Civilization in Decline
Cemetery workers in Najaf, Iraq, say "the surge" must be working because their incomes are down by a third . . . . . The city of Vienna, Austria, with a 66% divorce rate, will hold a two-day "divorce fair" with 20 vendors of divorce and post-divorce services . . . . . Fine Point of the Law: Philly judge Teresa Carr Deni ignored the gunpoint-gang-rape charges and set the five men to trial for "theft of services" because the prostitute had already agreed to sex but merely failed to get paid for it.
The Human Condition Today
The human condition was on display all over Pennsylvania, and not just in Judge Deni’s courtroom: (1) "Baby boy" Jones, 29, snatched a cell phone in Lancaster and then asked a ransom for it, of, er, $185,000; (2) A Scranton woman was criminally charged for cussing out her own toilet in her own home; (3) a Pittsburgh woman had to be rescued when she crawled under an SUV to spy on her husband’s alleged affair and couldn’t get up . . . . . A West Virginia man was stopped by police as he was tooling around the streets of Beckley in a motorboat (with his four grandkids) pulled by a lawn mower . . . . . At least two people in the audience of a hypnotist in Logan, Utah, had trouble coming out of their trances, and panic ensued . . . . . Son, 57, wanted to put dad, 81, into a nursing home in San Francisco but mistakenly thought admission had to be via a hospital and so bashed dad over the head with a hammer . . . . . How to guarantee a spot in NOTW Daily: be a Catholic parish priest and worship Elvis on the side (Bonus: sermons sprinkled with lyrics of Celine Dion).
Your Daily Loser
The robber of a bank in Miami Springs, Fla., ran back inside as police closed in on him and yelled at the tellers: "You ruined my life! I told you not to call [the] police!"
NOTW Lite
The Quebec legislature banned members’ use of the word "weathervane" (meaning, one who shifts his opinions easily) because the people so described were feeling hurt by the term . . . . . Weird on Several Levels: To reduce crime in Le Havre, Frawnts (crime which often germinates when thugs gather in entry halls to apartment houses), the gov’t built a make-believe entry hall into a non-existent building, and somehow, they believe, the project is working.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Joe Littrell, Tom Wilson, Eli Christman, Larry Seltzer, Roger Gulbransen
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
NOTW, The Blog
Listen up: Yr Editor has some business to attend to, and I figure it’ll take about 30 days (maybe a bit longer). The only effects on NOTW Daily will be: (1) I won’t post on Saturdays until at least mid-November, and (2) each daily post will have less of my sardonic commentary, in favor of sort of a lightly annotated collection of story links (as you can plainly see, below). I’ll still be doing business, and I’ll still be doing the same amount of collecting stories, but I just won’t be able to write up as much every day, and I hope to be out of this-here chair by 9 a.m and on to other things. I didn’t want to drop this on you without explanation.
Civilization in Decline
Manassas, Va., fired a longtime employee because, well, she came down with cancer, and employment law experts muddle around and say that might be OK . . . . . Can’t Possibly Be True: A Marine assigned to fight in a stateside role-playing demonstration was roughed up and shot by the Lebanese actor hired to be the enemy . . . . . A Utah water district hands out bottles of purified water as promotions, but to scare everyone, the labels list these ingredients of typical sewer water.
The Human Condition Today
He put a penny on a railroad track to show how a train would flatten it, but then he didn’t get himself off the track in time . . . . . The man wanted worldwide for that child-rape video was arrested in Nevada while driving a car around with no license plate . . . . . Merely Quasi-Weird: an attempted baby-snatching in Westbury, Conn., and police are looking for a "hunchbacked" woman.
Your Daily Loser
Suave pick-up con man was done in by failing to keep straight whether he was a "doctor" or a "lawyer."
NOTW Lite
Scientists now know why some fish get insomnia.
Updates
Rev. Fred Phelps and family are being sued in Pennsylvania for one of those GI-deaths-are-God’s-punishing-fag-America demonstrations, but the judge said the "defamation" count is out because saying that Satan is after you is not a credible insult anymore . . . . . The wife of Oral Roberts Univ.’s president proclaimed her purity against charges [NOTW Daily, 10-6-2007], but three fired professors say they’ve got time-stamped photos of her hanging out in the middle of the night with a teen hunk.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
In honor of Rev. Phelps, here is his website (which is earnest), and here is Yr Editor's favorite parody site, Landover Baptist (well, besides FSM, Church of the SubGenius, and, er, Scientology).
Newsrangers: Bob Pert, Karl Olson, Tim Trewhella, Roger Katz, Luke Gardner
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Listen up: Yr Editor has some business to attend to, and I figure it’ll take about 30 days (maybe a bit longer). The only effects on NOTW Daily will be: (1) I won’t post on Saturdays until at least mid-November, and (2) each daily post will have less of my sardonic commentary, in favor of sort of a lightly annotated collection of story links (as you can plainly see, below). I’ll still be doing business, and I’ll still be doing the same amount of collecting stories, but I just won’t be able to write up as much every day, and I hope to be out of this-here chair by 9 a.m and on to other things. I didn’t want to drop this on you without explanation.
Civilization in Decline
Manassas, Va., fired a longtime employee because, well, she came down with cancer, and employment law experts muddle around and say that might be OK . . . . . Can’t Possibly Be True: A Marine assigned to fight in a stateside role-playing demonstration was roughed up and shot by the Lebanese actor hired to be the enemy . . . . . A Utah water district hands out bottles of purified water as promotions, but to scare everyone, the labels list these ingredients of typical sewer water.
The Human Condition Today
He put a penny on a railroad track to show how a train would flatten it, but then he didn’t get himself off the track in time . . . . . The man wanted worldwide for that child-rape video was arrested in Nevada while driving a car around with no license plate . . . . . Merely Quasi-Weird: an attempted baby-snatching in Westbury, Conn., and police are looking for a "hunchbacked" woman.
Your Daily Loser
Suave pick-up con man was done in by failing to keep straight whether he was a "doctor" or a "lawyer."
NOTW Lite
Scientists now know why some fish get insomnia.
Updates
Rev. Fred Phelps and family are being sued in Pennsylvania for one of those GI-deaths-are-God’s-punishing-fag-America demonstrations, but the judge said the "defamation" count is out because saying that Satan is after you is not a credible insult anymore . . . . . The wife of Oral Roberts Univ.’s president proclaimed her purity against charges [NOTW Daily, 10-6-2007], but three fired professors say they’ve got time-stamped photos of her hanging out in the middle of the night with a teen hunk.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
In honor of Rev. Phelps, here is his website (which is earnest), and here is Yr Editor's favorite parody site, Landover Baptist (well, besides FSM, Church of the SubGenius, and, er, Scientology).
Newsrangers: Bob Pert, Karl Olson, Tim Trewhella, Roger Katz, Luke Gardner
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Monday’s 5-Star Special
The Vatican ID’d Msgr. Tommaso Stenico (a high-ranking Church bureaucrat) on a TV's hidden camera telling a man that gay sex is not a sin, and even that he’s gay, himself, and so the Church suspended him, but he now says, well, of course it’s a sin, and besides he’s never had gay sex but was just pretending to be gay (and he’s obviously very good at that, according to the video).
Civilization in Decline
The NY Post audited the green-preaching Mayor Bloomberg’s carbon footprint and found it the same size as the footprint of 18 avg Americans, 53 Europeans, or 404 Guatemalans . . . . . Texas’s state police have refused, over 2 yrs now and $165k in private attorney fees, to give up a specific surveillance tape of the area just off the floor of the Legislature, allegedly because it would show a favored lobbyist breaking the law (or maybe worse?) (Bonus: the official excuse? homeland security!) . . . . . In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the union got its teachers excluded from duty monitoring the lunchroom (in 1970, they got that!), and now parents have to pay C$200 a yr for monitors unless their kids can go home, eat, and get back within the 50 minutes allotted for lunch . . . . . London’s The Sun interviews shop owners and town officials, who say gov’t safety rules, plus insurance company admonitions, mean there’ll be fewer Christmas decorations this yr (but they’re still OK, provided you put them up via a hydraulic lift rather than climbing a ladder) . . . . . UK Headline: "Patients Pull Own Teeth as [Nat’l Health Service] Dental Contract Falters."
The Human Condition Today
Mr. Gao, newly arrived in Shanghai (where he saw a train for the first time), played chicken on the tracks as one approached, just to test his nerves (and he got away with it) . . . . . Alarmed citizens called police when a guy walked by the courthouse in Oklahoma City wearing one handcuff on his wrist, but it was just part of his goth fashion for the day . . . . . South Korean Sim Jae-Duck did not win the Nobel Peace Prize, but give him time: He’s started a World Toilet Ass’n to raise consciousness about sanitation (the competition is the World Toilet Organization, in Singapore), and he’ll actually live in a huge toilet monument (Bonus: He was born in a latrine, part of some tradition or other) . . . . . Fine Point of Anti-Discrimination Law: So, your mother is 88 and needs assisted-living, including help with bodily stuff, and so insists on a female nurse, and who shows up but "Sue," a 6-ft, rough-edged, square-jawed person in one of her first jobs after the operation . . . . . Inglewood, New Zealand, priest Father Gary volunteered to make regular runs to the closest town last yr to buy women underwear after the one emporium in Inglewood stopped carrying them, but he proudly announces that the trips will stop now that there's bus service and people can go buy their own damned knickers.
Your Daily Loser
A woman was about to run from a bounty hunter in Oklahoma City, and facing Tasering, smartly stuck her infant in front of her as a shield (and it partially worked, as the tot caught one of the Taser needles, breaking the current)
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Police in a Washington, D.C., suburb in Virginia suspect it’s the same man, over 2 yrs, who’s too cool, apparently, to flash teenage girls his own package and so whips out a laptop with porn on it [second item] before running off.
NOTW Lite
Sounds Like a Joke: From German artist Marcus Kison, a ring for the finger, with a digital display that will note your running total of Google hits, in real time, on the market next yr . . . . . Terrye Cheathem is about to introduce her prison line of greeting cards (e.g., "Sorry to Hear About Your Arrest," "I know that I have not visited you. But I still care about you.").
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
An Asst U.S. Atty Gen’l said last week that at least 108 countries work through front companies to procure Pentagon equipment and parts, much of it because to buy upfront would have broken U.S. law (including F-14 parts to Iran!).
Update
Sri Chinmoy passed away on Thursday, he of the alleged superhuman endurance feats [NOTW 564, 11-27-2000], which he employed to call attention to his world-peace calmatives; he was widely lauded (by Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev, Muhammad Ali), but he also was famously nasty to those who ultimately decided that he was full of crap.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
According to this website, a company that hired the soothingly-credible Gary Coleman as a hawker will lend you $2,600 if only you’ll promise to pay them back $216 a month for the next 3½ yrs ($9,095).
NOTW, The Blog
A reader advises that the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Armenian genocide vote [NOTW Daily, 10-12-2007] was born of an attempt by Democrats to pressure Turkey to cut off access across its border for U.S. war supplies into Iraq. But things sorta got away from them and are now way, way out of control.
Newsrangers: Dave Null, Matthew McGill, Mark Neunder, Bob Pert, Edward Ingram, Emmitt Dove, Gary Goldberg, H.Thompson, Scott Langill, Nancy Hackett
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
The Vatican ID’d Msgr. Tommaso Stenico (a high-ranking Church bureaucrat) on a TV's hidden camera telling a man that gay sex is not a sin, and even that he’s gay, himself, and so the Church suspended him, but he now says, well, of course it’s a sin, and besides he’s never had gay sex but was just pretending to be gay (and he’s obviously very good at that, according to the video).
Civilization in Decline
The NY Post audited the green-preaching Mayor Bloomberg’s carbon footprint and found it the same size as the footprint of 18 avg Americans, 53 Europeans, or 404 Guatemalans . . . . . Texas’s state police have refused, over 2 yrs now and $165k in private attorney fees, to give up a specific surveillance tape of the area just off the floor of the Legislature, allegedly because it would show a favored lobbyist breaking the law (or maybe worse?) (Bonus: the official excuse? homeland security!) . . . . . In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the union got its teachers excluded from duty monitoring the lunchroom (in 1970, they got that!), and now parents have to pay C$200 a yr for monitors unless their kids can go home, eat, and get back within the 50 minutes allotted for lunch . . . . . London’s The Sun interviews shop owners and town officials, who say gov’t safety rules, plus insurance company admonitions, mean there’ll be fewer Christmas decorations this yr (but they’re still OK, provided you put them up via a hydraulic lift rather than climbing a ladder) . . . . . UK Headline: "Patients Pull Own Teeth as [Nat’l Health Service] Dental Contract Falters."
The Human Condition Today
Mr. Gao, newly arrived in Shanghai (where he saw a train for the first time), played chicken on the tracks as one approached, just to test his nerves (and he got away with it) . . . . . Alarmed citizens called police when a guy walked by the courthouse in Oklahoma City wearing one handcuff on his wrist, but it was just part of his goth fashion for the day . . . . . South Korean Sim Jae-Duck did not win the Nobel Peace Prize, but give him time: He’s started a World Toilet Ass’n to raise consciousness about sanitation (the competition is the World Toilet Organization, in Singapore), and he’ll actually live in a huge toilet monument (Bonus: He was born in a latrine, part of some tradition or other) . . . . . Fine Point of Anti-Discrimination Law: So, your mother is 88 and needs assisted-living, including help with bodily stuff, and so insists on a female nurse, and who shows up but "Sue," a 6-ft, rough-edged, square-jawed person in one of her first jobs after the operation . . . . . Inglewood, New Zealand, priest Father Gary volunteered to make regular runs to the closest town last yr to buy women underwear after the one emporium in Inglewood stopped carrying them, but he proudly announces that the trips will stop now that there's bus service and people can go buy their own damned knickers.
Your Daily Loser
A woman was about to run from a bounty hunter in Oklahoma City, and facing Tasering, smartly stuck her infant in front of her as a shield (and it partially worked, as the tot caught one of the Taser needles, breaking the current)
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Police in a Washington, D.C., suburb in Virginia suspect it’s the same man, over 2 yrs, who’s too cool, apparently, to flash teenage girls his own package and so whips out a laptop with porn on it [second item] before running off.
NOTW Lite
Sounds Like a Joke: From German artist Marcus Kison, a ring for the finger, with a digital display that will note your running total of Google hits, in real time, on the market next yr . . . . . Terrye Cheathem is about to introduce her prison line of greeting cards (e.g., "Sorry to Hear About Your Arrest," "I know that I have not visited you. But I still care about you.").
