Jim Walker from The Santa Clarita Valley Signal talks about the time he had one of his kidneys stolen (before you become alarmed but not alert, Jim still has both of his kidneys) and the time he almost fell for the rumour that Wall-Mart was releasing Chanukah Hams just in time for the holiday season! [1]

A very fun read!

• Jim Walker: Sticking forks in urban turkeys

Footnotes:

1.	For those in need of extra guidance, Chanukah (variously spelled “Hannuka”, “Chanuka” and “Channukah”, is a holy Jewish holiday, and of course observant Jews would never eat ham.
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There’s an interesting article on the BBC News site that discusses the hysteria that is often claimed to have swept across America in 1938, during the live radio broadcast of HG Wells’s War Of The Worlds.

According to the article, some people did react to the broadcast with fear, however time has inflated these numbers to nothing less than mythic proportions.

• The Halloween myth of the War of the Worlds panic – BBC News

It was once entirely the stuff of Urban Legend fiction — a man meets a woman at a bar, they go back to his hotel room, he wakes up the next morning in a bathtub filled with ice. There is a telephone on a nearby stool and the words “Call an ambulance!” are written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. When he reaches hospital, in a critical condition, the Doctors discover that he has been drugged and one of his kidneys has been harvested in his hotel room bathroom.

Obviously nothing says you’ve had a great time on a business trip more than coming home missing an organ. You and all the other guys in the office can compare scars where your kidneys used to be and reminisce about “Good old Ralph”, who was stupid enough to let it happen to him twice.

And yet, as much fun as that situation sounds like, grim stories of commercial organ harvesting are turning out to be very real, although perhaps a little less sensationally dramatic than the popular urban legend version above.

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I’ve decided to start paying attention to ulblog again. Things may be a little random around here while I settle in.

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