Civilization in Decline
The UK gov’t introduced a popular bill to de-stigmatize designer babies, even if created expressly for their "spare parts" (as long as the purpose is not elective gender-selection) . . . . . A price war in London means beer sells for less than bottled water . . . . . British-born Samina Malik, 23, a shop assistant at Heathrow, was convicted for writing Islamic terrorist poetry (She apparently has a thing for beheadings: "Tilt the fool’s head to its left / Saw the knife back and forth / No doubt that the punk will twitch and scream / But ignore the donkey’s ass / And continue to slice back and forth") . . . . . It costs $275 (nonrefundable) to appeal a $100 traffic ticket in Massachusetts . . . . . So far this yr, the federal gov’t has run background checks on 25m people, most not for anti-terrorism.
The Human Condition Today
A few of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s fans remind us this week of his passing 50 yrs ago, even though his main contribution has never left the fringe of science: He thought that releasing orgasmic energy was the key life force . . . . . The mayor of Chepstow, Wales, is all for Remembrance Day (Britain’s Veterans’ Day) but wants the full-dress military marchers to leave their "awful" guns at home . . . . . Paul Durant, on trial for murder in Spain, said his mission in life was to kill (and eat) pedophiles . . . . . Just in time for the story in this week’s NOTW (M031, 11-11-2007) of motorists stuck on railroad tracks, unable to move or leave the car, at the precise moment a train is coming: Yet another! (Mineola, N.Y.) . . . . . An F State man, 77 and apparently headed south quickly, bicycled to school to pick up his grandson, and had pedaled all the way back home before his wife informed him that he had the wrong kid . . . . . The South Dakota Supreme Court freed Michael James Plenty Horse from his indecent exposure conviction on the ground that Mr. Plenty Horse barely had his pants down at all when he was caught lying on top of a female mannequin, undulating his hips (i.e., nothing was "exposed") . . . . . What looks so far like a case of Third World’ers caught up in one of those supernatural hysteria epidemics, in this case, "twitching," by a dozen schoolkids, but it was near Roanoke, Va. . . . . . Too Good 2 B True: Fortune magazine reports that a software team is part-way done on a filter that blocks online comments that are stupid (but is hung up on what sounds stupid but is actually ironic or sarcastic, which may actually be brilliant) (but maybe not) . . . . . In Thailand, a free-lance security guard watchdog: He roams the streets, and if he finds a guard asleep, he beats the crap out of him (eight dead so far) . . . . . From Sweden, a Muhammad-blaspheming cartoon is being turned into . . a musical! . . . . . And TheSmokingGun.com’s latest mugshot gallery is of 14 people who have made chillingly horrible fashion decisions about their hair.
Your Daily Loser
Near Seattle, a 66-yr-old man was working on his Lincoln Continental, trying to take a wheel off, but was confounded by one stubborn lug nut. Solution: 12-gauge shotgun blast. Unintended consequence: various ricochets of buckshot. Result: hospital, with serious injuries to both legs, on up to his chin.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
An estimated 15,000 obscene phone calls (to women, on the subject of underwear) have now sent Paul Kavanagh to jail for 2½ yrs..
NOTW Lite
Final tally for a city council seat in Winchester, Ind.: Bill Monroe, the incumbent, 111; Tom Sells, 112. Among those who neglected to vote: Mrs. Bill Monroe.
Good Enough for Gov’t Work (Special District of Calamity Edition)
The District of Calamity needs to move its government operations to some other city that’s not serviced by the Washington Post, because last week, once again, Post investigations blistered ‘em for some inexcusable embarrassments that cost millions of dollars and made some struggling people’s lives significantly worse, and as usual, it wasn’t so much the initial miscreants (every organization has ‘em) but the almost-patented D.C. bureaucratic ethical fog that keeps the miscreants out of plain sight. For so many offices, there’s a sense of employee entitlement to raid the buffet (and if anyone finds out, it’ll make everybody look bad, so Shhhhh!). The gov’t was already reeling last week from that $20m (since revised upward) tax-refund scam operated with impunity for three yrs before the feds busted in [NOTW Daily, 11-8-2007], but then on Friday, the Post turned over another rock to find yet another underground pit teeming with worms of corruption: student activity funds at District of Columbia schools. Basically, concluded the Post investigators, if you find even one of the 147 schools’ funds being managed properly, it’s a mistake, and you’ve missed something. They’ve all been misused, for years (and some actually "looted"), by D.C. school employees, at least some of whom in all honesty thought that the funds were there for employee recreation instead of for sponsoring student organizations and field trips and student computer maintenance, etc. Here’s the secret: Keep no records! That way, any auditors (or federal prosecutors) that come upon these train wrecks will have to punt because there’d be no smoking guns that they could show the school board or a jury. (But, wait, D.C. law requires that funds get reported periodically so someone up the chain of command will notice, sooner or later, that reports aren’t coming, right? Answer: This is the District of Columbia gov’t; they never notice. And if someone does notice, it’s not long before he faces the heartbreaking realization that no one else cares about exposing the wrongdoing. Nearly 25 percent of all people listed as "business managers" of their schools had, themselves, bankruptcies, foreclosures, lawsuits, etc., on their records. The funds are mostly in the tens of thousands of dollars, but some are huge: Wilson High School’s is $700k. A couple of the blatant abusers were tracked down by the Post, which was easy to do because they’re still on the job, on "probation," and richly defended by their current boss. D.C. schools: worst performing, most expensive, highest administrative-to-instruction ratio.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Emory Kimbrough, Ginger Katz, Scott Langill, Casey Burns, Karl Olson, Edward Ingram, Gary Goldberg, John Witherspoon, Perry Levin, Joe Littrell, Bob Pert
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Civilization in Decline
Woo! "Fires During Surgeries a Bigger Risk Than Thought" reported the Boston Globe, especially in Pennsylvania (28 per yr) and Massachusetts (at least 6 per yr), with the main cause, apparently, those cauterizing thingees, used too soon after alcohol-swabbing . . . . . The mayor-elect of Lorain, Ohio (pop. 68,000) announced that the new temporary director overseeing the police department would be, er, a 21-yr-old Heidelberg College student now interning at city hall . . . . . Japanese researchers said they genetically removed the neurological connector between a mouse’s nose and brain that causes it to get scared when it smells a cat [Ed.: Undisclosed, though, is how tedious this research must be, in that the subjects obviously get quickly eaten] . . . . . No more camel beauty contests in Saudi Arabia, as they've been fatwa-ed out, sorta because they inspire pride of ownership, when camels are really just tools from God.
The Human Condition Today
Yr Editor has had it wrong, thinking that a Pentecostal’s getting bitten handling snakes was a sign from God, and sayonara, but, no, it turns out from this lawsuit that the hospital has a duty to override God’s will and save their pious selves . . . . . I also had it wrong that cults recruit members by wearing them down, because apparently a door-to-door magazine-sales cult was able to convince this 21-yr-old woman in Anchorage, Alaska, to join them within minutes, and now she tells mom she’s as happy as she can be, in Bakersfield, Calif. . . . . . At a St. Louis Cardinals’ home game, with their scoreboard that flashes fans’ text messages, someone wrote A.B. has an S.T.D., and one Miss A.B. was harassed in school over it, so she’s suing the prankster, wait, no, she’s not; she’s suing the Cardinals. . . . . . In reporting one of those instantaneous wood-chipper deaths, the L.A. Times found that 31 people died disrespecting wood chippers between 1992 and 2002.
Your Daily Loser
A 45-yr-old convicted molester of his 5-yr-old daughter in Edmonton, Alberta, did his own version of penitence in a letter to her, apologizing for not saying no when she kept initiating things in the bedroom and the shower, demanding answers to questions like about women’s orgasms. "I didn’t want you hating daddy because I wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to know."
NOTW Lite
Oops! Mom hired a dance-a-gram service to serenade her son, 16, during his high school drama class, as good clean fun, but through a "booking error," the service sent a stripper instead of the requested gorilla; the teacher stood by stewing for a couple of minutes, but then, "That’s it, That’s enough."
Updates
Wesley Snipes goes on trial for tax fraud in January (he fell for one of those airheaded income tax schemes and then also failed to file for 6 straight yrs [NOTW Daily, 10-20-2006]), in one of the more cracker-filled counties in the F State, but it’s no "hotbed of Klan activity" as his lawyer claimed in trying to get the trial moved to New York City . . . . . Keeping you up to date on ovulation research: A Canadian team found that the sexiness of a woman’s walk does not indicate her state of fertility, which is fair enough, but the team did this by "dress[ing] female volunteers in suits which had light reflectors placed on the joints and limbs and filmed them walking in order to analyze their gait," wrote Agence France Presse. (This is an "update" because of a previous story on judging sexy walks [NOTW M027, 10-14-2007] and because of this recent research, indicating that lap dancers get wilder at that time of the month.)
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Here’s a report (with photos) on a Russian guy with pretty severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, manifested by his need to jot down his extensive thoughts about something or other, using any flat surface he encounters.
NOTW, The Blog
(1) In September, an F State parent wrote to the local sheriff that students were huffing a concoction of fermented doo-doo and pee-pee to get high, and the sheriff went into panic mode and issued an advisory, and the story made the wires. Turns out that some meth-deprived Third Worlders do actually huff that stuff (NOTW has reported it) and have given it a name ("jenkem"), but Snopes.com doubts that it’s coming to America, except in the mind of that F State parent. (2) Errorores: Apparently the Jerusalem Post got some things wrong with the story Yr Editor used yesterday on the poor translations. A comment on the site says (a) the faulting translation program was "Babylon," not "Babelfish.com"; (b) it was not a delegation of journalists headed for the Netherlands but just one; and (c) some Hebrew was miswritten, like, y’know, it was reported as ishkabbbl when it was really lktoosnibr, so something like that. [Go to the link, above, and read the Talkbacks at the end of the story] (3) Reminder: Saturday posts will be returning soon but just not in the next three Saturdays.
Newsrangers: Ginger Katz, Steve Passen, Karl Olson, Joe Littrell. Paul Di Filippo, Michelle Jensen, Paul Music
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Woo! "Fires During Surgeries a Bigger Risk Than Thought" reported the Boston Globe, especially in Pennsylvania (28 per yr) and Massachusetts (at least 6 per yr), with the main cause, apparently, those cauterizing thingees, used too soon after alcohol-swabbing . . . . . The mayor-elect of Lorain, Ohio (pop. 68,000) announced that the new temporary director overseeing the police department would be, er, a 21-yr-old Heidelberg College student now interning at city hall . . . . . Japanese researchers said they genetically removed the neurological connector between a mouse’s nose and brain that causes it to get scared when it smells a cat [Ed.: Undisclosed, though, is how tedious this research must be, in that the subjects obviously get quickly eaten] . . . . . No more camel beauty contests in Saudi Arabia, as they've been fatwa-ed out, sorta because they inspire pride of ownership, when camels are really just tools from God.
The Human Condition Today
Yr Editor has had it wrong, thinking that a Pentecostal’s getting bitten handling snakes was a sign from God, and sayonara, but, no, it turns out from this lawsuit that the hospital has a duty to override God’s will and save their pious selves . . . . . I also had it wrong that cults recruit members by wearing them down, because apparently a door-to-door magazine-sales cult was able to convince this 21-yr-old woman in Anchorage, Alaska, to join them within minutes, and now she tells mom she’s as happy as she can be, in Bakersfield, Calif. . . . . . At a St. Louis Cardinals’ home game, with their scoreboard that flashes fans’ text messages, someone wrote A.B. has an S.T.D., and one Miss A.B. was harassed in school over it, so she’s suing the prankster, wait, no, she’s not; she’s suing the Cardinals. . . . . . In reporting one of those instantaneous wood-chipper deaths, the L.A. Times found that 31 people died disrespecting wood chippers between 1992 and 2002.
Your Daily Loser
A 45-yr-old convicted molester of his 5-yr-old daughter in Edmonton, Alberta, did his own version of penitence in a letter to her, apologizing for not saying no when she kept initiating things in the bedroom and the shower, demanding answers to questions like about women’s orgasms. "I didn’t want you hating daddy because I wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to know."
NOTW Lite
Oops! Mom hired a dance-a-gram service to serenade her son, 16, during his high school drama class, as good clean fun, but through a "booking error," the service sent a stripper instead of the requested gorilla; the teacher stood by stewing for a couple of minutes, but then, "That’s it, That’s enough."
Updates
Wesley Snipes goes on trial for tax fraud in January (he fell for one of those airheaded income tax schemes and then also failed to file for 6 straight yrs [NOTW Daily, 10-20-2006]), in one of the more cracker-filled counties in the F State, but it’s no "hotbed of Klan activity" as his lawyer claimed in trying to get the trial moved to New York City . . . . . Keeping you up to date on ovulation research: A Canadian team found that the sexiness of a woman’s walk does not indicate her state of fertility, which is fair enough, but the team did this by "dress[ing] female volunteers in suits which had light reflectors placed on the joints and limbs and filmed them walking in order to analyze their gait," wrote Agence France Presse. (This is an "update" because of a previous story on judging sexy walks [NOTW M027, 10-14-2007] and because of this recent research, indicating that lap dancers get wilder at that time of the month.)
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Here’s a report (with photos) on a Russian guy with pretty severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, manifested by his need to jot down his extensive thoughts about something or other, using any flat surface he encounters.
