This, That, and the Other

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Flashback Friday post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 24th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

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This was originally posted on my old blog on March 24, 2012. You might notice that back then I used to write much longer posts.

Cutting Your Nose to Spite Your Face

Who hasn’t heard, at one time or another, someone say, “He cut off his nose to spite his face”? It’s an idiom, a common expression used, perhaps even overused, to describe a needlessly self-destructive response to a problem, like when you do something crazy that will get you in trouble and cause more harm than good.

Legend has it that the expression originated way back in the 12th century when pious women disfigured themselves in order to protect their virginity. Hey, you’ve come a long way, baby, over the past thousand or so years.

Speaking about cutting off body parts, an Egyptian woman turned out to be quite the cut-up. She decided to exhaust her husband by having sex with him all night long. Once he fell asleep, exhausted as planned, this human praying mantis stabbed him to death and cut his body into little pieces, which she then threw into her backyard, where they were consumed by stray cats and dogs.

The woman calmly sat on her balcony, she confessed, and watched the cats and dogs eating the pieces of her dead husband’s body. “Every time they finished a piece, I threw them another,” she said. I guess she didn’t think the sex was that good.

How about the Californian who tried to poison his wife by putting paint remover in her cereal? Fortunately for his wife, she detected a “horrible taste and smell in her Rice Krispies” and stopped eating, thus avoiding any serious harm.

Of course, the husband claimed that he “accidentally” spilled paint remover into his wife’s cereal bowl. One way of preventing such “accidents” is to be sure that you’re not keeping paint remover in your refrigerator.

And as long as we’re talking about ingesting toxic liquids, did you hear about some guy in North Carolina who decided to light up a cigarette after having taken a swig from a jar of gasoline? Sure, having a cigarette after sex back in the day…before smokers were stigmatized…seemed to be the norm. Maybe it was the calm after the storm or just some way of avoiding that post-sex awkwardness or having to actually talk to the person you just diddled.

But what was this dude thinking when he decided to grab a smoke after drinking from a jar filled with gasoline? Supposedly he mistook the jar of gas for a beverage, and once he took a big gulp and realized it was gasoline, he spit it out. He then went outside to smoke a cigarette and guess what happened to him? He burst into flames, Duh! He was transported to the UNC Burn Center in Chapel Hill, NC, were he later died.

Here’s an idea for a new warning label to put on cigarette packs. SMOKING CIGARETTES IMMEDIATELY AFTER DRINKING GASOLINE MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.

I swear, I’m not making this up!