Watch your mouth

Attention squeamish people. This blog today uses dirty words like sperm and cephalopods and tongue. If you are under age, go away, you stand a very real chance of learning something from this.

Today's blog is inspired by a horrifying bit of food news which I ran across while goofing around on the internet. According to www.dailymail.co.uk “a 63 year old woman became 'pregnant' with 12 baby squid after eating calamari”. No, she did not become pregnant in the standard way, she became “pregnant in the mouth”. That's right folks! This woman was from South Korea and was eating a whole squid, though in her defense it had been cooked when “she felt a sharp pain in her mouth”. The article states “The lady told doctors that she could feel something in her mouth which they described as 'bug-like organisms'”. The doctors examined her and found baby cephalopods attached to the inside of her mouth, on her gums and tongue and cheek. Apparently, over in the east, they don't bother taking the internal organs out of their eight legged seafood, or any other food for that matter. I mean, honestly, who has time for all that, right? Well, if you happen to get one of these little squids and it is a guy-squid, and you chomp the still intact sperm bag, that little man will impregnate you! I'm telling you, guys will get it on even if they are dead and have been cooked! There is no stopping the male species from sowing their oats. And this little guys oats come with a cement like substance on them, the spermatangium, and this stuff will deeply embed itself in soft tissue. The article states – oh dear god – “Inside the pods is an 'ejaculatory apparatus' and sperm – with the apparatus expelling the sperm quite forcefully”. In other words, this poor woman bit down on a veritable squid sperm filled bag of dynamite and those things implanted themselves on every available surface in her mouth. Fortunately it hurt so bad that she immediately spat this fun piece of food out and avoided swallowing any of it. I am not even going to make a joke about that, it's entirely too easy. She took it to the doctor and they were fortunately able to determine who the daddy was.

My very favorite part of this article reads thus: “Danna Staaf, a squid enthusiast from Science 2.0, said 'The skin on your hands, and most of the rest of your body is much too thick to get stuck. I've probably had hundreds of spermatophores ejaculate on my fingers and never felt a sting”. Well, well, well, have you really? What does this woman do for a living? I cannot imagine any time period in my life where I have casually mentioned that I have hundreds of squid ejaculations on my fingers, whether it stung or not. I can think of no reason I would have my hand or any other body part in the direct line of fire of a squid or any other animal... and I live in the Appalachian Mountains! I realize some people really, REALLY get into their job, but this seems extreme to me.

The really good part of this story is that this is not a singular incident. Nope, “a similar case was reported in December last year when a woman in Japan suffered severe pains in her mouth after eating raw squid. She took the remaining piece – I'm thinking this means she swallowed the part she was chewing – with her to the Tosei General Hospital, the NCBI reports, and the sperm bags were removed”. These people have to have surgery to remove these things! “Twelve small, white spindle-shaped bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva (gums) were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa”. I think I would ask them to simply remove the entire lower half of my face and replace it with a wooden jaw and mouth, like the one on Howdy Doody. It seemed to work just fine for him.

So, dear friends, I suppose the moral of the story is don't eat calamari. Ever. It just isn't a good idea and it was a bad enough idea before this delightful piece of information found it's way onto my computer screen. Though if you absolutely must eat calamari, perhaps the world has run out of grasshoppers or something, then for heaven's sake, make sure it is a girl calamari and not a guy calamari. At least the women aren't out to impregnate anything within range of their... firing apparatus.