Results tagged “poison”

Last we heard Bret Michaels had fractured his nose and got three stitches to his bloodied lip (luckily the hair extensions went unscathed). He's denied the Tony Awards accident was his fault, saying he hit his mark, leaving conspiracy theorists to wonder if a Rock of Love reject got behind the wheel of that particular piece of stage scenery. Probably not. But now Michaels continues to draw attention to the blunder, posting photos of his injuries up on MySpace and proving that nothing compliments stitches like a subtle soul patch.

       

The Tony Award broadcast usually amounts to a night of boring Broadway boosterism which most Americans happily ignore to watch basketball, but last night viewers actually got a few seconds of drama to go with all the backslapping, as Poison lead singer Bret Michaels got into an exciting accident with a piece of scenery. The "Rock of Love" star was on hand to perform a song with the cast of hair band jukebox musical Rock of Ages; but as you can see from the last few seconds of this video clip, that bit of cross-promotional synergy nearly cost him his life.

If only the Williamsburg area had the occasional hipster grifter to worry about, and not the much uglier problem of machete attacks. For about a year now we've been reporting on the machete and alleged gang attacks in the South Williamsburg neighborhood, and now the Village Voice takes a closer look at the weapon of choice there.

What ever happened to itching powder in the jock strap? NY Mag is reporting that two sophomore J.V. football players became violently ill after drinking Gatorade spiked with copper sulfate, a chemical fungicide. One of the kids started coughing up blood and had to be taken to the hospital! Police arrested one suspect, a sophomore, and charged him with reckless endangerment. Happily, both of the sickened players recovered in time for the big homecoming game three days later. In September, a 13-year-old student at the Talented and Gifted School for Young Scholars was arrested after spiking his teacher's water with calcium hydroxide, sending her to the hospital. And in June, students at the Brooklyn School for Global Studies were arrested when their laxative-spiked cake sickened teachers. Isn't it high time for an After School Special on this? Oh, ABC stopped making After School Specials. Which explains a lot about today's poison-prone youth.

Emerson wrote that the "surest poison is time," but for Dru D'Amico, a teacher at the Talented and Gifted School for Young Scholars, the white powder a student slipped into her water bottle was also pretty cruel. D'Amico was taken to the hospital Wednesday after a pupil spiked her water with calcium hydroxide. The substance is used to make cement, but in this case it went to enhance that special bond of mistrust and contempt that's the hallmark of any real teacher/student relationship. Also, ingesting enough can cause internal bleeding, hypertension, and skeletal muscle paralysis. D'Amico was later released, and police have charged the 13-year-old with reckless endangerment, NY1 reports. Of course, this isn't the first time teachers have been poisoned by their scheming, bloodthirsty students: Remember the hilarious laxative cake prank?

The FBI arrested Manhattan resident Anton Dunn today after he posted a series of videos on YouTube in which he claims to have used an employee at Gerber to poison baby food with cyanide. The Post reports that Gerber has been receiving a flood of calls since the videos first appeared on YouTube; the feds say Dunn wore a ski mask and boasted of a “plan in motion” to kill black babies, while also acknowledging that white babies would die as well.

Five NJ residents have been hospitalized and one has died after drinking oil used to light tiki torches. Apparently the victims from Burlington and Bergen Counties believed they were drinking apple juice, but it's actually a kerosene-like substance (one victim was an 8-year-old girl who now has permanent lung damage; another person "mistook the oil for bottled water and tried to make coffee, but didn't get sick"). NJ Poison Information and Education System executive director Steve Marcus says, "During my 40 years in medicine, you get an occasional kid who ingests kerosene, but I have never seen this kind of cluster." The product is Tiki Torch Fuel from Lamplight Farms Inc.

Health officials say his death was caused by a hardened resin, made partly from venom collected from toads of the Bufo genus, which contains chemicals called “bufadienolides” known to disrupt heart rhythms. The aphrodisiac is supposed to be applied topically, not eaten, but authorities warn that even that use can be harmful.