News for Youse: Blood, guts, body parts, and one big ol' penis

Really, sometimes this column writes itself, especially when you get body parts in the mail, the unfolding horrors of the Floridian face-eater, and the weaponization of human intestines in New Jersey.

We’ll get to the South African president’s magnificent swinging member in just a moment. As for the severed foot that was mailed to Conservative Party HQ in Ottawa yesterday, a confusing picture has emerged.

While police have confirmed that both the foot and a hand—later discovered at a Canada Post terminal—came from the “same point of origin”, it looks like the torso found in a suitcase in Montreal isn’t connected to the detached extremities (so to speak), and never was.

More puzzling is the claim made by an unnamed source and published by the Globe and Mail yesterday that the foot came with “a message”—followed by another anonymous claim that it didn’t.

Conservative MP for the riding of Obvioustown/Noshitsville Brad Tost meanwhile added to the vagueness when he described the stunt as “probably someone’s sick idea”, (yeah, you think?) while everybody played down the notion that the gruesome business was anything more than a random act of weirdness.

Best quote came from the RCMP’s officer in charge of its Inadvertent Irony Division, Glen Woods, who remarked, ““This is the kind of stuff you might see in developing countries where you have dictatorships and coups.”

By now you’re no doubt well aware of the Miami face-eater, shot dead over the weekend as he hunched naked over another man and ate his face. In today’s Star, the victim—who, almost unthinkably, resides in intensive care with 75 percent of his face missing—was identified as a 65-year-old who’s been homeless for 40 years.

His attacker, meanwhile, was described as “funny and friendly, with a particularly radiant smile,” but also as something of a serial offender. You decide.

It’s probably worth remembering that these kinds of horrors occur on a daily basis here on Planet Earth—it’s just that our news cycle is apparently being programmed by the AMC network at the moment. In that spirit, let’s add to the jollies with this tale of a Hackensack, New Jersey, man who attacked himself with a knife, and then threw his own intestines at cops who tried to stop him.

Perhaps the most ghastly story of all comes from South Africa, where President Jacob Zuma—he of the four wives, 21 kids, and recent rape charges—suffered “humiliation and indignity” over a depiction of his huge swinging genitalia in a Johannesburg art gallery.

Last week, two protestors defaced and ruined artist Brett Murray’s painting, titled “The Spear”, while Zuma’s party the ANC pursued a lawsuit against the gallery.

Today, the gallery apologized to the president and his impressive endowment, and the suit was dropped—a stark contrast to matters in Canada, where our PM refrained from even commenting on the recent depiction by Margaret Sutherland of his cherub-sized pointer barely breaking the event horizon of his pubis. And Zuma says he’s embarrassed?