NOTW, The Blog
(1) In September, an F State parent wrote to the local sheriff that students were huffing a concoction of fermented doo-doo and pee-pee to get high, and the sheriff went into panic mode and issued an advisory, and the story made the wires. Turns out that some meth-deprived Third Worlders do actually huff that stuff (NOTW has reported it) and have given it a name ("jenkem"), but Snopes.com doubts that it’s coming to America, except in the mind of that F State parent. (2) Errorores: Apparently the Jerusalem Post got some things wrong with the story Yr Editor used yesterday on the poor translations. A comment on the site says (a) the faulting translation program was "Babylon," not "Babelfish.com"; (b) it was not a delegation of journalists headed for the Netherlands but just one; and (c) some Hebrew was miswritten, like, y’know, it was reported as ishkabbbl when it was really lktoosnibr, so something like that. [Go to the link, above, and read the Talkbacks at the end of the story] (3) Reminder: Saturday posts will be returning soon but just not in the next three Saturdays.
Newsrangers: Ginger Katz, Steve Passen, Karl Olson, Joe Littrell. Paul Di Filippo, Michelle Jensen, Paul Music
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Civilization in Decline
Found in the briefcase this week of the new Sicilian Mafia capo di tutti capo, probably addressed indirectly to the young punk recruits they’re letting in these days, was a list of Commandments on how to be honorable thugs, like, no hitting on friends’ wives and stay out of bars . . . . . Two mid-level Washington, D.C., city tax department workers were charged with stealing $16m with bogus tax refunds over at least a three-yr period [Ed.: There are bad apples everywhere, but only in the fog of the District of Calamity bureaucracy can you do this continuously for three years, and no one notice].
The Human Condition Today
An Israeli journalists’ organization, anticipating a working visit to the Netherlands, e-mailed a list of questions it expected to ask officials, but left their translation entirely in the hands of the robo-translator Babelfish.com, with ensuing hilarity (e.g., "The mother of your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian, and on relational Israel Holland") . . . . . Not only is Alexander Smith, 46, unconcerned about his carbon footprint, he doesn’t even mind driving down the road in North Carolina and dumping his old washing machine, and then his dryer, and then his stove, and then another stove, and then a freezer (and that's "felony littering") . . . . . A UK lottery game was abruptly pulled from the market because of customer, er, unsophistication (i.e., a lot of people had the damnedest time deciding whether minus-6 degrees is warmer or colder than minus-8) [via ScienceBlogs.com] . . . . . Catholic priest Fr. David Ajernian was arrested in New York City for an ongoing celebrity stalking of, er, Conan O’Brien ("I want a public confession [he wrote Conan] before I ever consider giving you absolution" [and absolution for what, he didn’t say]).
Your Daily Loser
Brian Poulin, 35, was arrested after calling 911 in Hebron, Conn., several times and asking seriously if the police could please bring him some beer.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
A UK driving instructor was charged with fondling several female students, but his perfectly good, don’t-we-all-do-this explanation for showing one girl the photograph of his penis: Well, I had a new camera and I wanted to test the close-up lens. (Bonus: Who needs Doc Johnson when you've got a carrot?)
NOTW Lite
And the deer rested in peace (recurring theme): Two cars collided with a deer on a Wisconsin road at about the same time, but then careened off and hit each other, causing one of the cars to burst into flames . . . . . Since It Could Theoretically Happen, It Did: In Cary, N.C., a woman gave birth to twins early Sunday morning, with one dropping at 1:32 a.m. and the other 34 minutes later, at, er, well, 1:06 a.m.
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
It’s not so crucial that the terrorist watch list is overbloated because (the defense goes) you can just write in and have your name taken off . . well, except for those 15,000 people, most of whom wrote in months ago begging Homeland Security’s pardon.
Updates
A downside of term limits: If your representatives can’t return to the state house, what will they do with their free time? Until last yr, Ted Klaudt was a wide-bodied South Dakota legislator, and now here he is, convicted of sexually assaulting two teenage girls by convincing them that his probing fingers were giving them a medical exam to ascertain their fitness to sell their eggs for the big bucks [NOTW Daily, 5-21-2007] . . . . . And Florida’s own toe-tapper, state Rep. Bob Allen of Titusville, went on trial this week, with his defense now focusing on whether money was ever mentioned in that public restroom (For a look at Allen’s evolving explanations, see NOTW Daily, 7-13-2007, 8-4-2007, 8-24-2007) . . . . . The Philadelphia judge who [reasonably, in Yr Editor’s view, although not in the view of many other people] downgraded a possible rape of a prostitute to "armed robbery"/"theft of services" [NOTW Daily, 10-17-2007] was re-elected to the bench this week.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
NOTW, The Blog
London’s Daily Mail, always toeing the line of appeal to the salacious, crossed it in Thursday’s online edition: detailed instructions on how a woman is supposed to weigh her breast (for bra-fitting purposes, of course), accompanied by definite NSFW photos.
Newsrangers: Wendy Palm, Zoe Boult, Emory Kimbrough, Judy Kane, Joe Littrell, Scott Langill, Valerie Carr, Steve Miller, Karl Olson
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Found in the briefcase this week of the new Sicilian Mafia capo di tutti capo, probably addressed indirectly to the young punk recruits they’re letting in these days, was a list of Commandments on how to be honorable thugs, like, no hitting on friends’ wives and stay out of bars . . . . . Two mid-level Washington, D.C., city tax department workers were charged with stealing $16m with bogus tax refunds over at least a three-yr period [Ed.: There are bad apples everywhere, but only in the fog of the District of Calamity bureaucracy can you do this continuously for three years, and no one notice].
The Human Condition Today
An Israeli journalists’ organization, anticipating a working visit to the Netherlands, e-mailed a list of questions it expected to ask officials, but left their translation entirely in the hands of the robo-translator Babelfish.com, with ensuing hilarity (e.g., "The mother of your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian, and on relational Israel Holland") . . . . . Not only is Alexander Smith, 46, unconcerned about his carbon footprint, he doesn’t even mind driving down the road in North Carolina and dumping his old washing machine, and then his dryer, and then his stove, and then another stove, and then a freezer (and that's "felony littering") . . . . . A UK lottery game was abruptly pulled from the market because of customer, er, unsophistication (i.e., a lot of people had the damnedest time deciding whether minus-6 degrees is warmer or colder than minus-8) [via ScienceBlogs.com] . . . . . Catholic priest Fr. David Ajernian was arrested in New York City for an ongoing celebrity stalking of, er, Conan O’Brien ("I want a public confession [he wrote Conan] before I ever consider giving you absolution" [and absolution for what, he didn’t say]).
Your Daily Loser
Brian Poulin, 35, was arrested after calling 911 in Hebron, Conn., several times and asking seriously if the police could please bring him some beer.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
A UK driving instructor was charged with fondling several female students, but his perfectly good, don’t-we-all-do-this explanation for showing one girl the photograph of his penis: Well, I had a new camera and I wanted to test the close-up lens. (Bonus: Who needs Doc Johnson when you've got a carrot?)
NOTW Lite
And the deer rested in peace (recurring theme): Two cars collided with a deer on a Wisconsin road at about the same time, but then careened off and hit each other, causing one of the cars to burst into flames . . . . . Since It Could Theoretically Happen, It Did: In Cary, N.C., a woman gave birth to twins early Sunday morning, with one dropping at 1:32 a.m. and the other 34 minutes later, at, er, well, 1:06 a.m.
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
It’s not so crucial that the terrorist watch list is overbloated because (the defense goes) you can just write in and have your name taken off . . well, except for those 15,000 people, most of whom wrote in months ago begging Homeland Security’s pardon.
Updates
A downside of term limits: If your representatives can’t return to the state house, what will they do with their free time? Until last yr, Ted Klaudt was a wide-bodied South Dakota legislator, and now here he is, convicted of sexually assaulting two teenage girls by convincing them that his probing fingers were giving them a medical exam to ascertain their fitness to sell their eggs for the big bucks [NOTW Daily, 5-21-2007] . . . . . And Florida’s own toe-tapper, state Rep. Bob Allen of Titusville, went on trial this week, with his defense now focusing on whether money was ever mentioned in that public restroom (For a look at Allen’s evolving explanations, see NOTW Daily, 7-13-2007, 8-4-2007, 8-24-2007) . . . . . The Philadelphia judge who [reasonably, in Yr Editor’s view, although not in the view of many other people] downgraded a possible rape of a prostitute to "armed robbery"/"theft of services" [NOTW Daily, 10-17-2007] was re-elected to the bench this week.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
NOTW, The Blog
London’s Daily Mail, always toeing the line of appeal to the salacious, crossed it in Thursday’s online edition: detailed instructions on how a woman is supposed to weigh her breast (for bra-fitting purposes, of course), accompanied by definite NSFW photos.
Newsrangers: Wendy Palm, Zoe Boult, Emory Kimbrough, Judy Kane, Joe Littrell, Scott Langill, Valerie Carr, Steve Miller, Karl Olson
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Wednesday’s 5-Star Special
[Ed.: Sorry, this is personal; you don’t need to revere this story as I do, but please bear with me; I’m helpless when I see these.] Charles Everson Jr. and his wife Linda were riding along near Manson, Wash., on Sunday when a flying 600-lb. cow landed on their minivan. (They were shaken up but not injured.) [Ed.: That’s it. That’s the story. Uh, well, how many of you have insurance against flying cows? If you’re a person of faith, did you pray this morning to be spared from flying cows? What could be more ominous, to test our resiliency as a presage to the Apocalypse, than to send in a wave of flying cows? I rest my case.]
Civilization in Decline
Lead in Chinese toys is for amateurs; a Chinese bead set toy (sold in Australia) contains a chemical that the body metabolizes into, er, the date-rape drug (GHB) . . . . . Oops! A convicted rapist was temporarily freed in 1991 after 2 months of a 20-yr-sentence, but Massachusetts then lost track of him until recently (including not realizing who he was while investigating two domestic abuse complaints several yrs ago), and now he argues that his "right," to serve an uninterrupted sentence, has been violated and that he should go free (Bonus: He won) . . . . . A Mascoutah (Ill.) Middle School girl got two days of detention for innocently hugging one of her friends bye-bye (two hugs, actually, therefore disqualifying her from a first-offender warning).
The Human Condition Today
Family Values: A boy, 13, took the family car for a ride by himself, crashed into a tree, and when police came, immediately gave up his dad as the driver . . . . . Washington state Rep. Jim Dunn remorsefully said he didn’t exactly recall what he said to the sexually-harassed woman but that, whatever it was, he was "sure it was very inappropriate, because I do that kind of thing" (with the probable subject matter being how his bulbous, slob-like self wanted to take her home and nail her) . . . . . Drug dealers, pussified: Two student dealers, holding a customer hostage after his pals skipped out with the stash, roughed up the guy to get him to give up his friends, beating him with a paddle, shaving off some of his hair, dousing him with urine, and burning his neck and shoulders with hot cookies straight from the oven (Seriously) . . . . . Recurring Theme: another one of those Japanese suicides, leaping off of a tall building, and inadvertently landing on someone (who survived) (Bonus: "It is common in Japan for people to remove their shoes [which she did] before committing suicide").
Your Daily Loser
Carl Dashaw, 45, was arrested in Anchorage because, while police were conducting a warranted search of his home for child porn, they learned that he was busy downloading even more child porn.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
According to the prosecutor, perp Albert McCausland, 61, on trial for indecent assault on an underage girl, laid professional seduction techniques on her, including showing her an air freshener that depicted a bare-breasted woman.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
More on the paranormal: Here’s a page (StopAbductions.com) of do-it-yourself on constructing a helmet that’s guaranteed to repel those irritating radio waves that the gov’t and various private citizens keep bombarding you with, especially the ones enticing you out from under the security of your covers. [Warning: Blocking out radio waves will also repel those beamed-in messages from Anna Kournikova, telling you how much she loves you.]
NOTW, The Blog
BBC News reported a granddaddy of a story on the world’s "dumb laws," a genre of which Yr Editor is always distrustful, since these compilations almost never, ever include citations or even evidence of serious research. Some may actually be laws on the books. I suspect, though, that most are of the "as told to" variety. Enjoy it if you will, but my guess is that you would be enjoying at least partly a work of fiction . . . . . The latest in cheap, breathless, nearly-scientifically-worthless news that’s guaranteed to grab readers of this day and time: Some guy has figured out how to make fuel as the by-product of the manufacture of chocolate, so, of course, go gorge yourself because it’s good for the planet.
Newsrangers: Gil Nelson, Philip Urban, Jerry Whittle, Paul Music, Emory Kimbrough, Mark Neunder, Jeannine Townsend, Jan Wolitzky
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
[Ed.: Sorry, this is personal; you don’t need to revere this story as I do, but please bear with me; I’m helpless when I see these.] Charles Everson Jr. and his wife Linda were riding along near Manson, Wash., on Sunday when a flying 600-lb. cow landed on their minivan. (They were shaken up but not injured.) [Ed.: That’s it. That’s the story. Uh, well, how many of you have insurance against flying cows? If you’re a person of faith, did you pray this morning to be spared from flying cows? What could be more ominous, to test our resiliency as a presage to the Apocalypse, than to send in a wave of flying cows? I rest my case.]
Civilization in Decline
Lead in Chinese toys is for amateurs; a Chinese bead set toy (sold in Australia) contains a chemical that the body metabolizes into, er, the date-rape drug (GHB) . . . . . Oops! A convicted rapist was temporarily freed in 1991 after 2 months of a 20-yr-sentence, but Massachusetts then lost track of him until recently (including not realizing who he was while investigating two domestic abuse complaints several yrs ago), and now he argues that his "right," to serve an uninterrupted sentence, has been violated and that he should go free (Bonus: He won) . . . . . A Mascoutah (Ill.) Middle School girl got two days of detention for innocently hugging one of her friends bye-bye (two hugs, actually, therefore disqualifying her from a first-offender warning).
