A window cleaner died after stabbing himself in the groin repeatedly with a jumbo souvenir pencil, an inquest heard.

Jeffrey Burton’s family and friends were baffled by his bizarre death, which was recorded as an open verdict because there was no evidence he was trying to commit suicide.

The room [police found Mr. Burton in] was splattered with blood and music was still playing on his stereo. The giant blood-covered pencil was beside him.

East Sussex coroner Alan Craze told the Hastings inquest: “It’s a mystery to me. If you were choosing to take your own life, that’s not the way you would do it.

“It seems to me that it can’t have been a single stab wound. He seems to have worked on it. The pencil was blunt.”

Poor guy. Novelty items aren’t meant to bring pain to anyone, they’re just supposed to bring the simple joy of seeing something typically small turned into something extremely large. I’m just glad he didn’t harm anyone else. We could have been looking at an OJ Simpsonian double murder if he’d recently won a visit from Publisher’s Clearing House with an oversized check.

[Mirror]
Window cleaner killed himself with giant souvenir pencil, inquest hears

Actress Brittany Murphy, 32, died this morning from what is being called cardiac arrest. Reports the New York Daily News…

The troubled starlet went into full cardiac arrest early Sunday and could not be revived, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

It was her beloved mom who discovered her unconscious in the shower, according to the Web site TMZ. When paramedics arrived just after 8 a.m., they immediately began administering CPR and rushed her to nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.

Prior to her death she was already inside a cloud of strangeness in recent months…

Last month, Murphy’s husband of two years, Simon Monjack, was rushed to a hospital after his plane landed at Los Angeles Airport. He was incoherent when EMTs boarded the plane.

In October, cops got a call from neighbors complaining that a frantic Murphy was on her balcony screaming about gunshots being fired near her home in Hollywood.

The noise was found to be coming from a generator.

Murphy appeared in appeared in more than 20 movies including 8 Mile, Girl Interrupted, Don’t Say a Word, and Sin City. Murphy is seen in here in recent photos from the premiere of the movie Across The Hall, the last movie she appeared in before her death. She also is scheduled to appear in two more movies that are currently in post-production.

Dogs bite people sometimes and, if it’s bad enough, the dog might get put down. It’s sad, but so are a lot of things. But what about when your partially blind dog bites your husband so bad that he dies? Well, if you’re this British woman, you go, “Eh, it happens” and keep the dog.

A father died after being nipped by his dog during a game of fetch.

Steven Sewell, 55, was on holiday in the Scottish Highlands with his wife Angela and teenage son David when the family’s partially blind dog Judy bit him.

The retired teacher patched up the small wound with tissue and carried on as normal because he was not in any pain.

However, an inquest has heard how he began complaining of shivers and sickness a few days later.

He was taken to hospital, where doctors diagnosed blood poisoning, and he died a few days later after the infection spread to his brain.

The family say the dog has never behaved aggressively, and are keeping her in spite of the freak accident.

Mrs Sewell, 53, said of the incident: ‘It was not vicious. It was just bad eyesight and tragic, but you have to accept it and move on.’

[Daily Mail]

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In the evenings, Donna Munson liked to sit in front of her picture window and watch the bears amble toward her Ouray County log cabin for dinner.

The 74-year-old woman — who stocked her backyard with dog food, fruit and yogurt — was found dead outside her home Friday, being eaten by a bear.

It was still unknown Saturday whether a bear killed Munson or whether one or more animals consumed part of her body after her death. But people who knew her said she was an eccentric wildlife lover who had been feeding bears, elk, skunks and raccoons for years.

Munson, who rented half of her home in southwestern Colorado to several people over the years, told one of them that “when the time came, she wanted to go out with the bears.”

I used to read Winnie the Pooh a lot as a kid, mostly because I related to Christopher Robin since we had the same first name. But then I grew up thinking bears were cool, and all about honey and misadventures with their random animal pals. Yeah, turns out they’ll just eat your face, no matter how much you tell them they’re your best friend. Thanks, Asexual Chris.

