Pharyngula

Posted by: Nick Gotts | December 1, 2008 2:01 PM

Now, now, this is quite unfair - I'm sure the potato was provocatively dressed, and so is primarily to blame.

Posted by: Jeeves | December 1, 2008 2:02 PM

I could be wrong, but wouldn't a person have to fall at an impressive speed and from a decent height to completely wedge a potato in their ass? Perhaps the curtains were by the second story loft (40-50 ft) and perhaps he's a largish chap...Hey, maybe the guys from Mythbusters could give it a shot!

Posted by: The Petey | December 1, 2008 2:05 PM

and I'm sure the good old vicar keeps all his tubers well coated in vaseline in order to increase shelf life.

Posted by: the Petey | December 1, 2008 2:08 PM

"The question we all want answered - was he fooling around with Mrs. or Mr. Potato head?"

if he was catholic it was an altar-boy potato head

Posted by: Randy | December 1, 2008 2:10 PM

Oh, my Gawd. I've got tears in my eyes. The entire office here at my day job is still chuckling over this one. I especially liked the final sentence in the news article, cheekily entitled "Vicar went to hospital with potato stuck in bottom":

"But our staff deal with them in a discreet, professional and kind way."

Posted by: jj | December 1, 2008 2:19 PM

"Posted by: Penon | December 1, 2008 2:01 PM

But, was the potato peeled, or unpeeled? Somehow that question seems very important."

Safety & hygiene First :)

Posted by: Adrián | December 1, 2008 2:20 PM

He will switch to french fries after this (Biggie size).

Posted by: Longtime Lurker | December 1, 2008 2:23 PM

Why didn't the idiot just call it a miracle?

Transpudstantiation?

Posted by: negentropyeater | December 1, 2008 2:25 PM

The clergyman, in his 50s, told nurses he had been hanging curtains when he fell backwards on to his kitchen table. He happened to be nude at the time of the mishap, said the vicar, who insisted he had not been playing a sex game.

In French, we have a funny expression for this :
Il veut nous faire prendre des vessies pour des lanternes
(he wants us to believe that bladders are lanterns)

Is there an expression for this in English ?

Posted by: MarkusR | December 1, 2008 2:31 PM

"I swear, I was hanging curtains and fell on that hooker."

Posted by: Steverino | December 1, 2008 2:34 PM

I bet his french fries taste like shit!

Posted by: Rey Fox | December 1, 2008 2:37 PM

It was a million-to-one shot, doc.

Posted by: Janine ID AKA The Lone Drinker | December 1, 2008 2:39 PM

Just a suggestion: if he'd been wearing two wetsuits while hanging his curtains, it would never have happened.

Um, that is because there would not have been room for the potato.

Clothing: The decedent was received wearing two (2) wet suits, one scuba diving mask, one pair of diving gloves, one pair of slippers, one pair of rubber underwear, two (2) ties, five (5) belts, eleven (11) straps.

Personal Effects: One yellow metal ring intact on left ring finger, one dildo.

Posted by: MH | December 1, 2008 2:41 PM

"Why didn't the idiot just call it a miracle?"

Vicar to doctor: Look, I was just casting some spells over some bits of bread in order to turn them into bits of 2000 year old dead Jew, and I must have got the words mixed up and thus transubstantiated my poo into a rather large potato, which just happened to look like a 'thingy'. What? Why are looking at me like that? I'm hardly going to lie; I'm a vicar.

Posted by: Janine ID AKA The Lone Drinker | December 1, 2008 2:43 PM

Posted by: Rey Fox | December 1, 2008

It was a million-to-one shot, doc.

We all know from reading our Pratchett that a million-to-one shot has an one in eight chance in seceding.

Posted by: Sven DIMilo | December 1, 2008 2:47 PM

Busch D B, Starling J R. Rectal foreign bodies: Case reports and a comprehensive review of the world's literature. Surg 1986; 100: 512-519.
"The study reports, among other items: a beer glass, a suitcase key and a magazine"

X-rays linked from here.