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
An Asst U.S. Atty Gen’l said last week that at least 108 countries work through front companies to procure Pentagon equipment and parts, much of it because to buy upfront would have broken U.S. law (including F-14 parts to Iran!).
Update
Sri Chinmoy passed away on Thursday, he of the alleged superhuman endurance feats [NOTW 564, 11-27-2000], which he employed to call attention to his world-peace calmatives; he was widely lauded (by Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev, Muhammad Ali), but he also was famously nasty to those who ultimately decided that he was full of crap.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
According to this website, a company that hired the soothingly-credible Gary Coleman as a hawker will lend you $2,600 if only you’ll promise to pay them back $216 a month for the next 3½ yrs ($9,095).
NOTW, The Blog
A reader advises that the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Armenian genocide vote [NOTW Daily, 10-12-2007] was born of an attempt by Democrats to pressure Turkey to cut off access across its border for U.S. war supplies into Iraq. But things sorta got away from them and are now way, way out of control.
Newsrangers: Dave Null, Matthew McGill, Mark Neunder, Bob Pert, Edward Ingram, Emmitt Dove, Gary Goldberg, H.Thompson, Scott Langill, Nancy Hackett
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Saturday’s 5-Star Special
Rabid white nationalist Kevin Strom (Wikipedia says his National Vanguard org’n has disbanded) was acquitted of sexual enticement of an 11-yr-old girl last week in Charlottesville, Va., and apparently the original episodes were good readin’. He was married at the time to another white supremacist, who had a fierier temper even than Kevin’s. She happened to walk in one day to catch Kevin naked and pounding his pud to photos of "young white nationalist-movement singers the couple both knew, superimposed onto a picture of nude and entwined women," according to C’ville’s weekly The Hook. Turns out that he had a fascination with a certain 10-yr-old local girl, sent her presents, drove by her house, and expressed his feelings for her to his shrink, but in the end, a federal judge said those actions were not enough to amount to a crime. His now-ex-wife took no prisoners in the divorce. (Now, though, he’ll stand trial for all the other child porn he had.)
Civilization in Decline
Zero Tolerance Is Only for the Students (cont’d): President Glenn Poshard of Southern Illiniois Univ. will keep his job and merely has to make some corrections in his dissertation, which was found to have three dozen "citation problems" that could or could not amount to plagiarism (depending on whose definition is used) . . . . . Three aldermen in Dover, N.J., got a wild hair on homeland security and have begun exhaustively studying the city’s vulnerability to terrorists’ poisoning all the gumballs in town (with a report due January 1!) . . . . . Residents of an Orlando neighborhood seem to believe that there are still-live bombs, from a World War II munitions farm, buried under about 50 of their homes.
The Human Condition Today
Brazilian sculptor Doris Salcedo gave it her best effort for a piece on "racial divisions," and it’s perched on a platfor—uh, no, it’s perched on a stage—uh, no, actually, it’s a crevasse 548 feet long occupying a whole floor in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London (Bonus: 3 visitors have fallen in so far while taking it in) . . . . . A Greenpeace official in Australia said our meat-eating society should be raising kangaroos instead of cows, in that, since ‘roos fart less, global warming could be slowed . . . . . 60 Minutes will report on Sunday that 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef has become a Christian (shaved, eats pork, doesn’t do Muslim prayer), but, jeez, trying to take down the WTC surely banked him some goodwill with Allah (even though Allah couldn't have been too happy with the gang's capture, especially since it came in part because one of them tried to get his deposit back on the bomb-carrying rental van).
Your Daily Loser
F Stater Christina Adams (not a bad-looking mom) was arrested for dangling her 5-yr-old out the window of a speeding SUV. AWI.
NOTW Lite
At a Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, and following some bantering back and forth, a Pepsi route man cold-cocked a Coke route man . . . . . A man in a St. Louis suburb is suing Walgreen’s because he has kidney stones, er, because Walgreen’s filled his liquid Oxycodone Rx (with generous spoonfuls called for) with an industrial-strength laxative (which seriously dehydrated him).
Erroror
Actually, the guy who ran naked (for our sins) through downtown Miami [NOTW Daily, 10-10-2007] wasn’t an out-of-stater, as I wrote. He’s home-grown. Ouch.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™ (Monday)
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor linked to Nat’l Enquirer’s John Edwards scandal story on Thursday [NOTW Daily, 10-10-2007, The Blog], and Edwards has denied that report, but it’s a weaselly denial. (Yr Editor wrote extensively on how and why to weaselly deny, during the Clinton escapades, and maybe I’ll try to find those brilliant lectures.) Reporter Sam Stein at Huffington Post was the first to suspect that something fishy was going on between Edwards and a hot number who renamed herself Rielle Hunter and who ran a video production company under contract to the Edwards campaign. Reason: A short while back, abruptly, all the company’s work quickly disappeared from Edwards’s wesbite, with little plausible explanation. Slate.com blogger Mickey Kaus has tied Stein’s and Nat’l Enquirer’s work together [entries of Oct. 12, 11, 10], plus Kaus is a Shepherdist on weaselly denials. Now, apparently, Ms. Hunter has issued a denial [via blogger Jerome Armstrong, via Kaus] more nearly complete than Edwards’s, though Yr Editor’s Weaselity Theory only applies to high office-holders who have been around for a while and not to (apparently) former party gals who change their names. A Ladies Home Journal poll this week, by the way, said the Edwardses seem to have the happiest marriage of all the presidential candidates. [Statement for the record: Yr Editor is politically and professionally indifferent to John Edwards for President, but watching public figures squirm when they’re (probably) guilty is my artistic duty. OK, OK, and my passion.]
Newsrangers: Scott Langill, Peter Hine, Josh Fisher, Becky Nelson, Jerry Whittle, Richard Gaitens, Paul Music, Jim McNally
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Rabid white nationalist Kevin Strom (Wikipedia says his National Vanguard org’n has disbanded) was acquitted of sexual enticement of an 11-yr-old girl last week in Charlottesville, Va., and apparently the original episodes were good readin’. He was married at the time to another white supremacist, who had a fierier temper even than Kevin’s. She happened to walk in one day to catch Kevin naked and pounding his pud to photos of "young white nationalist-movement singers the couple both knew, superimposed onto a picture of nude and entwined women," according to C’ville’s weekly The Hook. Turns out that he had a fascination with a certain 10-yr-old local girl, sent her presents, drove by her house, and expressed his feelings for her to his shrink, but in the end, a federal judge said those actions were not enough to amount to a crime. His now-ex-wife took no prisoners in the divorce. (Now, though, he’ll stand trial for all the other child porn he had.)
Civilization in Decline
Zero Tolerance Is Only for the Students (cont’d): President Glenn Poshard of Southern Illiniois Univ. will keep his job and merely has to make some corrections in his dissertation, which was found to have three dozen "citation problems" that could or could not amount to plagiarism (depending on whose definition is used) . . . . . Three aldermen in Dover, N.J., got a wild hair on homeland security and have begun exhaustively studying the city’s vulnerability to terrorists’ poisoning all the gumballs in town (with a report due January 1!) . . . . . Residents of an Orlando neighborhood seem to believe that there are still-live bombs, from a World War II munitions farm, buried under about 50 of their homes.
The Human Condition Today
Brazilian sculptor Doris Salcedo gave it her best effort for a piece on "racial divisions," and it’s perched on a platfor—uh, no, it’s perched on a stage—uh, no, actually, it’s a crevasse 548 feet long occupying a whole floor in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London (Bonus: 3 visitors have fallen in so far while taking it in) . . . . . A Greenpeace official in Australia said our meat-eating society should be raising kangaroos instead of cows, in that, since ‘roos fart less, global warming could be slowed . . . . . 60 Minutes will report on Sunday that 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef has become a Christian (shaved, eats pork, doesn’t do Muslim prayer), but, jeez, trying to take down the WTC surely banked him some goodwill with Allah (even though Allah couldn't have been too happy with the gang's capture, especially since it came in part because one of them tried to get his deposit back on the bomb-carrying rental van).
Your Daily Loser
F Stater Christina Adams (not a bad-looking mom) was arrested for dangling her 5-yr-old out the window of a speeding SUV. AWI.
NOTW Lite
At a Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, and following some bantering back and forth, a Pepsi route man cold-cocked a Coke route man . . . . . A man in a St. Louis suburb is suing Walgreen’s because he has kidney stones, er, because Walgreen’s filled his liquid Oxycodone Rx (with generous spoonfuls called for) with an industrial-strength laxative (which seriously dehydrated him).
Erroror
Actually, the guy who ran naked (for our sins) through downtown Miami [NOTW Daily, 10-10-2007] wasn’t an out-of-stater, as I wrote. He’s home-grown. Ouch.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™ (Monday)
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor linked to Nat’l Enquirer’s John Edwards scandal story on Thursday [NOTW Daily, 10-10-2007, The Blog], and Edwards has denied that report, but it’s a weaselly denial. (Yr Editor wrote extensively on how and why to weaselly deny, during the Clinton escapades, and maybe I’ll try to find those brilliant lectures.) Reporter Sam Stein at Huffington Post was the first to suspect that something fishy was going on between Edwards and a hot number who renamed herself Rielle Hunter and who ran a video production company under contract to the Edwards campaign. Reason: A short while back, abruptly, all the company’s work quickly disappeared from Edwards’s wesbite, with little plausible explanation. Slate.com blogger Mickey Kaus has tied Stein’s and Nat’l Enquirer’s work together [entries of Oct. 12, 11, 10], plus Kaus is a Shepherdist on weaselly denials. Now, apparently, Ms. Hunter has issued a denial [via blogger Jerome Armstrong, via Kaus] more nearly complete than Edwards’s, though Yr Editor’s Weaselity Theory only applies to high office-holders who have been around for a while and not to (apparently) former party gals who change their names. A Ladies Home Journal poll this week, by the way, said the Edwardses seem to have the happiest marriage of all the presidential candidates. [Statement for the record: Yr Editor is politically and professionally indifferent to John Edwards for President, but watching public figures squirm when they’re (probably) guilty is my artistic duty. OK, OK, and my passion.]
Newsrangers: Scott Langill, Peter Hine, Josh Fisher, Becky Nelson, Jerry Whittle, Richard Gaitens, Paul Music, Jim McNally
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Friday’s 5-Star Special
Arbitrators in New York City are trying to work through hedge-fund trader Andrew Tong’s charges that his $150m/yr boss at SAC Capital made him take female hormones so he’d tone down his aggressiveness in trading. He complied, and, he says, the hormones made him effeminate, and Wall Street is agog (Bonus: He started wearing dresses).
Civilization in Decline
Coming to America soon, a reality TV show that dares contestants to admit embarrassing things in front of family and friends (in exchange for the big bucks), but it’s just been closed down in Colombia after a woman confessed to hiring a hit man to take out her husband . . . . . Sounds Like a Joke: OK, genocide is not a joke, and it’s bad bad bad, but still, where in the world did this come from? The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs (like, can you think of any, er, more crucial issues that such a committee ought to be fighting over these days?) has voted out a contentious resolution condemning genocide in Armenia in 1915, thus embarrassing a valuable U.S. secular Muslim ally (Turkey) that has so far resisted going extremist . . . . . The House Homeland Security Committee, too, acted sorta quixotic, telling the four staffers it sent to two NASCAR races that they needed to get vaccinated (but it turns out there was a good reason) . . . . . IRS reported this ridiculous fact based on the latest (2005) adjusted gross incomes: The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all our income; the bottom 50% earned 12.8% (and there must be inequality within inequality because the Chicago Sun-Times did a catch-up on that 2005 website where, on a lark, a guy let some women post their photos and ask for public donations to get breast implants, and y’know, it was a hot site for a while, and a few guys here and there sent in, oh, $5 and $10, etc., and—wait, it’s still up, and it’s huge, and 2500 women have raised $250k, and if America’s got enough money to fund breast implants for strangers, well . . ..).
The Human Condition Today
A Woodland, Calif., dentist, under investigation, said his chest massages are completely legit, and he may be right, naaah, well, maybe . . . . . Cypriot-born artist Stelios Arcadious actually has, courtesy of British surgeons, an ear growing in his arm (and wants to mic it and Bluetooth it so he’ll be able to "hear" with it) . . . . . The L.A. Times went to the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (a literal-text college), where women can take a concentration in homemaking (cooking, laundering, sewing, etc.) not because they necessarily want to but because the Bible demands that they serve their (future) husbands . . . . . The perils of the incompletely written story: On the same day as the Ohio Columbine-wannabe struck this week, cops busted the arsenal of another potential Columbiner, 14-yr-old in Pennsylvania who said he was feeling "bullied"—but he’s home-schooled! (but I’m pretty sure that referred to taking out bullies from where he went to school before, only that’s not in the story) . . . . . Would-be Mexican horror novelist Jose Luis Calva certainly walked the walk of a cannibal, i.e., his tasty girlfriend and maybe three more women . . . . . In Poland, it says in today’s subscriber-only Wall Street Journal, the dubbing for any American TV program (including all the characters in "Desperate Housewives," for example) is done by one man, and the huskier the voice, the better the Poles like it.
Your Daily Loser
Jose Jimenez was arrested in Hobart, Ind., done in by demon rum that caused him to shoot holes in his ceiling because he thought that’s where his wife’s presumed lover was hiding, but the gun was stolen and besides, he’s a convicted felon who can’t possess one.
NOTW Lite
Too bad you’re not in the British military because you might have the tingly pleasure of serving under an Air Chief Marshal fabulously named Jock Stirrup . . . . . A train hit a, well, somewhat-inebriated man and woman in Delray Beach, Fla. ("What happened?" the woman asked the paramedic / "You were hit by a train" / "Oh . . Can I get a beer?") . . . . . A New Mexico researcher found a way to get world headlines (including in The Economist, for heaven’s sake!) while hanging out at strip clubs: He learned what Yr Editor has known for years: that ovulation begets horniness (but the professor added, it also begets bigger tips).
Updates
Illinois lawyer Gary Peel [NOTW 950, 4-23-2006], who was too smart for own his britches in trying to blackmail his ex-wife into not ratting him out at his bankruptcy hearing (by threatening to show her parents NSFW photos of her younger sister) (but, since young sis was way too young, he was convicted of possessing child porn), has now said his case was lost because of his three lawyers (for a total of four working on the case), and a judge gave him a new one, at $94/hr, on taxpayers.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
NOTW, The Blog
It’s been ten yrs since Yr Editor introduced you to Matt McMullen’s creation of the lifelike silicone-doll industry [NOTW 508. 10-31-1997]:
McMullen moved to California; the price has gone up; and the varieties and sophistication of features have progressed, but only now is Hollywood getting to the "deep void" stuff. The movie Lars and the Real Girl opens this weekend, and even though Lars supposedly has a top-of-the-line doll (who according to the reviews, is a major character in the story), there’s no sex, just some deep psychological void-filling.