The Human Condition Today
Family Values: A boy, 13, took the family car for a ride by himself, crashed into a tree, and when police came, immediately gave up his dad as the driver . . . . . Washington state Rep. Jim Dunn remorsefully said he didn’t exactly recall what he said to the sexually-harassed woman but that, whatever it was, he was "sure it was very inappropriate, because I do that kind of thing" (with the probable subject matter being how his bulbous, slob-like self wanted to take her home and nail her) . . . . . Drug dealers, pussified: Two student dealers, holding a customer hostage after his pals skipped out with the stash, roughed up the guy to get him to give up his friends, beating him with a paddle, shaving off some of his hair, dousing him with urine, and burning his neck and shoulders with hot cookies straight from the oven (Seriously) . . . . . Recurring Theme: another one of those Japanese suicides, leaping off of a tall building, and inadvertently landing on someone (who survived) (Bonus: "It is common in Japan for people to remove their shoes [which she did] before committing suicide").
Your Daily Loser
Carl Dashaw, 45, was arrested in Anchorage because, while police were conducting a warranted search of his home for child porn, they learned that he was busy downloading even more child porn.
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
According to the prosecutor, perp Albert McCausland, 61, on trial for indecent assault on an underage girl, laid professional seduction techniques on her, including showing her an air freshener that depicted a bare-breasted woman.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
More on the paranormal: Here’s a page (StopAbductions.com) of do-it-yourself on constructing a helmet that’s guaranteed to repel those irritating radio waves that the gov’t and various private citizens keep bombarding you with, especially the ones enticing you out from under the security of your covers. [Warning: Blocking out radio waves will also repel those beamed-in messages from Anna Kournikova, telling you how much she loves you.]
NOTW, The Blog
BBC News reported a granddaddy of a story on the world’s "dumb laws," a genre of which Yr Editor is always distrustful, since these compilations almost never, ever include citations or even evidence of serious research. Some may actually be laws on the books. I suspect, though, that most are of the "as told to" variety. Enjoy it if you will, but my guess is that you would be enjoying at least partly a work of fiction . . . . . The latest in cheap, breathless, nearly-scientifically-worthless news that’s guaranteed to grab readers of this day and time: Some guy has figured out how to make fuel as the by-product of the manufacture of chocolate, so, of course, go gorge yourself because it’s good for the planet.
Newsrangers: Gil Nelson, Philip Urban, Jerry Whittle, Paul Music, Emory Kimbrough, Mark Neunder, Jeannine Townsend, Jan Wolitzky
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Civilization in Decline
Again! Scotland’s mighty loose on who they label a "sex offender"; there was that bicycle-humper [NOTW Daily, 10-31-2007], and now, a guy who humped the pavement (but at least the pavement was in public view) . . . . . The federal budget must be in fine shape ‘cause the latest House appropriations bill on defense spending (whose pet-project "earmarks" were supposedly cut in half) contains 580 contracts for items that the Pentagon never requested (but which lobbyists surely did) . . . . . Leading Economic Indicator of progress in Iraq: Some liquor stores are re-opening in Baghdad . . . . . The penalty in Melbourne for forcing a girl into oral sex, setting her hair on fire, spitting and peeing on her, and making a video of the whole thing (called "[C-word] the Movie"): Probation!
The Human Condition Today
He got dat ol’ Guinness Book Fever: Texan Jackie Bibby, who holds the record of sitting in a tub for 45 minutes with 75 rattlesnakes, put some distance in the record Monday (in case any smartasses are thinking about challenging The Man), with an 87-rattler session (with photo).
Your Daily Loser
Paul Keith, 75, Framingham, Mass., rear-ended a car at a traffic light, but despite his age, he apparently had that gas pedal/brake pedal thing all worked out perfectly. The problem, he defiantly told the cop, was that the light had turned green, and the guy in front didn’t go. "He didn’t move, so I drove into the back of him." "When the light turns green, you’re supposed to go, and I did."
NOTW Lite
No Longer Weird: the squirrel raiding the electrical substation and plunging the area into darkness, as happened last Friday in Auburn, Calif . . . . . Be on the lookout in the St. Louis area for a burglar (via one of the least useful composite sketches in Missouri police history).
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
GAO, grading the Customs and Border Protection agency on how well they made sure that, at the legal checkpoints, at least, only the people proper and legal got in, said the agency came within, well, 21,000 people of getting it right last year.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Paranoi—er, Paranormal Marketplace! A ghostbusters, etc., investigation supply store online, selling, e.g., the MultiFunction Environmental Meter: "Part of a small investigation team? No team at all? On a budget? This is for you! Digital thermometer, Hygrometer, Anamometer and Light Meter all in one unit!" $149. And more, more, more!
Newsrangers: Karl Olson, Bob Pert
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Again! Scotland’s mighty loose on who they label a "sex offender"; there was that bicycle-humper [NOTW Daily, 10-31-2007], and now, a guy who humped the pavement (but at least the pavement was in public view) . . . . . The federal budget must be in fine shape ‘cause the latest House appropriations bill on defense spending (whose pet-project "earmarks" were supposedly cut in half) contains 580 contracts for items that the Pentagon never requested (but which lobbyists surely did) . . . . . Leading Economic Indicator of progress in Iraq: Some liquor stores are re-opening in Baghdad . . . . . The penalty in Melbourne for forcing a girl into oral sex, setting her hair on fire, spitting and peeing on her, and making a video of the whole thing (called "[C-word] the Movie"): Probation!
The Human Condition Today
He got dat ol’ Guinness Book Fever: Texan Jackie Bibby, who holds the record of sitting in a tub for 45 minutes with 75 rattlesnakes, put some distance in the record Monday (in case any smartasses are thinking about challenging The Man), with an 87-rattler session (with photo).
Your Daily Loser
Paul Keith, 75, Framingham, Mass., rear-ended a car at a traffic light, but despite his age, he apparently had that gas pedal/brake pedal thing all worked out perfectly. The problem, he defiantly told the cop, was that the light had turned green, and the guy in front didn’t go. "He didn’t move, so I drove into the back of him." "When the light turns green, you’re supposed to go, and I did."
NOTW Lite
No Longer Weird: the squirrel raiding the electrical substation and plunging the area into darkness, as happened last Friday in Auburn, Calif . . . . . Be on the lookout in the St. Louis area for a burglar (via one of the least useful composite sketches in Missouri police history).
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
GAO, grading the Customs and Border Protection agency on how well they made sure that, at the legal checkpoints, at least, only the people proper and legal got in, said the agency came within, well, 21,000 people of getting it right last year.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Paranoi—er, Paranormal Marketplace! A ghostbusters, etc., investigation supply store online, selling, e.g., the MultiFunction Environmental Meter: "Part of a small investigation team? No team at all? On a budget? This is for you! Digital thermometer, Hygrometer, Anamometer and Light Meter all in one unit!" $149. And more, more, more!
Newsrangers: Karl Olson, Bob Pert
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Monday’s 5-Star Special
Case Western Reserve researchers have messed around with a gene involved in glucose metabolism and created a supermouse, capable of proportionately even more amazing stuff than, y’know, Lance Armstrong, but the head researcher warns the biochemical industry, "[T]his is not something that you’d do to a human. It’s completely wrong," so I guess that’s the last we’ll hear of that.
Civilization in Decline
Sri Lankan Airlines decided to fly out of Heathrow anyway even though one wing tip had broken off on a runway collision (but 7 passengers went nuts until the captain let them off the plane) (Bonus: The reason for the collision was that a taxiing Sri Lankan pilot smacked a stopped British Airways plane) . . . . . It’s Good to Be a British Prisoner (cont’d): pole-vaulting lessons at a lockup in Dorset (but relax, because the prison walls are 20 ft high, and the pole only 17 ft long) . . . . . In the midst of a serious no-teen-smoking campaign in Australia, a Canberra high-schooler was prescribed in-school smoking breaks by her doctor, to deal with stress . . . . . A girl was born in rural India with a fused skeleton from her failed twin, including 4 arms and 4 legs, and will need about 40 hours of delicate surgery, but the story is here because, as you can imagine in rural India, as soon as they got a look at her, everybody started worshiping her.
The Human Condition Today
Recurring Theme: Here is yet another Islamic expert opining on how to humanely beat your unsubmissive wife (but this time it’s on a Dr. Phil-like TV show) . . . . . An F Stater walked in to a church during a stranger’s funeral and for some reason started pummeling the body . . . . . Mark Durfee of NY’s Long Island did a hit-and-run, police said, but then a few minutes later, when his car died and he got out, a motorist did a hit-and-run on him (whereas, a kid in Jacksonville, Fla., was hit by a car, but then jumped over a highway barrier to safety, and was promptly hit by another car).
Your Daily Loser
A Cape Girardeau, Mo., teen might be an arsonist, but then again, his story may be true: that the fire was accidentally started when he tried to burn the cuffs off of his pants because they were dragging on the floor.
NOTW Lite
What Goes Around, Comes Around: Google News is in trouble for bad algorithms that mismatched news stories, with the worst being the photo of two monkeys to accompany a story on Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons (who is black) . . . . . It was hard as hell to get Ethiopian men to use protection, but now condoms’re all the craze since they’re being made with the aroma of coffee (the national drink) . . . . . Encouraging N.Y. Times lede: "Hundreds of police firing tear gas and swinging batons clashed with lawyers . . .." (but, damn, it’s only Pakistan).
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
High-level radioactive waste has piled up at the go-to sites of Lawrence Livermore, Hanford, and Oak Ridge, which have become more suburban than they were when they opened as rural outposts, and the waste has to be moved. Since the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste site is being delayed into eternity, the Dept. of Energy has to find temporary storage, but now GAO said even that’s not close to getting done, mostly because of DOE slovenliness. DOE’s reputation for action is so dismal that the supposed receiving sites, in Texas, Idaho, and South Carolina, haven’t even bothered to gear up opposition yet, knowing that it’ll be years before crunch time.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
A guy named Bob Truby, an artist and pencil collector, has designed an elaborate page, sortable a couple of ways, listing the pencils he has, by brand name with logo photographs. There are 134 brands. There are "copying pencils," and there are "long ferrule pencils." Ain’t the Internet somethin’?
NOTW, The Blog
The proprietor of the Museum of Hoaxes, Alex Boese, has just published Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, all straight from the science literature, and is now making the news rounds with his Top Ten list. Included of course is Comrade Demikhov’s dog-head transplants, but also the doctor who self-proved that Yellow Fever is not communicable, by drinking a YF patient’s vomit. (Upon further review, though, YF is communicable if injected into the bloodstream.) The best is surely the Penn State professors’ 1960s study of just how horny turkeys are: Using a lifelike model of a female turkey, they progressively removed parts to see whether the toms would continue to hit on "her," and the answer was yes, even when only the head and a stick remained. Boese’s book-preview article is in New Scientist this week, but that’s subscriber-only reading. Here’s a pretty lengthy Daily Mail takeout on it.
Newsrangers: Scott Langill, Jamie Anderson, Ginger Katz, Tim Trewhella, Bob Pert, Steve Miller, Mark Neunder
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Case Western Reserve researchers have messed around with a gene involved in glucose metabolism and created a supermouse, capable of proportionately even more amazing stuff than, y’know, Lance Armstrong, but the head researcher warns the biochemical industry, "[T]his is not something that you’d do to a human. It’s completely wrong," so I guess that’s the last we’ll hear of that.
Civilization in Decline
Sri Lankan Airlines decided to fly out of Heathrow anyway even though one wing tip had broken off on a runway collision (but 7 passengers went nuts until the captain let them off the plane) (Bonus: The reason for the collision was that a taxiing Sri Lankan pilot smacked a stopped British Airways plane) . . . . . It’s Good to Be a British Prisoner (cont’d): pole-vaulting lessons at a lockup in Dorset (but relax, because the prison walls are 20 ft high, and the pole only 17 ft long) . . . . . In the midst of a serious no-teen-smoking campaign in Australia, a Canberra high-schooler was prescribed in-school smoking breaks by her doctor, to deal with stress . . . . . A girl was born in rural India with a fused skeleton from her failed twin, including 4 arms and 4 legs, and will need about 40 hours of delicate surgery, but the story is here because, as you can imagine in rural India, as soon as they got a look at her, everybody started worshiping her.
The Human Condition Today
Recurring Theme: Here is yet another Islamic expert opining on how to humanely beat your unsubmissive wife (but this time it’s on a Dr. Phil-like TV show) . . . . . An F Stater walked in to a church during a stranger’s funeral and for some reason started pummeling the body . . . . . Mark Durfee of NY’s Long Island did a hit-and-run, police said, but then a few minutes later, when his car died and he got out, a motorist did a hit-and-run on him (whereas, a kid in Jacksonville, Fla., was hit by a car, but then jumped over a highway barrier to safety, and was promptly hit by another car).
Your Daily Loser
A Cape Girardeau, Mo., teen might be an arsonist, but then again, his story may be true: that the fire was accidentally started when he tried to burn the cuffs off of his pants because they were dragging on the floor.
NOTW Lite
What Goes Around, Comes Around: Google News is in trouble for bad algorithms that mismatched news stories, with the worst being the photo of two monkeys to accompany a story on Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons (who is black) . . . . . It was hard as hell to get Ethiopian men to use protection, but now condoms’re all the craze since they’re being made with the aroma of coffee (the national drink) . . . . . Encouraging N.Y. Times lede: "Hundreds of police firing tear gas and swinging batons clashed with lawyers . . .." (but, damn, it’s only Pakistan).
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
High-level radioactive waste has piled up at the go-to sites of Lawrence Livermore, Hanford, and Oak Ridge, which have become more suburban than they were when they opened as rural outposts, and the waste has to be moved. Since the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste site is being delayed into eternity, the Dept. of Energy has to find temporary storage, but now GAO said even that’s not close to getting done, mostly because of DOE slovenliness. DOE’s reputation for action is so dismal that the supposed receiving sites, in Texas, Idaho, and South Carolina, haven’t even bothered to gear up opposition yet, knowing that it’ll be years before crunch time.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
A guy named Bob Truby, an artist and pencil collector, has designed an elaborate page, sortable a couple of ways, listing the pencils he has, by brand name with logo photographs. There are 134 brands. There are "copying pencils," and there are "long ferrule pencils." Ain’t the Internet somethin’?
