I’m starting a group called The Anti-Social Society, with meetings at a restaurant every Friday. If anyone turns up, they’re drummed out of the group.

***

These days it’s too much trouble to go out anyway. Case in point: A reader sent me a report about a man who filed a police report against a restaurant which served him a meal which was too spicy.

His tongue was still aflame from the plate of nasi goreng he’d eaten at 9 pm the previous night. “I can still taste the spiciness from the rice I had yesterday,” the man, a Singaporean visiting Johor Bahru in Malaysia, wrote in a police statement. His next stop was hospital.

The news item forwarded from the Rakyat Post says top cop Abdul Samad Salleh confirmed that such a complaint had been filed, but declined to say whether or not a police tactical unit would raid the kitchens. “Put your hands up and step away from the chilli sauce.”

***

Now if you’ll excuse me being sexist for a moment, most women reading this are probably thinking that it would be wise to avoid that restaurant, while most guys are thinking:

"Food so spicy it requires hospitalization! Cool! I need to get me down to Johor Bahru fast!"

***

You see, we real men like lethal foods.

My wife says this is because men are driven by machismo, which is Latin for “stupidity”.

I prefer to think that evolution primed us to tackle danger in all shapes and forms. “Over-spiced nasi goreng? Stand back. I’ll deal with this.”

***

The good news is that the business community stands ready to help. The Ancheng Insurance Company of China has launched a cash-back policy which specifically covers cases in which diners burn their mouths eating hotpot, a fashionable dish which is often both spicy-hot and heat-hot.

***

The Universe clearly wants me to write about lethal foods, because the very next item sent in by a reader (thank you, Wendy Tong), was about Corey McQueary, 33, recently found dead in a cell in the US state of Kentucky, after eating the underpants of a fellow inmate.

The underpants had been soaked in the liquid form of an expensive drug.

I dearly love my friends, readers and colleagues, but I don’t think I would eat your underpants even if they were soaked in Chateau Lynch-Bages 1961.

I apologize if any of you feels insulted by that.

***

On the subject of marinated foods, a reader from India sent me a curious report suggesting that a man-eating leopard in the Kumoan Hills, near the Himalayas in that country, has developed a taste for Homo sapiens soaked in alcohol. Over the past two and half years, it has killed more than a dozen unfortunate people, showing a strong preference for drunk males staggering home after a night out.

A friend who knows about these things tells me that alcohol adds piquancy to foodstuffs, but animals hate chilli sauce. The obvious answer is to airlift a large portion of nasi goreng from Malaysia to India.

***

Anyway, if you do turn up at the first meeting of The Anti-Social Society, don’t look for me. I’ll probably be sitting by myself at a restaurant in Johor Bahru, demonstrating my machismo while my wife stands by to drive me to the hospital.

***

(Pic at top for indication only)