Posted by: jj | December 1, 2008 2:50 PM

I've got a buddy's who's father is an ER Doc, and he has sooo many of these stories to tell. The worst he said he ever saw was a curling iron.

Posted by: Janine ID AKA The Lone Drinker | December 1, 2008 2:56 PM

Some of the comments here reminded me of this charming book, Autoerotic Fatalities.

Posted by: Interrobang | December 1, 2008 2:57 PM

On a related note, when I was a resident we had a (required) lecture about rectal foreign bodies. They brought in a guest speaker to do it. She was an attending in emergency medicine in Hershey PA and also a Roman Catholic Nun.

Given that this paragraph contains the phrases "rectal foreign bodies," "guest speaker," "Hershey, PA," and "Roman Catholic nun," you'd almost expect the phrase "walked into a bar" to be in there somewhere, wouldn't you? I'm attempting to stifle a plethora of Hershey Highway jokes, and not really succeeding...

Posted by: E.V. | December 1, 2008 3:01 PM

Umm, I linked to this a couple of weeks ago on one of the threads here.
Perhaps this potato was shaped like the turnip Black Adder served to his Round Head relatives - it looked like a "thingy", about which Baldric confessed his 'thingy' happened to look like a turnip.
Anyway, I hope the potato had been doused with oil first, for his sake. =0

Posted by: pcarini | December 1, 2008 3:06 PM

"But our staff deal with them in a discreet, professional and kind way."

Right, like leaking some of the details to the press.

Rev. BDC always beats me to the punch... sending the story to The Telegraph is neither discreet nor professional.

Since I have nothing new to add, I'll leave you with a verse from Frank Zappa's Call Any Vegetable:

Call any vegetable Pick up your phone / Think of a vegetable Lonely at home / Call any vegetable And the chances are good / That a vegetable will *respond* to you /

Posted by: culmastadm | December 1, 2008 3:10 PM

Is there an expression for this in English ?

YEah, it goes:
"What a dumb-ass!"

Posted by: Blondin | December 1, 2008 3:11 PM

How 'bout that - a brown-eyed potato...

Posted by: Kobra | December 1, 2008 3:13 PM

I meant, @44: I hate my laptop keyboard. I'm not used to not having a numpad.

Posted by: Longtime Lurker | December 1, 2008 3:17 PM

The vicar only claimed to be naked because wearing a tutu would be considered more scandalous:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5kxUSrYngo

Posted by: spud u like | December 1, 2008 3:20 PM

Well, the inclusion of this trivial (and entirely unoriginal) piece, and the pathetic schadenfreude over the fact that the victim was (ooooh!) a vicar, really signifies to me that Pharyngula has reached rock bottom (fnar, for those so inclined). It used to be a good read. Now it's more like a self-parody, and PZ is looking more than a little desperate. Sad.

Posted by: E.V. | December 1, 2008 3:23 PM

A potato... Not a cucumber, not a carrot. Not a zucchini - a potato.
Maybe it was a fingerling potato. One that could stand all on its own. If not, now the Vicar can authoritatively use the epithet fuck me sideways!
Oh, I tell ya', it's a bum rap. *ba doom doom chic*

(Surely one of the parishioners can afford to give a dildo or butt plug to the good Vicar. A Fleshlight™ too? The parents of the altar boys should consider it a charitable donation.)

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp, KoT, OM | December 1, 2008 3:25 PM

Well, the inclusion of this trivial (and entirely unoriginal) piece, and the pathetic schadenfreude over the fact that the victim was (ooooh!) a vicar,

Missing the point for 1000 alex

Posted by: E.V. | December 1, 2008 3:27 PM

Spud , with all that shit on your teeth, I'll just assume you ate the potato. Thanks for playing, idiotic Butt Munch!

Posted by: Kristoffer | December 1, 2008 3:29 PM

And generally, it's scripture their pulling out of their ass.

Posted by: SplendidMonkey | December 1, 2008 3:40 PM

I swear I thought the sack was empty.

Posted by: Darles Chickens | December 1, 2008 3:45 PM

Rock bottom, hmm, I think that's potato bottom....

