[1070] in Humor
HUMOR: News of the Weird, August 4, 1995
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Tue Sep 19 13:38:36 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 1995 13:34:29 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 95 11:27:17 EST
From: pug@MIT.EDU (Sharalee M. Field)
WEIRDNUZ.391 (News of the Weird, August 4, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd
LEAD STORY
* In "News of the Weird" in January 1991, the plight of Merhan
"Alfred" Nasseri, 49, was celebrated. He was well into his third
year as a full-time resident of the lounges of Charles de Gaulle
Airport in Paris because he was unable to enter or leave France.
(He arrived in 1988 on a two-day trip but without a passport or
visa. He said his Iranian passport had been confiscated when he
took part in an anti-Shah demonstration in 1975.) Airport
employees were bringing him food and newspapers, and he
passed the time writing in his diary and studying the history of
economic analysis. Well, according to a Los Angeles Times
story in May 1995, he's still stuck there, and his diary is now
6,000 pages long. [Seattle Times-L. A. Times, 5-20-95]
SEEDS OF OUR DESTRUCTION
* In April, New York Newsday reported that the owners of the
Exxon Valdez, which was banned from its profitable Alaska
route following the 1989 oil spill, has applied to the Maritime
Administration for a federal subsidy, which the owners say is
necessary to make any other uses of the ship profitable. [New
York Newsday, 4-2-95]
* The Xinhua news agency in China reported in June that six men
had just been executed for producing bogus "paid-up" tax
invoices. And also in China in June, Zhang Guangming was
sentenced to life in prison in Shaanxi province for killing a
panda. [Toronto Star, 6-16-95; Boston Herald-Reuter, 6-27-95]
* In June, what was described as the "Annual Death-Row
Banquet" at Eddyville prison in Kentucky was canceled after
word of it was widely reported for perhaps the first time ever.
The banquet would have brought together the 28 death-row
inmates plus 125 guests that included inmates' family and
friends, inmates' lawyers, and death-penalty opponents. Victims'
rights organizations said they were shocked to learn of the
banquet. [Louisville Courier-Journal, 6-30-95]
* In 1992, an advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsen
proposed that emergency relief food and supplies could be placed
in the nuclear warhead housing of an SS-18 intercontinental
ballistic missile and fired into remote areas of the world as
humanitarian aid. That suggestion was not accepted, but the
ITAR-Tass news agency reported in June that an SS-18 launched
from a nuclear submarine near Murmansk, across nine time
zones, delivered 1,270 pieces of mail to Kamchatka. [Chicago
Sun-Times, Jun95]
* Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine reported in
February that a new fuel would soon be used in U. S. war
missiles, including Hellfires, TOWs, and Sidewinders. Among
the fuel's benefits were higher performance and less heat--and the
fact that it gave off less air pollution on the way to the target.
[Aviation Week & Space Technology, 2-27-95]
* In April, trustees of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Louisville, Ky., endorsed their president's position that new
faculty hires must adhere to the belief that the Bible prohibits
female pastors. One week later, to the trustees' chagrin, in the
Seminary's annual Francisco Preaching Awards competition, the
top three finishers were Ms. Kimberly Baker, Ms. Mary Beth
McCloy, and Ms. Dixie Petrey. [Christian Century, 6-7-95]
* In January, the maternity unit of Rockyview Hospital in
Calgary, Alberta, which requires mothers to complete the
provincial registration records of their births with a black pen,
stopped lending the pens and began charging 25 cents each for
them. [Sault Star-CP, 1-12-95]
THE CONTINUING CRISIS
* In Kennewick, Wash., in June, while on location for a story on
beekeepers, TV reporter Mychal Limric, 24, was stung on the
head about 30 times by bees apparently attracted to his hair gel.
The subject of the piece, beekeeper Irv Pfeiffer, tried to help
Limric by covering him immediately with a protective hood, but
did not realize that there were many bees inside the hood, as
well. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 6-21-95]
* In February, Hong Kong legislator Eric Li proposed a law to
strengthen the family by limiting extramarital affairs. Li would
ban affairs that involve financial support to the mistress or which
produce children; however, affairs that involved neither of those
conditions and which had not reached their second anniversary
would be legal. [New Haven Register, 2-18-95]
* In June, Barbara Ricci was voted by fellow contestants as Mrs.
Congeniality in the Mrs. New York State pageant, receiving 22
of the 28 votes. However, in January, she had gone to trial in
Mount Vernon, N. Y., on charges that she tried to drive over the
11-year-old daughter of a neighbor with whom she had been
feuding, but a hung jury resulted, and a second trial was pending
at press time. And in an unrelated incident in 1993, she pleaded
guilty to harassment of a police officer, who had said Mrs. Ricci
had punched and kicked him at a school board meeting. [N. Y.
Times, 6-7-95]
* In April, a South African Airways plane headed home had to
return to the London airport when fire alarms sounded. The
alarms were triggered by the heat, and flatulence, produced by 72
prize stud pigs in the cargo hold. [Chicago Tribune-Reuters, 4-7-
95]
* In February, in Edmonton, Alberta, a man driving three family
members passed out briefly behind the wheel of their car and
collided with another car, careened out of control, and struck a
utility pole. None was seriously hurt. According to police, the
father had become woozy from listening to his 22-year-old son
describe for the family the bloody extraction of his wisdom teeth
earlier in the day. [Sault Star-CP, 2-25-95]
* In perhaps the first reported case of gay male "Bobbittry" since
John and Lorena Bobbitt came to national attention in 1993,
Mark Aaron Krebs, 35, was charged with slashing his lover's
scrotum in Bristol, Tenn., in June, in a fit of jealousy.
[[Kingsport Daily News, Jun95]]
LEAST COMPETENT PERSON
* Steven Kemble, 21, was arrested in St. George, Utah, in
March when he attempted to flee the Tom Tom CD's & Tapes
store after allegedly shoplifting a CD. After being detained
briefly by a clerk, he then broke free, dashed out the door, and
ran smack into a pillar in front of the store, knocking himself
briefly unconscious. [St. George Spectrum, 3-30-95]
Copyright 1995, Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.
Released only for entertainment of readers. No commercial use
may be made of the material or of the name News of the Weird.