Newsrangers: Steve Miller, James Wicht, Emory Kimbrough, Karl Olson, Matt Mirapaul, Daniel Wiesenfeld, Mark Neunder, Gerald Sacks
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Arbitrators in New York City are trying to work through hedge-fund trader Andrew Tong’s charges that his $150m/yr boss at SAC Capital made him take female hormones so he’d tone down his aggressiveness in trading. He complied, and, he says, the hormones made him effeminate, and Wall Street is agog (Bonus: He started wearing dresses).
Civilization in Decline
Coming to America soon, a reality TV show that dares contestants to admit embarrassing things in front of family and friends (in exchange for the big bucks), but it’s just been closed down in Colombia after a woman confessed to hiring a hit man to take out her husband . . . . . Sounds Like a Joke: OK, genocide is not a joke, and it’s bad bad bad, but still, where in the world did this come from? The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs (like, can you think of any, er, more crucial issues that such a committee ought to be fighting over these days?) has voted out a contentious resolution condemning genocide in Armenia in 1915, thus embarrassing a valuable U.S. secular Muslim ally (Turkey) that has so far resisted going extremist . . . . . The House Homeland Security Committee, too, acted sorta quixotic, telling the four staffers it sent to two NASCAR races that they needed to get vaccinated (but it turns out there was a good reason) . . . . . IRS reported this ridiculous fact based on the latest (2005) adjusted gross incomes: The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all our income; the bottom 50% earned 12.8% (and there must be inequality within inequality because the Chicago Sun-Times did a catch-up on that 2005 website where, on a lark, a guy let some women post their photos and ask for public donations to get breast implants, and y’know, it was a hot site for a while, and a few guys here and there sent in, oh, $5 and $10, etc., and—wait, it’s still up, and it’s huge, and 2500 women have raised $250k, and if America’s got enough money to fund breast implants for strangers, well . . ..).
The Human Condition Today
A Woodland, Calif., dentist, under investigation, said his chest massages are completely legit, and he may be right, naaah, well, maybe . . . . . Cypriot-born artist Stelios Arcadious actually has, courtesy of British surgeons, an ear growing in his arm (and wants to mic it and Bluetooth it so he’ll be able to "hear" with it) . . . . . The L.A. Times went to the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (a literal-text college), where women can take a concentration in homemaking (cooking, laundering, sewing, etc.) not because they necessarily want to but because the Bible demands that they serve their (future) husbands . . . . . The perils of the incompletely written story: On the same day as the Ohio Columbine-wannabe struck this week, cops busted the arsenal of another potential Columbiner, 14-yr-old in Pennsylvania who said he was feeling "bullied"—but he’s home-schooled! (but I’m pretty sure that referred to taking out bullies from where he went to school before, only that’s not in the story) . . . . . Would-be Mexican horror novelist Jose Luis Calva certainly walked the walk of a cannibal, i.e., his tasty girlfriend and maybe three more women . . . . . In Poland, it says in today’s subscriber-only Wall Street Journal, the dubbing for any American TV program (including all the characters in "Desperate Housewives," for example) is done by one man, and the huskier the voice, the better the Poles like it.
Your Daily Loser
Jose Jimenez was arrested in Hobart, Ind., done in by demon rum that caused him to shoot holes in his ceiling because he thought that’s where his wife’s presumed lover was hiding, but the gun was stolen and besides, he’s a convicted felon who can’t possess one.
NOTW Lite
Too bad you’re not in the British military because you might have the tingly pleasure of serving under an Air Chief Marshal fabulously named Jock Stirrup . . . . . A train hit a, well, somewhat-inebriated man and woman in Delray Beach, Fla. ("What happened?" the woman asked the paramedic / "You were hit by a train" / "Oh . . Can I get a beer?") . . . . . A New Mexico researcher found a way to get world headlines (including in The Economist, for heaven’s sake!) while hanging out at strip clubs: He learned what Yr Editor has known for years: that ovulation begets horniness (but the professor added, it also begets bigger tips).
Updates
Illinois lawyer Gary Peel [NOTW 950, 4-23-2006], who was too smart for own his britches in trying to blackmail his ex-wife into not ratting him out at his bankruptcy hearing (by threatening to show her parents NSFW photos of her younger sister) (but, since young sis was way too young, he was convicted of possessing child porn), has now said his case was lost because of his three lawyers (for a total of four working on the case), and a judge gave him a new one, at $94/hr, on taxpayers.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
NOTW, The Blog
It’s been ten yrs since Yr Editor introduced you to Matt McMullen’s creation of the lifelike silicone-doll industry [NOTW 508. 10-31-1997]:
New York City special-effects artist Matt McMullen, 28, has been offering his lifesize, authentically detailed, steel-skeletoned, silicone dolls, under the name "Real Dolls," for several months on the Internet, for around $4,000 each plus options. So far, Stacy, Natasha, Nina, and Leah are available, with choice of hair color, skin color, and height (either "supermodel" or short and voluptuous). His original doll was intended as sculpture until lonely men bombarded him with price inquiries. Said McMullen, "There is no way this can compete with the real thing, but it can fill a deep void in someone's life."
McMullen moved to California; the price has gone up; and the varieties and sophistication of features have progressed, but only now is Hollywood getting to the "deep void" stuff. The movie Lars and the Real Girl opens this weekend, and even though Lars supposedly has a top-of-the-line doll (who according to the reviews, is a major character in the story), there’s no sex, just some deep psychological void-filling.
Newsrangers: Steve Miller, James Wicht, Emory Kimbrough, Karl Olson, Matt Mirapaul, Daniel Wiesenfeld, Mark Neunder, Gerald Sacks
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Thursday’s 5-Star Special
Well . . . not really a busy day . . .
Civilization in Decline
Here in Weird Central, a sheriff’s deputy (or his machine) botched a field test for methamphetamine, resulting in a woman’s sitting in jail for 50 days before they finally realized the substance was what she told them it was: cat urine (for her son’s science project) . . . . . The Russian chessboard murderer Alexander Pichushkin turned sentimental: "A first killing is like your first love. You never forget it."
The Human Condition Today
In the current Kansas City trial for that 2004 womb-robbery, it looks once again like it was one woman’s compulsion to have a baby (though she couldn’t) that caused her to slice one out of another’s belly, but the womb-robber’s husband testified that he didn’t think it was strange that day when the wife called and said, Uh, dear, I’ve had the baby, and I’m fine, and I’ll meet you with it in the parking lot of Long John Silver’s . . . . . More alert than that hubby were the tellers at a St. Paul, Minn., credit union, who ratted out an employee of the city’s parking meter department when he kept depositing hundreds of dollars in coins into his account . . . . . Sound sleeper: Pedro Brito, 26, fell asleep while driving his truck and failed to awaken even when a cop jumped on the running board and tried to stop it . . . . . When a lawyer describes his client this way ("never intended to kill," "just wanted to scare," "just someone who can’t control his rage real well"), you know he’s a monster (He allegedly doused his ex-girlfriend in gasoline and lit her up, along with her kids).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Mr. Klutzo the Clown, of Springfield, Ill., said the reason he had all those photos of nekkid boys on his computer when he returned from "entertaining" the kids at a Philippines orphanage, was to demonstrate to people back home how poor they are (They can't even afford clothes!). (His wife and entertainment partner, Smilee the Clown, almost immediately filed for divorce.)
NOTW Lite
Guinness Book fever: He’s blessed with the world’s longest leg hair (4.88 inches), to which he applies conditioner to keep it in shape.
Updates
The Mexican marathoner from yesterday denied that he cheated in Berlin (Why, he never intended to run the entire race, he said!) (even though he might have failed to mention that fact when he posted the fastest time in his age group) . . . . . Remember the "best friend" of Hulk Hogan’s son (who was in the front seat when Little Hulk smashed up his car [NOTW Daily, 8-28-2007])? The official prognosis is possibly a lifelong coma, with the best to hope for his being able to communicate by eye-blinks.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
NOTW, The Blog
Several commentors on the website of London’s Daily Mail doubt the bona fides of the story Yr Editor ran yesterday about the husband with a tattoo of his wife’s face on his back, pointing out that the couple appear to be quite jovial in photographs and that the "other man" was present in the same photo shoot with the divorcing couple. Yr Editor agrees that that’s somewhat fishy, but on the other hand, it was obvious in the original that the cuckold-husband initiated the story (the tattoo was on his back), rather than a reporter’s having outed him, so Yr Editor still gives the Daily Mail the benefit of the doubt . . . . . The following political news doesn’t quite fit NOTW, but Yr Editor wants you to be well-informed and ahead of the curve, and, left to your own prejudices, you would underregard news from National Enquirer. However, Yr Editor has been crusading on behalf of the Enquirer ever since it shockingly got mostly everything exactly right in its lurid O.J. Simpson stories in 1994 and 1995. So, as a public service to you prisoners of the mainstream, pseudo-highbrow news, Yr Editor informs you that, according to the Enquirer, John Edwards’s political career will soon be toast because of a recent hide-the-salami relationship.
Newsrangers: Steve Miller, Brian Bjolin
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Well . . . not really a busy day . . .
Civilization in Decline
Here in Weird Central, a sheriff’s deputy (or his machine) botched a field test for methamphetamine, resulting in a woman’s sitting in jail for 50 days before they finally realized the substance was what she told them it was: cat urine (for her son’s science project) . . . . . The Russian chessboard murderer Alexander Pichushkin turned sentimental: "A first killing is like your first love. You never forget it."
The Human Condition Today
In the current Kansas City trial for that 2004 womb-robbery, it looks once again like it was one woman’s compulsion to have a baby (though she couldn’t) that caused her to slice one out of another’s belly, but the womb-robber’s husband testified that he didn’t think it was strange that day when the wife called and said, Uh, dear, I’ve had the baby, and I’m fine, and I’ll meet you with it in the parking lot of Long John Silver’s . . . . . More alert than that hubby were the tellers at a St. Paul, Minn., credit union, who ratted out an employee of the city’s parking meter department when he kept depositing hundreds of dollars in coins into his account . . . . . Sound sleeper: Pedro Brito, 26, fell asleep while driving his truck and failed to awaken even when a cop jumped on the running board and tried to stop it . . . . . When a lawyer describes his client this way ("never intended to kill," "just wanted to scare," "just someone who can’t control his rage real well"), you know he’s a monster (He allegedly doused his ex-girlfriend in gasoline and lit her up, along with her kids).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Mr. Klutzo the Clown, of Springfield, Ill., said the reason he had all those photos of nekkid boys on his computer when he returned from "entertaining" the kids at a Philippines orphanage, was to demonstrate to people back home how poor they are (They can't even afford clothes!). (His wife and entertainment partner, Smilee the Clown, almost immediately filed for divorce.)
NOTW Lite
Guinness Book fever: He’s blessed with the world’s longest leg hair (4.88 inches), to which he applies conditioner to keep it in shape.
Updates
The Mexican marathoner from yesterday denied that he cheated in Berlin (Why, he never intended to run the entire race, he said!) (even though he might have failed to mention that fact when he posted the fastest time in his age group) . . . . . Remember the "best friend" of Hulk Hogan’s son (who was in the front seat when Little Hulk smashed up his car [NOTW Daily, 8-28-2007])? The official prognosis is possibly a lifelong coma, with the best to hope for his being able to communicate by eye-blinks.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
NOTW, The Blog
Several commentors on the website of London’s Daily Mail doubt the bona fides of the story Yr Editor ran yesterday about the husband with a tattoo of his wife’s face on his back, pointing out that the couple appear to be quite jovial in photographs and that the "other man" was present in the same photo shoot with the divorcing couple. Yr Editor agrees that that’s somewhat fishy, but on the other hand, it was obvious in the original that the cuckold-husband initiated the story (the tattoo was on his back), rather than a reporter’s having outed him, so Yr Editor still gives the Daily Mail the benefit of the doubt . . . . . The following political news doesn’t quite fit NOTW, but Yr Editor wants you to be well-informed and ahead of the curve, and, left to your own prejudices, you would underregard news from National Enquirer. However, Yr Editor has been crusading on behalf of the Enquirer ever since it shockingly got mostly everything exactly right in its lurid O.J. Simpson stories in 1994 and 1995. So, as a public service to you prisoners of the mainstream, pseudo-highbrow news, Yr Editor informs you that, according to the Enquirer, John Edwards’s political career will soon be toast because of a recent hide-the-salami relationship.
Newsrangers: Steve Miller, Brian Bjolin
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Wednesday’s 5-Star Special
Drum roll, please, for the super-fertile Ms. Amelia Spence of Scotland, apparently the world’s most powerful procreator: Not only did she force her birth-control pills to tap out, but then she got pregnant again three weeks after that first conception (and both babies were born on the same day and are officially not twins).
Civilization in Decline
A stringer for London’s Guardian thinks the villagers along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua look on the bales that periodically drift ashore as mysterious, God-sent cargo (as in "cargo cults"); because of the currents, they are cocaine shipments ditched overboard by Miami drug runners, who will eventually browse the villages and offer the big bucks for their return (and God will have thus blessed) . . . . . Uh-oh: The Washington Post quotes law-abiding Americans who say they’ve been spied on by dragonflies buzzing around but which aren’t dragonflies at all but robo-bugs.
The Human Condition Today
Michael Tisdale, 44, one of those men who clearly ought not to be wearing an Old Glory-design thong swimsuit, jogged in one through downtown Miami protesting, second, the conspiracy of higher-ups that is allegedly sending us to hell, but first, us, because we are so dumb that we tolerate it (and, sorry to disappoint, but he’s from out-of-state!) . . . . . A.J. Jacobs, the guy who famously read the Encyclopedia Britannica word for word, has completed (for a new book) a year living according to the Bible, and wearing robe and sandals and herding sheep were no big deals, but he struggled with that "covet" and "bear false witness" stuff . . . . . "I never wanted Alan to have my [life-sized] face tattooed on his back in the first place," said Lisa Jenkins as she prepared for her new life with a young hunk after walking out on Alan after 15 yrs, but he still has the faces of their two daughters on his back to console him . . . . . Univ. of Missouri-Columbia researchers have given us rich background on the Newfoundland Mummers (which, if you hurry, you can put all this in a so-far sparse entry in Wikipedia!): They visit their neighbors around Xmas-time in disguise and actually threaten them, and the neighbors (1) try to guess who they really are and (2) practice restraining themselves from a violent defense, and this whole thing has allegedly made sense for hundreds of years and adds to "community" and "trust" (but you can see why the Wikipedia entry is sparse) . . . . . Least Competent Marathoner: Former Mexican presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo finished first in the age-55 group in Berlin, but that was because he disrespected the computer chip check-ups, which busted him for shorting the circuit, and it didn’t help that he aroused suspicion by running in a windbreaker and long pants ("There’s no windbreakers in marathoning" [sic]).
