On the Lighter Side

I've been told my posts are too long to read. Well, here's a short one for all you MTV Gen-X, ADD-afflicted bastards.

I have a two-way pager that pushes down news, stocks, sports, entertainment and other assorted snippets. One of these snippets is called "On the Lighter Side" and it normally consists of stupid/amusing news stories about burglars getting caught because they fall asleep in the house they rob, or the bank robber who writes the money note on one of his own deposit slips, or in the excitement, pulls his finger-gun out of his pocket by mistake -- you know the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Every once in a while, I find myself wondering who the hell picks these stories. About a week or so ago, I read this:

On The Lighter Side:
A Romanian man had his testicles ripped off by his wife after she accused him of having an affair.Fifty-year-old Aurica Marinescu from Constanta managed to call an ambulance before he passed out. Doctors at a local hospital managed to re-attach his scrotum after a ten hour operation. He said: "We were at home when we started to fight over a so-called relationship I had with another woman. She got so angry that she grabbed my scrotum and ripped it off. "I wouldn't have said she was a strong woman but she was furious and she seemed to have superhuman strength in her anger. The pain was incredible. "

First of all, yeah, no shit. I'll bet the pain was incredible. Just thinking about it makes my testicles want to crawl back up into my belly in some sort of primal, fear-induced retreat. In fact, I normally have to whisper phrases like "testicles ripped off" in order to avoid alarming them unneccesarily.

Secondly, I keep wondering why the hell his scrotum was right out there within easy grabbing/ripping reach. If I'm going to start up some sort of "other woman" conversation with my wife, and I think there might be even the slightest, remote chance that any measure of scrotum ripping is going to happen, you can bet that I will be fully clothed, and have at least a table between us.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't see anything "Light" about this story. It still makes me cringe when I think about it.

I can only assume that the person they have in charge of picking these stories is a man-hating, militant lesbian feminist of some sort. Or maybe not. There's always the possibility that she just thinks castrated Romanians* are funny as hell. Who's to say?


(*Note: Romanians are not enemies of the Federation. You're thinking of Romulans.)