mayhem

On the plane to LA, I sat next to this guy Richie who looked exactly like some kind of indie filmmaker. Turned out he was a graphic designer (close enough), and after chatting for fully an hour, he mentioned that the friends he'd been visiting in New York had been to this crazy spelling bee.... Small world. Or, incestuous social circles. Or, great publicity job, Jen! It's all in how you look at it.

So, Richie was a wealth of knowledge and wit, and happened to ask if I knew the legal definition of the term "mayhem." Like most people, I had just assumed it meant something like "madness and chaos." Actually, however (and I verified this just now), the word has to do with causing people the loss of their arms and legs.

Specifically: "the crime of willfully injuring a person so as to diminish his or her capacity for self-defense. Cutting off an arm or leg would thus be mayhem, while such a battery as cutting off an ear would not." (Incidentally, if you look up "definition of mayhem," you discover that there's a band called exactly that).

I found this especially funny, as I am a member of a models-and-photographers online community called ... Model Mayhem.

It would be beyond awesome if this were, in fact, a website for amputee models.

Model mayhem? Imagine a social networking site called "bikini maiming," or "fashion deformity."