The Palm Beach Post's Andrew Abramson writes about a high school linebacker's gruesome injury. It's a well-done article all the way, but let me share the top few graphs here:
When Will Claunch felt some pain after tackling a teammate during a South Fork High School intrasquad football scrimmage last week, he figured he had jammed his finger.Then he looked down at the injured digit and didn't see any skin.
"All the skin on my right (middle) finger was sliced from the base to the tip ... all the skin was gone," Claunch said.
The junior linebacker's finger got caught in the drawstring of his teammate's pants, ripping the flesh from the inside bottom of his finger from the first joint all the way to the tip, exposing the tendons.
Doctors considered amputation, but instead they attached the finger to the area between Claunch's abdomen and
groin, hoping to stimulate the blood supply to repair the tendons and replace skin.
"I'm stuck to myself," Claunch, 17, said Thursday from his Palm City home.
Yeah, they cut open a slit near his groin and sewed his finger into it to give it temporary shelter and a chance to heal (I think that's what they did anyway). Let's just hope somebody got all this on tape. It's got Most Fucked Up Clip of the Week written all over it.
-- The Sun-Sentinel's Brittany Wallman (yeah, it's the second time this week I've gone close to home) writes about the oh-so-dramatic revelation that a Fort Lauderdale condo told a marina builder that it would support the expansion for a price, $550,000 to be exact. That's apparently what condo Mark 1 (lobbyist Neil Schiller of Becker & Poliakoff) offered The Harborage (lobbyist Debbie Orshefsky) in exchange for supporting the project. When Harborage balked, the condo fought the 15-story expansion like a banshee. Sure, it's sleazy, but Commissioner Cindi Hutchinson, who orchestrated the news, protests way too much. "I was stunned," she says in the article. "I couldn't think of anything else after I heard that." Her innocent virgin ears were offended? Pleeeeease. Obviously, Hutchinson is using the issue to deflect attention away from her controversial vote to back the expansion.
-- Well, it's official (again) -- Broward County is smarter than Miami-Dade by like ten percentage points. The Miami Herald's Nirvi Shah fills in the details here. I would try to assuage the pain and humiliation of this news to my brothers and sisters down south by pointing out that there is a simple reason for this: more poverty in Dade, along with more language-barriered immigrants. But for some reason I don't think that would help.
