Luis Zarate was taken to the regional hospital of Trujillo [Peru] earlier this week by his family after complaining of sharp stomach pains. Doctors took X-rays of his chest that showed his insides littered with screws.

“There were 17 strange objects found at the level of his stomach and colon,” said Dr. Julio Acevedo, one of the surgeons who operated on Zarate.

The black-and-white scans showed Zarate’s skeleton interlaced with things like bolts, barbed-wire and pens. “The objects had caused the stomach to expand,” said Acevedo.

Doctors said Zarate was mentally ill but it was not clear why he ate the metal. — stuff.com.nz

Iron deficiency perhaps? Or maybe he was just hungry. Next patient, please.

These two news stories have nothing to do with one another, but I happened to read one after the other, and well, you understand….

Some Pinellas County residents were shocked Tuesday when 30 catfish were spotted taking a stroll in their subdivision.

Apparently, the fish walk by using pectoral fins and can still live outside water as long as surfaces stay wet.

According to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission scientist Paul Shafland, walking catfish have been in the state since the 1960s. — OrlandoSentinel.com

Sitting on your back patio and that’s what you see. Okay. Now suppose Ron Wood was with you when this happened……

Ronnie Wood entered a rehabilitation facility Wednesday for help with alcoholism, said a spokeswoman for the Rolling Stones guitarist.

“Following Ronnie’s continued battle with alcohol he has entered a period of rehab,” the spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity as required by her agency. “His close family and friends say he is seeking help and look forward to his recovery.”

Wood, 61, has fought a long battle with alcoholism during his rock ‘n’ roll career, which started in the 1960s when he played with the band The Faces. — SFSS

See the connection? Over and out.

Not.

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in an interview with The New York Times that was published Sunday that he opposed allowing same-sex couples to adopt children. “I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption,” he said……

On Tuesday, as his statements were criticized by a number of gay rights organizations, his campaign clarified his remarks. “John McCain could have been clearer in the interview in stating that his position on gay adoption is that it is a state issue, just as he made it clear in the interview that marriage is a state issue,” Tucker Bounds, a campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “He was not endorsing any federal legislation.” –NYTimes

Right. Got it. When he said he “didn’t believe in gay adoption,” he was talking about the distinction between state and federal laws. Not how he felt about homosexuals adopting children.

How stupid do you need to be to believe this kind of spin and doubletalk? And why doesn’t Mr Straight Talk Express have the courage to stick to his own prejudices convictions? Why doesn’t he come out and say that like most Americans of his ancient generation, he’s acutely uncomfortable around “queers” and wants them to fade back into the shadows, if not die off, and hopes that Real Red Meat Rock Ribbed Americans respect him for his outspokenness and vote his ass into the White House? Did he lose his balls when he dumped his first wife and married the wealthy trophy?

Of course, the Uncle Toms of the gay world lined right up.

Patrick Sammon, the president of Log Cabin Republicans, a gay Republican group, said in a statement: “We are pleased that Senator McCain clarified the remarks, and we thank the senator for once again re-iterating his belief that issues concerning marriage and family laws should be left up to the states — not the federal government.”

Count on all four card-carrying members (pun) of the Log Grabbin ‘Pubes to walk in self-hating goose-step synchronicity with this position. Face it, fellas: McCain and the ‘Pubs hate you like poison, some of whom think AIDS is a god-given blessing to purge you from the planet. When it comes to gay issues, their thinking is identical to fundamentalist Muslims’. But in these lickspittle, self-censoring, politically correct times, they can’t be straight (!) about even their own sacrosanct beliefs. Spin spin spin.

You’d think a guy who spent 5 years as a tortured POW would have earned the right to speak his mind, but that’s not the way the game is played. Not in this system. Not any more. And that’s the American Effin Way.

Novi, MI. - A 33-year-old Michigan man is accused of wearing a “World’s Greatest Dad” shirt to a meeting for sex with what he thought was a 14-year-old girl.

Daniel Allen Everett of Clarkston was arraigned Tuesday in Novi (NOE’-veye) on charges of child sexual abuse and using the Internet to attempt child sexual abuse. — philly.com

Best looking, too. And happiest.

FORT PIERCE - An 18-year-old woman accused of hitting a man with a toilet seat after reportedly finding him smoking crack in the bathroom is facing a battery charge, according to an arrest affidavit released Monday. –SFSS

Reached for comment, the toilet seat referred the matter to his attorney (who not coincidentally is an asshole), saying only, “In my line of work, I’m exposed to lots of crack.”

P.S. A “battery charge?” What, with jumper cables?

