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The Morning According to Us

Remember kids, arms and toilets don't mix.

by Paul Kix

Getty Images

The toilets are the more dangerous part of this photo, believe it or not.

If there's anything we've learned from the Mets fan whose gold tooth fell out of her mouth and into a Citi Field toilet, it's that it's best to leave what falls down there alone. Nothing good will come of your search.

For instance, the Mets fan, an unidentified woman who attended last Wednesday's game against the Braves, got her hand stuck in the toilet and screamed and screamed for help until an EMS crew arrived. Only the crew couldn't pry it loose, so it had to call for back-up: Cardoza Plumbing, the business that installed all 646 toilets at Citi Field. By the time Cardoza arrived, fans were standing outside the section 338 bathroom to see what the commotion was about. (It was more exciting than the game; the Mets ended up losing 8-7.) Meanwhile, inside the bathroom stall, the toilet kept flushing over the woman's hand.

Ultimately, the woman's hand was freed. The tooth was never recovered.

It's probably best to pause here and say that neither Cardoza nor the Mets would comment about the women's plight. But God bless the New York Post for finding a working plumber who offered this gem: "People have probably been getting their hands stuck in toilets as long as there have been toilets."

Indeed, last year a passenger on a French train lost his cell phone down one of those high-suction, little-water toilets. He made the mistake of trying to retrieve his phone. The train was delayed for two hours while firemen cut through the train's piping. Ambulance whisked the man away with the toilet still attached to his arm. Pretty much the same thing happened in 2006 in China. Only difference is that gruesome rescue photos accompanied the Chinese man's rescue.

It's in times like these that we're reminded of the eternal wisdom of Jack Handy. One of his "Saturday Night Live" epigraphs went like this (scroll down): "If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, man, because they're gone."

So to recap: toilets and molten lava -- don't go after what falls into either.

Life lessons here, kids. Life lessons.


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