Rapunzel syndrome

Just because this particular disorder is named after the fairy tale princess with incredibly long hair does not mean that it has a happy ending. In fact it is the opposite and it is the oddness and bizarreness of this syndrome that made me share it in case one is unaware that it exists.

The Rapunzel syndrome is an unusual form of trichobezoar (large mass of hair) found in patients with a history of psychiatric disorders, trichotillomania (habit of hair pulling) and trichophagia (morbid habit of chewing the hair), consequently developing gastric bezoars or hair ball with a “tail” that extends into the intestines. The principal symptoms are vomiting and epigastric pain.

A rare case of this nature has been reported out of the UK where a 17-year-old girl showed up at the hospital after her fainting spells, her face and head bruised from the resulting falls. Per a case study documented in BMJ Case Reports, the teen also mentioned she’d had stomach pains off and on for five months, and that they’d gotten worse over the past two weeks. A CT scan showed the patient had a “grossly distended stomach,” as well as a rip in the stomach wall—the result of a trichobezoar (i.e., a giant hairball) that was 19 inches long and had burst through. When doctors operated on her to remove it, they discovered the hair mass was so big that it “formed a cast of the entire stomach.”

BMJ Case Reports is an important educational resource offering a high volume of cases in all disciplines so that healthcare professionals, researchers and others can easily find clinically important information on common and rare conditions.

It turned out that the girl suffered jointly from trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder that affects between 0.5% and 3% of people, and trichophagia, which involves eating one’s hair (between 10% and 30% of those with the former condition also have the latter).

Statistics show that only 1% of people with both end up like this teen, with hair tangled and trapped in the intestinal tract, an even rarer, sometimes fatal condition attributed to this syndrome.

The girl left the hospital a week after the procedure, and the study authors describe her recovery as “uneventful”: A month later, she was said to be “progressing well with dietary advice” and attending sessions with a psychologist, and there have been no signs of complications.

Genital-breathing turtle on the verge of extinction

I find the story of this species of turtle worth recording, while it is still around, for its unique appearance and peculiar ways. Its freakishness is what makes it worth saving.

Imagine, where else in the animal kingdom could one find a member that exhibits a very bizarre way of breathing using specialized glands in their cloacas—organs that are used for both excretion and mating and which allows it to stay submerged in water for up to 72 hours?

Indeed, the Mary River turtle, as it is called, does not only have a weird way of breathing, but it is also described as having a piercing gold eyes, ‘green hair’ and fleshy barbs on its neck and a tail that can grow to exceptional lengths – that is up to 70 percent longer than the length of its shell.

The gentle turtle’s scientific name is Elusor macrurus and the ‘hairs’ on its head are vertical strands of algae, which makes it look like a swimming patch of grass, the result of staying submerged in water for long hours.

Measuring up to 40cm, the turtle is said to take a long time to mature sexually, rarely mating before the age of 25.

They prefer to dwell in well-oxygenated, flowing sections of streams, known as riffles, though they are sometimes found in deeper pools.

It is because of its gentle/docile nature that the Mary River turtle was kept as a pet in Australia in the 1960s and 70s.

During that period, it was estimated that around 15,000 Mary River turtle eggs were sold to pet shops every year, and the unchecked raiding of the animal’s nests played a large part in driving the turtle towards extinction.

According to the Australian Zoo, Mary River turtles are also threatened by habitat degradation, which includes “problems such as a deterioration of water quality through riverside vegetation being cleared, water pollution through siltation, agricultural chemical contamination and water flow disruptions through the construction of weirs for irrigation and predation.”

As its name suggest, the Mary River turtle lives only in the flowing streams of the Mary River in Queensland, Australia.

Unfortunately the turtle is also at number 29 on the new official list of the most endangered reptiles in the world.

 

Dog cyst pictured like Trump

 

I do not know if this is fake news, but I sure found this under a weird news column and like any weird news item this is simply incredible and worth sharing.

A beagle dog in Tyneside, England was said to be persevering a growth, a cyst, if you may, in his ear.

Will, this may be normal for a  beagle since its extraordinary long ears almost always touches the ground when sniffing for something and in the process picks up a lot of dirt.

Jade Robinson said her two-year-old beagle, Chief, developed the cyst after dirt got in his ears.

Robinson said that while she tries to keep Chief’s ears clean on a daily basis, she admitted she can only do so much and noticed the infection growing from bad to worse.

Finally she decided to take a picture of the growing cyst to show to the vet, but not before a friend saw it and commented that what made the infection more seemingly painful to the dog was that the cyst resembled the image of Donald Trump, the 45^th president of the USA!

You just have to use your imagination and picture it out yourself and you will see the resemblance.

It was said that Chief needed to be sedated so that vets can figure out the severity of his ear problem. The initial cost is the equivalent of about $590 ― more than Robinson could afford ― so she was hoping to raise the money via a crowd funding campaign that has the words “get Trump out of Chief’s ear” cleverly embedded in the URL.

