Thailand is infamous for wives slicing off the penis of a wayward husband as he sleeps. As such, Bangkok has become a hub for penile-reattachment surgery. Not to be outdone, the lovely ladies here have devised more extreme measures. One lady tied her husband’s penis to a helium balloon and released it; one fed it to the ducks out in their yard (the link above mentions the old Thai saying: “I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat”); still another popped it into the blender. These are NOT Urban Legends, but rather well-documented instances.
An Agence France-Presse story on it can be found here in the Taipei Times. I like this part:
He said his hardest case required bribing an angry wife to confess its location in a septic tank and the hiring of a wrecking crew to retrieve it. “I asked the nurse to clean it up well and warned the patient that he may get septicemia and he said, `do your best and if it gets septicemia I will die with my penis.'” “It was 15 hours between it being chopped off and reattached, which is much longer than the books say it can be done, but I went ahead and to my surprise everything went fine,” he said.
Fortunately, it’s not really that common, which is why it’s generally big news when it does, especially if it involves one of the more creative disposal methods. But it probably happens more than it does in other countries.
I myself have manage to escape this fate … so far, heh. At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Not quite the same thing but this reminds me of an incident back when I was working in prisons. We had a prisoner who broke a mirror and managed to slice off a good portion of his thumb. While he was being treated we started looking around for the missing piece of thumb so we could sent it out to possibly be re-attached. But we were unable to find it.
It wasn’t until he got to the hospital that the prisoner finally decided he could trust a nurse there. When she asked him where the cut off piece was, he told her he had flushed it down his toilet “so the guards wouldn’t get it”.
That would be the capital. What one hears most often is that Bangkok may be short for Bang Makok – bang meaning “village on a stream” or even just “place of” and makok being a type of local olives. But that’s not definitive, and there are other explanations too.
The Thais always call it Krung Thep, which means City of Angels. Los Angeles, if you will. Although Krung Thep is short for it’s full name:
City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems, seat of the king, city of royal palaces, home of gods incarnate, erected by Visvakarman at Indra’s behest.
Schoolchildren have to memorize this. The wife says she’s long forgotten it though.
If this is a recurring thing in Thailand then I suppose it’s likely that somewhere out there is a guy who’s had reattachment done more than once (presumably by different women)? A guy whose “take away” from a vengeful penectomy was “hey, this is a solved problem”?
What one hears most often is that Bangkok may be short for Bang Makok – bang meaning “village on a stream” or even just “place of” and makok being a type of local olives. But that’s not definitive, and there are other explanations too.