Bully For You

I'm not going to pretend to understand bullfighting. I don't understand why in the world anyone would want to participate in it and I certainly don't understand why in the world anyone would want to watch it. I see it as a publicly sanctioned event in which the torture of an animal is wildly cheered on by the masses. I find it strange. I think what I find even more strange is that there aren't more unhappy endings for the bullfighter. And I use the term "unhappy" only in regard to what the bullfighter must be thinking when he gets gored by a bull. (It's probably what he's thinking right after "Holy hell! That effing hurts!!") My opinion? The bullfighter has whatever he gets coming to him.

All of that being said, it still didn't stop me from actually saying, "Holy S!" (though I did use the elongated version) when I saw pictures of a one Julio Aparicio being gored by a bull during something called the Festival of Saint Isidro that takes place somewhere in Spain. Apparently, that is like the most important event in the bullfighting calendar. I guess it's like the Super Bowl of bullfighting. Super Bull, if you will. (Or if you won't. That was pretty bad.) It takes place at something called the Plaza de Toros las Ventas bullring. I tried to get The Google magical translate tool to translate that into English. It didn't go so well. It would translate Plaza de Toros into bullring and it would translate las Ventas into sales. Bullring Sales? That can't be right. Whatever it means, it's freaking huge. Up to 24,000 can get in there to watch this madness. And yesterday when they went to madness watch, this is what they saw. Behold!

Holy. Crap. That bull stuck that big 'ol horn right on through ol' Julio there. No bueno. It looks like it enters underneath his chin and exits right out of his mouth. Good Lord, man. According to the Huffington Post via something called AFP one of the medics who worked on Julio said, "It went through the tongue and penetrated the roof of the mouth, fracturing the jawbone." Went through the tongue? Through. The tongue. Again, I say Oh. My. God.

Now, below is a picture right before el Bull did all of the goring and tongue piercing and what not. Can you honestly say that you blame the bull? Look at him! (I'm assuming it's a him based solely on that huge dingus that he has hanging from his nether region.) He's covered in his own blood. I'd be a little pissed off too if someone was constantly riling me up and stabbing me with something as I ran by.

While that's not a little bit of blood, that's an awfully big animal. And look at that stabbing instrument that Julio is using there. That looks like nothing more than a skewer for shishkabobs! How long does it take him to kill the animal using his specially formulated Ginsu knife there? I'm guessing quite a while! But back to the blood. That blood is all from the bull. That has to hurt. No, I know it hurts. Why do you think the bull was so angry? Because someone was slowly torturing him to death, that is correct. According to the Chicago Sun-Times blog Sports Pros(e) "Aparicio fell during the part of the match where the matador uses his cape and sword to entertain the crowd before delivering the death blow." Uh-huh. How...entertaining? Really? Whatever. Good for the bull.

I'm guessing that it doesn't matter that the bull won. I'm guessing that he will still be killed at some future fight. I wish they had some sort of rule that if the bull wins, he gets to go free. Then again, in order to do that, they'd have to come up with what constitutes a "win". But I'd guess that having the bull's horn go in under your chin and come out of your mouth would be a pretty simple baseline to establish what a "win" is. I'm totally on the bull's side with this one. Sorry, Julio. That's what you get. Am I saying that I'm glad he was gored? Not necessarily. Am I saying that I'm sad he was gored? Not necessarily. All I'm saying is what did he expect?