Maybe not surprisingly, but generally, Chief got a lot of support from people who sympathize with him, and aren’t fans of the man the cyst resembled and donated with the accompanying comments like:

• “Hope this helps Chief to rid himself of any nonsense creeping into his lughole. Could you even imagine how annoying it would be to have that fool in your ear?!?”
• “I would donate far more for a vet to deal with the real Donald Trump!”
• “Poor Chief. No one should have to put up with Trump in their ear! Here’s to a speedy recovery.”
• “We here in America would all like to see Donald Trump surgically removed-The least we can do is help out Chief!”

Now, talking about how unpopular and despised Trump is!

“Aliens” are coming

 

Bryant Johnson

This is definitely not fake news. This is authentic.

The only problem is that the news came from an overly boozed up man who was accused of public intoxication and detained later after he told police that he traveled from the year 2048 to warn mankind of an impending invasion by extraterrestrials.

After reeking of alcohol and speaking with slurred words about his out-of-this-world warning, Bryant Johnson, who is from Wyoming, was eventually transported peacefully to the Natrona County Detention Center.

Johnson informed the officers that he was able to travel through time because the aliens filled his body with alcohol. He also claimed he stood on a “giant pad” which then transported him to the year 2017 — though he said he was supposed to be sent to the year 2018.

According to the news, Johnson didn’t specify an exact date or time for the aliens’ arrival except to say that “the aliens were coming next year and we needed to make sure to leave as fast as possible.”

A joke? Maybe.

But the joke could be on us if and when all this turns out to be true!

‘Balls’ of steel

 

That is what this gongfu (kung fu) master has literally – ‘balls’ of steel!

I thought man’s family jewels (testicles) were the weakest and fragile part of man’s body that would bring one to his knees with wrenching pain once it gets hit.

Every male, one time or another, must have experienced the excruciating pain felt following a direct hit! You can ask a boxer who has been at the receiving end of a low blow.

Until I saw this video I did not have the faintest idea that there was such a training that would turn this vulnerable part of man’s body into an unsusceptible ‘balls’ of steel or iron crotch.

Check this link out about Master Wei Yaobin and his followers and if you are a male person I am sure you will keep on grimacing at every blow that hits its mark!

But what i found painfully funny are the self-flagellations!

http://news.asiaone.com/news/asia/move-over-ip-man-meet-iron-crotch-man

A marriage proposal that could never go wrong

Marriage proposals anywhere in the world have never been as creative, romantic and original at any other time than it is today.

Not only is it being done on the ground and under water, but it has also gone up in the air.

From the classic getting down on one knee with your offering of flowers, ring or what not, while surprising her with your proposal to be your wife, to having divers in an aquarium hold a sign saying, “will you marry me” while pretending to watch the show, and to the impressive and unexpected proposal of having an airplane spell those magic words “will you marry me” in the sky above an event you both are attending.

Oh, the many, many ways of making both private and public proposals!

It can be crazy, serious, funny, and even daring too.

There was even a mob dance that led to marriage proposal.

What is important is to make it overwhelming and memorable for the girl such that she can’t say anything else, but YES! YES! YES!

This is what happened to a man in China who got the affirmation from his girlfriend with his unique offering of a meat bouquet as he got down on one knee and made the proposal to his girlfriend.

Why the use of raw beef slices rolled into the shape of roses? Because his girlfriend loves to eat meat!

How could this proposal go wrong?

For more on this please open this link: http://shanghaiist.com/2015/03/30/meat-bouquet-proposal.php.

 

Evolution of beauty: from torture to considerable fee

  I can’t help but write about this after reading how beauty treatment has evolved from the ancient Mayan times until the present.

Torture is a big issue today for different reasons, but it used to be that torture was applied to female Mayan babies to make them look beautiful when they grow up. Cranial deformation and being cross-eyed is a beautiful person in ancient times so what the mothers would do was attach a board to the baby’s head and dangle a bead in front of them, resulting in flat heads and crossed eyes.

In Africa the Mangbetu tribe of Congo has made the torturous practice of binding the female baby’s head to elongate it as she grows and make her look beautiful.

In China daughters of the rich had their feet excruciatingly bound starting at four years old as a symbol of beauty and status. With lotus feet, as they called it, they walked in tiny steps. Having bound feet was a sign that a woman would be a good wife, as they would be subservient to their husbands. This, I can relate, as growing up in Leyte we had a couple of these ladies owning big stores with their husbands. I saw more like them later when I continued my studies in Cebu City.

Even today torture as a beauty treatment is still being done by the Padung Tribe of Myanmar (formerly Burma) where their women start wearing brass coils around their necks at a very young age, increasing the number of rings as they get older until their heads are balanced on top of a long, thin, pole-like neck, earning them the moniker, Longneck tribe or the Giraffe people.