Your Daily Loser
He’s in custody in Pittsburgh, Pa., but hasn’t identified himself yet, and no wonder: He walked into a grocery store and seriously asked for change of his $1 million bill.
NOTW Lite
Headline from Marion, Iowa: "Clown Kicks in Door, Punches Resident" . . . . . Something to look forward to if you mistakenly ingest antifreeze: One approved remedy is a three-day vodka drip.
Update
OK, the medical examiner told y’all not to speculate about that Alabama minister found dead dressed in two rubber suits [NOTW Daily, 10-8-2007], but apparently the Montgomery Advertiser had partly sanitized his autopsy report. Fortunately, TheSmokingGun.com was on the case. Y’all are now officially free to speculate because the coroner also found a dildo covered with a condom up the reverend’s wazoo.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Body-Philosophy.net is kinda all-purpose. There’s a lot of medical quasi-advice plus stuff for learned discussion on surgeries, on obesity, on anorexia, etc., so you can always keep a serious-type page on your screen at work . . and open tabs for, e.g., the world’s fattest people, or largest tumors, or largest breasts,
or people who get surgery to look like celebrities.
Newsrangers: John Wriedt, Gary Miller, Mark Neunder, Paul Blumstein, Paul Music, Justin Warner, Mara Levy, Steve Dunn.
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Drum roll, please, for the super-fertile Ms. Amelia Spence of Scotland, apparently the world’s most powerful procreator: Not only did she force her birth-control pills to tap out, but then she got pregnant again three weeks after that first conception (and both babies were born on the same day and are officially not twins).
Civilization in Decline
A stringer for London’s Guardian thinks the villagers along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua look on the bales that periodically drift ashore as mysterious, God-sent cargo (as in "cargo cults"); because of the currents, they are cocaine shipments ditched overboard by Miami drug runners, who will eventually browse the villages and offer the big bucks for their return (and God will have thus blessed) . . . . . Uh-oh: The Washington Post quotes law-abiding Americans who say they’ve been spied on by dragonflies buzzing around but which aren’t dragonflies at all but robo-bugs.
The Human Condition Today
Michael Tisdale, 44, one of those men who clearly ought not to be wearing an Old Glory-design thong swimsuit, jogged in one through downtown Miami protesting, second, the conspiracy of higher-ups that is allegedly sending us to hell, but first, us, because we are so dumb that we tolerate it (and, sorry to disappoint, but he’s from out-of-state!) . . . . . A.J. Jacobs, the guy who famously read the Encyclopedia Britannica word for word, has completed (for a new book) a year living according to the Bible, and wearing robe and sandals and herding sheep were no big deals, but he struggled with that "covet" and "bear false witness" stuff . . . . . "I never wanted Alan to have my [life-sized] face tattooed on his back in the first place," said Lisa Jenkins as she prepared for her new life with a young hunk after walking out on Alan after 15 yrs, but he still has the faces of their two daughters on his back to console him . . . . . Univ. of Missouri-Columbia researchers have given us rich background on the Newfoundland Mummers (which, if you hurry, you can put all this in a so-far sparse entry in Wikipedia!): They visit their neighbors around Xmas-time in disguise and actually threaten them, and the neighbors (1) try to guess who they really are and (2) practice restraining themselves from a violent defense, and this whole thing has allegedly made sense for hundreds of years and adds to "community" and "trust" (but you can see why the Wikipedia entry is sparse) . . . . . Least Competent Marathoner: Former Mexican presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo finished first in the age-55 group in Berlin, but that was because he disrespected the computer chip check-ups, which busted him for shorting the circuit, and it didn’t help that he aroused suspicion by running in a windbreaker and long pants ("There’s no windbreakers in marathoning" [sic]).
Your Daily Loser
He’s in custody in Pittsburgh, Pa., but hasn’t identified himself yet, and no wonder: He walked into a grocery store and seriously asked for change of his $1 million bill.
NOTW Lite
Headline from Marion, Iowa: "Clown Kicks in Door, Punches Resident" . . . . . Something to look forward to if you mistakenly ingest antifreeze: One approved remedy is a three-day vodka drip.
Update
OK, the medical examiner told y’all not to speculate about that Alabama minister found dead dressed in two rubber suits [NOTW Daily, 10-8-2007], but apparently the Montgomery Advertiser had partly sanitized his autopsy report. Fortunately, TheSmokingGun.com was on the case. Y’all are now officially free to speculate because the coroner also found a dildo covered with a condom up the reverend’s wazoo.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Body-Philosophy.net is kinda all-purpose. There’s a lot of medical quasi-advice plus stuff for learned discussion on surgeries, on obesity, on anorexia, etc., so you can always keep a serious-type page on your screen at work . . and open tabs for, e.g., the world’s fattest people, or largest tumors, or largest breasts,
or people who get surgery to look like celebrities.
Newsrangers: John Wriedt, Gary Miller, Mark Neunder, Paul Blumstein, Paul Music, Justin Warner, Mara Levy, Steve Dunn.
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Monday, October 08, 2007
Monday’s 5-Star Special
Can’t Possibly Be True: Canada’s Mint assessed the city of Toronto C$47,680 [US$48,354—ouch!] for using the phrase "one cent" and a photograph of a penny in its political campaign to get voters to raise their taxes. Said a Mint spokesman, "They are registered trademarks of the Royal Canadian Mint."
Civilization in Decline
Leading Economic Indicators: (1) A new condominium under development on West 24th Street in New York City (units start at $6.75m) will have a special place in each unit for the owner to stash his bicyc—no, check that, stash his car, i.e., a garage in each apartment (with special elevator, obviously) (2) It’s good to be a blue-collar teenager: Apparently, Jessica Springsteen, 14, was almost the recipient of a horse worth $850,000 from her sweat-it-out-in-the-streets parents (or, so says this lawsuit) . . . . . More and more churches are so desperate for young fannies in the pews that they’re sucking them in with video game sessions, including Halo 3 ("thou shalt kill") (Said Tim, 12: "It’s just fun blowing people up") . . . . . A NY Times writer this morning points out a deadly discrepancy in SCOTUS policies: It only takes 4 justices to put a case on the docket for consideration, but it takes 5 for a stay of execution, even if the very issue raised by the stay has already been accepted onto the docket, i.e., you can be executed while the justices are preparing to decide the issue you raised (Seriously).
The Human Condition Today
And another meta-question examined by the NY Times: If a lot of people get fortune cookies that are downers, shouldn't the company check up on the guy writing the fortunes? . . . . . It looks like the key to Mother Teresa’s sainthood rests with a mineral deposit, er, an Indian priest’s kidney stone . . . . . In Houston, Tex., a deadly fight that started because one of the two men had really stinky feet . . . . . The prosecutor in Farmington, Mo., is sticking by his conclusion that if you push someone out of the way while dashing out the door with a shoplifted 52-cent donut, that’s a "strong-arm robbery" (and if you’ve already got a rap sheet, you’re looking at 30-to-life).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
A 51-yr-old Baptist minister in Montgomery, Ala., died alone and without foul play but was bound hand and foot and dressed in two rubberized suits, but the medical examiner cautioned the public not to engage in speculation until his investigation was complete [Ed.: You heard him! Cut that out! No speculation!]
NOTW Lite
Yeah, it’s all over the news: A defendant in Indianapolis did have his charges dismissed after he dropped down and gave the prosecutor 50 pushups, but there was less to that than meets the eye . . . . . The St. Petersburg Times managed to locate a retired, 78-yr-old black man in central Florida who is a proud historian of, and true believer in, the Confederate States of America (to the reporter, "You’ve never seen nothing like me, have you?" and "Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray") . . . . . Wonderful mixture of words and images, from an F State lawsuit: A woman sued a club called the . . Coco . . Bongo . . because a . . disco ball . . fell on her . . head.
Updates
The Virginia schoolteacher-artist (who paints not with a brush but by smearing paint on his cheeks and wiggling around) ("I’m certainly proud of my ass-painting") [NOTW 989, 1-21-2007] has, predictably, sued for his firing, in that he swears that he made great efforts to keep his avocation away from his students.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Erroror
This story, which appeared in NOTW M025, 9-30-2007, appears to be way wrong, based entirely on a piece in London’s Daily Telegraph, 8-31-2007:
Newsrangers: Matt Mirapaul, Bob Pert, Joe Pat Clayton, H.Thompson, Joe Littrell
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Can’t Possibly Be True: Canada’s Mint assessed the city of Toronto C$47,680 [US$48,354—ouch!] for using the phrase "one cent" and a photograph of a penny in its political campaign to get voters to raise their taxes. Said a Mint spokesman, "They are registered trademarks of the Royal Canadian Mint."
Civilization in Decline
Leading Economic Indicators: (1) A new condominium under development on West 24th Street in New York City (units start at $6.75m) will have a special place in each unit for the owner to stash his bicyc—no, check that, stash his car, i.e., a garage in each apartment (with special elevator, obviously) (2) It’s good to be a blue-collar teenager: Apparently, Jessica Springsteen, 14, was almost the recipient of a horse worth $850,000 from her sweat-it-out-in-the-streets parents (or, so says this lawsuit) . . . . . More and more churches are so desperate for young fannies in the pews that they’re sucking them in with video game sessions, including Halo 3 ("thou shalt kill") (Said Tim, 12: "It’s just fun blowing people up") . . . . . A NY Times writer this morning points out a deadly discrepancy in SCOTUS policies: It only takes 4 justices to put a case on the docket for consideration, but it takes 5 for a stay of execution, even if the very issue raised by the stay has already been accepted onto the docket, i.e., you can be executed while the justices are preparing to decide the issue you raised (Seriously).
The Human Condition Today
And another meta-question examined by the NY Times: If a lot of people get fortune cookies that are downers, shouldn't the company check up on the guy writing the fortunes? . . . . . It looks like the key to Mother Teresa’s sainthood rests with a mineral deposit, er, an Indian priest’s kidney stone . . . . . In Houston, Tex., a deadly fight that started because one of the two men had really stinky feet . . . . . The prosecutor in Farmington, Mo., is sticking by his conclusion that if you push someone out of the way while dashing out the door with a shoplifted 52-cent donut, that’s a "strong-arm robbery" (and if you’ve already got a rap sheet, you’re looking at 30-to-life).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
A 51-yr-old Baptist minister in Montgomery, Ala., died alone and without foul play but was bound hand and foot and dressed in two rubberized suits, but the medical examiner cautioned the public not to engage in speculation until his investigation was complete [Ed.: You heard him! Cut that out! No speculation!]
NOTW Lite
Yeah, it’s all over the news: A defendant in Indianapolis did have his charges dismissed after he dropped down and gave the prosecutor 50 pushups, but there was less to that than meets the eye . . . . . The St. Petersburg Times managed to locate a retired, 78-yr-old black man in central Florida who is a proud historian of, and true believer in, the Confederate States of America (to the reporter, "You’ve never seen nothing like me, have you?" and "Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray") . . . . . Wonderful mixture of words and images, from an F State lawsuit: A woman sued a club called the . . Coco . . Bongo . . because a . . disco ball . . fell on her . . head.
Updates
The Virginia schoolteacher-artist (who paints not with a brush but by smearing paint on his cheeks and wiggling around) ("I’m certainly proud of my ass-painting") [NOTW 989, 1-21-2007] has, predictably, sued for his firing, in that he swears that he made great efforts to keep his avocation away from his students.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Erroror
This story, which appeared in NOTW M025, 9-30-2007, appears to be way wrong, based entirely on a piece in London’s Daily Telegraph, 8-31-2007:
Oral-B’s Triumph SmartGuide toothbrush, available in the UK for the equivalent of about $280, uses navigation technology to transmit the exact location of the toothbrush to a base unit so that the user can see which areas in his mouth the brush might have missed. The wireless LCD mouth display can be mounted on a mirror or held in the free hand.Thanks to reader-engineer Jim Furman, who surmises that the Daily Telegraph reporter merely looked at the promotional photos and jumped to the conclusion that "navigation technology" was involved. Nope. The toothbrush does not track the inside of your mouth; it merely reminds you that your mouth can be thought of as four quadrants, upper-left, upper-right, lower-left, lower-right, and that it’s time to move on to another quadrant. And it doesn’t cost £140 ($280), either; it sells for $150. Ouch.
Newsrangers: Matt Mirapaul, Bob Pert, Joe Pat Clayton, H.Thompson, Joe Littrell
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Saturday’s 5-Star Special
Father / Son / Holy Spirit: The son of retired evangelist Oral Roberts, Richard, says the HS has moved him to fight! the charges made by colleagues, employees, and students at Oral Roberts Univ. in Tulsa, Okla., that he, and especially Mrs. Roberts, are out of control. Among the allegations: super-wild personal spending sprees; use of ORU personnel and students for personal errands; clandestinely supporting a political candidate with religious donations; and especially Mrs. R’s $800/month cell phone bill that included "hundreds" of middle-of-the-night text msgs to and from "underage males" whom ORU had supplied with phones.
Civilization in Decline
Can’t Possibly Be True: Two years being a long time, the Minnesota Nat’l Guard just came home from Iraq after 22 months (plus the "surge" extension), to find that their orders for Iraq had been written to last "729 days," and not "730" (at which point gov’t education benefits would have kicked in) . . . . . In the District of Calamity, yet another (now ex-) school official was charged with stealing money (Bonus: He was the school system’s director of internal audit!) . . . . . Italy’s economy minister proposed a tax break worth the equivalent of $1,400 each to all those momma’s boys who still live at home (which feeds an apartment-rental crisis he’s trying to alleviate).
