Run, Donny, run!

My friend Donny is in Europe right now with a bunch of his friends, and they all had the brilliant idea of joining in on La Fiesta de San Fermin while they were in Pamplona. In case you didn't know, this festival involves the world famous running of the bulls, in which hordes of bulls are let loose into the streets to have free reign over hordes of people (who then become just as dangerous as the bulls). Judging from his diary, it seems that he had a good time. Yet I couldn't help but notice this article in the BBC today.

The annual nine-day festival of San Fermin, which concludes today, draws the curious, the naive and the foolhardy from around the world to run through the streets pursued by six fighting bulls.

Foolhardy is quite the appropriate word, considering most of these people are drunk and disoriented as it is.

The account continues...

Like a shotgun blast mixed with falling timber, I heard and felt something, or maybe someone, smash into the paling in front of me.

A flash of black, high in the air, and it was all over. I looked down and saw a body, prone on the ground some 10ft away, the eyes already glazing, a patch of blood spreading about it.

Like Hemingway, Matthew Peter Tassio was from Illinois. As he was running up San Domingo, he was felled by one of the oxen which run alongside the bulls. As he struggled to his feet, witnesses said, he was charged.

The fighting bull which gored him weighed half a tonne. It hit him in the abdomen, severed a main artery, sliced through his kidney and punctured his liver, before tossing him seven metres (23 feet) in the air.

Yes, the kid died. I'm glad it wasn't Donny.