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In June the Associated Press reported on Bolivia’s annual Tinku festivals–pre-Columbian ritual celebrations held by the country’s high plains Indians, intended to settle feuds and secure better crops in the coming year. The largest occurs on a midnight in early May in the town of Macha; men from several nearby villages, dressed in native war garb, gather to drink and dance and whip each other with braided leather thongs, and soon the festival turns into a bloody brawl that often results in at least one death. (“If a person dies it is better for the fields,” says a local nurse.) A tour guide to Macha calls Tinku “a friendly meeting to test one’s energy,” but the Bolivian government has nonetheless tried to moderate the violence in recent years.
In April in Riverside, California, 31-year-old motorcycle enthusiast Michael Machetti filed a lawsuit against Bull’s Eye Tattoo, charging that an artist’s needle had infected him with a “flesh-eating virus,” necessitating the removal of large swaths of skin on his neck and under his arms. (Machetti, as a concession to his coworkers at a Hilton hotel, had asked to have one of his neck tattoos–the words “fuck you”–covered with a large “666.”)
Chicago police arrested six people in June and charged them with insurance fraud in connection with a long-running scam allegedly led by a 39-year-old man nicknamed “Bonecrusher.” Homeless men reportedly allowed Bonecrusher to administer a compound fracture to an arm or leg with a heavy wooden club; then scammers would take the injured man to a staged auto-accident scene, call 911, and pose as relatives in order to arrange a quick insurance settlement of up to $100,000 (though the homeless man would receive at most $1,500).
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