva Barcelos, 67, was on her way to the cemetery when the hearse she was travelling in was hit by another car.

The coffin was thrown forward by the impact and slammed into her head, killing her instantly.

Her husband Josi Silveira Coimbra, 76, had died the night before from a heart attack at a dance."

Are you fucking serious, God? The story doesn't mention anything about children, but the widow and her (ex?)husband were old and it's a foreign country, so they probably haven't discovered contraception, which leads me to believe they probably had like 28 kids and 433 grandkids. Somewhere around there anyway, I'm not a mathematician.

Next up, Utterly Ridiculous Suicide #1.

Getting evicted must suck. I mean really, REALLY suck, because apparently, this guy got evicted and he chose to off himself in his apartment rather than face the real-estate market.

What up till now has been a somewhat sad but ultimately mundane tale of misfortune suddenly morphs into some kind of torture-porn-movie-style splatterfest.

"The last resident in a block of flats due to be demolished cut his own head off with a chainsaw to highlight the 'injustice' of being asked to move out, an inquest heard today."

HE DID WHAT? HOW?

"Desperate David Phyall, 50, plugged the electric chainsaw into the mains and attached a timer to the socket.

He then wrapped sellotape around the machine's trigger to secure it in the 'on' position and tied the handle of the saw to a table leg to hold it steady.

Mr Phyall rested the saw on his neck and waited for the timer to go off.

The Black and Decker chainsaw sliced through his neck in an instant but kept going for a further 15 minutes."

**throws up**

So, to sum up: A guy lost his apartment, and in order to "highlight the injustice," he elected to CUT HIS OWN FUCKING HEAD OFF WITH A FUCKING CHAINSAW.

(Sorry for all the CAPS, but if you want to express your horror/shock/disbelief at something on the Internet, I'm told that's how you do it.)

And finally, Utterly Ridiculous Suicide #2.

So if that whole chainsaw thing didn't do it for you, then go grab a beer, come back and let me brighten up your day a bit. This right here is a lovely story of a man playing with cats. Really, really big cats. White tigers. And he's not just any man, either. He's, sigh, suicidal. And works at the zoo. Near the big cats.

See where this is going?

"According to eyewitnesses, Mr Nordin, who was seen shouting and flinging items about shortly before the incident, vaulted a low wall and landed in a moat in the enclosure, four meters below.

Carrying a yellow pail and a broom, he then crossed the 1.75m-deep moat, walked up to a rocky ledge near where the animals were and began agitating them by swinging the broom.

As two of the tigers approached him, he covered his head with the pail, lay down on the ground, and curled himself into a fetal position...

In a flash, two of the extremely rare white tigers were on him. One took a swipe at him with its paw - which is about the size of a softball glove - and he began screaming in pain...

Many in the crowd of 30 or so onlookers at the enclosure initially thought the intrusion was part of a show.

But when Mr Nordin began screaming, they reacted with horror."

You really should read the whole thing. It's...well, okay, it doesn't really get better than the whole man-tries-to-get-eaten-by-tigers thing, but it's a nice denouement.

I don't really have much else to say about that.

I would, however, like to point out that all three of these bizarre events occurred in other countries, which once again makes it easy to answer this question: You know what's fuckin' awesome? That's right. America.

What? You want what? Video of the whole tiger incident? You sick bastard.

Weeeellllll...since you asked nicely...



(Yeah, I thought it would be gorier, too.)