A Sacramento TV station reports that a woman has died after a radio station (KDND 107.9) held a contest to see who could drink the most water without relieving themselves. The winner was supposed to get a Nintendo Wii ($249 MSRP).

Sadly, the woman who won the contest left and then called in sick to work after telling them “her head was hurting her real bad”. Only a few hours later she was found dead from water intoxication.

The radio station apparently had provided a warning, which was described by another contestant as “if you don’t feel like you can do this, don’t put your health at risk”. The TV station report also mentions a waiver of liability. It does not sound like anyone was given any serious health consultation or recommendation about balance of electrolytes to ensure they were making an informed decision. It’s also not clear if anyone at the station themselves understood the dangers of hyper-hydration.

Sacramento County Sheriff’s Sgt. Tim Curran confirmed Strange’s death Friday, but said there were no immediate grounds to begin an investigation.

According to contest participants, 17 to 20 contestants took part in the competition in a room at KDND’s Madison Avenue studios. The contest broadcast during The End’s Morning Rave program began around 6:15 a.m. as contestants were each handed eight-ounce bottles of water to drink every 15 minutes.

Fellow contestant James Ybarra of Woodland said he met Strange at the event and had no idea of the potential danger of water poisoning.

[…]

Ybarra said before the contest, he did not read a liability waiver form handed to him by station personnel before signing it. Ybarra said he was surprised by the physical toll he felt after the contest.

“I was kind of out of it yesterday. I was just drained. I was just going to the bathroom,” Ybarra said. “I wasn’t feeling well and I actually fell asleep. I woke up with a headache (Saturday) morning and then took a couple of aspirins.”

How is someone supposed to know if they are at a proper hydration level? It seems a popular recommendation is to look at the level of color in your urine, the exact measure of health that was forbidden in the contest.

Perhaps this will be filed under psychiatric conditions that lead to death? It certainly does not fit the other “at risk” categories listed by Wikipedia (Infants, Runners, Overexertion and heat stress, Unusual water losses in disease, Iatrogenic water intoxication).

And if you think this is bad, I hear the radio station’s next hot contest will be “Self-Immolation for a Playstation”…

The BBC has posted an amusing security lesson about the historic battle between arsonists and the keepers of a straw goat:

Goats of Christmas past have been burned down on 22 occasions, ram-raided or simply smashed to pieces.

Authorities said the goat’s longevity in 2006 was down to a special flame-resistant chemical coating.

“If the Gavle goat hadn’t been impregnated with flame-resistant chemicals, we would have been left with a black skeleton,” said Anna Oestman, a member of the city’s goat committee.

Leave it to a Swedish city’s “goat committee” to provide the world a way to protect straw from catching fire. But is it safe to touch/breathe, and can animals eat it, or is it just for decoration (like most food preserved and then brought out for the holiday season)?

This year was a big success compared to last year’s tragic end:

In 2005, arsonists dressed as Santa Claus and the Gingerbread Man burned the goat to the ground.

Beware the Santa who wants to get your goat.

People often identify themselves or others by the food they eat. I guess for some it even becomes a point of national pride, as the BBC points out in a report about the latest nations to join the EU:

Mamaliga is so central to Romanian life, that Bulgarians sometimes refer to Romanians pejoratively as Mamaligi – though the dish exists in Bulgaria too, under the name kachamak.

One elderly Romanian voiced anxieties about Romania’s membership of the EU, telling BBC correspondent Oana Lungescu: “We’ll no longer be able to make our mamaliga, because we’ll have to eat sliced bread wrapped in plastic with a food safety stamp on it!

But do the Bulgarians mean it in a positive or negative fashion? What would New Yorkers think if everyone started calling them Bagelers? The funny thing is, Mamaliga not only exists in Bulgaria but many other parts of the world under the more common name of Polenta.

…a cornmeal dish popular in Italian, Savoyard, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Corsican, Argentine, Brazilian, and Mexican cuisine, and it is a traditional staple food throughout much of northern Italy.

Will Romanian cornmeal-based dishes survive an onslaught of competitive foodstuffs? Hard to say, but it seems highly likely, especially if someone manages to market it to the EU or beyond as a more traditional, unique, or essential element of Romanian life (or maybe BalmoÅŸ is a better candidate). Actually, it did not take long to find exactly that kind of discussion already underway:

Again, with Romanians things are more complicated and tricky, because ‘mamaliga’, as many other things Romanian, is not just food; there is a whole symbolism behind the poor innocent ‘mamaliga’. The mystery dwells in, at least, few aspects: how ‘mamaliga’ is cooked; our history; how we dealt with our history across time.

[…]

Here is the trick: ‘mamaliga’ is made of corn, which is the peasants’ bread, is thick but not as consistent as bread, is not baked but boiled to a certain point. You eat it fast; the leftovers are not good, as it is with bread. If is chilling out too much, then ‘mamaliga’ is not good; if is not boiled enough is flawed. So, there you go to an ad-hoc manual in defining Romanians: we need to boil to the hottest point until we take any action; even so, we might get it wrong if not boiled properly or chilled out too much.

Look deep within your bowl and you may find the secrets to understanding geopolitical security. Reminds me of the movie Tampopo as I mentioned once before — the Japanese quest to create the perfect bowl of ramen. If nothing else, this story again just takes us back to the old saying “you are what you eat”.

The Onion with breaking news in this report:

The sweeping new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from being born with random genetic mutations that could make them better suited to evade predators, secure a mate, or, adapt to a changing environment. In addition, it bars any sexual reproduction, battles for survival, or instances of pure happenstance that might lead, after several generations, to a more well-adapted species or subspecies.

Comprehensive approach. They’ve certainly done their homework.

To enforce the law, Kansas state police will be trained to investigate and apprehend organisms who exhibit suspected signs of evolutionary behavior, such as natural selection or speciation. Plans are underway to track and monitor DNA strands in every Kansan life form for even the slightest change in allele frequencies.

Your cell-phone may soon include DNA analysis capabilities. And surely things like used chewing gum will be treated as essential personal identity information.

Anti-evolutionists such as Hellenbaum have long accused microorganisms of popularizing “an otherwise obscure, agonizingly slow, and hard-to-understand” biological process. “These repeat offenders are at the root of the problem,” Hellenbaum said. “We have the fossil records to prove it.”

Oh, nice dig Onion!

“No species is exempt,” said Marcus Holloway, a state police spokesman. “Whether you’re a human being or a fruit fly—if we detect one homologous chromosome trying to cross over during the process of meiosis, you will be punished to the full extent of the law.”

Although the full impact of the new law will likely not be felt for approximately 10 million years, most Kansans say they are relieved that the ban went into effect this week, claiming that evolution may have gone too far already.

Hilarious stuff. When you read the whole article, note the sage point (pun not intended) about protests from Agribusiness leaders who depend on evolutionary science for genetic modification of crops.