Year: 2009

So I saved several news stories for you folks today, and they all have a similar theme… they’re all a bit weird:

– Rom Houben is a Belgian man who was in a horrific car crash in 1983. At the time, doctors guessed that he was in a coma. So they treated him like that for 23 years… only to give him a brain scan in 2006 and find out that his brain was functioning perfectly. It seems that Rom wasn’t in a coma after all – he was just paralyzed from the accident. Poor Rom sat there, in his hospital bed, for 23 years without the ability to tell his doctors that he wasn’t in a coma. After the 2006 brain scan, doctors began an intensive physical rehabilitation plan, and now Rom is able to type communicate with the outside world by typing messages on a computer. Personally, I can’t think of anything scarier – lying in a hospital bed for two decades, fully conscious of everything going on around you, yet unable to communicate that to anyone else. Read more about it here.

– Police in Peru have busted criminal gang that was allegedly killing people for their fat, which they sold to European cosmetic companies. As the article points out, there is plenty of human fat available for purchase thanks to liposuction, and there’s really no documented cosmetic benefit to human fat. But still, the gang was able to sell the illicit wares for around $15,000 per litre.

– The town of Coshocton, Ohio has a free municipal Wi-Fi system. Police use it to file paperwork without leaving their cars (after giving someone a traffic ticket, for example). During festivals, vendors use it to make credit card transactions. Truckers and businessmen often stop in the town and use it to check their email or corporate websites. But it almost all came crashing down after someone used the network to illegally download a movie. Amazingly, the system only uses a single external IP address, and the MPAA had the entire network shut down because of the file-sharing. The network is now back up, but the incident only highlights the MPAA’s foolishness.

– And lastly, a story a bit closer to home: Belmont police offer Jerry Anderson kept the city’s K-9 dog in a kennel behind his home… that is, until this past Friday, when the dog was stolen. The missing Belgian Malinois is valued at $2,600.

This is just chilling:

A thug high on drink and drugs gouged out his former lover’s eye during a murder bid and threw it from an eighth-floor balcony.

Francis Murphy was today jailed for 12 years by a judge who told him he had committed a crime of “almost medieval barbarity”.

An earlier trial heard how jealous Murphy attacked Natalie Farrell, 27, with the wire of a coat hanger as he threatened: “I am taking your eye out you f****** cow”.

After flinging her eye from the eighth floor of a Dundee high-rise, evil Murphy then tried to throw her over the balcony as well.

via Mail Online.

From our Russian friends:

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian police have arrested three homeless people suspected of eating a 25-year-old man they had butchered and selling other bits of the corpse to a local kebab house.

Suspicions were raised when dismembered parts of a human body were found near a bus stop in the outskirts of the Russian city of Perm, 1,150 km (720 miles) east of Moscow.

Three homeless men with previous criminal records have been arrested on suspicion of setting upon a foe with knives and a hammer before chopping up his corpse to eat, local investigators said in a statement on their www.susk.perm.ru Web site.

“After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up: part was eaten and part was also sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies,” the Prosecutor-General’s main investigative unit for the Perm region said in a statement issued Friday.

It was not immediately clear from the statement if any of the corpse had been sold to customers.

Nice.

At least they didn’t make bears play ice hockey.

Russians are weird.