NOTW, The Blog
The proprietor of the Museum of Hoaxes, Alex Boese, has just published Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, all straight from the science literature, and is now making the news rounds with his Top Ten list. Included of course is Comrade Demikhov’s dog-head transplants, but also the doctor who self-proved that Yellow Fever is not communicable, by drinking a YF patient’s vomit. (Upon further review, though, YF is communicable if injected into the bloodstream.) The best is surely the Penn State professors’ 1960s study of just how horny turkeys are: Using a lifelike model of a female turkey, they progressively removed parts to see whether the toms would continue to hit on "her," and the answer was yes, even when only the head and a stick remained. Boese’s book-preview article is in New Scientist this week, but that’s subscriber-only reading. Here’s a pretty lengthy Daily Mail takeout on it.
Newsrangers: Scott Langill, Jamie Anderson, Ginger Katz, Tim Trewhella, Bob Pert, Steve Miller, Mark Neunder
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Civilization in Decline
Two NYC law firms announced that 2nd-yr peons will earn this yr (with bonuses) $225k (Chief Justice John Roberts, er, $215k) . . . . . Ireland’s Road Safety Authority is proposing to lower the blood-alcohol legal threshold from 0.08 to 0.05, but Catholic priests object, seein’ as how they have to drive around to all those wine-sipping Masses during the Christmas season . . . . . But people are after cops in Washington, D.C., and Corvallis, Ore., for wholesale arrests of "suspected" DUI’s, even when they blow way below the legal threshold—or even 0.00 [Ed.: Oops, just had that D.C. cite around here somewhere!].
The Human Condition Today
A complicated twins’ birth, a medical Sophie’s Choice goes wrong, both kids live, and, woo-wee, when that kid learns to read and finds out about it! . . . . . An alleged car thief, confronted by police, reached for his waistband, and a cop naturally fired at him (but missed) (Bonus: Actually, the thief was reaching for a dildo) (Extra Bonus: A guy actually had a dildo tethered to his waistband) . . . . . Another one of those unexplained medical cases in which someone recovering from serious head trauma mysteriously comes down with 24/7 sex-on-the-brain . . . . . A patient of Syracuse, N.Y., dentist George Trusty has sued over a 2004 incident in which he was multitasking (drilling in her mouth while dancing to "Car Wash" on the radio), causing a drill bit to snap off and stick near her eye . . . . . Too Much Information: Newsweek profiles a guy named Ramesh, who’s a professional sewer unclogger in Delhi, India (definitely too much information).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Among the latest batch of toe-tappers (from a Daytona Beach sting) was former city commissioner Mike Shallow (Bonus: The arresting cop said Shallow was the only one of the perps to actually bend down under the partition to stick his head into the next stall) (And, while we’re on the subject, Senate Republican leaders have relented and allowed Mr. Toe-Tapper, himself, Sen. Larry Craig’s "earmarks," aka pork-barrel spending projects, to go through, including $1m for police to improve information-sharing about criminals, though it was for the Idaho State Police, not the Minneapolis police, so it wouldn’t have helped publicize Craig’s initial men's room arrest, which mysteriously no one knew about for a month) [Slate.com's The Has Been blog, Nov. 2, 2007]
NOTW Lite
Two good photo-ops: another one of those knife-into-the-brain x-rays (from Iraq) and the 61-yr-old driver who managed to precisely locate an 8-ft hole in the middle of a downtown street . . . . . 8-yr-old twins from Ohio have invented "wedgie-proof" (tearaway) underwear.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Paul Music, Michael Ravnitzky, Ginger Katz, Joe Littrell, Bob Pert, Diarmid Connell
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Two NYC law firms announced that 2nd-yr peons will earn this yr (with bonuses) $225k (Chief Justice John Roberts, er, $215k) . . . . . Ireland’s Road Safety Authority is proposing to lower the blood-alcohol legal threshold from 0.08 to 0.05, but Catholic priests object, seein’ as how they have to drive around to all those wine-sipping Masses during the Christmas season . . . . . But people are after cops in Washington, D.C., and Corvallis, Ore., for wholesale arrests of "suspected" DUI’s, even when they blow way below the legal threshold—or even 0.00 [Ed.: Oops, just had that D.C. cite around here somewhere!].
The Human Condition Today
A complicated twins’ birth, a medical Sophie’s Choice goes wrong, both kids live, and, woo-wee, when that kid learns to read and finds out about it! . . . . . An alleged car thief, confronted by police, reached for his waistband, and a cop naturally fired at him (but missed) (Bonus: Actually, the thief was reaching for a dildo) (Extra Bonus: A guy actually had a dildo tethered to his waistband) . . . . . Another one of those unexplained medical cases in which someone recovering from serious head trauma mysteriously comes down with 24/7 sex-on-the-brain . . . . . A patient of Syracuse, N.Y., dentist George Trusty has sued over a 2004 incident in which he was multitasking (drilling in her mouth while dancing to "Car Wash" on the radio), causing a drill bit to snap off and stick near her eye . . . . . Too Much Information: Newsweek profiles a guy named Ramesh, who’s a professional sewer unclogger in Delhi, India (definitely too much information).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Among the latest batch of toe-tappers (from a Daytona Beach sting) was former city commissioner Mike Shallow (Bonus: The arresting cop said Shallow was the only one of the perps to actually bend down under the partition to stick his head into the next stall) (And, while we’re on the subject, Senate Republican leaders have relented and allowed Mr. Toe-Tapper, himself, Sen. Larry Craig’s "earmarks," aka pork-barrel spending projects, to go through, including $1m for police to improve information-sharing about criminals, though it was for the Idaho State Police, not the Minneapolis police, so it wouldn’t have helped publicize Craig’s initial men's room arrest, which mysteriously no one knew about for a month) [Slate.com's The Has Been blog, Nov. 2, 2007]
NOTW Lite
Two good photo-ops: another one of those knife-into-the-brain x-rays (from Iraq) and the 61-yr-old driver who managed to precisely locate an 8-ft hole in the middle of a downtown street . . . . . 8-yr-old twins from Ohio have invented "wedgie-proof" (tearaway) underwear.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Paul Music, Michael Ravnitzky, Ginger Katz, Joe Littrell, Bob Pert, Diarmid Connell
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Civilization in Decline
A German entrepreneur announced the launch of an all-death TV channel (funerals, death announcements, documentaries about cemeteries) . . . . . 21 of the 28 2004 Madrid train bombers were convicted, with three receiving almost 40,000 yrs each in prison (but Spanish law will allow them 39,960 yrs off for good behavior) . . . . . Mixed reviews for University of Delaware’s re-education camp—er, mandatory racial and gender sensitization training (i.e., the way I think is the best way; now, y’all come on and think like I do, OK?).
The Human Condition Today
Irish judge Denis McLoughlin reduced the speeding charge against David Clarke (caught doing 180km/hr), specifically pointing out that it was only 108 miles/hr, which doesn’t seem so fast to him.
Your Daily Loser
A 47-yr-old man, sitting in his cubicle at Boenker Insurance near Fort Worth, Tex., accidentally fumbled with the handgun he liked to bring to work in his coat pocket and shot himself (one bullet, both legs).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Dr. Paul Schum, the principal of the Catholic Bethlehem High School in Bardstown, Ky., was picked up in an alley late at night dressed as a woman, in leather, with fishnet stockings and fake breasts. A local pastor, classically looking for the good in Dr. Schum, told WAVE-TV that, well, after all, it is Halloween season.
NOTW Lite
Part of the disorderly conduct conviction of Jason Kaminski in West Chester, Pa., was for kicking the guy’s car and part was for removing his shirt and flashing the guy with his tattoo of (probably, we don’t know for sure) the familiar two-word admonition ending in "you."
Update
Round One went to the York, Pa., family of the Marine whose funeral was picketed by Rev. Fred Phelps and the lesser Phelpses as part of their campaign, i.e., pick a dead, heterosexual serviceman and use his funeral to blast America for coddling homosexuals); a jury awarded the family $2.9m plus $8m punitive damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress, but this case has U.S. Supreme Court written all over it.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Those of you anticipating your first hard-time prison sentence will want to rush to Stephen Donaldson’s primer on becoming some punk’s bitch. He runs through advantages and disadvantages and offers tips on choosing your daddy carefully, learning to suck so well that daddy won’t even get around to the other thing, dealing with your fear that you’ll then be a lifetime bitch even when you get out, etc.
NOTW, The Blog
Reminder: Yr Editor will not publish tomorrow but will be back on Saturday, November 3, and will resume 5-day publishing for probably the next two weeks, after which it’ll be 6-day publishing again. Probably.
Newsrangers: Emory Kimbrough, Bob Pert, Mark Neunder
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
A German entrepreneur announced the launch of an all-death TV channel (funerals, death announcements, documentaries about cemeteries) . . . . . 21 of the 28 2004 Madrid train bombers were convicted, with three receiving almost 40,000 yrs each in prison (but Spanish law will allow them 39,960 yrs off for good behavior) . . . . . Mixed reviews for University of Delaware’s re-education camp—er, mandatory racial and gender sensitization training (i.e., the way I think is the best way; now, y’all come on and think like I do, OK?).
The Human Condition Today
Irish judge Denis McLoughlin reduced the speeding charge against David Clarke (caught doing 180km/hr), specifically pointing out that it was only 108 miles/hr, which doesn’t seem so fast to him.
Your Daily Loser
A 47-yr-old man, sitting in his cubicle at Boenker Insurance near Fort Worth, Tex., accidentally fumbled with the handgun he liked to bring to work in his coat pocket and shot himself (one bullet, both legs).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Dr. Paul Schum, the principal of the Catholic Bethlehem High School in Bardstown, Ky., was picked up in an alley late at night dressed as a woman, in leather, with fishnet stockings and fake breasts. A local pastor, classically looking for the good in Dr. Schum, told WAVE-TV that, well, after all, it is Halloween season.
NOTW Lite
Part of the disorderly conduct conviction of Jason Kaminski in West Chester, Pa., was for kicking the guy’s car and part was for removing his shirt and flashing the guy with his tattoo of (probably, we don’t know for sure) the familiar two-word admonition ending in "you."
Update
Round One went to the York, Pa., family of the Marine whose funeral was picketed by Rev. Fred Phelps and the lesser Phelpses as part of their campaign, i.e., pick a dead, heterosexual serviceman and use his funeral to blast America for coddling homosexuals); a jury awarded the family $2.9m plus $8m punitive damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress, but this case has U.S. Supreme Court written all over it.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Those of you anticipating your first hard-time prison sentence will want to rush to Stephen Donaldson’s primer on becoming some punk’s bitch. He runs through advantages and disadvantages and offers tips on choosing your daddy carefully, learning to suck so well that daddy won’t even get around to the other thing, dealing with your fear that you’ll then be a lifetime bitch even when you get out, etc.
NOTW, The Blog
Reminder: Yr Editor will not publish tomorrow but will be back on Saturday, November 3, and will resume 5-day publishing for probably the next two weeks, after which it’ll be 6-day publishing again. Probably.
Newsrangers: Emory Kimbrough, Bob Pert, Mark Neunder
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Civilization in Decline
The singer Donovan said he’ll open the "Invincible Donovan University" in Scotland to make sure students get a well-rounded education in all of the Transcendental Meditation arts (and his pal, the director David Lynch, said that, since Scotland is so small, only "250" yogics would be needed to "protect Scotland from its enemies and to bring peace, to stop violence and drug abuse") (NOTW’s previous reports on TM as the key to world peace and crimelessness: [NOTW 915, 8-21-2005] [NOTW 607, 9-24-1999]) . . . . . Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia warned countrymen not to discriminate against gays (in the same speech in which he said, with little explanation, that he was filing papers to disown his newly-uncloseted lesbian adopted daughter).
The Human Condition Today
More stats on pet surgery (in the UK): hundreds of cancerous jaw removals a yr; eight open-heart surgeries; "increasingly common" cataract removal; "widespread" dog hip replacements (and elbow replacements coming along, too) . . . . . A Minnesota woman said she’ll press abuse charges against a former friend who volunteered to care for her pig but allowed it to balloon from 50 lbs. to 150 . . . . . The Alabama Ku Klux Klan and the national Ku Klux Klan LLC protested the racial slurs, etc., of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and want the movement cleansed of the latter’s "ignorance and stupidity" . . . . . A Huntersville, N.C., optometrist was arrested for conducting eye exams of female patients way lower down than on their eyes (Bonus: He may have a defense, in that his own eyes, according to the mugshot, aren’t aligned just right, plus his head appears Photoshopped onto his neck) . . . . . Wayne Scullino of Sydney, Australia, fell in love with the Green Bay Packers at age 15, and he’s 30 now, and his devotion was killing him, and so he and the wife recently moved to Green Bay.
NOTW Lite
Sounds Like a Joke: A researcher estimated that more than one-third of U.S. high school football players have had sex with other males (but the research sample size: 19 of 47 former high school football players who went on to become college cheerleaders).