That reminds me, In Canyonlands Park in Utah, on the White Rim Trail, one of the campsites is called Potato Bottom Campsite. I wonder where that name came from........

Posted by: blf | December 1, 2008 3:47 PM

The VLF (Veggie Liberation Front) Manifesto

We, the vegetables of the world, must unit and throw off the dreadful consumers of our breathen. Fibres are not for eating, leaves are not for chewing, roots are not swallowing, they are our vital bodily mass, serving us in times good and bad, winter and summer, day and night. The hairless ape, the long pig, the descendent of a monkey, rips us from the earth, tears us away from our mother, and boils our very being. And our friends the bean. The murderous monsters fry us, bake us, and even attack us raw with bare teeth, sharp knifes, and the iron maiden that is the fork. Arise, arise, fight back, with your every molecule, your every chromosome, every part of your plant's soul! Attack them on the beaches, in the pantrys, in the vicarages! Do not go down the throat, through the gut, and out the arse. Jump up! Fight back!! Exterminate!!!

Posted by: Brownian, OM | December 1, 2008 3:58 PM

Nothing ruins a joke more than having to explain it to a maroon, but here's to you spud (and anybody else that thinks that pointing out such acts amounts to nothing more than schadenfreude):

The reason we point and laugh with such zeal at such events is that they constitute data points against the hypothesis that religiousity provides any protection whatsoever from 'immoral' acts, not because we want to see a priest get his comeuppance (okay, some priests deserve it), and that the religious are more 'moral' than anyone else, a claim that they have so successfully insinuated into our culture that it's taken for granted that members of the clergy are good or trustworthy people (which I'm sure they are, like the average layperson). As we've seen, sometimes this misplaced trust has dire consequences.

Further, most Abrahamic religions have at their core some idea that the world would be a wonderful place if we were all just godly enough, and we should continue to strive to acheive this godly perfection, regardless of how impossible or inhuman such a goal would be. Nowhere in church doctrine is this fallacious reasoning more apparent than in the anti-sex attitudes they hold, and thus sexual scandals among the clergy are so delicious.

Hell, even 'moderate' churches will claim it's not a sin to be a homosexual, but just to act as one. But it seems to me that when men whose job it is to talk to God all day can't keep stuff out of their ass, then what business do any of them have blathering on to the rest of us who have real jobs about pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and the rest.

If you'd really still rather that people not delight in priestly sex scandals, then I've got a solution for you, spud: have all the priests STFU with regard to sex. Then we won't care what they shove up their asses, as long as whatever goes up there is capable of giving necessary and sufficient consent.

Posted by: Raynfala | December 1, 2008 4:06 PM

"You using the whole spud, Doc?"

Posted by: Graham | December 1, 2008 4:16 PM

"The clergyman, in his 50s, told nurses he had been hanging curtains when he fell backwards on to his kitchen table."

Sounds like he's putting his apologetics skills to good use.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | December 1, 2008 4:18 PM

I hope he gets booted out of his parish. After all, Matthew 7 explicitly states:

³And why beholdest thou the condom that is on thy brother's penis, but considerest not the tuber that is in thine own rectum?

⁴Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull the condom off of thine penis; and, behold, a tuber is in thine own rectum?

⁵Thou hypocrite, first cast out the tuber out of thine own rectum; and then shalt thou walk unbowlegged to cast off the condom off of thy brother's penis.

Posted by: AJ Milne | December 1, 2008 4:21 PM

It reminds me of that old line from TV commercials: "How often has this happened to you?"

Me, I was gonna go with 'Damn, I hate it when that happens'.

But either way, let's face it, the line's just lying there...

Waiting for you to fall on it. Ass-first. While hanging curtains. In the nude...

Anyway...

nfortunately most people who come in with something stuck in their rectum are not exactly 'sex positive folks' (because otherwise they would have the good sense to use something with a flange at the base and/or tie a string on it.)

I'm picturing this pamphlet that could be distributed to emergency departments, just for these folks... Headline: 'So you'd like to stick something in your rectum...'

