|
Emma Ness of Fargo, N.D., passed her driver's license-renewal eye test in September despite the fact that she is so severely vision-impaired that her nurse must drive her around. Ness, 79, said she had 75 percent blockage in one eye, 25 percent in the other, and sees spots in the middle of road signs, according to a report in the Fargo Forum, but she bet the nurse that clerks would renew her license, anyway, and they did. ("We're only human," said a state transportation official.) [Charlotte Observer, 10-11-01]
Port of Oakland (Calif.) commissioners ordered a full inquiry in October on why 1,000 secure-area access badges to Oakland International Airport were missing. However, the FAA had come down hard on the airport only because 1,000 badges was too many, in that regulations permit that airport to have only 500 unaccounted-for access badges. [sfgate.com-AP, 10-24-01]
During the summer, cell-phone users who dialed 911 in Northern California and who were placed on hold for the next available operator did not receive the traditional, calming recorded messages of reassurance. Rather, the often-panicked callers had to listen to tapes of either energy-saving tips or job-recruiting notices for the California Highway Patrol. After the San Francisco Chronicle publicized the messages in an August story, the traditional calming messages were returned to the line. [San Francisco Chronicle, 8-18-01]
For reasons not yet explained in the British press, when David Devlin of Glasgow, Scotland, retrieved prints from his four rolls of Greek-vacation photographs from a film processing shop in August, he found that his package contained not his photos but rather year-old snapshots taken by Cherie Blair (wife of the British prime minister) of husband Tony and their children on holiday in Italy. Devlin returned the photos to the shop, and Blair's office said only that the prime minister was grateful to have them back. [Excite-Reuters, 9-4-01]
Mark Wayne Toon, 24, was arrested in September and charged with breaking into the Van Alma Tire Center in Fort Smith, Ark., and stealing some things. Police investigators learned that Toon had not only accidentally dropped his wallet at the scene but, in the course of urinating against a front window, had had occasion to rest his buttocks against the pane, leaving two sets of what police described as buttocks-shaped prints. [Southwest Times Record, 9-27-01]
A September San Francisco Chronicle profile highlighted the several victories of free-lance postal-customer advocate Doug Carlson in getting sluggish or recalcitrant postal supervisors to do their jobs better, but also described Carlson's lifelong fascination with the post office: "As a kid, he followed the postman around. He got his first post office box when he was 15. (H)e toured mail-processing facilities." "It's fun to watch," he said. A law-school graduate and now a university administrator, Carlson reads the postal manual as a "hobby," he said, to be able to cite instances in which the USPS doesn't follow its own procedures. [San Francisco Chronicle, 9-4-01]
On being informed that Canada had chosen a secluded rural retreat for next year's Group of Eight summit, possibly because the area's grizzly bear population would discourage the usual protestors, Alberta activist Alan Keane said the protestors would be out in force, anyway, because grizzly bears "are our friends." [Boston Globe, 6-9-01]
Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti told London's Daily Telegraph in November that the Company had a project in the 1960s ("Acoustic Kitty") in which a cat had batteries and wires surgically installed, with an antenna in the tail, so that it could be placed close to enemy operatives and transmit eavesdropped conversations back to a monitoring station. The project was five years in development when the first Kitty was deployed, but it was immediately run over by a taxicab. [Daily Telegraph, 11-4-01]
A couple of days after the problem was highlighted in a Reuters news story (but several weeks after it had been going on), the Pentagon decided to change the color of the food packages it was dropping in Afghanistan, from yellow to blue, so recipients would be less confused. For several weeks, it had been dropping yellow packages of food and yellow packages of cluster bombs, along with fliers that explained that the square yellow packages were food and the cylindrical yellow packages were bombs, and urging people to open the former but avoid the latter. [Reuters, 10-29-01; Associated Press, 11-2-01]
Arson and Nakedness: The property-eschewing religious sect Doukhobours were in the news again recently. (The sect's breakaway Freedomites ritually burn property and ritually remove their clothes.) Mary Braun, 81, was convicted of setting fire to a college building in Nelson, British Columbia, in October. Her rap sheet for this type of thing is lengthy, and this episode appeared to be another of her revelations. She tried to attend court sessions nude, but staff members covered her with blankets. [Canoe-Canadian Press, 8-29-01; Reuters, 10-23-01]
Israeli security agents scrambled to high alert in September over what they feared was a suicide parachuter from Jordan, landing near the airport in the town of Eilat, Israel. It turned out merely to be Rabbi Shimon Eizenbach carrying out a pre-Yom Kippur ritual of kapparot, floating down in an ultralite glider while holding a hen in one cage (to atone for women) and a rooster in another (for men). Security forces held their fire, and the town was duly blessed. [Jerusalem Post, 9-26-01]
In western Kenya near Lake Victoria, the Wanga faction of the Luhya tribe continue to practice "wife inheritance," in which a woman who becomes a widow is obliged to marry another family member (or risk acquiring a curse), a practice that opponents say is particularly bad in light of the region's high HIV-infection rate. According to a May Agence France-Presse dispatch, tradition provides that if a widow refuses to remarry, the family upon her death pays any available man to have sex with her corpse so that she can be posthumously "inherited" and her soul saved. [Bangkok Post-AFP, 5-6-01]
People Different From Us
