OMNI Magazine Contest



 These are responses to a contest sponsored by OMNI magazine:

 Grand Prize Winner:

 When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and
 when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered
 side facing down.  I propose to strap buttered toast to the
 back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning inches above
 the ground.  With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed
 monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.

 Runners-up:

 If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number
 of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds
 at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually
 produce all the worlds great literary works in Braille.

 Why Yawning Is Contagious:  You yawn to equalize the
 pressure on your eardrums.  This pressure change outside
 your eardrums unbalances other people's ear pressures, so
 they must yawn to even it out.

 Communist China is technologically underdeveloped
 because they have no alphabet and therefore cannot use
 acronyms to communicate ideas at a faster rate.

 The earth may spin faster on its axis due to deforestation.
 Just as a figure skater's rate of spin increases when the
 arms are brought in close to the body, the cutting of tall
 trees may cause our planet to spin dangerously fast.

 Honorable Mentions:

 Birds take off at sunrise.  On the opposite side of the
 world, they are landing at sunset.  This causes the earth to
 spin on its axis.

 The reason hot-rod owners raise the backs of their cars is
 that it's easier to go faster when you're always going
 downhill.

 The quantity of consonants in the English language is
 constant.  If omitted in one place, they turn up in another.
 When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate
 southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in
 "erl wells."

Tycho Brahe:

An important Danish astronomer of the 16th century. His ground breaking
research allowed Sir Isaac Newton to come up with the theory of gravity.

How he died: Didn't get to the bathroom in time

In the 16th century, it was considered an insult to leave a banquet table
before the meal was over. Brahe, known to drink excessively, had a bladder
condition -- but failed to relieve himself before the banquet started. He
made matters worse by drinking too much at dinner, and was too polite to
ask to be excused. His bladder finally burst, killing him slowly and
painfully over the next 11 days.

Scrotum Self-Repair


                                 Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality
                                      by William A. Morton, Jr.

One morning I was called to the emergency room by the head ER nurse.  She
directed me to a patient who had refused to describe his problem other
than to say that he "needed a doctor who took care of men's troubles."
The patient, about 40, was pale, febrile, and obviously uncomfortable, and
had little to say as he gingerly opened histrousers to expose a bit of
angry red and black-and-blue scrotal skin.  After I asked the nurse to
leave us, the patient permitted me to remove his trousers, shorts, and two
or three yards of foul-smelling stained gauze wrapped about his scrotum,
which was swollen to twice the size of a grapefruit and extremely tender.
A jagged zig-zag laceration, oozing pus and blood, extended down the left
scrotum.  Amid the matted hair, edematous skin, and various exudates, I saw
somehalf-buried dark linear objects and asked the patient what they
were.  Several days earlier, he said, he had injured himself in
the machine shop where he worked, and had closed the laceration himself
with a heavy-duty stapling gun.  The dark objects were one-inch staples of
the type used in putting up wallboard.

We x-rayed the patient's scrotum to locate the staples; admitted him to the
hospital; and gave him tetanus antitoxin, broad-spectrum antibacterial
therapy, and hexachlorophene sitz baths prior to surgery the next morning.
The procedure consisted of exploration and debridement of the left side of
the scrotal pouch.  Eight rusty staples were retrieved, and the skin edges
were trimmed and freshened.  The left testis had been avulsed and was missing.
The stump of thespermatic cord was recovered at the inguinal canal, debrided,
and the vessels ligated properly, though not much of a hematoma was present.
Through-and-through Penrose drains were sutured loosely in site, and the
skin was loosely closed.  Convalescence was uneventful, and before his
release from the hospital less than a week later, the patient confided
the rest of his story to me.

An unmarried loner, he usually didn't leave the machine shop at lunch time
with his coworkers.  Finding himself alone, he had begun the regular practice
of masturbating by holding his penis against the canvas drive-belt of a large
floor-based piece of machinery.  One day, as he approached orgasm, he lost
his concentration and leaned too close to the belt.  When his scrotum became
caught between the pulley-wheel and the drive-belt, he was thrown into the
air and landed a few feet away.  Unaware that he had lost his left testis,
and perhaps too stunned to feel much pain, he stapled the wound closed and
resumed work.  I can only assume he abandoned this method of self-
gratification.

[William A. Morton is a retired urologist residing in West Chester,
Pennsylvania.]