Harold Jaffe - Induced Coma

At 3 PM, the Swiss climber Jean-Pierre Culotte, “elated, exultant,” stood on the roof of the world in bright sunlight gazing down at the Himalayas.

Now Mount Everest is his grave, because minutes later he suddenly went blind, had to be abandoned, perished from the cold.

The Utah cave where a medical student suffocated to death last week will be closed and his body will stay put.

The announcement said it was too dangerous to try to recover the spelunker’s body.

He died hours after getting wedged into an unmapped passage of Nutty Putty Cave.

No spelunking in Katmandu

No descent into Les Catacombes de Paris

No corporate building elevator on weekends

No cramped basement toilet in Marseilles

No swimming underwater in the echoing indoor pool

No scuba-doo in Quintana Roo

No Poe tales of interment

No sexy choking games such as upper caste Brits play

No entering the commercial aircraft until the air conditioning is on

No MRI tube

No execution by hanging

No Peter Greenaway films

No confinement in “black” rendition camps

No drinking alone after midnight

No being stuck in a nun’s habit in a Bunuel satire

No confessional box, Father

Loneliness is contagious, reports a US research team.

It spreads among people & females are especially vulnerable.

Lonely people transmit their lonely feelings to others.

Societies develop a natural tendency to shed lonely people; this was confirmed in lab tests on gerbils.

These shedding effects mean that our social fabric can fray at the edges like a loose yarn at the end of a crocheted sweater.

Because loneliness is associated with mental and physical diseases that shorten life, it is crucial that we help those affected with loneliness before they wrench away from us, out of sight.

A former Miss Brazil, 36, died while undergoing cosmetic surgery on her buttocks.

Friend: “The procedure involved injections and the liquid went to her lungs and brain. A woman with everything died for a firmer behind.”

Surgeon: “She arrived with acute respiratory deficiency. Her degraded condition enabled the embolism.”

Male swallows a liter of top-shelf vodka rather than surrender it to airport personnel (who themselves would drink it after hours).

New regulations designed to obstruct terrorism (which the “First World” itself provoked) prohibit passengers from carrying quantities of liquid onto aircraft. (Does that apply equally to first- and biz-class passengers?)

Informed at a security check that he would have to relinquish the vodka or pay a hefty fee to have his carry-on bag checked as cargo, the male opened the bottle, chugged the liquor down on the spot, passed out, died.

Unofficial cause of death: global nausea .

A librarian reported that two volumes of William Blake’s “prophetic books” were returned after 55 years along with a $1,800 check.

The Blakes were borrowed in November 1959.

The human who sent the check requested anonymity.

The librarian said the overdue Blakes would be replaced on the shelves straightaway.

suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome.

As a child, he repeated words obsessively.

As an adult, he made friends, had affairs, spoke out on political issues.

Passion, genius, and standing up for justice are compatible with Asperger’s.

What sufferers fail at utterly is narrow functionality in or out of the work-place.

You’re an old blind guy with titties. What are you doing outside Kentucky Fried Chicken?

Prophesizing.

Kool. What’s going to happen to me tomorrow?

You will get into a violent quarrel with a noble stranger at a crossroads. You will kill him. That same day you will marry a high-born woman your mother’s age . .

I’ve always gravitated to older women. I hope it’s not because I’m secretly queer. Will we live happily ever after?

Parricide, incest, pestilence, self mutilation, unremitting self-loathing, solitary exile. .

You say exile. Will that mean no online access?

For several seconds I experience a joy impossible to describe — an absolute harmony with the world. For those seconds of bliss one would exchange all of life.

You so-called healthy people have no idea what joy is. That joy we epileptics experience for an instant before we seize.

Underestimated while alive, he compels himself to believe that “innocence” alone will possess clear eyes.

While Cezanne and his apprentice are painting in natural surroundings, a child pulls away from her mother and father to approach the painters.

Immediately she points to the apprentice’s canvas, exclaiming: “Mama, this one!”

is provisioned with every appliance of pleasure.

Hyper-advanced technology thin as your fingernail.

Psychotropic agents to zoom/vroom/sex/sext.

Exercise emporia headlining steroidal trainers.

Salon baths.

Dancers, acrobats, naked jugglers.

Che-sized cigars from US-embargoed Cuba.

My erection will defy the pestilence.

Let the external world suffocate on its own vomit.

A 78-year-old Frenchman was detained after assaulting a plain porcelain urinal with a hammer.

Called “Fountain,” the urinal, a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 original, was on display at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Police said the man had urinated on the same object at an exhibition in Nimes in 2010.

Duchamp initially rescued the urinal from the trash on a Paris suburb street, added the signature “R Mutt” and displayed it in an exhibition.

Its estimated worth is 18 million euros.

The assailant claimed his hammer attack and urination constituted a “Dadaist intervention” that Duchamp would have appreciated.

Eleven private security guards attached to the US embassy in Kabul have been sacked over claims they took part in drunken orgies and lewd bullying rituals.

The Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, reported that guards brawled, held peeing-for-distance competitions, and drank vodka from each other’s buttocks.

A woman sat on a toilet for so long that the seat adhered to her flesh.

Her live-in boyfriend finally contacted the sheriff who arrived with 2 deputies (all three had shaved heads) and found the woman physically stuck to the toilet.

Evidently she’d refused to come out of the bathroom for 2 years, and had been sitting on the toilet continuously for 8-and-a-half months.

She has been placed under the protection of the state.

Her boyfriend, meanwhile, has been detained on an unrelated charge of lewd and lascivious behavior for exposing himself to an adolescent neighbor.

A 10-year-old boy died a day after playmates buried him.

Cody asked his friends to bury his head in a sandbox to mimic the cartoon character “Naruto,” an aspiring ninja who plays pranks & hides by burying himself then breathing through a tube.