Most Floridians are aware by now that in the state they call their home, it is not explicitly illegal to have sex with the family dog (or even a stray). Cattle, swine, poultry, even gators (I suppose) — when it comes to finding a sex partner on a lonely night of the blues, they’re all (sorry) fair game. It’s a way of life and a cultural practice rural Floridians and their representatives in Tallahassee stoutly defend.

A courtroom in Madison Wisconsin confronted an even more gruesome love affair:

Wisconsin law bans sex with dead bodies, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in reinstating charges against three men accused of digging up a corpse so one of them could have sex with it.

The court waded into the grisly case after lower court judges ruled nothing in state law banned necrophilia. Those decisions prompted public outrage and a push by a state lawmaker to make sex with a corpse a crime.

In Wednesday’s 5-2 decision, the high court said Wisconsin law makes sex acts with dead people illegal because they are unable to give consent. — Jamaica Gleaner News

“Unable to give consent.” The cheddar-head court got it exactly right. The reason sex with children, mental defectives, and animals is Just Wrong is because they can’t say yes or no. Add corpses to the list. They can’t give consent, or head, for that matter. Well, but, shit. Never mind.

The rest of the story is even more entertaining, and a tribute to the power of the media:

Police say the three men, carrying shovels, a crowbar and a box of condoms, went to a cemetery in southwestern Wisconsin in 2006 to dig up the body of Laura Tennessen, 20, who had been killed the week before in a motorcycle crash….[The defendant] had seen an obituary photo of her and asked the others for help digging up her corpse so he could have sexual intercourse with it, prosecutors say.

Got the plot? He spots a photo of her, falls ass over teakettle in animal lust, and figures he just has to have her. He gets his brother and a buddy to help him. Wonder if sloppy seconds was part of the deal.

* Sigh * True Love.

Next time the issue of bestiality comes up in the Florida Lege, this case needs to be mentioned so the law can be broadened to prohibit necrophilia as well. This being Florida, there’s probably an interest group that will lobby against it. After all, in a state where the elderly are routinely, even happily fucked by their families, legal guardians, and government, how different would it be if they were already dead?

Think this 100% guaranteed genuine photo will cause any controversy?

I mean, How can the American people elect somebody who wears sandals in the Oval Office?

It’s the end of the world, I tellya.

I have a very good friend who has everything. His birthday approacheth. What does one get a man who has everything?

Well, he’s a beer drinker, and years ago I introduced him to an incredible, powerful malt beverage from Denmark: Elephant Malt Liquor. I have seen grown men (and women) stun themselves drinking any more than 2 in a single sitting. One acquaintance downed a sixpack at dinner time, then drove his Buick literally screaming up and down icey US-130 through a south Jersey snowstorm, starting fights with gangs of punks in convenience store parking lots and creating a police event from which he miraculously escaped with most of his ass. Good stuff. Man did HE look like shit at work the next day.

The perfect gift, yes? But I haven’t seen Elephant in these parts for years, dammit. I make some calls to local liquor stores. Nobody carries it, and nobody wants to order it for me. Not even the place where I drop thousands of dollars a year in tequila taxes. (South Florida sucks. Nobody ever wants to extend himself for a little extra money. Up North they’d clamor for the business and encourage even more. I’d be a chesty hero. Sigh.).

I go on-line. I find two places that carry it, one in Jersey, one in Connecticut. There’s an on-line form (uh-oh). I manage to get through the crap with the name and address and pull-down menu because nobody knows what their state abbreviation is, the goddam credit card number which might or might not want you to leave spaces between the numbers — you never know until you’re done and find out you did it wrong and need to do it again AAAAGGGGGHHHHH why don’t they TELL YOU UPFRONT THE RAT BASTARD FUCKTARDS and then there’s nowhere to actually make a purchase. Nowhere.

I send them an email explaining my problem (”I only wanted to buy a case of beer. Why won’t you let me buy a case of beer? Why did you make me register and concoct a password and then not let me buy a case of beer? I’m a big boy and I eat my vegetables as well as my wife and all I wanted was a little case of beer….”) and try the second place.

The second place wants $2/bottle ($48 total) and $27 to ship it. And, I discover, so do several other on-line services, like beerrgeek. If I wanna gag, I’ll chug it warm, not pay half the price of it in shipping.

I go to Carlsberg.com, “probably the best website in the world.” This echoes their pathetic tagline, “probably the best beer in the world.” Which is probably, make that “almost certainly,” the worst hook I’ve ever read, up there with “Eat More Chicken.” Talk about a self-esteem problem. “Probably.” Fucking “probably!”