The Human Condition Today
A first-grade teacher in Valparaiso, Ind., was caught at work, smashed, and with two cans of beer in her purse (and blew a .20; the state max for driving is .08, which sounds to Yr Editor like a good minimum for any day you're teaching first-graders) . . . . . The mayor of Atlantic City has been AWOL now for 10 days (well, not literally AWOL, because he granted himself medical leave) with almost no explanation (which is strange enough, but it also affords Yr Editor the opportunity to point out that 3 of the last 6 Atlantic City mayors have at some point been arrested, and one-third of the current City Council are in prison or awaiting sentencing) ("Look, if the mayor of Atlantic City can’t go off on a ten-day bender every now and then, the terrorists have already won" – Slate.com's Today’s Papers) . . . . . All we know about this story from Mobile is that a man is dead, another hacked off part of his tongue, $200,000 is missing, and this is Alabama! . . . . . Another dentist with the Tax Gene: Dr. Louis Genard, 57, was slam-dunk convicted of tax evasion, despite his most excellent defense that he was beyond the court’s jurisdiction because he had declared himself in July to have diplomatic immunity as "Ambassador and Citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven under its King Jesus Christ" [also, see Updates] . . . . . Chutzpah! Frank Drake, 37, was busted in Concord, N.H., charged with growing 130 marijuana plants in several gardens right there on the side of Interstate 89.
Your Daily Loser
Career criminal Clive Halford of Wolverhampton, England, pleaded guilty after being busted in July for a break-in and theft of 18 pallets of nickel and copper from a metal company but not quite getting away, in that his cargo broke his truck’s suspension.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Parents of two kids filed a lawsuit against former Jackson, Miss., assistant principal Sherard Hollins for messing with the boys, and apparently it was important to the lawsuit that it specify that Hollins was interested in sucking not just "the toes" of one boy but his "big toe."
NOTW Lite
SCOTUS only wishes it had this power: The High Court in New Delhi got so annoyed with a certain lower court judge that it ordered him back to law school and for the dean to submit a written report on his progress . . . . . Best Headline (Mainichi Daily News, Tokyo): "Policeman Shot in Butt with Own Gun While Battling Porn Vending Machine Bandits."
Updates
Our old friends (with the Tax Gene) Ed (the retired exterminator) and Elaine (the dentist) Brown, holed up in their "compound" in New Hampshire [NOTW Daily, 6-14-2007, 6-20-2007, 7-20-2007] and vowing not to be taken alive by the U.S. Marshals surrounding the place in order to arrest them after their tax-evasion conviction, got tricked. A stream of anti-gov’t types had been visiting for months, bringing the Browns, y’know, covered dishes, toilet paper, bullets, etc., and apparently some Marshals talked the talk of anti-gov’t types and were invited in, also, and then arrested the Browns peaceably . . . . . Another chapter closed in that years-long Great Fast-Food Restaurant Telephone Strip-Search Hoax [NOTW 981, 11-26-2006] [NOTW 811, 8-24-2003] [NOTW 731, 2-10-2002] [NOTW 570, 1-8-1999], when a jury in, ahem, Shepherdsville, Ky., awarded one stripsearch-ee $6.1m from her employer, McD’s, for not taking the hoax calls seriously enough when they were going on. (Backstory: A guy would call up pretending to be a cop and demand that a manager strip-search a certain female employee, looking for "evidence," and demand that the manager describe the search over the phone, step-by-step, and a lot of managers actually said, Uh, OK.) . . . . . Bottom-feeding F-State political consultant Doug Guetzloe, whose business papers (smoking guns included) were handed off to WKMG-TV in Orlando after he failed to keep up his storage locker payments [NOTW M001, 4-15-2007], lost on appeal, and now the station is entitled to broadcast whatever they found. (This would be a slam-dunk case in most of the country, but in the F State, it takes several months for judges to read SCOTUS opinions on First Amendment law because, y’know, they have to move their lips and stop to look up words.) (Bonus: a particularly-weaselly photo of Guetzloe)
Professor Music’s Weird Links
This is apparently a serious recipe (in a section called "Congress Cooks!") offered by U.S. Sen. Larry Craig for his toe-tapping-good "Super Tuber" made by sticking your wiener through a cored-out Idaho potato (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor was both heart-warmed and cold-sweated yesterday, by athlete Marion Jones’s performance. Regardless of the offense, that was an outstanding public apology! Wow! She is mortally ashamed, and begs your forgiveness, for unequivocally screwing up! On the other hand, if public figures all of a sudden start sincerely apologizing for their misdeeds (instead of their usual weaseling, "regret"-type, if-anyone-was-hurt, "made a bad choice," not-a-perfect-person, Jesus-forgives-me public sedations), we will be deprived of a generous resource for ridicule and amusement, which of course crimps Yr Editor’s style. On balance, though, I’d take the hit on that for the betterment of society, but I’m sure it’ll never come to that.
Newsrangers: Karl Olson, Joe Littrell, Wayne Gossett, Paul Music, Robert Evatt
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Father / Son / Holy Spirit: The son of retired evangelist Oral Roberts, Richard, says the HS has moved him to fight! the charges made by colleagues, employees, and students at Oral Roberts Univ. in Tulsa, Okla., that he, and especially Mrs. Roberts, are out of control. Among the allegations: super-wild personal spending sprees; use of ORU personnel and students for personal errands; clandestinely supporting a political candidate with religious donations; and especially Mrs. R’s $800/month cell phone bill that included "hundreds" of middle-of-the-night text msgs to and from "underage males" whom ORU had supplied with phones.
Civilization in Decline
Can’t Possibly Be True: Two years being a long time, the Minnesota Nat’l Guard just came home from Iraq after 22 months (plus the "surge" extension), to find that their orders for Iraq had been written to last "729 days," and not "730" (at which point gov’t education benefits would have kicked in) . . . . . In the District of Calamity, yet another (now ex-) school official was charged with stealing money (Bonus: He was the school system’s director of internal audit!) . . . . . Italy’s economy minister proposed a tax break worth the equivalent of $1,400 each to all those momma’s boys who still live at home (which feeds an apartment-rental crisis he’s trying to alleviate).
The Human Condition Today
A first-grade teacher in Valparaiso, Ind., was caught at work, smashed, and with two cans of beer in her purse (and blew a .20; the state max for driving is .08, which sounds to Yr Editor like a good minimum for any day you're teaching first-graders) . . . . . The mayor of Atlantic City has been AWOL now for 10 days (well, not literally AWOL, because he granted himself medical leave) with almost no explanation (which is strange enough, but it also affords Yr Editor the opportunity to point out that 3 of the last 6 Atlantic City mayors have at some point been arrested, and one-third of the current City Council are in prison or awaiting sentencing) ("Look, if the mayor of Atlantic City can’t go off on a ten-day bender every now and then, the terrorists have already won" – Slate.com's Today’s Papers) . . . . . All we know about this story from Mobile is that a man is dead, another hacked off part of his tongue, $200,000 is missing, and this is Alabama! . . . . . Another dentist with the Tax Gene: Dr. Louis Genard, 57, was slam-dunk convicted of tax evasion, despite his most excellent defense that he was beyond the court’s jurisdiction because he had declared himself in July to have diplomatic immunity as "Ambassador and Citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven under its King Jesus Christ" [also, see Updates] . . . . . Chutzpah! Frank Drake, 37, was busted in Concord, N.H., charged with growing 130 marijuana plants in several gardens right there on the side of Interstate 89.
Your Daily Loser
Career criminal Clive Halford of Wolverhampton, England, pleaded guilty after being busted in July for a break-in and theft of 18 pallets of nickel and copper from a metal company but not quite getting away, in that his cargo broke his truck’s suspension.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Parents of two kids filed a lawsuit against former Jackson, Miss., assistant principal Sherard Hollins for messing with the boys, and apparently it was important to the lawsuit that it specify that Hollins was interested in sucking not just "the toes" of one boy but his "big toe."
NOTW Lite
SCOTUS only wishes it had this power: The High Court in New Delhi got so annoyed with a certain lower court judge that it ordered him back to law school and for the dean to submit a written report on his progress . . . . . Best Headline (Mainichi Daily News, Tokyo): "Policeman Shot in Butt with Own Gun While Battling Porn Vending Machine Bandits."
Updates
Our old friends (with the Tax Gene) Ed (the retired exterminator) and Elaine (the dentist) Brown, holed up in their "compound" in New Hampshire [NOTW Daily, 6-14-2007, 6-20-2007, 7-20-2007] and vowing not to be taken alive by the U.S. Marshals surrounding the place in order to arrest them after their tax-evasion conviction, got tricked. A stream of anti-gov’t types had been visiting for months, bringing the Browns, y’know, covered dishes, toilet paper, bullets, etc., and apparently some Marshals talked the talk of anti-gov’t types and were invited in, also, and then arrested the Browns peaceably . . . . . Another chapter closed in that years-long Great Fast-Food Restaurant Telephone Strip-Search Hoax [NOTW 981, 11-26-2006] [NOTW 811, 8-24-2003] [NOTW 731, 2-10-2002] [NOTW 570, 1-8-1999], when a jury in, ahem, Shepherdsville, Ky., awarded one stripsearch-ee $6.1m from her employer, McD’s, for not taking the hoax calls seriously enough when they were going on. (Backstory: A guy would call up pretending to be a cop and demand that a manager strip-search a certain female employee, looking for "evidence," and demand that the manager describe the search over the phone, step-by-step, and a lot of managers actually said, Uh, OK.) . . . . . Bottom-feeding F-State political consultant Doug Guetzloe, whose business papers (smoking guns included) were handed off to WKMG-TV in Orlando after he failed to keep up his storage locker payments [NOTW M001, 4-15-2007], lost on appeal, and now the station is entitled to broadcast whatever they found. (This would be a slam-dunk case in most of the country, but in the F State, it takes several months for judges to read SCOTUS opinions on First Amendment law because, y’know, they have to move their lips and stop to look up words.) (Bonus: a particularly-weaselly photo of Guetzloe)
Professor Music’s Weird Links
This is apparently a serious recipe (in a section called "Congress Cooks!") offered by U.S. Sen. Larry Craig for his toe-tapping-good "Super Tuber" made by sticking your wiener through a cored-out Idaho potato (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor was both heart-warmed and cold-sweated yesterday, by athlete Marion Jones’s performance. Regardless of the offense, that was an outstanding public apology! Wow! She is mortally ashamed, and begs your forgiveness, for unequivocally screwing up! On the other hand, if public figures all of a sudden start sincerely apologizing for their misdeeds (instead of their usual weaseling, "regret"-type, if-anyone-was-hurt, "made a bad choice," not-a-perfect-person, Jesus-forgives-me public sedations), we will be deprived of a generous resource for ridicule and amusement, which of course crimps Yr Editor’s style. On balance, though, I’d take the hit on that for the betterment of society, but I’m sure it’ll never come to that.
Newsrangers: Karl Olson, Joe Littrell, Wayne Gossett, Paul Music, Robert Evatt
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Friday’s 5-Star Special
Winners of this yr’s IgNobel awards last night in Cambridge, Mass.: the biologists who found that mites are all over everything, even the now-scratching audience in their seats watching the IgNobel awards; research on the obviously alarming "side effects of sword swallowing"; the Air Force’s "gay bomb" (that supposedly turns enemies uncontrollably frisky, and prone to grab the first warm body they see, regardless of gender); and the Japanese researchers who found a way to extract vanillin (for ice cream, etc.) from, er, cow dung. There’s more, including a couple that NOTW readers didn’t see here first. [Agence France-Presse]
Civilization in Decline
South Korea, aided by the head of its Unidus company, has declared that it’s the big dog of world condom manufacturing now that its countrymen’s penises have grown larger, and the country will hold a 50-nation conference on product-standardization next week . . . . . The newly emerging resort property in Ukraine, featuring boating and scenic beauty, now aches for tourists: Chernobyl (site of the world’s worst, and actually only serious, nuclear power disaster, in 1986) . . . . . What, Me Worry? A typical low-taxes, gov’t-off-our-backs Republican candidate in a suburb of Washington, D.C., cheerfully, chutzpahtically owned up to having received almost $300k in federal farm subsidies in the last 10 yrs despite the fact that he’s been just a trial lawyer all that time. ("There’s no way you can justify this for guys like me. This is what is wrong with gov’t.") . . . . . A New York couple allegedly got inadequate Dell support for their computer, along with some nonsensical e-mails back, so Dell owes us $50.5m, please . . . . . Get in bed with a bunch of anti-analytical wusses, and it’ll be hard to convince them of anything analytically: Brian Marquis thinks he’s got a good case for an A-minus in one course at the notorious U.Mass.-Amherst (America’s citadel for political correctness), instead of the C he received (which sounds like he’s being a crybaby, except it involved a professor’s ex post facto changing the criteria for a grade just because it felt right to him, and at U.Mass-Amherst, "feeling" something is much more important than proving it by logic and principle).
The Human Condition Today
A New Zealand gov’t report made it official that a doctor doing back surgery actually misplaced the patient’s false teeth (until four days later when they were recovered somewhat down his throat) . . . . . The owner of a glass company in Scottsdale, Ariz., was arrested for making a deal to replace 135 broken school bus windows for $430k, because cops now believe he’s the one that hired the hit men to break the windows in the first place . . . . . A Brit got tagged with one of those Anti-Social Behavior Orders when neighbors turned him in for habitually screaming at his TV set . . . . . The Only Way Out: The owner of a barber shop in Clarksville, Tenn., desperately wanted to relocate it to his home and made a dramatic zoning appeal to the city council, which turned him down, 7-5, at which point he muttered, "I’m outta here" (followed by a gunshot to the head confirming it) . . . . . The Michigan Supreme Court will review a confusing case in which authorities believe Rev. Gennaro Piscopo sexually assaulted a parishioner of a Roseville church but that the woman still believes it was Satan himself who did the deed, [LINK CORRECTED] and Piscopo’s lawyers say this is obviously reasonable doubt.
Your Daily Loser
Timothy Vaughn, 39, is everywhere, and we know it, only he goes by a different name in different high schools. This one, who graduated from Lakeland High in the F State in 1985, was caught stockpiling a major arsenal of explosives that he threatened to use against various of his former classmates who had ignored him in school but continue to bother him now. "Nobody talked to me back then, so stop talking to me now. [I] can make Virginia Tech look like a [phuccking] birthday party," he wrote in one e-mail to someone who was trying to organize a class reunion via Classmates.com. Vaughn just wants to be left alone . . there in his house . . living with his mom (Bonus: "reasonable-doubt"-removing mugshot, of course!)