In this day and age of computers and globalization, however, beauty treatment has gone more sophisticated, and while the torture may only be temporary, the end result could simply be amazing as one is transformed from what you hate yourself about, to how you want people to look at you now – and for a considerable fee!

Plastic surgery is the most famous and expensive among beauty treatments today. It comes in different terms, like, liposuction, rhinoplasty or nose job, breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, tummy tuck, face-lift, breast lift, lip augmentation, etc., etc.

The problem with plastic surgery is that it is not the fountain of youth. It is simply a brief relief for what seems to be a vanity problem.

But, hell, if one is awashed with money, why not go for it and look different and appreciated – or depreciated by tongues wagging.

Lost English talking parrot reappears speaking Spanish

Nigel

There is no name more British than Nigel and so for British owner, Darren Chick, living in Torrance, California, he taught Nigel, his pet African grey parrot, how to talk with a British accent.

But one day in 2010 Nigel flew away and was gone for so long that he was given up for lost.

Nigel was a missing parrot for four years until a few months ago when the owners of Happy Tails Dog Spa in Torrance heard him calling from outside their shop and took him in.

“I heard somebody whistling and saying, ‘Hello? Hello?’ ” said Julissa Sperling, who owns the dog-grooming business with her husband, Jonathan, both from Panama.

The Sperlings, who speaks Spanish, describe the parrot as the happiest bird since it was singing and talking and barking like the dogs and kept on asking, “Que pasa?” (What happened?), in Spanish. He must have known a guy also by the name of “Larry” as he kept on mentioning it.

Julissa, impressed by the parrot’s verbal mimicry was getting attached to it, but knew that somebody else must be looking for it.

What they did was look on the Internet and verify for possible owners. Coincidentally, Teresa Micco, a veterinarian, has been running ads for her own lost African grey parrot named Benjamin.

While the parrot looked a lot like Micco’s Benjamin – including the distinctive yellow eyes and red tail – Micco used a scanner to check for a microchip, which did not turn up her ownership information.

Since the microchip turned out to be Darren Chick’s bird, Nigel, Micco immediately got in touched with Chick and informed him about the find.

Chick was obviously dumbfounded, but the reappearance of Nigel in his life four years after brought tears of joy to his eyes – despite the fact that Nigel, who now has forgotten his English, bit him when he first tried to pick him up.

I am sure they are now back where they started – mimicking the British accent.

Cockroach breeding is trending in China

And for obvious reason – it is done for money!

Besides it doesn’t really cost much to raise them and the risk factor is nil. One has only to find a place for them. The murkier, the better’

This is about entrepreneurship at its best as it seems to have adopted a motto, saying, “If you can’t get rid of them fast enough, then breed them and make money out of them as medicinal novelty or exotic food.”

After all, this is China, and anything goes.

This video that I am sharing is about Wang Fuming who has made a fortune breeding cockroaches – the kind you see in common houses – no matter how much cleaning is done sometimes.

For those who can’t stand the sight and can’t help but imagine the stench of a cockroach, let me just warn you to skip it and read something else.

For Wang, however, his farm of over a million cockroaches is the sight, the sound, the smell and the taste of his booming business that is raking him cold cash.

(For another version of this video please open this link: http://khon2.com/2014/09/01/chinese-cockroach-farmer-makes-big-bucks-on-bugs/.)

Severed snake head kills chef

This is one bizarre story that ought to be remembered by anybody – always.

One might think that because a snake’s head has been chopped off and left alone that it could no longer do any harm.

Well, the story of Peng Fan, a Chinese chef, came unfortunately surprising, but too late.

Peng was said to have just finished preparing a soup delicacy out of an Indochinese spitting cobra.

Before that, however, the chef chopped off the head of the snake and left it on the table. Twenty (20) minutes after, when the special dish was done, Peng went back to dispose the head to the waste bin.

Nobody knew how he picked it up, but the thing is that the snake’s severed head clamped down on his hand, while in the act of throwing it away, injecting him with fast-acting, deadly venom.

Diners who were eating in the restaurant at the time of the incident described screams coming from the kitchen.

Peng died before he could be treated in hospital with life-saving anti-venom.

“It is a highly unusual case, but it appears to be just an accident,” a police spokesman said. “He prepared the snake himself and was just unlucky.

“There was nothing that could be done to save the man. Only the anti-venom could have helped, but this was not given in time. It was just a tragic accident.”

According to snake expert Yang Hong-Chang, all reptiles can function for up to an hour after losing their body parts.

“It is perfectly possible that the head remained alive and bit Peng’s hand,” he said. “By the time a snake has lost its head, it’s effectively dead, as basic body functions have ceased, but there is still some reflexive action.

“It means snakes have the capability of biting and injecting venom even after the head has been severed.”