[497] in Humor
HUMOR: WEIRDNUZ.347 (News of the Weird, September 30, 1994)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Mon Oct 17 09:49:58 1994
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 09:42:28 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 13:10:18 -0600 (MDT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN%ARIES@VAXF.Colorado.EDU>
From: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
From: notw-request@nine.org (NotW List Admin)
WEIRDNUZ.347 (News of the Weird, September 30, 1994)
by Chuck Shepherd
Lead Story
* The New York Times reported in August on Zimbabwe's recent salutary
birth control performance, an effort led by more than 800 family-planning
missionaries who regularly tour the countryside. The achievement has also
helped produce a new export industry: Zimbabwe now sells wooden penises
for use by family-planning programs in other African countries for
demonstrating how to apply condoms. [New York Times, 9-4-94]
Inexplicable
* A New York City Emergency Medical Services crew that was called to a
Macy's restroom on July 25 diagnosed the contents of a plastic bag that
a cleaning woman had found in a toilet as a fetus. A few minutes later,
a crew from the city medical examiner's office arrived and correctly
determined that the bag contained spaghetti. [Albany Times Union-AP,
7-26-94]
* According to England's Manchester Guardian newspaper in August, members
of a village in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea had to that point
raised about $530 in a legal defense fund for O. J. Simpson. [The
Guardian, 8-14-94]
* In New York City in July, Bartolome Moya, 37, charged with kidnaping,
drug-dealing, and six murders, skipped town after being released on bail.
In 1993, Moya was jailed pending trial on the same charges but was in such
poor health from heart disease that a judge thought his death was imminent
and dismissed the charges so Moya could go home to die. In February 1994,
Moya obtained a Medicare-financed heart transplant--one of only 2,000 (out
of 6,000 on waiting lists) who got hearts during a 12-month period.
Prosecutors learned of the transplant, reindicted Moya in May, and jailed
him. Then a judge released him on bail on the condition that Moya wear
a beeper/monitor, and Moya has not been heard from since. [Philadelphia
Inquirer, 8-6-94]
* The regional airline Markair apologized to passenger Rosalyna Lopez in
July for a May incident in which a flight attendant on a
Tucson-to-Washington, D. C., flight ordered her to stop talking in Spanish
to a relative traveling with her. "No Spanish!" said the flight
attendant. "English only! Do you understand that?" [Albuquerque Journal,
7-26-94]
* In August, New York City criminal court judge Sheryl Parker ruled that
the well-known Times Square tourist hustle known as "three-card monte"
was legal, thus freeing dealer Eric Hunt of criminal charges. (Players
try to follow the path of one red card thrown in with two black ones;
police routinely describe players' chances of winning as "zero" because
of dealers' sleight of hand and intimidation.) Asked one officer, "What
is that judge, about 100 years old?" [New York Post, 8-17-94]
* Police in Des Moines, Iowa, in April easily subdued Ronald Albert
Siedelman in the Norwest Bank after he had given a teller a long, poorly
written note that officers characterized as implying a robbery and asking
for "$19 trillion." Siedelman further astounded tellers by walking
outside as tellers were deciphering the note. He said that he wanted to
smoke a cigarette and did not want to violate the bank's no-smoking
policy. [Des Moines Register, 4-15-94]
* In July, at an international travel baggage exposition in Japan, a
prototype suitcase-car, manufactured by the government of Toyooka City,
in partnership with an electronics firm, was introduced. The device looks
like an ordinary, large plastic suitcase but can be converted into a
battery-driven automobile capable of transporting a rider at about 6 miles
an hour. A spokesman for the manufacturer admitted its drawbacks: It
cost about as much as a real car, and it weighs more than passengers are
permitted to carry aboard airliners. [Manchester Guardian Weekly, 6-12-94]
* In September, after a six-month investigation, the California Department
of Health Services decided that it was merely stress, and not mysterious
fumes, that rendered several hospital emergency-room workers unconscious
in February in Riverside, Calif. One of the workers, who has been
hospitalized since February and who has undergone three bone operations,
called the diagnosis of stress "absurd and ridiculous." [New York Times,
9-4-94]
* In August, Ottawa biologist David Brez Carlisle told a meeting of
geologists in Waterloo, Ontario, that the exotic amino acids found in
several rocks from space, which are considered evidence that
extraterrestrial life exists, are not what they seem. Carlisle said that
the space rocks he has examined contain not the exotic amino acids but
flakes of human dandruff, which have a similar chemical makeup to the
amino acids. Carlisle said he knows a lot about dandruff because he has
a lifelong, severe case. [Edmonton Journal-Ottawa Citizen, 8-15-94]
First Things First
* In June, the state of Maine yanked the driver's license of a divorced
father -- the first victim of a 1993 law authorizing the revocation of
driver's licenses and professional licenses (among them doctors, lawyers,
architects, plumbers, electricians) of parents behind on child support
payments. However, not affected under the law are deadbeat parents'
hunting and fishing licenses. [AP wirecopy, 6-28-94]
* In August near Mont Saint-Michel, France, Marie-Noelle Guillernee, 42,
drowned in a deep water hole at a tourist attraction when she tried to
save her 6-year-old daughter. Dozens of tourists were watching the
ten-minute rescue attempt, and none attempted to assist the woman or
called for help. Spectators reported hearing one tourist say, "I got the
whole thing on tape." [Newark Star-Ledger-AP, 8-29-94]
* Last fall in a jail in New Haven, Conn., inmate Francis Gotlibowski was
beaten and kicked by other inmates in an attack that sent him to the
intensive-care unit of the Yale-New Haven Hospital. After an
investigation, a jail spokesman found that the beating was in retaliation
for Gotlibowski's having littered on the floor of the cafeteria. Said
the spokesman, "[The inmates] apparently have their own code to keep the
place clean." [New Haven Register, 10-5-93]
I Don't Think So
* Lloyd Johnson, Jr., 38, was arrested in Jacksonville, Fla., in May. He
admitted to running by a bank's drive-through teller chute and swiping
money just before the waiting motorist could grab it. Johnson told Judge
Morton Kesler that he wasn't a thief; he said he had been using an
automatic teller machine elsewhere on the bank's property but was
unfamiliar with how it worked and thought he had to run over to the
drive-through chute to retrieve his money. [Florida Times-Union, 5-25-94]
Copyright 1994, Universal Press Syndicate. All rights
reserved. Released for the personal use of readers.
No commercial use may be made of the material or of the
name News of the Weird.
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