And besides, it isn’t. Smacked in the ass if I can figure out how to contact anybody, let alone order a goddam case of beer. Music, colors, visual effects……but nothing practical. What’s the point of a website if you can’t SELL somebody something? European savages.

I get an email from the first place I tried, telling me that the reason I couldn’t find a button to press to make a purchase is because the item needs to be picked up, not shipped. NOW he tells me. I fire off a response to that effect, and tell him if I can’t find any store closer than 1,800 miles away, I might convert to Schlitz. He tells me to get in touch with Carlsberg USA. Which I do.

My first two emails requesting a local contact are returned as undeliverable. WTBF. So I call. I get an automated answering service, and I press the numbers for Sales and Marketing, which turns out to be VM advising that he’s out of the office for a week, bother somebody else at another extension. Then, amazingly, it cuts off. I call back, press the other extension, and get a VM advising that this putz won’t be back in the office until the end of the month.

This is almost enough to get me to drink water for the rest of my life. Tap water. Sewer water. Don’t they want to sell me anything?

A day passes, and I try email again, this time using a different email service. It goes through! But the return-automatically-generated email advises that the person I tried to contact n longer works there (ironic: the “person” was “customerservice@CarlsbergUSA.com” — and it seems true that “customer service is no longer available” there) — but if this is an an emergency, I should contact so-and-so. Whom I call. And who answers!

I lay it all out. He’s sympathetic. Even helpful. He asks me where I live. He says he has a distributor here! he gives me his cell phone number! I thank him profusely and promise not to mock his ass in my blog. I call the distributor’s cell phone number! I leave a message! I call again 8 hours later because I haven’t heard from him! This is exciting!

I’ll let you know what happens when if he ever calls. OMG. What the bleeding fuck is going on in this country when nobody will fucking sell you and you can’t fucking buy a fucking case of fucking beer?

This just bites.

Parkland, FL - A man who keeps capuchin monkeys in his backyard was bit by a raccoon today while he was feeding them, the Broward Sheriff’s Office said. The victim was in an enclosure where he keeps four capuchin monkeys when the raccoon slipped in through the open door and bit him, the Sheriff’s Office said.

He was bitten on the arms and legs and treated at Coral Springs Medical Center. None of the monkeys bit him, the Sheriff’s Office said. — SFSS

As Freud said, it’s a Jungle out there.

Playing Chicken

Ypsilanti, MI — Police said an Ypsilanti man is accused of stabbing his mother with a fork and hitting another woman over the head with a frozen chicken.

“He stabbed his mother in the back of the neck when she refused to give him money, and then, an hour later, he attacked a neighbor woman with a chicken,” Jackson County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Mark Blumer told the Ann Arbor news. ClickonDetroit.com

Fowl play. Forked up. Aaaah, enough of this.

I am shocked - shocked! - NOT that Gov Charlie Crist announced his engagement to be married, but at the relative silence that announcement inspired. So I make a few calls, and finally get through to society writer Cecelia Serpentine-Bouche, known to her friends as “Cece.”

“Oh, Bee Eff Dee” she tells me. “Over the last few months Charlie has completely repudiated about a third of his steadfast positions — coastal drilling was the most famous — so it’s just another move to position himself.”

Position himself? For what?

“For McCain’s VP, silly! Honestly, did you think the Republican party is ready for a flaming faggot on the presidential ticket? I mean, Gentle Ben’s lesbian niece as Secretary of State is one thing, but a gay VP? What evangelical Christian could swallow that?”

Cece — Just because he’s getting married doesn’t mean he isn’t gay.

“Well, duh. But it’s a cover story, isn’t it? Plausible deniability. He marries this lovely creature with two darling kiddies and any asshole (like you) who keeps calling him gay just looks spiteful and vicious.”

Spiteful Vicious and Deadly. That’s my attorneys. She’s a divorcee, right? Been there done that?

“Right. Him, too. But she’s on record as never having been married to a gay man before.”

Um, me too, actually.  But not my wife.  Let’s go back. Does this mean Crist is in the mix for McCain’s VP? Does this make it official?

“You’re like so print-media ago. Of course he’s in the running. And he has the inside track. He’s young and photogenic, he delivers a pivotal state, and if he goes down in flames — pardon the expression — he still has a future. And now he has a lovely wife and a beautiful family.”

How touching. They’ll probably be gone a week after election day.

“You go ahead and sneer — that’s your job, right?”

Yes….and yours is to find video coverage of their alleged honeymoon night antics. You know, Erection Day politics.

“Ooooh. That’s cold. Nobody with any sense is counting on anything like that.”

Nobody with any sense is counting on ‘President McCain’ either.

Photo is Carole Rome, Gov Crist’s fiancee. Credit.