LONDON (Reuters) – A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles to celebrate Wales beating England at rugby, the Daily Mirror has reported. Geoff Huish, 26, was so convinced England would win Saturday’s match he told fellow drinkers at a social club, “If Wales win I’ll cut my balls off”, the paper said on Tuesday.

Friends at the club in Caerphilly, south Wales, thought he was joking.

But after the game Huish went home, severed his testicles with a knife, and walked 200 meters back to the bar with the testicles to show the shocked drinkers what he had done.

Huish was taken to hospital where he remained in a seriously ill condition, the paper said. Police told the paper he had a history of mental problems.

Wales’s 11-9 victory over England at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff was their first home win over England in 12 years.

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I read a fine poem today, called For My Daughter in Reply to a Question, by David Ignatow. Here’s a bit:

We’re not going to die.
We’ll find a way.
We’ll breathe deeply
and eat carefully.
We’ll think always on life.

If you’d like to read the poem, go to this page at Writer’s Almanac and scroll down to the section for February 11. You can click a link there to hear Garrison Keillor read it, if you’re so inclined.

We’re not having fun tonight, my dog and I. My poor little friend is 14 and arthritic. Tonight, she’s done something to one of her front legs. She’s limping like crazy. It happens from time to time, (a leg just sort of goes out on her, like what happens with a person’s back) and when it does, I usually give her a dose of Rimadyl, a pain-reliever and anti-inflammatory. But I can’t, because she was itchy earlier today and I gave her prednisone. The two drugs don’t mix. So we have to wait out the night, and hope that she’ll feel better in the morning.

Getting older absolutely sucks.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

He always had a hard time facing his complicity with the world when things went bad and failed. It wasn’t his fault, being mostly just caught up and swept along. He got out of bed and opened the blinds. The sun was up and he saw the window was dirty and spattered, giving him a sadly marred view of the old clothesline and broken concrete patio, the budding plum tree. Any other day, he would have denied his part in all this. Not his fault that God insisted on driving the rain at an angle to the glass, nor that the man who used to come and wash the windows died last year on a cot in the YMCA. But just at that moment of dawning denial, he remembered the day.

It was Saturday, and it was his birthday. And it was his custom, on this one day every year, to admit that he was, after all, the one guy who was always around when things started going bad. Other people were around for some it, and some were there for most of it, but when the rubber met the road, he was the greatest common denominator. So he blinked through the grime and thought of the Windex under the sink, and the paper towels hanging there.

What he really wanted was to sit on the edge of the bed for two hours or three, watching CNN Headline News, to see if he could spot variations in the news from one half hour to the next. He always hoped that it would change, that he hadn’t already missed everything that was going to happen. But since it was a special day, he needed to get moving. He was burning daylight.

He ate oatmeal with honey and raisins, listening to a country station. Heard a song about a long haul trucker whose wife died home alone, while he pulled a long load of pipe through a cold Georgia rain. All the trucker had was a photo in his wallet and the dog they got together at the pound, who dozed in the sleeper while he drove and drove, trying to outrun his grief. Despite the comfort of oatmeal and coffee, he thought he could relate.

With his face shaved, belly full and shoes tied tight, he felt damn near heroic. Fit to go forth and stand fast to the winds of personal responsibility. On the hall table, he found the video he had to return. He went out, and behind him there was commitment in the sound of the lock.


by Kyle Kimberlin
Copyright Information

Here’s another in my periodic posts about The View From Here. You might think, based on the title of my blog – Metaphor – that it refers to my ontologic perspective, or my take on the putrifying human condition. Aw, no. It’s meant quite literally. I can sense your relief.

Opening my front door this morning, dog in my arms and backpack replete with freshly slaughtered English, I was met by this wonderful rainbow.

~ click to enlarge ~

I hoped this rainbow portended great things for my Friday. But a day is as a man does. … I didn’t hurt anybody, and that’s what counts. Right?