Updates
Here’s a good piece on the late Robert Shields, the guy I mentioned yesterday who kept a diary of his life in 5-minute segments (filling 91 boxes) . . . . . New Jersey announced in January that a toxic waste dump in Ringwood was acting up and that residents in the area should thus limit their consumption of, er, squirrels, but, now, great news!: The scare is over, and squirrel casseroles are back.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
NOTW, The Blog
(1) A guy named Robert Stewart is supposedly in some deep trouble in Ayr, Scotland, having "admitted to sexual breach of the peace" and being officially placed on the "sex offenders’ register." His "offense" was that he was "caught" by two workers at Aberley House Hostel, who barged in with a master key to find Stewart with his pants down, holding a bicycle, and "moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex." Two problems occur, of course, the lesser of which is that Scotland is apparently super-cautious about the health and safety of all its bicycles in that it feels it must keep sight of Mr. Stewart in the future via the "sex offenders’ register." The larger problem is that the story, as reported, contains no "breach of the peace," sexual or otherwise. If one cannot hump a bicycle in the privacy of his own locked room, we Americans should once again be grateful to our forefathers for liberating us from British-cum-UK control 231 yrs ago. Or, maybe the story's a hoax. . . . . . (2) The slam-dunk evidence of a photographed ghost in the Santa Fe, N.Mex., courthouse was revealed to be an insect on the camera lens. (Said a paranormal skeptic/investigator, "[P]eople typically say something is unexplained, and all that means is they haven’t worked hard enough to look for an explanation.")
Newsrangers: Dave Null, Gerald Sacks, Steve Miller, Ginger Katz, Jamie Anderson
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
The singer Donovan said he’ll open the "Invincible Donovan University" in Scotland to make sure students get a well-rounded education in all of the Transcendental Meditation arts (and his pal, the director David Lynch, said that, since Scotland is so small, only "250" yogics would be needed to "protect Scotland from its enemies and to bring peace, to stop violence and drug abuse") (NOTW’s previous reports on TM as the key to world peace and crimelessness: [NOTW 915, 8-21-2005] [NOTW 607, 9-24-1999]) . . . . . Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia warned countrymen not to discriminate against gays (in the same speech in which he said, with little explanation, that he was filing papers to disown his newly-uncloseted lesbian adopted daughter).
The Human Condition Today
More stats on pet surgery (in the UK): hundreds of cancerous jaw removals a yr; eight open-heart surgeries; "increasingly common" cataract removal; "widespread" dog hip replacements (and elbow replacements coming along, too) . . . . . A Minnesota woman said she’ll press abuse charges against a former friend who volunteered to care for her pig but allowed it to balloon from 50 lbs. to 150 . . . . . The Alabama Ku Klux Klan and the national Ku Klux Klan LLC protested the racial slurs, etc., of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and want the movement cleansed of the latter’s "ignorance and stupidity" . . . . . A Huntersville, N.C., optometrist was arrested for conducting eye exams of female patients way lower down than on their eyes (Bonus: He may have a defense, in that his own eyes, according to the mugshot, aren’t aligned just right, plus his head appears Photoshopped onto his neck) . . . . . Wayne Scullino of Sydney, Australia, fell in love with the Green Bay Packers at age 15, and he’s 30 now, and his devotion was killing him, and so he and the wife recently moved to Green Bay.
NOTW Lite
Sounds Like a Joke: A researcher estimated that more than one-third of U.S. high school football players have had sex with other males (but the research sample size: 19 of 47 former high school football players who went on to become college cheerleaders).
Updates
Here’s a good piece on the late Robert Shields, the guy I mentioned yesterday who kept a diary of his life in 5-minute segments (filling 91 boxes) . . . . . New Jersey announced in January that a toxic waste dump in Ringwood was acting up and that residents in the area should thus limit their consumption of, er, squirrels, but, now, great news!: The scare is over, and squirrel casseroles are back.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
NOTW, The Blog
(1) A guy named Robert Stewart is supposedly in some deep trouble in Ayr, Scotland, having "admitted to sexual breach of the peace" and being officially placed on the "sex offenders’ register." His "offense" was that he was "caught" by two workers at Aberley House Hostel, who barged in with a master key to find Stewart with his pants down, holding a bicycle, and "moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex." Two problems occur, of course, the lesser of which is that Scotland is apparently super-cautious about the health and safety of all its bicycles in that it feels it must keep sight of Mr. Stewart in the future via the "sex offenders’ register." The larger problem is that the story, as reported, contains no "breach of the peace," sexual or otherwise. If one cannot hump a bicycle in the privacy of his own locked room, we Americans should once again be grateful to our forefathers for liberating us from British-cum-UK control 231 yrs ago. Or, maybe the story's a hoax. . . . . . (2) The slam-dunk evidence of a photographed ghost in the Santa Fe, N.Mex., courthouse was revealed to be an insect on the camera lens. (Said a paranormal skeptic/investigator, "[P]eople typically say something is unexplained, and all that means is they haven’t worked hard enough to look for an explanation.")
Newsrangers: Dave Null, Gerald Sacks, Steve Miller, Ginger Katz, Jamie Anderson
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Civilization in Decline
The Muslim Grand Mufti in Australia, referring to women who go around un-hijabbed: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street . . and the cats come and eat it . . whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat [sic]?" . . . . .The process of acquiring a driver’s license in South Africa, reports the NY Times today, has a little Fellini to it, a little Catch-22, mostly Kafka.
The Human Condition Today
The traffic-stopped Teresa Walker called the police station while an officer was writing her a ticket, complaining that he was taking too much time and that if he didn’t hurry it up, she’d shoot him (but she denies it, except that she used the incriminatory phrase, "I don’t remember" threatening to shoot him) . . . . . An Aussie political candidate flamed out when his nude self (and apparently ordinary-looking manhood) showed up on a gay porn website, and all he could think of to explain was, "[M]y political enemies might have drugged me" and "[T]hat’s not my penis" . . . . . Kids fight; school schedules counseling with respective parents, one kid’s father kills the other kid's father . . . . . Selling your home offers such dismal prospects these days that the ol’ "bury a St. Joseph in the yard" for good luck is almost standard practice ("I wasn’t sure if it would be disrespectful for me, a Jewish Buddhist, to co-opt the saint for my real-estate purposes," said one woman, but "[w]ell, could it hurt?"
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
One F-Stater to another in an ordinary Internet chat room, after their new friendship seemed to be going well: Say, what about if I drive down to see you, and we kill somebody, and have sex with the body? (Later: Never mind. I found somebody here. Wanna come help me?)
NOTW Lite
Readers’ Choice: The latest man to be shot by his dog is James Harris of Grinnell, Iowa . . . . . Recovering from the September Folsom Street Fair [see below], San Francisco was the scene Sunday for the Cardboard Tube Fighting Championship [cardboard tubes being aka yard-long Ta-Doot-Ta-Dooo cylinders], where contestants whomp each other until such time as your tube breaks, and you’re out.
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
The chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Comm’n told Congress, No, thanks, don’t need more money; don’t need more staff; consumers are safe enough right now (and in fact, if you raise the amount of damages we can assess for unsafe products, more people will start complaining about unsafeness, and we won’t be able to do our job) (Seriously) . . . . . A special Texas state commission on reports submitted a 668-page report, after 18 months of surveying gov’t reports, and found about 400 reports, including many reports that all would agree are useless reports, and that’s not just the reports that no longer have anything to report or reports required of agencies that no longer exist yet must still report.
Updates
The Sultan of Brunei’s legendary feud with playboy brother Jefri (who famously owned a huge yacht called Tits and two dinghies, Nipple 1 and Nipple 2 [NOTW 637, 4-21-2000] [NOTW 717, 11-4-2001]) continues in London (which administers Brunei’s courts): In an accounting, the Sultan says he spent £1.26m on a badminton tutor, and £5.86m each on his five public relations babes . . . . . Robert Shields, one of the most fascinatingly bizarre people ever to grace a News of the Weird story, has passed away at age 89. From NOTW 435, 6-7-1996:
The Muslim Grand Mufti in Australia, referring to women who go around un-hijabbed: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street . . and the cats come and eat it . . whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat [sic]?" . . . . .The process of acquiring a driver’s license in South Africa, reports the NY Times today, has a little Fellini to it, a little Catch-22, mostly Kafka.
The Human Condition Today
The traffic-stopped Teresa Walker called the police station while an officer was writing her a ticket, complaining that he was taking too much time and that if he didn’t hurry it up, she’d shoot him (but she denies it, except that she used the incriminatory phrase, "I don’t remember" threatening to shoot him) . . . . . An Aussie political candidate flamed out when his nude self (and apparently ordinary-looking manhood) showed up on a gay porn website, and all he could think of to explain was, "[M]y political enemies might have drugged me" and "[T]hat’s not my penis" . . . . . Kids fight; school schedules counseling with respective parents, one kid’s father kills the other kid's father . . . . . Selling your home offers such dismal prospects these days that the ol’ "bury a St. Joseph in the yard" for good luck is almost standard practice ("I wasn’t sure if it would be disrespectful for me, a Jewish Buddhist, to co-opt the saint for my real-estate purposes," said one woman, but "[w]ell, could it hurt?"
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
One F-Stater to another in an ordinary Internet chat room, after their new friendship seemed to be going well: Say, what about if I drive down to see you, and we kill somebody, and have sex with the body? (Later: Never mind. I found somebody here. Wanna come help me?)
NOTW Lite
Readers’ Choice: The latest man to be shot by his dog is James Harris of Grinnell, Iowa . . . . . Recovering from the September Folsom Street Fair [see below], San Francisco was the scene Sunday for the Cardboard Tube Fighting Championship [cardboard tubes being aka yard-long Ta-Doot-Ta-Dooo cylinders], where contestants whomp each other until such time as your tube breaks, and you’re out.
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
The chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Comm’n told Congress, No, thanks, don’t need more money; don’t need more staff; consumers are safe enough right now (and in fact, if you raise the amount of damages we can assess for unsafe products, more people will start complaining about unsafeness, and we won’t be able to do our job) (Seriously) . . . . . A special Texas state commission on reports submitted a 668-page report, after 18 months of surveying gov’t reports, and found about 400 reports, including many reports that all would agree are useless reports, and that’s not just the reports that no longer have anything to report or reports required of agencies that no longer exist yet must still report.
Updates
The Sultan of Brunei’s legendary feud with playboy brother Jefri (who famously owned a huge yacht called Tits and two dinghies, Nipple 1 and Nipple 2 [NOTW 637, 4-21-2000] [NOTW 717, 11-4-2001]) continues in London (which administers Brunei’s courts): In an accounting, the Sultan says he spent £1.26m on a badminton tutor, and £5.86m each on his five public relations babes . . . . . Robert Shields, one of the most fascinatingly bizarre people ever to grace a News of the Weird story, has passed away at age 89. From NOTW 435, 6-7-1996:
According to a Seattle Times feature in March, Robert Shields, 77, of Dayton, Wash., is the author of perhaps the longest personal diary in history--nearly 38 million words on paper stored in 81 cardboard boxes--covering his last 24 years in five-minute increments. Example: July 25, 1993, 7 a.m.: "I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin." 7:05 a.m.: "Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used 5 sheets of paper."
Professor Music’s Weird Links
San Francisco’s annual Folsom Street Fair, highlighting Sodom on the Bay’s leather scene, came around this year on September 30, but here are some Not Safe For Work photos from the 2003-2006 Fairs. (Bonus: This selection is from the Catholic League’s website; try to imagine an already-disheartened Sam Brownback supporter peering at them.)
NOTW, The Blog
Pervs on Parade (today’s mugshots): the necrophiliac, the inflatable doll lover (from last week), the (beaten-down) rapist . . . . . Yr Editor will not post this coming Friday, Nov. 2, but will on Saturday, Nov. 3. Otherwise, the Mon-thru-Fri schedule will be in effect through the week of November 17, at least.
Newsrangers: Ginger Katz, Mark Neunder, Joe Littrell, Scotty Schrier.
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Monday’s 5-Star Special
Green funerals and burials are the rage now, aimed at the 30 percent who still don’t opt for cremation, and in Sweden, even cremation is bad, compared to freeze-drying (dip the body in liquid nitrogen and then industrially vibrate it ‘til it’s powder) (Bonus: A green California cemetery bans headstones but will give you a Google map and GPS coordinates to help you find your dad’s plot)
Civilization in Decline
Now that branding of animals is frowned on in civilized society, London’s Daily Mail detects an upward spike in fashionable branding of humans, including upscale professionals who you’d think would know better ("There was smoke coming out of my arm, and my burnt flesh smelled like a cross between chicken and bacon") . . . . . Mmmm, bacon . . . . . Some British research outfit claims that parents are timing conceptions so that when they reach school, their urchins will be months older than their classmates because stats show "older" is marginally more likely to get better grades [Ed.: which is a little weird, itself, but not as weird as the research outfit’s conclusion that someone ought to put a stop to this "urgent(ly)"] . . . . . Things Lawyers Argue About: Wisconsin law prohibits lawyers from having sex with "a current client," but, Question: What if a lawyer has a three-way with a client and the client’s girlfriend (with the lawyer and the client presumably both straight males)? [Link: The Volokh Conspiracy blog, Scroll way down to 10-25-2007]
The Human Condition Today
Philadelphia pastor Willie Singletary, running for Traffic Court judge, begged his motorcycle club for campaign donations because "You’re all going to need me" (Bonus: His own driver’s license has been suspended until 2011 for excessive tickets) . . . . . New World Record: Graham Hurley, Hackensack, N.J., charged with having nearly, er, 1,000 GB of child porn (and we long for much more information because he was married-with-children but kept his stash in a sealed-off room upstairs protected by fingerprint-ID) . . . . . A golfer in Naples, Fla., swears up and down that his 14-yr-old son, who typically shoots 100 for 18 holes, had a hole-in-one, plus holed out another shot from the fairway and chipped in yet another, all in the same rou—oh, wait, he also had two more holes-in-one that round, for a total of three—and, no, now that you ask, there weren’t any other witnesses (except one guy, on one of the aces, allegedly) . . . . . Least Competent Dictator: Uncle Bob’s ministers in Zimbabwe fell for a huckster who promised an unlimited, perpetual supply of refined oil, located by sort-of dowsing (On the other hand, the huckster accepted Zimbabwe dollars, whose value today is about 1/700th what it was when she was paid) . . . . . The Bank of England is not incompetent, though, because it quickly realized that Chinese con men trying to cash in £1,000 notes couldn’t be serious because they were all recalled in 1963 (and only a few serial numbers are still outstanding), er, let alone those £500,000 notes, let alone that it’s "Bank of England," not "England Bank" . . . . . Two more perps not ready for prime time: A Gainesville, Fla., home invader was shot in the neck by the resident, who’s blind, and a Dallas, Tex., home invader was shot to death by the resident, who had gotten up from his wheelchair to wrestle the perp’s gun away.
