I have decided to start a new series called “Freaky Friday”. While searching the internet for news throughout the week, I come across some very strange stories. Some apply to the world of politics while others apply to human nature. These stories need to be shared as they give a lighter and sometimes humorous look at the world around us.
The first story comes from India, where a man shocked people as part of his skull decided to come off.
Hundreds of people are thronging a hospital in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata to see a patient holding a piece of his own skull that fell off.
Doctors say a large, dead section of 25-year-old electrician Sambhu Roy’s skull came away Sunday after severe burns starved it of blood.
“When he came to us late last year, his scalp was completely burned and within months it came off exposing the skull,” Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay, the surgeon who treated Roy told Reuters Wednesday.
“Later, we noticed that the part of his skull was loosening due to lack of blood supply to the affected area, which can happen in such extensive burn cases.”
The piece came off Sunday and hundreds of people and dozens of doctors now crowd around his bed, where he lies holding the bone.
Bandyopadhyay said the skull’s inner covering and the membrane which helps produce bone was miraculously unaffected, allowing fresh bone to grow.
This certainly gives a new definition to the term “giving head”.
Next up comes a painful story from Pakistan, where an inmate woke up to a most unusual surprise:
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.
As painful as this sounds, please do not make light of this situation.
Do you Google? Now that statement is more appropriate since Google, along with unibrow, have been added to the dictionary:
Need tips on how to groom a unibrow or soul patch? Just google it. Or get a mouse potato to do it for you. If you’re still lost, grab the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary for a definition of those and about 100 other words that have made their way into its pages.
But be warned: you might come across a drama queen (a person given to often excessively emotional performances or reactions), an empty suit (an ineffectual executive), or a himbo (an attractive but vacuous man — think “male bimbo”.)
“We try to have a mix that address the wide range of people’s information needs when adding new words,” said John Morse, president of the Springfield-based dictionary publisher. “It could be a technical term or some lighthearted slang that sends people to a dictionary.”
To make it into the dictionary, a word has to be more than a flash-in-the-pan fad. It needs staying power.
People say Google is going to take over the world. That is apparent now, especially since they are taking over our language.
And our final stop is in Russia where Vladimir Putin has answered the question that has plagued international media for the past week – “Why did he kiss that boy’s stomach?”
In between answering questions about North Korea’s missiles, Iran’s nuclear program and relations with the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin answered what was for many observers a more burning question: What compelled him to kiss the bare stomach of a young boy in a Kremlin courtyard?
Footage of the June 28 incident was broadcast on all Russian television stations, quickly became fodder for Internet chat rooms and topped the Moscow tabloids the day after. The question was one of the most popular among the thousands e-mailed in for the Web chat, hosted by the British Broadcasting Corp. and Russian search engine Yandex.ru.
In the footage, Putin, 53, is shown walking up to a small crowd of tourists in a Kremlin courtyard and crouching down in front of the boy, who appears to be five or six years old. As the Russian president talks with Nikita for several seconds, he tugs at the boy’s shirt before finally lifting it up and kissing him on his bare stomach.
“He seemed to me very independent, very serious, but at the same time a boy is always vulnerable. He was very sweet. I’ll be honest, I felt an urge to squeeze him like a kitten and that led to the gesture that I made, there was nothing behind it really,” he said, smiling.
Of course if Bush was doing this then we would know he was sizing the boy up for military service.
I hope you enjoyed the first installment of Freaky Friday. With stories like this, it should be no problem filling the plate every week.