Several Canadian tax-evasion defendants have recently resorted to a language called "In the Truth" (invented by American David Wynn Miller) when they defend themselves in court. However, only true believers can distinguish the language from gibberish (one example: "With the sovereign, hyphen, authority of the Andrew, hyphen, William, colon, Sereda (the defendant) is for the stating of the authority of the noun"). Miller said he created the language to replace the "flawed syntax" of English. So far, according to an October Canadian Press report, most judges' preferred response is to award the "In the Truth" speakers a government-paid mental examination, and Canadian Immigration's response has been to keep Miller out of the country. [Edmonton Sun-CP, 10-14-01]
Thinning the Herd
William Stewart finally died of his injuries in November, three weeks after hanging himself in his jail cell, the latest tragedy to befall his Parma, Ohio, family. His wife, Joyce Stewart, died a month before William, allegedly murdered by him. William had been stopped on suspicion of DUI but then invited arrest by snapping gratuitously at the officer, "You can't get into my car without a warrant." The garbage bags in his back seat contained pieces of Joyce. Her son, Mark DiMarco, was serving 94 years for rape and murder before he hanged himself in his cell in 1999. Joyce had served time for obstructing justice in his case after having become sort of a house mother to Mark's gang of delinquents, and after Mark's death, Joyce treated Mark's bedroom as a shrine. [Cleveland Plain Dealer, 10-8-01,
In September, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution profiled desolate Echols County, Georgia (between Valdosta and the Okeefenokee Swamp), well-known to the state's judges because that is where they encourage lawbreakers to go when they really want them to leave the state altogether. The Georgia constitution prohibits banishing people from the state as punishment for crimes, so judges merely banish them from 158 of the state's 159 counties, trusting that they would never voluntarily settle in Echols, anyway, and such strategy seems always to work. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9-30-01]
Britain's Legal Services Commission granted imprisoned murderer Shaun Armstrong, 39 (whose victim was 3 years old), legal aid for his privacy-rights lawsuit for about $25,000 against the friend to whom he confessed in writing and who turned him in. Armstrong wants back the letters he sent the friend, claiming ownership of his confession (which reads, "Yes, I'm responsible for the crime, but please don't tell anybody."). [The Independent (London), 9-6-01]
An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled in May that spouses have no legal duty to inform each other of their adulterous affairs. A 52-year-old man had sued his estranged wife for about $210,000 (U.S.) for breaching her duty of "good faith" and "honesty" by hiding her affairs from him for 21 years, but the best the judge would do is agree only in cases where "hazardous" sexual activity outside the marriage would subject the spouse to health risks. [Edmonton Journal, 5-19-01]
Nolan Lett was awarded $17,000 from his former employer, Aramark Corp. (Oak Brook, Ill.), in October. He had fallen and broken his wrist after being chased by a goose as he arrived for work one day at Aramark's building, which he proved in court was a "high-goose" area, encouraged by the company's elaborate pond and garden. "It was very ferocious," Lett said. "It started acting crazy." [Chicago Sun-Times, 10-3-01]
Municipal clerk Anne Frank filed a lawsuit against Greenwich, Conn., in August for back pay owing to her boss's having had an 11-year affair with his secretary. According to the lawsuit, the trysting couple were so often going at it that much of the secretary's work was passed down to Frank, and it was work that she was expected to complete in uncompensated overtime. [Providence Journal-AP, 9-1-01]
Actual article from the Los Angeles Times:
"In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only trying to retrieve the gerbil," Eric Tomaszewski told bemused doctors in the Severe Burns Unit of San Francisco Hospital. Tomaszewski, and his homosexual partner Andrew "Kiki" Farnum, had been admitted for emergency treatment after a Felching session had gone seriously wrong.
"I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Raggot, our gerbil, in," he explained. "As usual, Kiki shouted out "Armageddon", my cue that he'd had enough. I tried to retrieve Raggot but he wouldn't come out again, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him."
At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman described what happened next. "The match ignited a pocket of intestinal gas and a flame shot out the tubing, igniting Mr. Tomaszewski's hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to the gerbil's fur and whiskers which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the rodent out like a cannonball."
Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.
TOP TEN SCARIEST THINGS ABOUT THIS STORY:
10) "I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum..."
9) "So I peered into the tube..." (I'm sorry, but that's like looking through a telescope into hell. I'd rather use binoculars to stare at the sun.)
8) That poor gerbil (who obviously suffers from low self-esteem) being shot out of the guy's ass like Rocky the Flying Squirrel on Rocky & Bullwinkle.
7) Suffering a broken nose from a gerbil being launched out of someone's anus. I'm just guessing, but I seriously doubt the said gerbil was springtime fresh after his little journey into Kiki's "tunnel of love."
6) People walking around with these volcanic-like pockets of gas in their rectums.
5) People who do this kind of thing and then admit what they were doing when taken to the emergency room. Sorry, but I think I would have made up a story about a gang of roving, pyromaniac, anal sex fiends breaking into my house and sodomizing me with a charcoal lighter before I admitted the truth. Call me old fashioned, but I just can't imagine looking at a doctor and saying "Well Doc., it's like this. You see, we have this gerbil named Raggot and we took this cardboard tube..."
4) "First and second degree burns to the anus." Wouldn't this make the burning itch and discomfort of hemorrhoids a welcome relief? How does one ever take a healthy poop after something like this? And the smell of a burning anus must be in the top five most horrible scents on the face of God's green earth.
3) People named "Kiki" which is obviously a Polynesian word for: "Idiotic white men who insert rodents up their butts."
2) What kind of a hospital would hold a press conference on this?
1) This happened in San Francisco, (I guess no real surprise.) It does give new meaning to the phrase "Blow it out your ass", doesn't it?
|
