Odds and Ends

Just a few bits and pieces that I've missed over the past week or so.

• A Danish football fan attacked the referee of the Denmark-Sweden European Cup Qualifier Saturday, after the official awarded a penalty and red carded a Danish player for striking one of the Swedish players in the stomach with his fist.
  
  The red-carded Danish player, Christian Poulsen, must be among the more thankful people on the planet this evening. Instead of the media sitting around dissecting his moment of complete stupidity, especially as the Danes had come back from 3-nil to tie the match, they've be able to totally concentrate on the fan who went mental. Poulsen helped his near instant rehabilitation along by attempting to shield the referee from the lunatic fan. From goat to hero in 10 seconds flat must be some sort of record.
  
  Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten editorialised that it was "A day where Denmark's self-image as a restrained and decent football crowd was jeopardised by a fool without self control." Predictably, several radical Islamic organizations immediately condemned the paper for insults to Islam, even though the fan in question was in all likelihood a Lutheran, like 83% of his countrymen.
  
• Charles Nelson Reilly passed away last week. Anyone who's lived in the United States for longer than 10 years or who watches the Game Show Network regularly will remember the always entertaining Reilly. Here's one last "LLLL! LLLL!!" in memory of this campy game show savant.
  
• Jack "The Dripper" Kevorkian was recently released from prison. Kevorkian says the best thing about his incarceration was that he learnt out to build a euthanasia drip machine from licence (number) plates, prison bedding and a shiv. Kevorkian says that he will no longer deliberately end lives, as a condition of his parole. For old times sake though, he says that he plans to hang out a lot in morgues.
  
• Californian Joey Chestnut set a new world record for eating hot dogs Saturday, devouring 59 and 1/2 of them in 12 minutes. Previous world record holder, Takeru Kobayashi, has vowed to reclaim the record when they next meet, by devouring 60 hot dogs and Joey Chestnut in one sitting. Chestnut responded, "I'd like to see him try. He'd never get past my shorts."