| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Craziest F#?king Thing I've Ever Heard - Barreleye Fish | ||||
| ||||
Sometimes, crazy things strike you as hilarious, other times crazy things sort of stop you in your tracks, and there are those rare times when a story just seems too crazy to be true. Here is one such story The Detroit News pointed me to. In a small western Pennsylvania town of about 1,700 people called Ligonier, two brothers were forced to close down their auto dealership under the weight of the recession and declining automobile sales - something with which we are all too familiar. This could have been one of those stories where it is a melancholy reflection on the decline of the automobile industry and the impact on people in large towns, small towns, and employed by major corporations. Instead, it is a like a bizarro-world version of Where the Red Fern Grows where the boy kills his first dog, then the second dog killed the boy for killing the first dog, and then the second dog sets itself on fire, running through the corn fields setting them ablaze and destroying them before passing, and a whole field of red ferns grows over the disaster setting.
The older brother, Gregory, went out to his dealership in the middle of the night, set fire to several of the cars, and then had a heart attack as the burning continued. I don't know how one self-induces a heart attack, but assuming the attack came about in the natural way, this is a crazy coincidence and the model example for future generations for going down with the ship. The younger brother, Randolph, was found in his car, thought to have committed suicide that very same weekend.
This is an incredibly tragic story, and I don't have much to add to it other than when I read it for the first time, it seemed far enough out there that I was 85% sure it was entirely fictional, plus it enabled me to half-swear on the internet. I'm a trailblazer of inappropriateness. Today when I woke up and still had it on my mind, it was automatically elevated into the "worth mentioning category" so here it is. Suffice it to say, I do not believe this to be the solution to your problems.
2 comments:
Aristotle claimed that the heart was the center of nerves. Galen corrected the matter a few hundred years later. But the heart, brain, and nerves are all intimately connected. These are not old wives tales.
When people are under enormous stress, a huge release of neurotransmitters / hormones can occur. If you already have heart disease, and your heart starts racing from stress, cardiac arrest can occur. Even healthy people can get heart failure in horrible stress. Look up Takotsubo cardiomyopathy on wikipedia. It could happen to you.
Stay peaceful. Jeff
While I know sadly little about biology, I can say that I know that a racing heart is more likely to result in heart attack, but even still there is a certain morbid poetry to the heart attack happening while the cars burned. It could have happened at home while devising his plan, while being arrested for the act, or when he counted up the total cost of lost inventory. Even with your smartie-pantsed-ness, I still think it's crazy.
What's a Wikipedia?
Post a Comment