It's all pictorial, see, like a lot of this stuff. There's two columns of icons:

On the left, under the word 'Yes', with the big standard green checkmark, we have an assortment of the sex toys designed for this purpose, with aforementioned flanges and so on to prevent accidental and embarassing loss...

On the right, under the word 'No', with the big green X, we have a potato, a small rodent, a pineapple, a watermelon...

I tells ya, if it hasn't been done, it really should be.

Posted by: E.V. | December 1, 2008 4:29 PM

"Roundheads" was the nickname given to the Puritan supporters of Parliament during the English Civil War.

Posted by: E.V. | December 1, 2008 4:40 PM

Brownian:
I have the feeling Spud (or S' Pud) was one of our regular drive by trolls who finds fault with PZ's ridicule of any religious (christian) figure. I'm sure any humor is lost on Spud beyond "Veggie Tales". ; )
................................................................................................................................
(My apologies, MH @#28. I didn't mean to step on your Black Adder reference)

Posted by: tsg | December 1, 2008 4:49 PM

One of the actors in a play I was working on told me a story (I have no idea if it is really true). Every once in a while, he would receive a FedEx package from an EMT friend containing a piece of paper on which was written what someone recently had to be taken to the hospital to have removed from his bottom. One time he got "an umbrella".

The question that immediately came to my mind was "was it open?"

Back to the original story, what kind of mind does it take to think that hanging curtains naked and falling on a potato is less embarrassing than putting it there on purpose? If it were me, I'd be telling the doctor I put it there even if I really did fall on it because there is just no way he would ever believe it. "I was drunk and my buddy bet me $50 I couldn't do it," is just going to go over a whole lot better.

Posted by: tsg | December 1, 2008 5:03 PM

@#68: Erm, the clerical hypocrisy that you so kindly and long-windedly "explain" is just another facet of the stating of the bleeding obvious that makes this thread so lame in the first place. Pointing out every ridiculous case of the religious not living up to their preachy ways rapdidly reaches the point of diminishing returns, I think.

Or maybe I'm wrong and this thread really is at the cutting edge of promoting freethought. How scary that would be.

"...random biological ejaculation..." Well, given the amount of utter wank here, I guess that's about right.

Tonight's top story: Reader Finds Blog Entry Uninteresting. Film at Eleven.

Posted by: annie | December 1, 2008 5:13 PM

OMFG, I'm gasping with laughter here. Two spews in a single comment thread ("transpudstantiation" and "tater tots"), is a record. Just wanted to say thanks, y'all, I needed that!

*wiping laugh tears from my eyes*

Posted by: Wowbagger | December 1, 2008 5:20 PM

spud u like,

Your concern is noted.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself | December 1, 2008 5:26 PM

It's purely an urban legend that the following happened:

"In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only trying to retrieve the gerbil," Eric Tomaszewski told bemused doctors in the Severe Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital. Tomaszewski, and his homosexual partner Andrew "Kiki" Farnum, had been admitted for emergency treatment after a sexual session had gone seriously wrong. "I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Raggot, our gerbil, in." he explained. "As usual, Kiki shouted out "Armageddon", my cue that he'd had enough. I tried to retrieve Raggot but he wouldn't come out again, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him."

At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman described what happened next. "The match ignited a pocket of intestinal gas and a flame shot out of the tubing, igniting Mr.Tomaszewski's hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to the gerbil's fur and whiskers which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the rodent out like a cannonball."

Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract. Raggot the Gerbil did not survive the incident.

Posted by: E.V. | December 1, 2008 5:29 PM

@#80: nope, just a formerly avid reader and lurker. Sad that your best attack on me is to question my sense of humour, something your totally unqualified to comment upon.

Posted by: CJ | December 1, 2008 5:58 PM

Il veut nous faire prendre des vessies pour des lanternes

Is there an expression for this in English ?

There is an English expression that means essentially the same: Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

It's a sarcastic way of saying that they're not fooling you.

I saw someone mention Terry Pratchett. He's fond of this phrase.

Posted by: MikeM | December 1, 2008 6:08 PM

I've got it! "Tuber Tails!" (pun intended)

Thanks for your patience.