Your Daily Loser
According to Austin, Tex., police, Tony Davis has ripped off the families of 160 inmates (up to $17.5k each) to get ‘em freed in court on a Congressional-error technicality that’s so transparently bogus that Yr Editor goes full-circle and actually has sympathy for the victims (and Davis is prepared for a defeat in SCOTUS, because he says he’s got 6 more technicalities researched and ready to go) (Bonus: He’s not a lawyer).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Urbana, Ill., elementary school teacher Jon White, 26, stands accused of getting away with, for a long time, having girls play the taste-test game where they’re blindfolded and have to guess the flavored topping that’s on a, uh, "banana."
NOTW Lite
The Massachusetts-area chain Jordan’s is out as much as $20m ($40k to one guy) (insured, though, since owner Berkshire Hathaway wouldn’t have it any other way) from a Spring promotion offering furniture for free if the Red Sox won the World Series.
Update
Yikes! The F State genital-piercing mother [NOTW Daily, 10-26-2007] was, um, acquitted, apparently because she didn’t mean any harm to the girl, who friends agreed was well on her way to slutdom before the mother's "solution."
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Jamie Anderson, Paul Music, H.Thompson, Tom Barker
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Green funerals and burials are the rage now, aimed at the 30 percent who still don’t opt for cremation, and in Sweden, even cremation is bad, compared to freeze-drying (dip the body in liquid nitrogen and then industrially vibrate it ‘til it’s powder) (Bonus: A green California cemetery bans headstones but will give you a Google map and GPS coordinates to help you find your dad’s plot)
Civilization in Decline
Now that branding of animals is frowned on in civilized society, London’s Daily Mail detects an upward spike in fashionable branding of humans, including upscale professionals who you’d think would know better ("There was smoke coming out of my arm, and my burnt flesh smelled like a cross between chicken and bacon") . . . . . Mmmm, bacon . . . . . Some British research outfit claims that parents are timing conceptions so that when they reach school, their urchins will be months older than their classmates because stats show "older" is marginally more likely to get better grades [Ed.: which is a little weird, itself, but not as weird as the research outfit’s conclusion that someone ought to put a stop to this "urgent(ly)"] . . . . . Things Lawyers Argue About: Wisconsin law prohibits lawyers from having sex with "a current client," but, Question: What if a lawyer has a three-way with a client and the client’s girlfriend (with the lawyer and the client presumably both straight males)? [Link: The Volokh Conspiracy blog, Scroll way down to 10-25-2007]
The Human Condition Today
Philadelphia pastor Willie Singletary, running for Traffic Court judge, begged his motorcycle club for campaign donations because "You’re all going to need me" (Bonus: His own driver’s license has been suspended until 2011 for excessive tickets) . . . . . New World Record: Graham Hurley, Hackensack, N.J., charged with having nearly, er, 1,000 GB of child porn (and we long for much more information because he was married-with-children but kept his stash in a sealed-off room upstairs protected by fingerprint-ID) . . . . . A golfer in Naples, Fla., swears up and down that his 14-yr-old son, who typically shoots 100 for 18 holes, had a hole-in-one, plus holed out another shot from the fairway and chipped in yet another, all in the same rou—oh, wait, he also had two more holes-in-one that round, for a total of three—and, no, now that you ask, there weren’t any other witnesses (except one guy, on one of the aces, allegedly) . . . . . Least Competent Dictator: Uncle Bob’s ministers in Zimbabwe fell for a huckster who promised an unlimited, perpetual supply of refined oil, located by sort-of dowsing (On the other hand, the huckster accepted Zimbabwe dollars, whose value today is about 1/700th what it was when she was paid) . . . . . The Bank of England is not incompetent, though, because it quickly realized that Chinese con men trying to cash in £1,000 notes couldn’t be serious because they were all recalled in 1963 (and only a few serial numbers are still outstanding), er, let alone those £500,000 notes, let alone that it’s "Bank of England," not "England Bank" . . . . . Two more perps not ready for prime time: A Gainesville, Fla., home invader was shot in the neck by the resident, who’s blind, and a Dallas, Tex., home invader was shot to death by the resident, who had gotten up from his wheelchair to wrestle the perp’s gun away.
Your Daily Loser
According to Austin, Tex., police, Tony Davis has ripped off the families of 160 inmates (up to $17.5k each) to get ‘em freed in court on a Congressional-error technicality that’s so transparently bogus that Yr Editor goes full-circle and actually has sympathy for the victims (and Davis is prepared for a defeat in SCOTUS, because he says he’s got 6 more technicalities researched and ready to go) (Bonus: He’s not a lawyer).
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Urbana, Ill., elementary school teacher Jon White, 26, stands accused of getting away with, for a long time, having girls play the taste-test game where they’re blindfolded and have to guess the flavored topping that’s on a, uh, "banana."
NOTW Lite
The Massachusetts-area chain Jordan’s is out as much as $20m ($40k to one guy) (insured, though, since owner Berkshire Hathaway wouldn’t have it any other way) from a Spring promotion offering furniture for free if the Red Sox won the World Series.
Update
Yikes! The F State genital-piercing mother [NOTW Daily, 10-26-2007] was, um, acquitted, apparently because she didn’t mean any harm to the girl, who friends agreed was well on her way to slutdom before the mother's "solution."
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Jamie Anderson, Paul Music, H.Thompson, Tom Barker
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Civilization in Decline
A federal judge OK’d the possibility of a raid on the N’awlins district attorney’s office, for cars, furniture, and office equipment, if DA Eddie Jordan doesn’t come up soon with that $3.5m he owes the white ex-employees whom he fired on a whim to racially re-balance his workforce . . . . . An F State mom forced genital-piercing on her 13-yr-old daughter, the girl said, to make sex painful so she’d stop doing it (especially with mom’s boyfriend) . . . . . An AP Halloween telephone poll found that about 1/3 of Americans believe in ghosts and UFOs (which seems low to Yr Editor because we all know how dead people and aliens can program your brain to give answers that throw off the poll-takers).
The Human Condition Today
Included in that UFO group would have to be Dennis Kucinich, according to his good friend Shirley MacLaine’s latest book (Bonus: Kucinich’s other good friend Chris Griscom is the man who taught Shirley to communicate with trees) . . . . . Travelodges in the UK will be the first chain, apparently, to train staff to deal with the ever-growing problem of naked sleepwalkers . . . . . Names weren’t released, but two drivers smart-assing their way around a highway construction barrier in Mequon, Wis., got stuck in the wet concrete and had to be towed . . . . . The alcoholic had been sober for 16 months, but he went nuts when he saw the Jack Daniel’s Lynchburg Lemonade display at Wal-Mart and didn’t stop until he had killed seven bottles . . . . . What Goes Around, Comes Around: A mom in Scotland, constantly berating her adult son as a total loser, even chiding him when he screwed up a suicide try, was very efficiently smothered to death in her sleep by said failure.
Your Daily Loser
Motorist Steven J. King, 40, ran the table, according to police in Monticello, N.Y.: drunk, un-seat-belted, driving against traffic, with unrestrained toddler in the car, with an open container, without insurance, expired safety inspection, wrong license plates.
NOTW Lite
Russia announced 33 cockroach births, stemming from ribaldry aboard an unmanned space flight in September (the first-ever creature conceptions in space, er, that we know of) . . . . . Female Japanese train grope-ees now have a remedy (since shouting in public is out of the question for their demure souls): A cell-phone program can put messages on the screen that the women can flash at the pervs ("Groping is a crime" and "Shall we head to the police?").
Professor Music’s Weird Links
The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World (and, hey, pufferfish doesn’t even qualify) (like, pacha, from Iraq, which is basically boiled, undisguised sheep’s face, and casu marzu, from Italy, which is a sheep milk cheese that’s not authentic unless it’s moving around on your plate, i.e., maggots).
NOTW, The Blog
Now, remember, Yr Editor is hard at work on other business until at least mid-November and will not be publishing on Saturdays (and also, will be thinning out the Monday through Friday posts a little, as you may have noticed). Thank you for bearing with me.
Newsrangers: Scott Langill, Sam Gaines, Mark Neunder
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
A federal judge OK’d the possibility of a raid on the N’awlins district attorney’s office, for cars, furniture, and office equipment, if DA Eddie Jordan doesn’t come up soon with that $3.5m he owes the white ex-employees whom he fired on a whim to racially re-balance his workforce . . . . . An F State mom forced genital-piercing on her 13-yr-old daughter, the girl said, to make sex painful so she’d stop doing it (especially with mom’s boyfriend) . . . . . An AP Halloween telephone poll found that about 1/3 of Americans believe in ghosts and UFOs (which seems low to Yr Editor because we all know how dead people and aliens can program your brain to give answers that throw off the poll-takers).
The Human Condition Today
Included in that UFO group would have to be Dennis Kucinich, according to his good friend Shirley MacLaine’s latest book (Bonus: Kucinich’s other good friend Chris Griscom is the man who taught Shirley to communicate with trees) . . . . . Travelodges in the UK will be the first chain, apparently, to train staff to deal with the ever-growing problem of naked sleepwalkers . . . . . Names weren’t released, but two drivers smart-assing their way around a highway construction barrier in Mequon, Wis., got stuck in the wet concrete and had to be towed . . . . . The alcoholic had been sober for 16 months, but he went nuts when he saw the Jack Daniel’s Lynchburg Lemonade display at Wal-Mart and didn’t stop until he had killed seven bottles . . . . . What Goes Around, Comes Around: A mom in Scotland, constantly berating her adult son as a total loser, even chiding him when he screwed up a suicide try, was very efficiently smothered to death in her sleep by said failure.
Your Daily Loser
Motorist Steven J. King, 40, ran the table, according to police in Monticello, N.Y.: drunk, un-seat-belted, driving against traffic, with unrestrained toddler in the car, with an open container, without insurance, expired safety inspection, wrong license plates.
NOTW Lite
Russia announced 33 cockroach births, stemming from ribaldry aboard an unmanned space flight in September (the first-ever creature conceptions in space, er, that we know of) . . . . . Female Japanese train grope-ees now have a remedy (since shouting in public is out of the question for their demure souls): A cell-phone program can put messages on the screen that the women can flash at the pervs ("Groping is a crime" and "Shall we head to the police?").
Professor Music’s Weird Links
The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World (and, hey, pufferfish doesn’t even qualify) (like, pacha, from Iraq, which is basically boiled, undisguised sheep’s face, and casu marzu, from Italy, which is a sheep milk cheese that’s not authentic unless it’s moving around on your plate, i.e., maggots).
NOTW, The Blog
Now, remember, Yr Editor is hard at work on other business until at least mid-November and will not be publishing on Saturdays (and also, will be thinning out the Monday through Friday posts a little, as you may have noticed). Thank you for bearing with me.
Newsrangers: Scott Langill, Sam Gaines, Mark Neunder
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Civilization in Decline
Singapore’s parliament voted to legalize oral and anal sex, er, for straights, not gays . . . . . Alabaman Daniel Siebert got a stay of execution, with this winning argument: Er, the lethal-injection drugs might interact with my pancreatic cancer medication (Bonus: The cancer’ll take him before the U.S. Supreme Court gets around to deciding) . . . . . USA Today found that, since 2000, more than 55,000 people have moved into the neighborhoods on fire this week in California [Ed.: Yeah, yeah, the F State builds homes on the coast, but we don’t ask thousands of emergency workers to put their lives on the line to save 'em] . . . . . Sandhurst Junior School in south London lined up its 100 kids for a photo, lightest-skinned on the left, working up to the darkest on the right (Seriously).
The Human Condition Today
A lawyer on People magazine’s list of most-eligible bachelors for 2001 apparently only wants it if he can grab it: He was just accused, for the third time, of sexual assault . . . . . You can egg a house; you can TP a house; and in Iowa, I guess, you ought to be able to corn a house . . . . . Deterrence works: An Oregonian, fleeing police on several charges, crossed into Idaho, causing the police to stand down, but then turned around and drove back into Oregon because he fears Idaho jails . . . . . He’s either a kinder/gentler pervert, or a man with verrrrry specific turn-ons: A convicted sex offender found a wandering 3-yr-old boy on the street and returned him unharmed (but his crime was assaulting a 4-year-old boy) . . . . . Someone vandalized the Atlanta "peace garden" statue of that iconic man of peace, Dr. Martin Lu—uh, no, actually, it was the Tupak Shakur peace statue.
Your Daily Loser
An 18-yr-old woman started the whole thing when she tried to shave her cat, which she thought was the best solution to the cat’s flea problem, and brother Nicholas Palmer, 22, heroically rescued it, which caused the sister to call the police claiming Nicholas pushed her down, and now there’s an all-out dragnet around Swanville, Maine, looking for the poor guy.
