Fan death: the silent killer

Okay, I didn't think I hallucinated this, but upon rediscovering it, I can understand why people might think I did....

Fan death is an urban legend that originated in South Korea, but has since spread to other countries in the Far East. The belief is that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners and the fans in cars. When the air conditioner or fan is on in a car, some people are apt to leave their car windows open a crack to avoid "fan death." Fans manufactured and sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on.

Some kind of a critter, indeed

It was a case of beauty and the bite when a Mrs. America contestant was bitten by a rattlesnake in Arizona on Sunday.

Christina Ryan, who is Mrs. Tennessee, spent hours in the hospital after suffering the bite while on her way to rehearsals for the pageant.

She's now watching the pageant from the sidelines.

Ryan had been coming down some stairs when she saw a brown recluse spider on the ground and backed away from it.

However, she didn't see the rattlesnake that was behind her.

"Suddenly they jumped and they were screaming and we assumed they had encountered some kind of a critter," said Mrs. Iowa, Taryn Schuyler, who is a nurse.

My favorite part is that she eludes the brown recluse but gets chomped by a rattlesnake. They make it sound like Arizona's some kind of haven of catastrophically dangerous fauna. And this should be a metaphor. Some days you're snake food, other days you're spider lunch.