NOTW Lite
Cheap career-advancing, mouse-click-provoking journalism of the day: the unnamed stringer in Amsterdam who discovered that Apenheul Primate Park has an orang-utan that refuses to mate with his own kind but really gets hot over blonde humans with tattoos.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Karl Olson, Eric Gibbs
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Winners of this yr’s IgNobel awards last night in Cambridge, Mass.: the biologists who found that mites are all over everything, even the now-scratching audience in their seats watching the IgNobel awards; research on the obviously alarming "side effects of sword swallowing"; the Air Force’s "gay bomb" (that supposedly turns enemies uncontrollably frisky, and prone to grab the first warm body they see, regardless of gender); and the Japanese researchers who found a way to extract vanillin (for ice cream, etc.) from, er, cow dung. There’s more, including a couple that NOTW readers didn’t see here first. [Agence France-Presse]
Civilization in Decline
South Korea, aided by the head of its Unidus company, has declared that it’s the big dog of world condom manufacturing now that its countrymen’s penises have grown larger, and the country will hold a 50-nation conference on product-standardization next week . . . . . The newly emerging resort property in Ukraine, featuring boating and scenic beauty, now aches for tourists: Chernobyl (site of the world’s worst, and actually only serious, nuclear power disaster, in 1986) . . . . . What, Me Worry? A typical low-taxes, gov’t-off-our-backs Republican candidate in a suburb of Washington, D.C., cheerfully, chutzpahtically owned up to having received almost $300k in federal farm subsidies in the last 10 yrs despite the fact that he’s been just a trial lawyer all that time. ("There’s no way you can justify this for guys like me. This is what is wrong with gov’t.") . . . . . A New York couple allegedly got inadequate Dell support for their computer, along with some nonsensical e-mails back, so Dell owes us $50.5m, please . . . . . Get in bed with a bunch of anti-analytical wusses, and it’ll be hard to convince them of anything analytically: Brian Marquis thinks he’s got a good case for an A-minus in one course at the notorious U.Mass.-Amherst (America’s citadel for political correctness), instead of the C he received (which sounds like he’s being a crybaby, except it involved a professor’s ex post facto changing the criteria for a grade just because it felt right to him, and at U.Mass-Amherst, "feeling" something is much more important than proving it by logic and principle).
The Human Condition Today
A New Zealand gov’t report made it official that a doctor doing back surgery actually misplaced the patient’s false teeth (until four days later when they were recovered somewhat down his throat) . . . . . The owner of a glass company in Scottsdale, Ariz., was arrested for making a deal to replace 135 broken school bus windows for $430k, because cops now believe he’s the one that hired the hit men to break the windows in the first place . . . . . A Brit got tagged with one of those Anti-Social Behavior Orders when neighbors turned him in for habitually screaming at his TV set . . . . . The Only Way Out: The owner of a barber shop in Clarksville, Tenn., desperately wanted to relocate it to his home and made a dramatic zoning appeal to the city council, which turned him down, 7-5, at which point he muttered, "I’m outta here" (followed by a gunshot to the head confirming it) . . . . . The Michigan Supreme Court will review a confusing case in which authorities believe Rev. Gennaro Piscopo sexually assaulted a parishioner of a Roseville church but that the woman still believes it was Satan himself who did the deed, [LINK CORRECTED] and Piscopo’s lawyers say this is obviously reasonable doubt.
Your Daily Loser
Timothy Vaughn, 39, is everywhere, and we know it, only he goes by a different name in different high schools. This one, who graduated from Lakeland High in the F State in 1985, was caught stockpiling a major arsenal of explosives that he threatened to use against various of his former classmates who had ignored him in school but continue to bother him now. "Nobody talked to me back then, so stop talking to me now. [I] can make Virginia Tech look like a [phuccking] birthday party," he wrote in one e-mail to someone who was trying to organize a class reunion via Classmates.com. Vaughn just wants to be left alone . . there in his house . . living with his mom (Bonus: "reasonable-doubt"-removing mugshot, of course!)
NOTW Lite
Cheap career-advancing, mouse-click-provoking journalism of the day: the unnamed stringer in Amsterdam who discovered that Apenheul Primate Park has an orang-utan that refuses to mate with his own kind but really gets hot over blonde humans with tattoos.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Karl Olson, Eric Gibbs
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Thursday’s 5-Star Special
Self-Foot-Shooting, Corporate Edition: Delta Air Lines told Arizonan Mandy Bailey that she’ll have to buy two tickets for her conjoined, 1-yr-old twins (only because they’d require separate oxygen masks in an emergency) (and, presumably, the principle goes, jeez, if we give you a break, think of all the masses of infant conjoined twins who’ll be trying to ride on one ticket).
Civilization in Decline
Do you know anyone who has fallen big-time for a Nigerian scam (because the gov’t says they average 800 complaints a month from genuine rip-ees, and that’s just the lightly-embarrassed ones) (and turns out that the Netherlands is an even bigger base than Nigeria) . . . . . A hit-and-run driver in Arizona creamed a senior citizen returning from shopping, and by the time the ambulance arrived, the locals had picked his groceries clean (along with those of a Samaritan attending to him) . . . . . Yr Editor withholds judgment for right now, but watch this one: A federal judge in California certified class-action status for blind people to sue a big company because its website’s not accessible.
The Human Condition Today
A federal appeals court told Tony Lee Smith that, no, the prison you’re locked up in doesn’t have to let you build a fire pit for your religious purity [“Odinism,” which Yr Editor doubts was selected on the basis of unique ability to give Tony spiritual strength] . . . . . Stop and smell the powerful cliché: Alabamians complain that New Yorkers are sending them their caca, and it really stinks (but farmers love the deal because they get free fertilizer) . . . . . The Lord Mayor of Belfast, Northern Ireland, trying to accommodate snap-shotters at a photo-op, attempted to leapfrog a female official but accidentally kneed her in the back, sending her to the hospital (Bonus: She was dressed up as a tomato) . . . . . Secessionists are meeting today in Chattanooga, Tenn., surprisingly cooperatively, seeing as how one group is states’ rights Jesus people and the other group mostly from the progressive kingdom of Vermont . . . . . An “expert” pathologist, offering dramatic CSI-type testimony about a Toronto murder, confused telltale exonerating body markings with, er, a previous witness’s red hi-liter marks on the photo.
Your Daily Loser
Respectable southern California community activist Steven Myrick decided to moon a cop during a protest, and the arrest and subsequent collection of his DNA nailed him for an unsolved, 7-yr-old rape case that carries a life sentence.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Justice came swiftly for the now-late Jesse Martin, 54, whose longtime lady friend pumped two shots into him upon learning that he had a porn-CD stash (and the woman resembles a grown-up Nola Darling, the ballbuster in She’s Gotta Have It and nobody to mess with).
NOTW Lite
An Indonesian businessman has concluded that “bigamy” is the enemy of “polygamy,” but the court disagreed . . . . . This weekend, 100 churches will celebrate National Porn Sunday, which means only that they’ll target the sermons to deal with “the elephant in the pews.”
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
At last, a rival for the nearly totally dysfunctional District of Calamity school system: The Philadelphia School District commissioned a $700k management report in 2005 because it was unclear whether it even had written “job descriptions” or “annual review criteria,” but the final November 2006 report is, er, around here somewhere, and no, the Philadelphia Inquirer hasn’t found anyone who’s read any of it yet.
Update
Texas officials have decided not to prosecute Tammy Jean Warner for the 2004 death of her husband, of acute alcohol poisoning, absorbed via, well, enemas (which Tammy loaded for him because “[H]e loved his enemas” and had recipes for different types, including the sherry wine one that killed him) [NOTW 890, 2-27-2005].
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Once again, Yr Editor finds himself jealous that so many (apparently) can spend so much time on a subject like “long hair on men” while other things, say, the brilliance of reporting the weird news, are lightly touched by the world’s eyeballs.
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor is surely not one of those Creationists, but one genre of “science” stories has given me particular trouble over the years, with the latest example being this AP report of archaeological findings about the Incas. Archaeo’s seem to me the most unjustifiably confident of all scientists. They examined hair samples from the 16th century and concluded (well, with proper fudge words, but still . . .) the Incas fattened up their to-be-sacrificed children; they took them on pilgrimages before the ceremony; the pilgrimages lasted at least 12 months; and “we” now know what the chosen ones were eating and when they were separated from their normal existence. Predicted rebuttal: “Oh, Shepherd, you poor thing, this is all done by looking at changes in isotopes, and you simply don’t understand,” and of course, on that point, at least, they are 100 percent correct. And what, then, is the “news/weird” purpose of this little rant? Reporters and editors who know not one bit more about this magic than I do dutifully write these stories up, straight from the mouths of Dr. X and Professor Y. I’d put this gunk slightly more believable than that “created in seven days” stuff, but only slightly.
Newsrangers: Matt Mirapaul, Mark Neunder, Tom Barker, Bob Pert, Eric Gibbs, Stefan Palys
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Self-Foot-Shooting, Corporate Edition: Delta Air Lines told Arizonan Mandy Bailey that she’ll have to buy two tickets for her conjoined, 1-yr-old twins (only because they’d require separate oxygen masks in an emergency) (and, presumably, the principle goes, jeez, if we give you a break, think of all the masses of infant conjoined twins who’ll be trying to ride on one ticket).
Civilization in Decline
Do you know anyone who has fallen big-time for a Nigerian scam (because the gov’t says they average 800 complaints a month from genuine rip-ees, and that’s just the lightly-embarrassed ones) (and turns out that the Netherlands is an even bigger base than Nigeria) . . . . . A hit-and-run driver in Arizona creamed a senior citizen returning from shopping, and by the time the ambulance arrived, the locals had picked his groceries clean (along with those of a Samaritan attending to him) . . . . . Yr Editor withholds judgment for right now, but watch this one: A federal judge in California certified class-action status for blind people to sue a big company because its website’s not accessible.
The Human Condition Today
A federal appeals court told Tony Lee Smith that, no, the prison you’re locked up in doesn’t have to let you build a fire pit for your religious purity [“Odinism,” which Yr Editor doubts was selected on the basis of unique ability to give Tony spiritual strength] . . . . . Stop and smell the powerful cliché: Alabamians complain that New Yorkers are sending them their caca, and it really stinks (but farmers love the deal because they get free fertilizer) . . . . . The Lord Mayor of Belfast, Northern Ireland, trying to accommodate snap-shotters at a photo-op, attempted to leapfrog a female official but accidentally kneed her in the back, sending her to the hospital (Bonus: She was dressed up as a tomato) . . . . . Secessionists are meeting today in Chattanooga, Tenn., surprisingly cooperatively, seeing as how one group is states’ rights Jesus people and the other group mostly from the progressive kingdom of Vermont . . . . . An “expert” pathologist, offering dramatic CSI-type testimony about a Toronto murder, confused telltale exonerating body markings with, er, a previous witness’s red hi-liter marks on the photo.
Your Daily Loser
Respectable southern California community activist Steven Myrick decided to moon a cop during a protest, and the arrest and subsequent collection of his DNA nailed him for an unsolved, 7-yr-old rape case that carries a life sentence.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Justice came swiftly for the now-late Jesse Martin, 54, whose longtime lady friend pumped two shots into him upon learning that he had a porn-CD stash (and the woman resembles a grown-up Nola Darling, the ballbuster in She’s Gotta Have It and nobody to mess with).
NOTW Lite
An Indonesian businessman has concluded that “bigamy” is the enemy of “polygamy,” but the court disagreed . . . . . This weekend, 100 churches will celebrate National Porn Sunday, which means only that they’ll target the sermons to deal with “the elephant in the pews.”
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
At last, a rival for the nearly totally dysfunctional District of Calamity school system: The Philadelphia School District commissioned a $700k management report in 2005 because it was unclear whether it even had written “job descriptions” or “annual review criteria,” but the final November 2006 report is, er, around here somewhere, and no, the Philadelphia Inquirer hasn’t found anyone who’s read any of it yet.
Update
Texas officials have decided not to prosecute Tammy Jean Warner for the 2004 death of her husband, of acute alcohol poisoning, absorbed via, well, enemas (which Tammy loaded for him because “[H]e loved his enemas” and had recipes for different types, including the sherry wine one that killed him) [NOTW 890, 2-27-2005].
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Once again, Yr Editor finds himself jealous that so many (apparently) can spend so much time on a subject like “long hair on men” while other things, say, the brilliance of reporting the weird news, are lightly touched by the world’s eyeballs.
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor is surely not one of those Creationists, but one genre of “science” stories has given me particular trouble over the years, with the latest example being this AP report of archaeological findings about the Incas. Archaeo’s seem to me the most unjustifiably confident of all scientists. They examined hair samples from the 16th century and concluded (well, with proper fudge words, but still . . .) the Incas fattened up their to-be-sacrificed children; they took them on pilgrimages before the ceremony; the pilgrimages lasted at least 12 months; and “we” now know what the chosen ones were eating and when they were separated from their normal existence. Predicted rebuttal: “Oh, Shepherd, you poor thing, this is all done by looking at changes in isotopes, and you simply don’t understand,” and of course, on that point, at least, they are 100 percent correct. And what, then, is the “news/weird” purpose of this little rant? Reporters and editors who know not one bit more about this magic than I do dutifully write these stories up, straight from the mouths of Dr. X and Professor Y. I’d put this gunk slightly more believable than that “created in seven days” stuff, but only slightly.
Newsrangers: Matt Mirapaul, Mark Neunder, Tom Barker, Bob Pert, Eric Gibbs, Stefan Palys
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Wednesday’s 5-Star Special
The latest NY Post tally of rubber-roomed employees of the city Dept. of Education is, gulp, 757. That’s people accused of wrongdoing, who, by their Santa Claus union contracts, are paid their full salaries (from, in these cases, $42k to $93k) while barred from doing a lick of work.
Civilization in Decline
SCOTUS said yesterday, in essence, that if Alabama citizens need to get themselves off, they’ll just have to use their fingers . . . . . It’s finally dawning on firefighters that they’re over-risking their lives to protect the fancy property of rich people who just have to live in the middle of beautiful, expensive fire traps. . . . . A North Carolina school system, mighty impressed with the anti-sexual-harassment presentation by a former teacher, might have wondered how she knew her subject so well (Oh . . that’s why).