NOTW Lite
It’s apparently a YouTube hit, so you’ve probably seen it, but it’s years-old footage of Kevin Rudd (whose party is favored in the November parliamentary elections in Australia and who would thus be prime minister), in the background at his seat in the parliament, excavating an ear and tasting the results . . . . . "The State Department with great fanfare on Tuesday," wrote the Associated Press, announced an agreement allowing the U.S. to board another country’s ships to look for WMD’s, and in this case "another country" refers to that maritime super-power, Mongolia (as in Gobi Desert).
Professor Music’s Weird Links
It seems that the artist Paddy Hartley wanted to make a point or two about facial beauty and thus created Facial Corsets to render himself, temporarily, as ugly as he possibly could. Point taken.
Newsrangers: Ginger Katz, Paul Di Filippo
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Singapore’s parliament voted to legalize oral and anal sex, er, for straights, not gays . . . . . Alabaman Daniel Siebert got a stay of execution, with this winning argument: Er, the lethal-injection drugs might interact with my pancreatic cancer medication (Bonus: The cancer’ll take him before the U.S. Supreme Court gets around to deciding) . . . . . USA Today found that, since 2000, more than 55,000 people have moved into the neighborhoods on fire this week in California [Ed.: Yeah, yeah, the F State builds homes on the coast, but we don’t ask thousands of emergency workers to put their lives on the line to save 'em] . . . . . Sandhurst Junior School in south London lined up its 100 kids for a photo, lightest-skinned on the left, working up to the darkest on the right (Seriously).
The Human Condition Today
A lawyer on People magazine’s list of most-eligible bachelors for 2001 apparently only wants it if he can grab it: He was just accused, for the third time, of sexual assault . . . . . You can egg a house; you can TP a house; and in Iowa, I guess, you ought to be able to corn a house . . . . . Deterrence works: An Oregonian, fleeing police on several charges, crossed into Idaho, causing the police to stand down, but then turned around and drove back into Oregon because he fears Idaho jails . . . . . He’s either a kinder/gentler pervert, or a man with verrrrry specific turn-ons: A convicted sex offender found a wandering 3-yr-old boy on the street and returned him unharmed (but his crime was assaulting a 4-year-old boy) . . . . . Someone vandalized the Atlanta "peace garden" statue of that iconic man of peace, Dr. Martin Lu—uh, no, actually, it was the Tupak Shakur peace statue.
Your Daily Loser
An 18-yr-old woman started the whole thing when she tried to shave her cat, which she thought was the best solution to the cat’s flea problem, and brother Nicholas Palmer, 22, heroically rescued it, which caused the sister to call the police claiming Nicholas pushed her down, and now there’s an all-out dragnet around Swanville, Maine, looking for the poor guy.
NOTW Lite
It’s apparently a YouTube hit, so you’ve probably seen it, but it’s years-old footage of Kevin Rudd (whose party is favored in the November parliamentary elections in Australia and who would thus be prime minister), in the background at his seat in the parliament, excavating an ear and tasting the results . . . . . "The State Department with great fanfare on Tuesday," wrote the Associated Press, announced an agreement allowing the U.S. to board another country’s ships to look for WMD’s, and in this case "another country" refers to that maritime super-power, Mongolia (as in Gobi Desert).
Professor Music’s Weird Links
It seems that the artist Paddy Hartley wanted to make a point or two about facial beauty and thus created Facial Corsets to render himself, temporarily, as ugly as he possibly could. Point taken.
Newsrangers: Ginger Katz, Paul Di Filippo
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Civilization in Decline
The imminently deadly drought in Georgia up to the Carolinas gets serious: (1) A Tennessee Jack Daniel’s distillery is threatened, and (2) The Int’l [Field] Hockey Federation still requires that its artificial-turf fields get heavily watered down every day (for practice, too), and Duke and UNC are in compliance! . . . . . New Jersey will vote in November on whether to adopt euphemistic language in its constitution for the provision denying suffrage to "idiots" . . . . . Families with Too Much Money: Susan Henken’s, of Dover, Mass., after the Washington Post reported that she and her two teenagers (13 and 15) each gave the maximum $2,300 to Mitt Romney’s campaign, which Susan said represented (for the kids) not illegal parental contributions but the kids' baby- and dog-sitting money.
The Human Condition Today
West Virginia women lead the nation . . in pregnant smokers (but it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, in that some of them say they do it on purpose to have small babies so it won’t hurt so much) . . . . . It’s illegal in the state of Western Australia for a woman to crush empty beer cans between her breasts (well, if you’ve got a hotelier’s license, it is) . . . . . In this corner, a convenience store robber; in that corner, Ms. Hafize Sahin, 5-feet, 90 lbs., and the outcome was not even close (Bonus: surveillance video).
Your Daily Loser
Timothy Short allegedly stole a fancy printer from a Missouri state office, to make his own driver’s licenses, but was busted when he had to call up tech support to order a printer driver.
NOTW Lite
In Stuttgart, Germany, a lobster prison break! . . . . . Starbuck’s, massages, pallets of fresh fruit, people making sandwiches for you—ahhh, it’s good to be in an emergency evacuation shelter in southern California!
Updates
The District of Calamity’s committee that hires administrative law judges will not renew the contract (the Washington Post reports, based on a leak) of the $54m-dry-cleaning-lawsuit judge Roy Pearson (prompting Pearson, perhaps, to ask, er, What comes after "gazillion"?) . . . . . The latest of those crazy Japanese ice cream flavors: ramen.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
And another ingenious Japanese product: the portable crosswalk mat that you carry, rolled up, until you need to lay it down in the street to get traffic to come to a stop while you cross.
Newsrangers: Cristi Breden, Tim Trewhella, Karl Olson, James Wicht, Charlie Rovner
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
The imminently deadly drought in Georgia up to the Carolinas gets serious: (1) A Tennessee Jack Daniel’s distillery is threatened, and (2) The Int’l [Field] Hockey Federation still requires that its artificial-turf fields get heavily watered down every day (for practice, too), and Duke and UNC are in compliance! . . . . . New Jersey will vote in November on whether to adopt euphemistic language in its constitution for the provision denying suffrage to "idiots" . . . . . Families with Too Much Money: Susan Henken’s, of Dover, Mass., after the Washington Post reported that she and her two teenagers (13 and 15) each gave the maximum $2,300 to Mitt Romney’s campaign, which Susan said represented (for the kids) not illegal parental contributions but the kids' baby- and dog-sitting money.
The Human Condition Today
West Virginia women lead the nation . . in pregnant smokers (but it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, in that some of them say they do it on purpose to have small babies so it won’t hurt so much) . . . . . It’s illegal in the state of Western Australia for a woman to crush empty beer cans between her breasts (well, if you’ve got a hotelier’s license, it is) . . . . . In this corner, a convenience store robber; in that corner, Ms. Hafize Sahin, 5-feet, 90 lbs., and the outcome was not even close (Bonus: surveillance video).
Your Daily Loser
Timothy Short allegedly stole a fancy printer from a Missouri state office, to make his own driver’s licenses, but was busted when he had to call up tech support to order a printer driver.
NOTW Lite
In Stuttgart, Germany, a lobster prison break! . . . . . Starbuck’s, massages, pallets of fresh fruit, people making sandwiches for you—ahhh, it’s good to be in an emergency evacuation shelter in southern California!
Updates
The District of Calamity’s committee that hires administrative law judges will not renew the contract (the Washington Post reports, based on a leak) of the $54m-dry-cleaning-lawsuit judge Roy Pearson (prompting Pearson, perhaps, to ask, er, What comes after "gazillion"?) . . . . . The latest of those crazy Japanese ice cream flavors: ramen.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
And another ingenious Japanese product: the portable crosswalk mat that you carry, rolled up, until you need to lay it down in the street to get traffic to come to a stop while you cross.
Newsrangers: Cristi Breden, Tim Trewhella, Karl Olson, James Wicht, Charlie Rovner
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Civilization in Decline
The Associated Press uncovered details of a consciously-hidden 2005 NASA survey of pilots about the safeness of commercial air travel, and, basically, you’d soil your pants if you knew . . . . . The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is out there somewhere between California and Hawaii, still growing (3m tons of mostly-plastic trash, 2x the size of Texas).
The Human Condition Today
The Taiwanese military officially abandoned its Theory Y experiment in management style: No more hugging the draftees . . . . . A super-conscientious sex offender in Springfield, Ill., feeling the urge coming on again, doused the desire with a, uh, fillet knife.
NOTW Lite
A Michigan physician and his teenage son figured out a chemical test to bust smokers who lie about it (which is a good thing, I suppose, but the story’s here mainly because the smoking-test kid’s name is "Ashray") . . . . . Awesome in Norfolk, Va.: pillows spill on the Interstate, trucks drive over them, popping them open, feathers all over the place!
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
This looked at first glance like a hack of the CIA website, but, no, it's apparently what the Counterterrorist Center thinks is a good idea: a Ghostbusters-type logo to, y'know, make Americans feel more secure. [link from Wonkette.com, via Copyranter blog]
Professor Music’s Weird Links
It’s supposedly a new-age-type technique for helping the mentally-imbalanced by "re-setting the brain," but despite the quasi-medical backstory, it looks to Yr Editor like a glorified Three Stooges punch (not that there's anything wrong with that). But y’all let me know if it works for you.
Erroror
The Bogota dog owners did not actually pay the $350k ransom, which completely removes the reason for including the story in NOTW Daily yesterday. Sometimes, Yr Editor reads a story in one place (not online, or online from an inconvenient source), writes it up, and then grabs a link to give you guys, assuming that the linked story’s details will match the details that I already "knew," but occasionally they don’t.
Newsrangers: Steve Passen, Gerald Sacks, Steve Miller, Scott Langill, Mark Swofford
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
The Associated Press uncovered details of a consciously-hidden 2005 NASA survey of pilots about the safeness of commercial air travel, and, basically, you’d soil your pants if you knew . . . . . The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is out there somewhere between California and Hawaii, still growing (3m tons of mostly-plastic trash, 2x the size of Texas).
The Human Condition Today
The Taiwanese military officially abandoned its Theory Y experiment in management style: No more hugging the draftees . . . . . A super-conscientious sex offender in Springfield, Ill., feeling the urge coming on again, doused the desire with a, uh, fillet knife.
NOTW Lite
A Michigan physician and his teenage son figured out a chemical test to bust smokers who lie about it (which is a good thing, I suppose, but the story’s here mainly because the smoking-test kid’s name is "Ashray") . . . . . Awesome in Norfolk, Va.: pillows spill on the Interstate, trucks drive over them, popping them open, feathers all over the place!
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
This looked at first glance like a hack of the CIA website, but, no, it's apparently what the Counterterrorist Center thinks is a good idea: a Ghostbusters-type logo to, y'know, make Americans feel more secure. [link from Wonkette.com, via Copyranter blog]
Professor Music’s Weird Links
It’s supposedly a new-age-type technique for helping the mentally-imbalanced by "re-setting the brain," but despite the quasi-medical backstory, it looks to Yr Editor like a glorified Three Stooges punch (not that there's anything wrong with that). But y’all let me know if it works for you.
Erroror
The Bogota dog owners did not actually pay the $350k ransom, which completely removes the reason for including the story in NOTW Daily yesterday. Sometimes, Yr Editor reads a story in one place (not online, or online from an inconvenient source), writes it up, and then grabs a link to give you guys, assuming that the linked story’s details will match the details that I already "knew," but occasionally they don’t.
Newsrangers: Steve Passen, Gerald Sacks, Steve Miller, Scott Langill, Mark Swofford
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Civilization in Decline
Macaques, as, er, descendants of the Hindu monkey god, are allowed to roam free in India, and in their latest foray, a pack attacked the deputy mayor of Delhi, knocking him off his balcony to a fatal landing below (By the way, Delhi and New Delhi have separate gov’ts, so the late deputy mayor was not a part of the New Delhi nat’l gov’t, whose Chief Minister is, of course, the lovely Sheila Dikshit) . . . . . In Ampthill, Bedfordshire, England, firefighters were banned from climbing ladders (safety, you know) to help remove the town’s decorations . . . . . The Associated Press tallied nationwide sex abuse by teachers (2,570 cases from 2001-2005, with about 14,500 [CORRECTION: uh, 1,450] being classic teacher-underage student).
The Human Condition Today
Univ. of Calif., Riverside recruits science students by running a cockroach petting zoo . . . . . The couple in Bogota paid the ransom (equivalent of $350k) [CORRECTION: They didn't pay it, and Yr Editor regrets the story] and got back their, er, dog . . . . . The teenager from Taunton, Mass., gave his secret to growing that award-winning pumpkin: "You spend all your time with it. No sports. You just come home and be with the pumpkin" . . . . . A new high-water mark in stashing: A man anticipating a prison sentence showed up in court in Cork, Ireland, with a cell phone, charger, and SIM card wrapped separately in foil in his rectum and five tiny packets of heroin under his foreskin . . . . . Speaking of which, sorta, it says here, on a South African website, that surgeons in Kenya removed a 10-inch-long, empty half-liter beer bottle from a guy’s rectum and concluded that it was so far in that it couldn’t have been one of those auto-erotic things . . . . . Juan Arreola, 20, will go down hard in Easton, Pa., after he told the judge that he smacked his girlfriend’s 2-yr-old because he himself is "not a morning person" . . . . . A Missouri baby was born with a 0.17 blood-alcohol reading, and lived to the age of 15 minutes, and thus mom’s charged with involuntary manslaughter . . . . . From a NY Times correction [scroll down at the link]: "Because of an editing error, an obituary . . misidentified the person . . arm in arm with Elvis Presley at a Memphis club in 1956. It was B.B. King, not the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
NOTW Lite
PETA alert: The "Mythbusters" TV show announced it will soon put 200 cockroaches into chambers with progressively more radiation, to see when they die, to help determine whether they’d really survive a nuclear attack.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Braille tattoos, ouch, designed by Klara Jirkova of the University of the Arts Berlin
Newsrangers: Joe Littrell, Roger Gulbransen, Sam Gaines, John Ayer, Paul Music
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Macaques, as, er, descendants of the Hindu monkey god, are allowed to roam free in India, and in their latest foray, a pack attacked the deputy mayor of Delhi, knocking him off his balcony to a fatal landing below (By the way, Delhi and New Delhi have separate gov’ts, so the late deputy mayor was not a part of the New Delhi nat’l gov’t, whose Chief Minister is, of course, the lovely Sheila Dikshit) . . . . . In Ampthill, Bedfordshire, England, firefighters were banned from climbing ladders (safety, you know) to help remove the town’s decorations . . . . . The Associated Press tallied nationwide sex abuse by teachers (2,570 cases from 2001-2005, with about 14,500 [CORRECTION: uh, 1,450] being classic teacher-underage student).
