Fingertip Tip-Off

I know I shouldn't be as interested as I am in this damned finger-in-the-chili story, but as Woody Allen once said, "The heart wants what the heart wants" (OK, so the quote isn't entirely germane, but you kind of get my point, right?).

Anyway, back to FingerGate. Looks like the net is tightening around Anna Ayala, that incredibly unpleasant-looking woman (think Rita Moreno as warden of a women's prison) who claims she found the digit in a bowl of chili at a San Jose, California, Wendy's restaurant. Investigators say they've traced the finger to a friend of Ayala's husband, who lost the finger fragment in an industrial accident last December. (One can only hope that the trial, when it finally happens, will offer some variant of the whole if-the-glove-doesn't-fit-you-must-acquit shtick).

So this has really been bothering me.

Let's say you chopped off your finger in an accident and, for the sake of argument, let's say you were told there was no way it could be reattached. Wouldn't you still feel, I don't know, some sense of ownership of this finger that had been with you for so long? This finger that had massaged your temples so many times, that had flicked so many of your boogers, that had punched everything from time cards to buttons on a phone and everything in between? Would it be that easy to cast it aside?

Would you really be able to let someone cart if off and plop it in a random bowl of greasy fast-food chili and then chomp down on it in a final, obviously futile attempt to make the ruse complete?

It just boggles my mind.