Monthly Archive for April, 2005

You know how you watch TV shows and they have a “Do not try this at home” disclaimer? Some people are just the sort to ignore such warnings.

A party trick gone awry Saturday caused an explosion that ripped open the legs of the host and was so loud neighbors thought it was a blown transformer, police said.

John Winkler, 28, suffered serious injuries in the explosion at his River Rock Boulevard home and was still in the hospital Sunday after a glass container blew up on his legs. Murfreesboro Fire Department and police were called to the home just before 9 p.m.

“The call came out as a hazardous materials call,” said Murfreesboro Police Officer Scott Newberg, who was dispatched to the scene at 8:56 p.m.

Newberg and his partner Mark Wood found Winkler with serious injuries, mainly to the thighs.

“He had muscle and tendon out of it and had lost a lot of blood,” said Newberg.

Winkler sat cradling a large glass container, filled it with rubbing alcohol, added compressed air and lit it, “which essentially turned it into a bomb, and the glass basically ripped his legs wide open,” Newberg said.

That boy needs to have his pipeline to the Jack Daniel’s distillery cut off.

Jim’s exclamation of “Jesus H. Christ!” in the comment section of a previous post got me to thinking. I’ve always wondered about why exactly we put the “H” in there. So I decided to see what I could find out.

Apparently, there is a running joke regarding The Lord’s Prayer. Namely,  ”Our Father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name.” Somehow, I don’t think that’s it.

But I did find this from Cecil at The Straight Dope:

(1) It stands for “Haploid.” This is an old bio major joke, referring to the unique (not to say immaculate) circumstances of Christ’s conception. Having no biological father, J.C. was shortchanged in the chromosome department to the tune of one half. Ingenious, I’ll admit, but whimsy has no place in a serious investigation such as this.

(2) It recalls the H in the IHS logo emblazoned on much Christian paraphernalia. IHS dates from the earliest years of Christianity, being an abbreviation of “Jesus” in classical Greek characters. The Greek pronunciation is “Iesous,” with the E sound being represented by the character eta, which looks like an H. When the symbol passed to Christian Romans, for whom an H was an H, the unaccountable character eventually became accepted as Jesus’s middle initial.

(3) Finally, a reader makes the claim that the H derives from the taunting Latin inscription INRH that was supposedly tacked on the cross by Roman soldiers: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Hebrei (Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Hebrews). Trouble is, the inscription is usually given as INRI: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum (J.C., King of the Jews).

Then there’s this additional info on #2 above:

The Greek scholar will look to the Greek letters for Jesus: “iota eta sigma omicron upsilon sigma,” which is variously transliterated IHSOYS or IHCOYC, the latter when converted to Latin letters using the common curved sigma variant. If one takes the first three letters as initials, it is not difficult to derive “Jesus H. Christ.”

And also:

An historian may be familiar with the tale that, before an important battle in 312, the Emperor Constantine saw a vision of the cross in the sky and heard a voice saying that he would conquer “under this standard” or “in this sign.” The Latin words would be “in hoc signo,” which abbreviates to IHS.

Lastly (also from The Straight Dope), there seems to be some indication that southerners were prone to exclaiming “Jesus Holy Christ” and some fast-talking northerner shortened it.

Interesting stuff.

So you’re at a strip club, and a couple of the dancers tell you the pole there just isn’t quite doing it for them. They want to slide down a longer pole. What do you do? Well, if you’re an off-duty fireman, you take them to the firehouse, of course.

A 19-year-old exotic dancer was injured while sliding on a fire pole at a West Side fire station, sources told KSAT 12 News.

Sources said that three off-duty San Antonio Fire Department firefighters visited a gentlemen’s club in October 2004 when two dancers followed the trio to Fire Station No. 10 at Culebra and Zarzamora roads because the women wanted to slide down the fire pole.

One of the dancers injured her back but refused treatment from paramedics, sources said.

This may be a tough concept to grasp, people, but seriously, it is NEVER a good idea to take strippers to your place of employment.

The headline reads:

Michael Vick Hit With Sex Suit

Is that one of those PVC things with the holes in all the right places?