And don’t get me started on the other types of bears out there. Once I was looking for something interesting to do on Craigslist and saw that there was going to be a party where it was going to be “Bears Having Fun.” Yeah…those bears, not quite the ones you see on Animal Planet. I was lucky to escape with my honeypot unsodomized.

[via]

Workers excavating an old South Carolina cemetery have uncovered hundreds of sets of human remains.

The Post and Courier of Charleston reports Thursday that the Charleston Housing Authority found and removed about 350 sets of remains from the former Hampstedt Cemetery.

Historian Charles F. Philips Jr. says the mass graves were likely used for victims of yellow fever. The remains are being moved to Bethany Cemetery, where they will be reburied.

[via]

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A 40-year-old woman has been found dead in a machine at a Southern California food processing plant that is a major supplier for McDonald’s restaurants.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives say the woman’s body was found early Tuesday at Golden State Foods in the City of Industry, an east Los Angeles suburb. Investigators believe her death was accidental.

No other details were given about her death or about the woman except that she was an employee.

The Irvine-based company has distribution centers across the nation. Its Web site says the company supplies McDonald’s and developed the sauce for the restaurant’s Big Mac in the 1960s.

Okay so I’m thinking I’m alone on this one, but I don’t think I’d be so skeeved out if I ate something delicious and then they were like, “GOTCHA THAT WAS HUMAN MEAT!” I’d probably ask if I knew the person, but so long as it was some delicious Polynesian boy who didn’t have a whole lot going for him or something, I’d probably quickly make peace with it. I find baby cows pretty adorable and find the way they’re “made” to be atrocious but damn if veal isn’t delicious. So why should little Paoemuhaaaaah expect any different?

Unrelated, would you be opposed if I asked you to sit in a bathtub filled with teriyaki sauce? No reason, just think you’d be comfy in it.

[via]

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Authorities said a man has died after falling into a vat of melted chocolate in a New Jersey processing plant.

A spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office said the 29-year-old temporary worker at Cocoa Services Inc. plant fell after a blade used to mix raw chocolate hit him. The man’s name has not been released.

The accident happened around 10:30 a.m. today as the worker was loading raw chocolate into the vat where it’s melted and mixed before being shipped elsewhere to be made into candy products.

Well then, if you get a chocolate bar that tastes like a filthy factory worker or if when you open your candy bar, you hear the sounds of screaming stifled by rich chocolate (and nougat!!) then I guess you’ll know where it came from.

For all the chocolate lovers out there who have said, “That’s how I’d like to go,” I bet you learned a powerful lesson about your hyperbole. I love vaginas, it doesn’t mean that I’d like to die in a barrel full of them. Plus, how did they all get into that barrel? That couldn’t possibly be legal. What a terrible situation all around.

[via]

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I personally think it’s pretty scummy to marry yourself to some sort of tragedy to make money, but hey, whatever works. I don’t think that “moonwalking down 2nd Avenue” is going to cut it though. If you’re going to do a Michael Jackson “tribute,” do it all the way. Let’s get a Brooke Shields look alike to walk out of a bar with me, then try to kiss me as a I go, “Oh, look at the time! Gotta go!” then vomit in a garbage pail for an hour. Then let me flamboyantly smash the crap out of a car like it was my abusive stage father. Then we can cruise by a playground where I make vague but inappropriate gestures towards kids and ultimately pass out in a gutter after getting painkillers injected straight into my bloodstream. Now THAT sounds like good times. So long as I don’t have to throw Clorox on my skin at some point. Not sure I’d pay for that one.

Honestly, it sucks that he died poor and isolated from the world after being one of the biggest and most influential acts in the world. All joking aside, I don’t know that I ever truly bought that he was some brilliant child molester who was somehow faking being batcrap crazy to gain access to more boys’ underpants. This is what can happen when you strip a child of his innocence and force him to perform and lose the experience of actually being a child.