The Human Condition Today
Univ. of Calif., Riverside recruits science students by running a cockroach petting zoo . . . . . The couple in Bogota paid the ransom (equivalent of $350k) [CORRECTION: They didn't pay it, and Yr Editor regrets the story] and got back their, er, dog . . . . . The teenager from Taunton, Mass., gave his secret to growing that award-winning pumpkin: "You spend all your time with it. No sports. You just come home and be with the pumpkin" . . . . . A new high-water mark in stashing: A man anticipating a prison sentence showed up in court in Cork, Ireland, with a cell phone, charger, and SIM card wrapped separately in foil in his rectum and five tiny packets of heroin under his foreskin . . . . . Speaking of which, sorta, it says here, on a South African website, that surgeons in Kenya removed a 10-inch-long, empty half-liter beer bottle from a guy’s rectum and concluded that it was so far in that it couldn’t have been one of those auto-erotic things . . . . . Juan Arreola, 20, will go down hard in Easton, Pa., after he told the judge that he smacked his girlfriend’s 2-yr-old because he himself is "not a morning person" . . . . . A Missouri baby was born with a 0.17 blood-alcohol reading, and lived to the age of 15 minutes, and thus mom’s charged with involuntary manslaughter . . . . . From a NY Times correction [scroll down at the link]: "Because of an editing error, an obituary . . misidentified the person . . arm in arm with Elvis Presley at a Memphis club in 1956. It was B.B. King, not the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
NOTW Lite
PETA alert: The "Mythbusters" TV show announced it will soon put 200 cockroaches into chambers with progressively more radiation, to see when they die, to help determine whether they’d really survive a nuclear attack.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Braille tattoos, ouch, designed by Klara Jirkova of the University of the Arts Berlin
Newsrangers: Joe Littrell, Roger Gulbransen, Sam Gaines, John Ayer, Paul Music
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Saturday’s 5-Star Special
"Experimental fashion designer" Aya Tsukioka introduces $800-and-up clothing items to protect Tokyo women fearful of crime, e.g., unwrap the skirt, and it converts into a full-size fabric rendition of a vending machine, to fool the perp (Seriously) (Of course there's a photo).
Civilization in Decline
It says here that, though the Myanmar generals ignore United Nations pressure, they won’t ignore women sending in their panties (which legend has it pussifies he-men) (Bonus: Prostitutes in Bolivia revolt against the shutdown of brothels in a La Paz suburb by threatening to march in their work clothes, i.e., naked) . . . . . Patty Cooper of Vermont sure enough needs a service animal, but . . a horse? (Bonus: with Patty’s apartment-remodeling suggestions to her landlord, e.g., in-room stable, hay, pee-proof flooring).
The Human Condition Today
Tajuan Bullock got caught burglarizing a house, and the homeowner made him clean up the mess to pass time before cops arrived (and Tajuan got attitude about it!) . . . . . Mona Shaw, repeatedly dissed by her cable company Comcast, lives the American Dream (with a claw hammer) . . . . . Scammer to the Accounts Payable dept. at SuperValu (one of America’s largest grocery chains): Start sending our payments to this-here address instead of the one you’ve been using, OK? (SuperValu: Sure, will do!) (SuperValu’s loss: $10.1M) . . . . . The mother of Atlanta Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph complained about her baby boy’s harsh conditions at Supermax [Ed.: Hey, mom, when he was on the run, dude lived in a cave and ate out of Dumpsters] . . . . . George Dallas Jr., 29, was arrested in Orlando, for the, er, 108th time.
Your Daily Loser
Still seething, after all these yrs: Thomas McGriff served his mandatory sentence for domestic abuse, got out, immediately opened up more abuse, and 12 hrs later was back in the hole.
NOTW Lite
Sounds Like a Joke: The respected Rotterdam Natural History Museum put out a call for a species long missing from its collection: pubic hair lice . . . . . Urban Legend Come to Life: Squirrel bites into power line, catches fire, falls underneath Camry, sets it on fire, ta-daaaaa!
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
Gee, thanks for catching that error! The Pentagon made a big deal Thursday, announcing the richest single contract in its history ($24B to Boeing). Friday: Actually, it was $24M, sorry about that.
Update
Here’s one thing that Transportation Security Administration, IRS, the VA, Homeland Security, et al, might consider doing about all those laptop thefts.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Wired’s 10 Most Curious Canned Goods Found Online, including canned haggis and things that sound like jokes, such as reindeer pâté and silkworm pupae.
NOTW, The Blog
This is a make-up post from yesterday. My current schedule, until mid-November, at least, is to publish somewhat-shorter posts Monday through Friday, with none Saturdays. There is nothing bad happening to Yr Editor these days, but when you’re a one-man show (except for your news tips!), and other projects come along that have to be attended to, I have to cut back.
Newsrangers: Bill Becker, Emory Kimbrough, Steve Miller, Bob Pert, Hudson Dean, John Witherspoon, Karen Kuras, Karl Olson
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
"Experimental fashion designer" Aya Tsukioka introduces $800-and-up clothing items to protect Tokyo women fearful of crime, e.g., unwrap the skirt, and it converts into a full-size fabric rendition of a vending machine, to fool the perp (Seriously) (Of course there's a photo).
Civilization in Decline
It says here that, though the Myanmar generals ignore United Nations pressure, they won’t ignore women sending in their panties (which legend has it pussifies he-men) (Bonus: Prostitutes in Bolivia revolt against the shutdown of brothels in a La Paz suburb by threatening to march in their work clothes, i.e., naked) . . . . . Patty Cooper of Vermont sure enough needs a service animal, but . . a horse? (Bonus: with Patty’s apartment-remodeling suggestions to her landlord, e.g., in-room stable, hay, pee-proof flooring).
The Human Condition Today
Tajuan Bullock got caught burglarizing a house, and the homeowner made him clean up the mess to pass time before cops arrived (and Tajuan got attitude about it!) . . . . . Mona Shaw, repeatedly dissed by her cable company Comcast, lives the American Dream (with a claw hammer) . . . . . Scammer to the Accounts Payable dept. at SuperValu (one of America’s largest grocery chains): Start sending our payments to this-here address instead of the one you’ve been using, OK? (SuperValu: Sure, will do!) (SuperValu’s loss: $10.1M) . . . . . The mother of Atlanta Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph complained about her baby boy’s harsh conditions at Supermax [Ed.: Hey, mom, when he was on the run, dude lived in a cave and ate out of Dumpsters] . . . . . George Dallas Jr., 29, was arrested in Orlando, for the, er, 108th time.
Your Daily Loser
Still seething, after all these yrs: Thomas McGriff served his mandatory sentence for domestic abuse, got out, immediately opened up more abuse, and 12 hrs later was back in the hole.
NOTW Lite
Sounds Like a Joke: The respected Rotterdam Natural History Museum put out a call for a species long missing from its collection: pubic hair lice . . . . . Urban Legend Come to Life: Squirrel bites into power line, catches fire, falls underneath Camry, sets it on fire, ta-daaaaa!
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
Gee, thanks for catching that error! The Pentagon made a big deal Thursday, announcing the richest single contract in its history ($24B to Boeing). Friday: Actually, it was $24M, sorry about that.
Update
Here’s one thing that Transportation Security Administration, IRS, the VA, Homeland Security, et al, might consider doing about all those laptop thefts.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Wired’s 10 Most Curious Canned Goods Found Online, including canned haggis and things that sound like jokes, such as reindeer pâté and silkworm pupae.
NOTW, The Blog
This is a make-up post from yesterday. My current schedule, until mid-November, at least, is to publish somewhat-shorter posts Monday through Friday, with none Saturdays. There is nothing bad happening to Yr Editor these days, but when you’re a one-man show (except for your news tips!), and other projects come along that have to be attended to, I have to cut back.
Newsrangers: Bill Becker, Emory Kimbrough, Steve Miller, Bob Pert, Hudson Dean, John Witherspoon, Karen Kuras, Karl Olson
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Civilization in Decline
This massive, UK-gov’t-funded report says it’s society’s fault that people are fat, and it does little good to tell individuals to push the plate back.
The Human Condition Today
The Vatican announced two new Cardinals yesterday, but surely not making the cut was San Francisco’s Archbishop George Niederauer, who just apologized for giving Communion Sunday before last to two street-theater gay men dressed as nuns . . . . . The old senior-driver/gas-brake problem took out a highly respected oncologist in Brockton, Mass., who happened to be standing by the front window when 76-yr-old Jane Berghold came through it . . . . . It doesn’t happen often, but, wait, why does it happen at all, i.e., how can someone drive onto railroad tracks, precisely to the middle of the track, and then suddenly, mysteriously, be unable to move the car either forward or backward, as happened to Betsy DeVall in Greer, S.C.? . . . . . A proposal is on the table to dedicate new public toilets in a London neighborhood to late gay playwright Joe Orton, who apparently spent much time in that area toe-tapping.
Your Daily Loser
Kingsport, Tenn., police took away Christopher Dougherty, who despite numerous efforts by the people at a Hardee’s to keep him conscious, was found passed-out, face-down in a gravy plate (AWI) (Bonus: Reporter's name is Kacie Dingus Breeding, hehheh, hehheh, hehhehheh).
NOTW Lite
A sorta-paranoid Dallas, Tex., man, who has a ridiculously high-tech security system, had to rely on his low-tech parrot to warn him of an intruder (who is no longer with us) . . . . . A gov’t report, the Campbelltown (Australia) Sex Industry Development Control Plan, refers to gay "sex-on-premises establishments" as "suckatoria" (Seriously).
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
Transportation Security Administration again: Two of its contractors’ laptops are missing, containing personnel information (not to be confused with the previous TSA computers with personnel information that have been lost or stolen). Meanwhile, USA Today found a classified report from 2005 revealing that TSA screeners at LAX and O’Hare missed 75% and 60% respectively of test bomb parts in passenger clothes and carry-ons (but the rate at SFO, where screening is by a private company, was only 20%).
Updates
The German cannibal Armin Meiwes just sat for his first TV interview, and Der Spiegel has it (including, yes, it "tastes like pork") . . . . . Another thing besides humans that’s not supposed to be food, according the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, is artist Cosimo Cavallaro’s chocolate Jesus (life-size, naked, anatomically-correct), but it’ll be on display in NYC next week.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Rae Augenstein, Paul Di Filippo, Steve Miller.
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
This massive, UK-gov’t-funded report says it’s society’s fault that people are fat, and it does little good to tell individuals to push the plate back.
The Human Condition Today
The Vatican announced two new Cardinals yesterday, but surely not making the cut was San Francisco’s Archbishop George Niederauer, who just apologized for giving Communion Sunday before last to two street-theater gay men dressed as nuns . . . . . The old senior-driver/gas-brake problem took out a highly respected oncologist in Brockton, Mass., who happened to be standing by the front window when 76-yr-old Jane Berghold came through it . . . . . It doesn’t happen often, but, wait, why does it happen at all, i.e., how can someone drive onto railroad tracks, precisely to the middle of the track, and then suddenly, mysteriously, be unable to move the car either forward or backward, as happened to Betsy DeVall in Greer, S.C.? . . . . . A proposal is on the table to dedicate new public toilets in a London neighborhood to late gay playwright Joe Orton, who apparently spent much time in that area toe-tapping.
Your Daily Loser
Kingsport, Tenn., police took away Christopher Dougherty, who despite numerous efforts by the people at a Hardee’s to keep him conscious, was found passed-out, face-down in a gravy plate (AWI) (Bonus: Reporter's name is Kacie Dingus Breeding, hehheh, hehheh, hehhehheh).
NOTW Lite
A sorta-paranoid Dallas, Tex., man, who has a ridiculously high-tech security system, had to rely on his low-tech parrot to warn him of an intruder (who is no longer with us) . . . . . A gov’t report, the Campbelltown (Australia) Sex Industry Development Control Plan, refers to gay "sex-on-premises establishments" as "suckatoria" (Seriously).
Good Enough for Gov’t Work
Transportation Security Administration again: Two of its contractors’ laptops are missing, containing personnel information (not to be confused with the previous TSA computers with personnel information that have been lost or stolen). Meanwhile, USA Today found a classified report from 2005 revealing that TSA screeners at LAX and O’Hare missed 75% and 60% respectively of test bomb parts in passenger clothes and carry-ons (but the rate at SFO, where screening is by a private company, was only 20%).
Updates
The German cannibal Armin Meiwes just sat for his first TV interview, and Der Spiegel has it (including, yes, it "tastes like pork") . . . . . Another thing besides humans that’s not supposed to be food, according the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, is artist Cosimo Cavallaro’s chocolate Jesus (life-size, naked, anatomically-correct), but it’ll be on display in NYC next week.
Professor Music’s Weird Links
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.™
Newsrangers: Rae Augenstein, Paul Di Filippo, Steve Miller.
This posting to News of the Weird Daily is © 2007 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)