The Human Condition Today
Diabolical: The makers of Thomas & Friends toys recalled a million units for having high-lead paint, then sent all the disappointed little tykes substitute toys as goodwill gestures, and, mu-hu-ha-ha-ha, they overleaded the subs, too, mu-hu-ha-ha-ha! . . . . . A Taiwanese judge OK’d a divorce on the ground that the wife had sworn to cut her husband’s wahoo off for infidelity (Bonus: Her name is Huang) . . . . . Shut off your cell phones if you have to go to court, especially if your ringtone is "Oh yeah! . . oh yeah! . . do it to me!" . . . . . A "Be afraid, be very afraid" public warning for Brampton, Ontario, to watch out for this choirboy-looking guy . . . . . Apparently, the state fair of the great presidential-primary (er, caucuses) state of Iowa has an "erotic corndog-eating" contest, which, if they don’t shut it down soon, will be converted into one of those Wolf Blitzer "raise your hand if you" debate questions . . . . . Yr Editor gave you the fist-fighting nuns on Monday, and now, fist-fighting preachers in the F State . . . . . And the Catholic Bishop of Gallup, N.Mex., might be having some trouble, in that he told police that 3 women and a man, wearing masks, came to his home for unknown reasons, and all were between three and four feet tall.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
"Well, what do you think of my naked body?" asked Jeffrey Long of Salisbury, Md., in a call to the CVS photo developer (Bonus: The plan was doomed, anyway, so this mug shot is just piling on the guy).
NOTW Lite
Fearless (and pessimistic) political prediction for first-time Texas Republican Congressional candidate: He’ll have a rough time, that guy named John Manlove (but on the other hand, he’s already a mayor!) . . . . . The annual IgNobel awards for curaaa-zee science achievements will be announced in Boston tomorrow night . . . . . This is why you have sophisticated journalist organizations creating those flashy news sites to attract "younger" readers: If a legit story out of United Arab Emirates is about one man’s donkey eating a shopper’s money at a market, you can use the hed, "Ass Chewing Leads to Fight" . . . . . A group of eight Providence, R.I., performance artists created a 750 sq. ft. space in the bowels of the local showcase mall four yrs ago and went undetected until recently, camping there, moving two tons of stuff in and out with relative ease, and video-documenting the whole thing (and yes, the mall does have security guards on the payroll).
Professor Music’s Weird Links
This apparently is the go-to site for those planning nuptials for their little doggies (tuxes, gowns, bridesmaid dresses, veils, and other things that make us thankful that dogs don’t embarrass easily).
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor didn’t mean to leave out Professor Music’s Weird Links yesterday, but in the course of working among three computers, I forgetfully used an old template for NOTW Daily and didn’t notice that PMWL wasn’t on it. Had it been on the template, of course, the entry would have read, "Not today. Maybe tomorrow."
Newsrangers: Todd Yarger, Karl Olson, Paul Di Filippo
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
The latest NY Post tally of rubber-roomed employees of the city Dept. of Education is, gulp, 757. That’s people accused of wrongdoing, who, by their Santa Claus union contracts, are paid their full salaries (from, in these cases, $42k to $93k) while barred from doing a lick of work.
Civilization in Decline
SCOTUS said yesterday, in essence, that if Alabama citizens need to get themselves off, they’ll just have to use their fingers . . . . . It’s finally dawning on firefighters that they’re over-risking their lives to protect the fancy property of rich people who just have to live in the middle of beautiful, expensive fire traps. . . . . A North Carolina school system, mighty impressed with the anti-sexual-harassment presentation by a former teacher, might have wondered how she knew her subject so well (Oh . . that’s why).
The Human Condition Today
Diabolical: The makers of Thomas & Friends toys recalled a million units for having high-lead paint, then sent all the disappointed little tykes substitute toys as goodwill gestures, and, mu-hu-ha-ha-ha, they overleaded the subs, too, mu-hu-ha-ha-ha! . . . . . A Taiwanese judge OK’d a divorce on the ground that the wife had sworn to cut her husband’s wahoo off for infidelity (Bonus: Her name is Huang) . . . . . Shut off your cell phones if you have to go to court, especially if your ringtone is "Oh yeah! . . oh yeah! . . do it to me!" . . . . . A "Be afraid, be very afraid" public warning for Brampton, Ontario, to watch out for this choirboy-looking guy . . . . . Apparently, the state fair of the great presidential-primary (er, caucuses) state of Iowa has an "erotic corndog-eating" contest, which, if they don’t shut it down soon, will be converted into one of those Wolf Blitzer "raise your hand if you" debate questions . . . . . Yr Editor gave you the fist-fighting nuns on Monday, and now, fist-fighting preachers in the F State . . . . . And the Catholic Bishop of Gallup, N.Mex., might be having some trouble, in that he told police that 3 women and a man, wearing masks, came to his home for unknown reasons, and all were between three and four feet tall.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
"Well, what do you think of my naked body?" asked Jeffrey Long of Salisbury, Md., in a call to the CVS photo developer (Bonus: The plan was doomed, anyway, so this mug shot is just piling on the guy).
NOTW Lite
Fearless (and pessimistic) political prediction for first-time Texas Republican Congressional candidate: He’ll have a rough time, that guy named John Manlove (but on the other hand, he’s already a mayor!) . . . . . The annual IgNobel awards for curaaa-zee science achievements will be announced in Boston tomorrow night . . . . . This is why you have sophisticated journalist organizations creating those flashy news sites to attract "younger" readers: If a legit story out of United Arab Emirates is about one man’s donkey eating a shopper’s money at a market, you can use the hed, "Ass Chewing Leads to Fight" . . . . . A group of eight Providence, R.I., performance artists created a 750 sq. ft. space in the bowels of the local showcase mall four yrs ago and went undetected until recently, camping there, moving two tons of stuff in and out with relative ease, and video-documenting the whole thing (and yes, the mall does have security guards on the payroll).
Professor Music’s Weird Links
This apparently is the go-to site for those planning nuptials for their little doggies (tuxes, gowns, bridesmaid dresses, veils, and other things that make us thankful that dogs don’t embarrass easily).
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor didn’t mean to leave out Professor Music’s Weird Links yesterday, but in the course of working among three computers, I forgetfully used an old template for NOTW Daily and didn’t notice that PMWL wasn’t on it. Had it been on the template, of course, the entry would have read, "Not today. Maybe tomorrow."
Newsrangers: Todd Yarger, Karl Olson, Paul Di Filippo
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Tuesday’s 5-Star Special
Here’s your worst-case-scenario: The 50,000-square-ft "Basketball Town" kids’ sports complex in Rancho Cordova, Calif. (near Sacramento) is today a ghost facility, on the verge of shutting down instead of providing recreation for thousands of urchins and their parents, and the sole reason, according to several news reports: the very, very pissed-off quadriplegic Derrick Ross, who (reportedly) refused to allow people to carry him and his ‘chair to and from the festive, joyous (but elevatorless-mezzanine-level) birthday party to which he had been invited, and instead filed yet another Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit, including sort-of "humiliation damages" that the community cannot afford (with the number being tossed out, $100k). A special lift costs about $35k, which someone has offered to donate, but so far, Mr. Ross prefers to remain pissed off.
Civilization in Decline
The school district in Oak Lawn, Ill., is the latest to grapple with mosque-state issues, which run sorta like this: We Muslims need to pray in school, if that’s where we happen to be located when the time comes to pray / School board: No praying in school / Muslims: But Christianity is all over the school, like Christmas decorations and festivals / School board: OK, no more Christmas / Muslims: Wait, that’s not what we meant (Bonus by school: We’ll even stop serving Jell-O in the cafeteria, seein’ as how it’s made with pig tissue) (Oak Lawn parents: Whaa-aaat?) . . . . . We Report, You Decide: A furniture company owner in Mumbai swore that his fresh line of products is to be known as the New Arrival Zone for India, and that’s not a tribute to Mr. Hitler . . . . . Think of how dumb someone has to be to get caught in a Texas public corruption scheme–Texas!–and here are 14 people who just got indicted, including state Rep. Terri Hodge, who the prosecutor says traded away 5 yrs’ under-the-table influence in exchange for a grand total of $32k (Bonus: Her major legislative issue has always been, er, prison reform) . . . . . A regional police force in Britain has officially notified its officers that it’s too dangerous for them to be rescuing any drowning swimmers so don’t ever try.
The Human Condition Today
Ms. Zorina Kroop, 63, told credulous reporters in all seriousness that one of the reasons why she had just won the $60m Mega Millions jackpot was because she believes in the Blue Dot (which is a thing that National Enquirer prints next to the horoscope column, Yr Editor has always assumed, to keep readers with poor ‘scopes from killing themselves) . . . . . A British court found that Ms. Tracy Wenn was, indeed, so upset that her boyfriend ate her specially-prepared meal out of the refrigerator that she, uh, stabbed him in the leg . . . . . And speaking of stabbing, two adult brothers in Chicago stabbed each other into the hospital Sunday night during a celebration (Happy birthday, Mom!) . . . . . Recurring Theme: DWEO (a driver in Houston, Tex., slamming into a bus, thus spilling the driver’s bowl of oatmeal all over the car’s interior) . . . . . How, you ask, is it possible for one driver to zoom right past the toll-road collection box 1,114 times (and thus owe $80,000)?
Your Daily Loser
Wendy Cook, 37, reportedly a prostitute in Schenectady, N.Y., was arrested for doing some of her work at home in front of her two toddlers, and, allegedly, she once snorted a line of coke off of her 8-month-old’s belly in front of a client.
NOTW Lite
NY Mets fans are probably wishin’ their Amazin’s showed as much competitive fire as these California pumpkin farmers, vying to grow this season’s biggest.
Update
Perhaps Kyle Krichbaum (the kid who appears to be as obsessed with vacuum cleaners at age 12 [NOTW M019, 8-19-2007] as Yr Editor was at that age with Annette Funicello) was onto something. Georgia Tech doctoral student Ja Young Sung (specialty: "emotional design") says Roomba (the robotic vacuum cleaner) customers have developed such a fondness for their devices that 21 of 30 he interviewed had names for them, and even others referred to it as "he." A Ga. Tech professor said she’s seen photos of people who dress up their Roombas. "This sort of notion that someone would dress a vacuum cleaner seemed strange. A lot more was going on." But, behold the silver lining: Now that a vacuum cleaner can be thought of as a complex electronic gadget . . . more housework is being done by men!
Good Enough for Government Work
Britain’s Lancashire police has concluded, after an exhaustive, year-long investigation, that Officer Lobo only erroneously (not criminally) submitted expense vouchers over by £90 ($183), and thank goodness, the police didn’t have to spend one shilling more than £500,000 ($1.03 million) to find that out.
Newsrangers: Mark Neunder, Karl Olson, Steve Miller, Emory Kimbrough, Melissa Bean, H.Thompson
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Here’s your worst-case-scenario: The 50,000-square-ft "Basketball Town" kids’ sports complex in Rancho Cordova, Calif. (near Sacramento) is today a ghost facility, on the verge of shutting down instead of providing recreation for thousands of urchins and their parents, and the sole reason, according to several news reports: the very, very pissed-off quadriplegic Derrick Ross, who (reportedly) refused to allow people to carry him and his ‘chair to and from the festive, joyous (but elevatorless-mezzanine-level) birthday party to which he had been invited, and instead filed yet another Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit, including sort-of "humiliation damages" that the community cannot afford (with the number being tossed out, $100k). A special lift costs about $35k, which someone has offered to donate, but so far, Mr. Ross prefers to remain pissed off.
Civilization in Decline
The school district in Oak Lawn, Ill., is the latest to grapple with mosque-state issues, which run sorta like this: We Muslims need to pray in school, if that’s where we happen to be located when the time comes to pray / School board: No praying in school / Muslims: But Christianity is all over the school, like Christmas decorations and festivals / School board: OK, no more Christmas / Muslims: Wait, that’s not what we meant (Bonus by school: We’ll even stop serving Jell-O in the cafeteria, seein’ as how it’s made with pig tissue) (Oak Lawn parents: Whaa-aaat?) . . . . . We Report, You Decide: A furniture company owner in Mumbai swore that his fresh line of products is to be known as the New Arrival Zone for India, and that’s not a tribute to Mr. Hitler . . . . . Think of how dumb someone has to be to get caught in a Texas public corruption scheme–Texas!–and here are 14 people who just got indicted, including state Rep. Terri Hodge, who the prosecutor says traded away 5 yrs’ under-the-table influence in exchange for a grand total of $32k (Bonus: Her major legislative issue has always been, er, prison reform) . . . . . A regional police force in Britain has officially notified its officers that it’s too dangerous for them to be rescuing any drowning swimmers so don’t ever try.
The Human Condition Today
Ms. Zorina Kroop, 63, told credulous reporters in all seriousness that one of the reasons why she had just won the $60m Mega Millions jackpot was because she believes in the Blue Dot (which is a thing that National Enquirer prints next to the horoscope column, Yr Editor has always assumed, to keep readers with poor ‘scopes from killing themselves) . . . . . A British court found that Ms. Tracy Wenn was, indeed, so upset that her boyfriend ate her specially-prepared meal out of the refrigerator that she, uh, stabbed him in the leg . . . . . And speaking of stabbing, two adult brothers in Chicago stabbed each other into the hospital Sunday night during a celebration (Happy birthday, Mom!) . . . . . Recurring Theme: DWEO (a driver in Houston, Tex., slamming into a bus, thus spilling the driver’s bowl of oatmeal all over the car’s interior) . . . . . How, you ask, is it possible for one driver to zoom right past the toll-road collection box 1,114 times (and thus owe $80,000)?
Your Daily Loser
Wendy Cook, 37, reportedly a prostitute in Schenectady, N.Y., was arrested for doing some of her work at home in front of her two toddlers, and, allegedly, she once snorted a line of coke off of her 8-month-old’s belly in front of a client.
NOTW Lite
NY Mets fans are probably wishin’ their Amazin’s showed as much competitive fire as these California pumpkin farmers, vying to grow this season’s biggest.
Update
Perhaps Kyle Krichbaum (the kid who appears to be as obsessed with vacuum cleaners at age 12 [NOTW M019, 8-19-2007] as Yr Editor was at that age with Annette Funicello) was onto something. Georgia Tech doctoral student Ja Young Sung (specialty: "emotional design") says Roomba (the robotic vacuum cleaner) customers have developed such a fondness for their devices that 21 of 30 he interviewed had names for them, and even others referred to it as "he." A Ga. Tech professor said she’s seen photos of people who dress up their Roombas. "This sort of notion that someone would dress a vacuum cleaner seemed strange. A lot more was going on." But, behold the silver lining: Now that a vacuum cleaner can be thought of as a complex electronic gadget . . . more housework is being done by men!
Good Enough for Government Work
Britain’s Lancashire police has concluded, after an exhaustive, year-long investigation, that Officer Lobo only erroneously (not criminally) submitted expense vouchers over by £90 ($183), and thank goodness, the police didn’t have to spend one shilling more than £500,000 ($1.03 million) to find that out.