The biggest joke of all though is the media and people who were the first ones to call the guy a freak and a weirdo and mock him being broke acting like they give a crap now. You can’t beat a guy to the point that he’s literally got to pop a bunch of pills to numb the pain enough to exist, then turn around and treat him as though you’ve always held him in the highest esteem after he dies. You can remember Michael Jackson as a polarizing figure and someone who didn’t make the best choices in life, you can love his music and cling to that. But the media and regular people acting like they give a crap now after slinging arrows and not caring for years is the biggest joke of all. Stop marrying yourselves to tragedy and putting these people on a pedestal like you weren’t trying to tear them down for literally almost 20 years.

Here’s a collection of Michael Jackson jokes from late-night hosts. Here’s a link to Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video (which, while somewhat ironic now) is still one of the best videos ever made. That’s an even-handed way to remember someone who’s the closest thing to a Greek tragedy to ever be a part of pop culture.

Also here’s my jokes, via my Twitter:

Why did Michael Jackson go to Wal-Mart?
-He heard they had boys pants half off. And a buy 1 get 1 free sale on tires for dead guys.

As a tribute to Michael Jackson, Chris Brown is going to punch a young boy in the face today instead of a woman.

Today’s exercise in listy morbidity was inspired by (what else?) the passing of Michael Jackson, which more or less ended Twitter’s obsession with green avatars, Facebook’s obsession with taking some random quiz to tell you what kind of noun you’d be in a greater collection of nouns, and cable television’s unfortunate predilection towards whatever the hell they were yammering about, because blogging does not, even on its best day, pay me enough to endure Glenn Beck.

But really, the person I feel bad for here is Farrah Fawcett. The woman died of anal cancer — yes, anal cancer — in prolonged agony. She left behind a better acting career than you’d give her credit for, and, of course, That Poster. And she might have been in the media awareness for about, oh, four hours, between the South Carolina earth-walking philanderer-governor and this generation’s freaky Elvis. It’s wrong. And it’s not something I want to see repeated when it’s my time to go.

11) My own day. You hear me, rest of the world? No dying for a day before, and a day after. Die on your own time, or my ghost is coming back to ruin some property values.

10) Continuing product. Hendrix, Shakur, Cobain… death does not stop them from continuing to put out new product. (I’ll just prep an intern, or sell the intellectual property rights of making lists. Big money in that.)

9) Competing images. Give it up to MJ for this: there is no definitive B-roll of footage to show during the memorial segment, because the dude had a dozen different looks. Don’t make it easy on the media, people. Make ‘em work for it.

Mystery. Missing body? Corrupt coroner’s office? Unconfirmed sightings from exotic locations? Bizarre rumors of cryogenics, cloning and fakery? I’m down with all that. Let’s keep building the brand.

7) Freaky post-mortem heroics. When Philadelphia Flyers goaltender Pelle Lindbergh died (and yes, I’m old, it happened a long time ago), the media made a lot out of his organ donation, which allowed some other people to live. That’s fairly cool, but only if you can really time this out. A kidney to a hot chick, good. A liver to some ancient geezer? Not so much.

6) Inexplicable spectacle. A funeral service where an elaborate custom animation of turtles playing poker on an endless loop where no on ever bets? Check. A closed see-through casket which slowly unveils twin raised middle fingers? I’ll take three, and have them move around in a monte game. Some form of parade that’s ripped off from “The Prisoner”, and drunken singing from “The Wire”? Check and mate. A final and fitting end where I manage to confuse and annoy while amusing myself to death? You’re getting me, dear reader. Too late, but so be it.

5) Complimentary narcotics with a commemorative keepsake. Sure, my body may be gone, but my memory — and your Five Tool Tool syringe — is forever.

4) Random acts of violence. Someone, for the love of all that is holy, give someone else a chair shot. It’s what I would have wanted.

3) Unseemliness. Who is the mysterious woman in black with a veil, speaking to no one? My murderer, mistress, love child, or just a random actress hired for the day to spice things up? Some things, I take to the grave.

2) Ongoing beef. Would we remember Pac with Biggie, and would both guys be as big without the other? Hell no. Just need to plan ahead, really.

1) At least 10 spectators. We couldn’t have a list without at least 10, right?

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