A bike, a shovel, a severed nose, a hungry dog--Iowa!

When I first heard about this story I assumed it happened somewhere down south.

I was wrong.

I'll just go ahead and quote the article in its entirety:

IOWA (NEWSCHANNEL 3) - A man in Iowa is without a nose. He lost it after a friend bit it off in a fight.

It all started when Donroy Merrival used Matthew Osing's bike to go to the store for more beer. He broke the bike in the process.

Osing told him to get out of his apartment, but the guy wouldn't leave.

Osing hit him with a shovel. That's when Merrival went for his nose, biting it off his face.

Now, Osing is not sure what happened to it. "I don't know if he swallowed it or if my dogs might have eaten it. I don't know," he said.

Merrival is now facing assault charges and could spend more than 12 years in prison.

It turns out that Donroy, no doubt wanting to be thorough, also took off part of his friend's lip. You can read more about it and see Donroy's mug shot here.

Love Me Tender

Meet Danielle Chastain of Fort Worth, Texas.

Reports do not state whether or not she was an Elvis fan. What the reports do state was that, when police arrived at her home and found her estranged husband outside, bruised and battered, they noted "the distinct “waffle-like pattern” of a meat tenderizer" in his injuries.

Ms. Chastain had beaten her husband with a meat tenderizer. She left the scene before the arrival of police and was arrested later.

This is not what Otis Redding had in mind when he suggested that we "try a little tenderness."

Feel free to insert your own hokey tenderizer jokes in the comments.

Pregnant gambler hits bonus round

32 year old Nyree Thompson was 8 months pregnant and feeling a little antsy. Maybe she was worried about working out the details of her upcoming maternity leave, or daddy hadn't yet painted and finished the nursery like he'd promised. So Nyree did what lots of pregnant women looking to relax might do--she headed down to the comforting, smoke-filled embrace of the casino.

And proceeded, after an unknown amount of time at the slot machines, to give birth.

According to this story, Nyree delivered at 9:40 am. I'd like to think she's an early riser and had just arrived at the casino, but I couldn't find any articles that said exactly how long she'd been at it before the miracle of birth occurred. The birth was a first for the casino:

Steve Callender, the vice president of operations at Resorts Atlantic City, where the event took place, said that to his knowledge, this was the first casino floor birth in the establishment's history. He told an Atlantic City reporter that "We've had people (cripes! people, as in more than one?!) die here, but we've never had people born here." Callender has been on staff since the casino opened in 1978.

She named the baby Qualeem--I think that's the name of the good luck charm she was rubbing against the machine while repeatedly chanting "mama needs a new pair of shoes" at the time she went into labor.