A Christian family values organization is celebrating after convincing an Australian retailer to stop selling chocolate poker chips.
Members of the FamilyVoice Australia group recently became suitably outraged after discovering that a Big W store in South Australia was selling the chips, which are essentially chocolate disks with poker-chip designs on the foil rather than the traditional gold coin imagery.
FamilyVoice head busybody David d’Lima told the News Mail that he’d raised a fuss because the “realistic-looking gambling chips effectively tell children that gambling is a fun thing – without giving them any idea of the heartbreak that can result.”
It’s unclear whether d’Lima is similarly worked up over those ubiquitous chocolate coins, which shamelessly tempt the kids’ taste buds without so much as a warning of the horrors of personal bankruptcy or having to pay alimony to that bitch-goddess queen of the harpies you used to call your wife.
That said, Australia is home to the world’s most avid gamblers, so perhaps d’Lima’s handwringing is warranted. Or maybe d’Lima fears that the chips will cause kids to associate eating with any form of wagering, like, say, swallowing a pointy metal object because someone bet you couldn’t do it and live.
That was the challenge facing the apparently mentally challenged Xiao Gong, a 27-year-old Chinese citizen who found himself out of a job and wondering how he was going to make that month’s rent. That is, until someone offered to pay him RMB 2k (US $313) if he’d swallow a five-inch carpentry nail and RMB 4k if he’d swallow a five-inch saw blade.
After not thinking about it for a second, Xiao agreed, channeled his inner Alanis Morissette and downed his jagged (not so) little pills. Xiao told People’s Daily that there was some initial pain in his esophagus but this went away. About a week later, the pain returned with a vengeance and Xiao (pictured above, in x-ray form) was forced to seek medical help.
A two-hour operation later, Xiao was resting uncomfortably, battling an infection caused by the shredding of his stomach lining. Xiao is expected to recover, but his hospital bills reportedly totalled over one million yuan, only slightly more than the earnings from his act of derring don’t. Lord only knows what dodgy hospital waste products he’s agreed to ingest in order to work off that debt.
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine what other endgame Xiao envisioned when he embarked on his suicide mission. Did he really expect to expel those items out his back passage? If so, we wouldn’t want to have been in the next public washroom stall when the moment of truth arrived.
Still, kudos to you, Xiao, for giving us the most outrageous gambling story since those two Russians each voluntarily cut off one of their own ears to satisfy a wager that ended in a draw.
