(Photo: Canada Tourism)
This requires a bit of explanation.
There's a bar in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada that has--or had--a preserved human toe. Since 1973, for a fee, drinkers could sip their whiskey with the toe inside. Because Canada.
Then, last week, one bar-goer swallowed the toe:
Terry Lee, the bar’s “Toe Captain,” said that on Saturday night, an American patron, who had drunk the cocktail before, decided to ingest it this time.
Mr. Lee said the customer was a card-carrying member of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club, a distinction given to each person who tries the drink. To gain full membership, people agree to abide by the club rules, including a $500 fine if the toe is ingested. He said the patron drank the cocktail, swallowed the toe, put the money on the table and left. “He just wanted bragging rights, that’s what he wanted,” Mr. Lee said, adding the patron deliberately swallowed the toe.
To be fair, he abided by the rules. Anyway, there's no need to worry because the bar has a large supply of severed human toes. Terry Lee, the owner, explained:
He said the bar receives toes through donations: either people who have lost toes in accidents or through illness, or have stipulated in their wills that they want a toe or toes donated to the bar.
Link -via Nag on the Lake
1. The behavior of the American who swallowed the pickled toe (shudder) reflects badly on the image of Americans traveling out-of-country.
2. The image that Americans project to the world has been in decline for many years, and so it is becoming more and more difficult to make Americans look worse.
3. The person in this story succeeded to make Americans look more boorish and uncivilized by his behavior, thus topping an already high performance bar.
4. This implies that his behavior was quite extreme in its offensiveness.