About A Florida Politician & Her Hilarious Lineage

As if anyone needed another reason to pay attention to the scintillating world of Florida gubernatorial politics, Alex Sink has burst on to the scene with a juicy nugget of novelty that is as erotic as it is pertinent — that is to say “not very,” but I like it nonetheless.

While making headlines in papers from the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel to the Tallahassee Democrat as a 2010 gubernatorial candidate (Note 2nd use of “gubernatorial”) and the first female CFO of the state of Florida, the real story behind the Sink lies in her lineage, as she is a direct descendant of the world’s most dignified two-headed monster, Chang and Eng Bunker.

For those of you who have been living under a rock and/or aren’t well-versed in the people-who-are-attached-to-each-other scene, the Bunker “brothers”* were a pair of Thai-American conjoined twins who according to Wikipedia, “their condition and birthplace became the basis for the term “Siamese Twins.”

The Bunker collective lived a relatively normal life considering the face that they were a walking work of science fiction, immigrating to America in 1839 and setting up a plantation where they became successful farmers using the popular agricultural technique of owning black people as property and forcing them to work in the fields without pay. The Bunker body also wed a pair of sisters, presumably with each head getting their own wife, and between the conglomeration of heads and genitals that was this 3.5-person marriage they produced 21 children.

With free labor playing a key role in their otherwise innovative business model, the Bunkers went broke following the Civil War and returned to freak show circuit, that apparently being a popular thing in the decades prior to the advent of flagpole-sitting. Chang died of pneumonia in 1874 and Eng hung around for a couple of hours with his dead half-body just kind of laying there before dying himself.

So there you have it. The tale of the original Siamese Twins is way more interesting than that of their great-granddaughter, who grew up with just one head and became a politician in some hick state. Take that, Alex Sink.