To Arms – Three Actually

Third time’s charmed, is one of my regular sayings and I keep running into arms, yep, three times. If I believed in co-inky dinks it would be one thing, or even if not, I figured I’d blog about arms, at least three of them, so here goes.

The first arm is one that’s been chewed by a shark, kept in a restaurant inspector’s fridge, and reeled in on a charter fishing trip, in the book Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen. The book is on the best seller list but one reason I liked it is that a large part of it take place in a place I am familiar with, on Andros Island, Bahamas. The monkey in the fictional account was part of the cast of the Johnny Depp movie, Pirates of the Caribbean, and is also (in the book) a resident of Andros. His bad behavior is pretty funny, of course.

The second arm isn’t funny ha ha, instead it’s more funny weird. It’s an arm that was recently returned to Viet Nam. It was the infected arm of an enemy that had been amputated by an American soldier/doctor in order to save the life of the captured Vietnamese soldier. This soldier recovered and remained and worked with the Americans for the duration without an arm. Forty years later the doctor returned the skeletal remains in a reunion of the two, onetime enemy soldiers. This was probably one of the strangest war trophies I’d ever heard of and I first heard about it when I was discussing a different war trophy, a gun that had been confiscated and returned to Europe as an artifact, but that discussion is for another blog.

The third and final arm I thought I’d blog about is Arm-ie Hammer. Armie is the nickname of Armand Hammer, the star of the latest movie version of the Lone Ranger. Who names their kid Armand Hammer? His parents are the answer here and the name apparently runs in the family since Armie’s great-grandfather was the oil tycoon and philanthropist, Armand Hammer (not of Arm and Hammer fame-the stuff you find in my fridge!) As for his Lone Ranger movie, I thought Silver was the best actor by a long shot and I am glad they included the music from the William Tell Overture. Those were my favorite parts.