You know that new term, “ear worm?” I guess it’s a song that gets stuck on your mind. I get word worms – words that won’t go away. I’ve had Irony on my mind all day. It’s ironic that I’m not entirely sure what it means, though it seems to inform a great deal of my existential perspective.

I looked it up, and that’s not much help. I guess we know it when we see it. Like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Romeo & Juliet, the deafness of Beethoven. And of course we’re hearing stories of soldiers surviving the dangers of Iraq, only to die in a traffic accident while home on leave.

OK. I’ll give you ironic. Writing is ironic. We who do this throw our best hours of vision and skill into choosing the best words and the best order of them, in the belief they will stand and survive. Then what do we do? We carry them like water in a bucket to the end of the wharf, and heave them into the cold and truculent sea.

Google is searching eight billion Web pages. Have you been in a Barnes & Noble lately? Am I wrong, or is it an ocean of paper and ink, uniform and rolling in gray distances? … Oh, I know! It’s like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark of the Covenant is nailed up in a plain box and trucked away into that vast warehouse.

“The saint proves his vision by stepping cheerfully into the fires. The poet, somewhat less spectacularly, proves his vision by submitting it to the fires of irony, in the hope that the fires will refine it. In other words, the poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned, that it can survive reference to the contradictions of experience.”

-Robert Penn Warren

So why do we do it? It’s a psychic itch that’s gotta be scratched. It’s a message in a bottle, dispatched in the hope of finding a commonality of mind or heart. It’s the threadbare faith that someone else out there has seen the ecstatic dance of eucalyptus leaves, and walked on into the evening overjoyed.

And see, that’s ironic: I knew what it meant all along.

“What [I] would write if [I] could… would be something… that, once it began to flow from [my] pen, would spread across the page out of control, like spilt ink. Like spilt ink, like shadows racing across the face of still water, like lightning crackling across the sky.”

J.M. Coetzee

So anyway, today was my brother’s 40th birthday party. We had brunch at a nice place in Auburn. I think there were 14 of us. Then we all went bowling.

I haven’t bowled since about 1981, when it got me past the PE requirement at SB City College, so I could transfer to a University, where you don’t have to take PE to get a degree. Before bowling, I’d tried Golf and Fencing. Passed golf, dropped fencing. I didn’t like the way all that thrusting and stretching made parts of me feel. And it wasn’t nearly as fun as I pictured it.

The bowling classes had intramural teams — I think that’s what they were called — meaning teams within the college played each other, not other schools. I was bowling around 160 and each member of my team got a little trophy in some sort of tournament. I think I still have mine; I should get a photo up. It’s pretty cute. Engraved with one of those cheapass adhesive label guns.

Today, we bowled two games and I didn’t come terribly close to breaking 100 either time. Something like 69 and 87. What a difference a mere quarter century makes. The stupid rental shoes wouldn’t slide, so every frame was a controlled near-disaster. I got one strike and a couple of nice spares … I’m lucky I didn’t drop the ball or plant my nose right in the middle of the lane.

Well, a good time was had by all. I hope brother J remembers his birthday with happiness. Forty is only as big a deal as you make of it; of life’s milestones, nothing compared to getting married and having a child.

Oh, the title. “Super What?” Yes … we didn’t watch the superbowl. And you know what? I didn’t miss it. I guess watching the game has always been about being with family, and I was.

Want to see some cool pictures of small dogs? Here you go.

I forgot to mention that my folks celebrated their 49th wedding anniversary a few days ago.

Love you, Mom & Dad. Next year … big party … Disneyland maybe.

Watched A Day Without a Mexican with la famila tonight. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it. It’ll get you thinking.

I have long believed, just based on what seems like common sense to me, that the economic contributions of immigrant workers from the 40 countries south of the border vastly outwiegh the costs to society of their pressence. I didn’t need convincing. Come to think of it, if you believe the implaccable lie that they are a great burden, you’re probably beyond the hope of any rhetoric; you won’t like this movie.