Newsrangers: Mark Neunder, Karl Olson, Steve Miller, Emory Kimbrough, Melissa Bean, H.Thompson
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Monday’s 5-Star Special
Australian researchers, tackling the difficult problem of their Brahmen cattle’s meat being tougher than British cattle’s, and vexed by the high cost of artificial insemination, now propose just to remove stem cells from the gonads of superior-stud British bulls and transplant them into those of Brahmen (no matter how much that hurts the feelings of the Aussie bulls).
Civilization in Decline
Gen. Petraeus’s daily salary in Iraq works out to a little less than half what the head of a 34-man Blackwater security team in Iraq makes a day (because of layers of subcontracting, with each layer getting its own profit), reports the Washington Post] [link from Slate.com] . . . . . The sheriff in Orlando announced that the department has purchased 14, er, elephant guns . . . . . It may be safer than eating pufferfish, but travel on African airlines is still, uh, 18x more dangerous than on other airlines, and that stat only counts airplanes with more than 15 seats [Wall Street Journal, paid-subscription only, until Rupert makes up his mind].
The Human Condition Today
Habitat for Humanity in Tyler, Tex., still says Derrick Hodges is on schedule to get a house he signed up for, even though in the interim the cops have become pretty sure he’s a serial bank-robber . . . . . The disgraced Clinton fund-raiser Norman Hsu now says that the 1992 no-contest plea he made (which he ran out on and stayed on the lam until this year) should be tossed out, seein’ as how his judge retired 7 yrs ago . . . . Video journalist in India, ahead of the curve: It’s a slow news day, he said to the despondent man, but if you kill yourself on camera, we can both be winners! (response: "Well . . OK") . . . . . Enough said: Fist-fighting nuns! . . . . . An Ohio court rejected Adam Smith’s murder appeal; Smith had stuck to his story that, yes, OK, he stabbed his wife 36 times, but that was only because he was disoriented after panicking when he discovered her already-dead, suicided body.
NOTW Lite
Recurring Theme: A home for the disabled in Schilde, Belgium, is the latest in Europe to declare that its residents have the human right to get it on and that if they don’t have partners, partners will be provided for them (although the home will have to seek special funding since "sex" is not an approved remedy under the country’s health insurance).
Professor Music’s Weird Links
The ever-handy website of Texas politician Larry Kilgore doesn’t just tell you where he stands on a number of issues, such as murder and child molestation (he’s against them), but tells you specifically why they’re bad, i.e., child-mo is bad not because it ruins the kid’s innocence and scars her or him for life, but, well, because Exodus 21:15-16 and Deuteronomy 22:25-27 and 24-7 say so. And, for example, pornography, public nudity, and transvestism require flogging, but only a max of 40 lashes (although the 40 might apply only to pre-capital punishment for murder, 1 Peter 2:20, and not ordinary-crime flogging). Quite useful.
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor relies a lot on BBC News, whose reputation for wearing its political biases in its reporting is growing slightly worse each year, but now BBC is actually admitting to fixing four supposedly straight-up (and inconsequential) website contests . . . . . Not news, but highly recommended reading: How to tell whether you need to reduce not your "carbon footprint," but your "ass[hoal] footprint," e.g., "Before you go out bicycling, do you first change into iridescent spandex shorts and a skintight spandex shirt with a gaudy pattern recalling a 1990s screen saver?" [VanityFair.com, link via Fark.com] . . . . . Ex-judge Florentino Floro [NOTW Daily, 9-17-2007, 9-19-2007] has now added Yr Editor to his Facebook friends list [Ed.: Can someone help me out here . . Nothing bad’ll happen to me just by being added to a friends list, will there?] . . . . . And by the way, NOTW Daily might be thin and a little sporadic this week because Yr Editor is in Phase II of the home repair project started in August; if all goes well, Yr Editor will not be repairing anything else, ever, no matter what, ever, until at least the year 2015.
Newsrangers: Emory Kimbrough, Joe Littrell, Dave Null, Ginger Katz, Paul Music, Rob Snyder, Tom Barker.
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Australian researchers, tackling the difficult problem of their Brahmen cattle’s meat being tougher than British cattle’s, and vexed by the high cost of artificial insemination, now propose just to remove stem cells from the gonads of superior-stud British bulls and transplant them into those of Brahmen (no matter how much that hurts the feelings of the Aussie bulls).
Civilization in Decline
Gen. Petraeus’s daily salary in Iraq works out to a little less than half what the head of a 34-man Blackwater security team in Iraq makes a day (because of layers of subcontracting, with each layer getting its own profit), reports the Washington Post] [link from Slate.com] . . . . . The sheriff in Orlando announced that the department has purchased 14, er, elephant guns . . . . . It may be safer than eating pufferfish, but travel on African airlines is still, uh, 18x more dangerous than on other airlines, and that stat only counts airplanes with more than 15 seats [Wall Street Journal, paid-subscription only, until Rupert makes up his mind].
The Human Condition Today
Habitat for Humanity in Tyler, Tex., still says Derrick Hodges is on schedule to get a house he signed up for, even though in the interim the cops have become pretty sure he’s a serial bank-robber . . . . . The disgraced Clinton fund-raiser Norman Hsu now says that the 1992 no-contest plea he made (which he ran out on and stayed on the lam until this year) should be tossed out, seein’ as how his judge retired 7 yrs ago . . . . Video journalist in India, ahead of the curve: It’s a slow news day, he said to the despondent man, but if you kill yourself on camera, we can both be winners! (response: "Well . . OK") . . . . . Enough said: Fist-fighting nuns! . . . . . An Ohio court rejected Adam Smith’s murder appeal; Smith had stuck to his story that, yes, OK, he stabbed his wife 36 times, but that was only because he was disoriented after panicking when he discovered her already-dead, suicided body.
NOTW Lite
Recurring Theme: A home for the disabled in Schilde, Belgium, is the latest in Europe to declare that its residents have the human right to get it on and that if they don’t have partners, partners will be provided for them (although the home will have to seek special funding since "sex" is not an approved remedy under the country’s health insurance).
Professor Music’s Weird Links
The ever-handy website of Texas politician Larry Kilgore doesn’t just tell you where he stands on a number of issues, such as murder and child molestation (he’s against them), but tells you specifically why they’re bad, i.e., child-mo is bad not because it ruins the kid’s innocence and scars her or him for life, but, well, because Exodus 21:15-16 and Deuteronomy 22:25-27 and 24-7 say so. And, for example, pornography, public nudity, and transvestism require flogging, but only a max of 40 lashes (although the 40 might apply only to pre-capital punishment for murder, 1 Peter 2:20, and not ordinary-crime flogging). Quite useful.
NOTW, The Blog
Yr Editor relies a lot on BBC News, whose reputation for wearing its political biases in its reporting is growing slightly worse each year, but now BBC is actually admitting to fixing four supposedly straight-up (and inconsequential) website contests . . . . . Not news, but highly recommended reading: How to tell whether you need to reduce not your "carbon footprint," but your "ass[hoal] footprint," e.g., "Before you go out bicycling, do you first change into iridescent spandex shorts and a skintight spandex shirt with a gaudy pattern recalling a 1990s screen saver?" [VanityFair.com, link via Fark.com] . . . . . Ex-judge Florentino Floro [NOTW Daily, 9-17-2007, 9-19-2007] has now added Yr Editor to his Facebook friends list [Ed.: Can someone help me out here . . Nothing bad’ll happen to me just by being added to a friends list, will there?] . . . . . And by the way, NOTW Daily might be thin and a little sporadic this week because Yr Editor is in Phase II of the home repair project started in August; if all goes well, Yr Editor will not be repairing anything else, ever, no matter what, ever, until at least the year 2015.
Newsrangers: Emory Kimbrough, Joe Littrell, Dave Null, Ginger Katz, Paul Music, Rob Snyder, Tom Barker.
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Saturday’s 5-Star Special
At the Los Angeles County Fair, 30 obsessed entrants vied in this year’s competitive table-setting. "Tablescaping" requires a combination of artistry and obedience to the Emily Post-type rules of dinnerware placement, e.g., if you’re setting a James Bond-scenario table, the spoons can’t be further up than the plate, of course, and the tablecloth must be perfectly aligned on the table, but a properly-placed cigarette lighter and handgun add to the score. Judges say they are considering improvements for next year, such as asking whether a diner might actually enjoy eating food off of the setting.
Civilization in Decline
A Los Angeles mother wanted her stillborn baby back from the coroner after an autopsy but was informed that state law allows, if the "baby" is less than 20 weeks old or under 400g, to be tossed out as "bio-waste" . . . . . Carlton Turner Jr, 28, is one of the two Texas death-row inmates whose executions were held up by this week’s SCOTUS lethal-cocktail review, and Turner has been adamant about that all along because he’s worried that the 3-drug regimen will be painful (whereas, presumably, the deaths of his mom and dad had come quickly upon being shot by Carlton) . . . . . If you’re a U.S. media consultant, and you want to take the gloves off, apparently you go work for a parliamentary leader up for re-election in Ukraine, where incumbent prime minister Viktor Yanukovych’s consultants seem to have OK’d his calling his chief rival, Ms. Yuliya Tymoshenko, a "cow on an ice rink" . . . . . The next battleground over "abstinence" education: Can you reduce young people’s binge-drinking if you teach them to drink at home in moderation?
The Human Condition Today
Nationally-known (they say) cardiologist Maurice Buchbinder lost his Scripps Memorial hospital (San Diego, Calif.) privileges after he smacked around a combative patient, post-op, in August (Bonus: He even gave him a Stooges move, by grabbing his nose and twisting hard) . . . . . Über small-town-white-guy Ben Daly, 18, of Leakey, Tex. (head west from San Antonio, through Hondo, and hang the first right, that is, if you don’t want to go through Uvalde) is defiant that Leakey High School can’t make him cut his hair, because he’s a Rasta! . . . . . Her younger brothers found an 85-yr-old British woman who had been wrongly institutionalized for, er, 70 yrs, but it turns out now that the first 45 yrs were apparently OK with their mom (who died 25 yrs ago) . . . . . A 36-yr-old man died of blood-poisoning, two weeks after being bitten by his family’s pet rat, Roger . . . . . Scottish pro golfer Marc Warren was cut pretty badly in his Irish hotel room between rounds when he took a swing with a 5-iron, and his backswing shattered a glass chandelier.
Your Daily Loser
Free-lance Minneapolis tree-trimming know-it-all Will Samson, 36, is in jail on $50k bail; he happened by and volunteered some advice to two pro tree-trimmers and then went ballistic (knife, baseball bat) when they failed to take it.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Errorores
Pedro Zapeta needed 11 yrs to save up his $59k (not two), which actually makes his story (from yesterday’s NOTW Daily) sadder. Thanks to eagle-eyed readers. I quickly corrected the NOTW Daily web page, but the e-mail readers get only one shot at my copy, and if I make subsequent changes, they won’t know about them unless they visit the web page. I give e-mail readers only one shot because I’m guessing that I’d make more people unhappy, than happy, if I sent two or three versions of the same daily post to reflect changes or errors in the text. My promise remains: If you sign up for the e-mail, I’ll bother you only once a day.
Newsrangers: Ginger Katz
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
At the Los Angeles County Fair, 30 obsessed entrants vied in this year’s competitive table-setting. "Tablescaping" requires a combination of artistry and obedience to the Emily Post-type rules of dinnerware placement, e.g., if you’re setting a James Bond-scenario table, the spoons can’t be further up than the plate, of course, and the tablecloth must be perfectly aligned on the table, but a properly-placed cigarette lighter and handgun add to the score. Judges say they are considering improvements for next year, such as asking whether a diner might actually enjoy eating food off of the setting.
Civilization in Decline
A Los Angeles mother wanted her stillborn baby back from the coroner after an autopsy but was informed that state law allows, if the "baby" is less than 20 weeks old or under 400g, to be tossed out as "bio-waste" . . . . . Carlton Turner Jr, 28, is one of the two Texas death-row inmates whose executions were held up by this week’s SCOTUS lethal-cocktail review, and Turner has been adamant about that all along because he’s worried that the 3-drug regimen will be painful (whereas, presumably, the deaths of his mom and dad had come quickly upon being shot by Carlton) . . . . . If you’re a U.S. media consultant, and you want to take the gloves off, apparently you go work for a parliamentary leader up for re-election in Ukraine, where incumbent prime minister Viktor Yanukovych’s consultants seem to have OK’d his calling his chief rival, Ms. Yuliya Tymoshenko, a "cow on an ice rink" . . . . . The next battleground over "abstinence" education: Can you reduce young people’s binge-drinking if you teach them to drink at home in moderation?
The Human Condition Today
Nationally-known (they say) cardiologist Maurice Buchbinder lost his Scripps Memorial hospital (San Diego, Calif.) privileges after he smacked around a combative patient, post-op, in August (Bonus: He even gave him a Stooges move, by grabbing his nose and twisting hard) . . . . . Über small-town-white-guy Ben Daly, 18, of Leakey, Tex. (head west from San Antonio, through Hondo, and hang the first right, that is, if you don’t want to go through Uvalde) is defiant that Leakey High School can’t make him cut his hair, because he’s a Rasta! . . . . . Her younger brothers found an 85-yr-old British woman who had been wrongly institutionalized for, er, 70 yrs, but it turns out now that the first 45 yrs were apparently OK with their mom (who died 25 yrs ago) . . . . . A 36-yr-old man died of blood-poisoning, two weeks after being bitten by his family’s pet rat, Roger . . . . . Scottish pro golfer Marc Warren was cut pretty badly in his Irish hotel room between rounds when he took a swing with a 5-iron, and his backswing shattered a glass chandelier.
Your Daily Loser
Free-lance Minneapolis tree-trimming know-it-all Will Samson, 36, is in jail on $50k bail; he happened by and volunteered some advice to two pro tree-trimmers and then went ballistic (knife, baseball bat) when they failed to take it.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Errorores
Pedro Zapeta needed 11 yrs to save up his $59k (not two), which actually makes his story (from yesterday’s NOTW Daily) sadder. Thanks to eagle-eyed readers. I quickly corrected the NOTW Daily web page, but the e-mail readers get only one shot at my copy, and if I make subsequent changes, they won’t know about them unless they visit the web page. I give e-mail readers only one shot because I’m guessing that I’d make more people unhappy, than happy, if I sent two or three versions of the same daily post to reflect changes or errors in the text. My promise remains: If you sign up for the e-mail, I’ll bother you only once a day.
Newsrangers: Ginger Katz
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
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