Bizarre News - November 26, 2014

Greetings fellow Bizarros:

When you're watching the slavering jaws of your friends and family indiscriminately plowing through your carefully prepared Thanksgiving meal tomorrow, consider yourself lucky you don't have competitive eater Joey Chestnut as a dinner guest.

He just won a turkey-eating contest in Connecticut, setting a record by devouring an entire bird (I'm assuming minus the feathers and feet, but I'm not certain).

Ten contestants vied to see who could eat the most of a 20-pound turkey in a competition at Foxwoods Resort Casino.

Chestnut ate 9.35 pounds of meat off the bone in 10 minutes. According to Major League Eating he bested the previous record, which was held by Sonya Thomas, who ate 5.25 pounds of turkey in November 2011.

Chestnut, a San Jose, California, resident who just turned 31, is ranked the top competitive eater in the world.

He took home a $5,000 check after stuffing his face with turkey. The remainder of the $10,000 purse was divided among other contestants.

Bizarrely,
Lewis

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Questions? Comments? Email Lewis


*Siberian police consider deputizing reindeer*
SALEKHARD, Russia (UPI) -- Santa's crew may soon be presented with a job opportunity during the off-season. Officials in northwest Siberia said police could soon be deputizing reindeer to help chase down criminals in the region. Irina Pimkina of the Yamalo-Nenets region's Interior Ministry said police in the area, which is located in Russia's Arctic tundra, often find themselves at a disadvantage when chasing down local criminals, who often employ reindeer as getaway rides. "Of course we have snowmobiles in service, but one should understand that a machine is a machine," Pimkina told the Izvestia newspaper. "A snowmobile can break down or get stuck in the tundra, but the deer will run at all times." The deer would join the animal ranks of about 150 donkeys and mules employed by the Russian Defense Ministry to serve in mountain brigades. The legislation governing the animals also allows for reindeer to be used for law-enforcement purposes. Police in neighboring Finland have been using reindeer in recent years to patrol forests in Lapland.


*-- China hospital puts men through pain of childbirth --*
SHANDONG, China (UPI) - Brave fathers-to-be are getting shocking lessons at a pioneering Chinese hospital in what it feels like for women to give birth. A nurse in the free lesson at Hangzhou Aima maternity hospital in China's Shandong province sends an electric current to a pad placed above the abdomen. Over five minutes, the strength of the current is increased, causing men to "writhe in agony," according to witnesses. One man compared the pain to feeling as if his "heart and lungs were being ripped out." Organizers hope the experience will make men more sensitive to their partners while they labor. It's an unusual exercise in a nation where men often don't attend the birth of their children. Hospital administrators emphasis that there's no lasting damage to men, and also note that there's no real comparison between the "pain experience camp" and women's suffering during the much longer-lasting agony of childbirth. Some men couldn't hack it and bailed out mid-shock. "I thought giving birth to a baby was something natural, something really normal that women could get through," one nearly-dad told the BBC. "After this I realized it's not easy giving birth. It's just painful."


*-- READER COMMENTS --*
Oh, c'mon Lewis! Do you really believe that Peruvians putting frogs in a blender as a folk-medicine cure-all is going to lead to extinction of frogs? High School biology students have been disecting frogs as a class assignment for the past century. Frog legs have been a part of upscale French cuisine for a very long time. To say that such home-remedy use of frogs as a cure-all will lead to their extinction is as silly as saying that our moms' using chicken soup as a home remedy for a cold will lead to extinction of chickens. Sheesh! -R.S.
[Yeah, but high school students don't dissect a rare variety of Peruvian mountain frog. Just because the American bison and the common cow are both bovid ungulates, does that mean we should finally hunt the remaining 30,000 bison to extinction? Why not? There are plenty of cows left and they are practically the same thing.]

Hey Lewis! Introduce him to Donald Duck! I understand several places he's been banned for not wearing pants! Kinda like you? --Karen
[Hey! That was just one weekend in Las Vegas with TZ.]

I have some of the symptoms that the splattered frog is supposed to cure.. but I don't care if I'm laying on my death bed with only hours to live unless I take this miracle cure. There is no way in hell anyone is going to get me to eat blended frog! Gross! -Patty
[Are you sure? Hamburger is nothing more than blended cow. What if we formed the blended frog into a patti and flame broiled it?]

Hi Lewis, I want to wish a happy Thanksgiving to you and yours and the rest of the goofy staff there at gophercentral and PulseTV. I have been a subscriber to several of your publications and a customer of yours for years and I feel like I know most of you. Not sure what that says about my personal life, but thanks for doing what you do.
[Don't think we don't appreciate it! That's the whole reason we're here after all. Thanks for reading.]

*-- END OF READER COMMENTS --*
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