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According to an August Wall Street Journal report, the $10,000 foot surgery a 31-year-old Philadelphia woman recently underwent–she had one toe shortened and another straightened–is merely a radical manifestation of a widespread obsession with fashionable but ever-pointier pumps. Over-the-counter products like gel cushions and “toe hose” have proliferated to help women endure these excruciating shoes, and podiatrists are offering nail-narrowing surgeries and collagen injections to pad the soles of the feet. (A podiatrist in Moline, Illinois, on the other hand, has her own reply for patients who say they need toe surgery: “No, you need different shoes.”)
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Least Competent Criminals
In North Platte, Nebraska, a judge accepted the defense offered by a 45-year-old inmate who’d returned from a work-release program with alcohol on his breath: the man said he’d eaten four homemade burritos containing meat marinated in tequila and beer. In Essex, England, Jeremy Bamber, jailed in 1986 for killing five members of his family, filed a lawsuit against four surviving relatives, claiming they’d unduly influenced his adoptive grandmother to deprive him of his share of the family estate (he maintains he was wrongfully convicted). And the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board turned down a petition for asylum by a Venezuelan woman who explained that she would be “persecuted” in her home country for being too fat.
