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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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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Don’t stop for any reason. Whatever you do… DON’T STOP FOR ANY REASON!!

That’s the frantic advice being given by a chain email that made its way into my inbox today [1].

Your life depends on it.

You are not safe.

If you pull your car over, if you stop, you are going to become a victim of a gang robbery, rape or perhaps even murder.

Footnotes:

1.	Thanks to Darren K
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“ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN,” the first picture reads, but the second is quick to disagree: “ONLY HUMANS GO TO HEAVEN READ THE BIBLE”.

So begins what appears to be a rather quirky theological debate about the souls of dogs (and eventually of rocks!), carried out entirely on church signs.

But, we ask ourselves, is it real? Did the religious communities represented by Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church really go to war with each other over whether or not pets can go to paradise?

As it happens, the answer is no, they didn’t…

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Barry Williams, Supreme Universal Skeptic Of The 12th Magisterial Order [1], has sent in another interesting variant of the infamous Nigerian Scam.

As Barry mentions in his email:

Murray

I despair for the continuing deterioration of literacy among barristers admitted to the bar in the UK.

Barry

I can understand Barry’s emotional distress, since the email asks you to believe that it has been sent by a barrister located in the UK, while simultaneously being pockmarked with a truly impressive variety of misspellings and grammatical errors.

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Footnotes:

1.	And owner-operator of the Barry Williams Blog.
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