[1222] in Humor
HUMOR: WEIRDNUZ.404 (News of the Weird, November 3, 1995)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Mon Nov 27 14:00:14 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 13:48:45 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 18:16:52 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
From: bostic@bsdi.com (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: notw-request@nine.org (NotW List Admin)
WEIRDNUZ.404 (News of the Weird, November 3, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd
LEAD STORY
* According to an October Wall Street Journal article, the number of
bellybutton reconstructions in Japan went up 375% in the last year, in
part because many Japanese have come to believe, as author Hogen Fukunaga
writes, "The navel is the core of everything about the person." Said a
Tokyo hospital president, "People want navels that aren't assertive."
The perfect navel, surmised the Journal reporter, is "vertical, very
narrow, and absolutely symmetrical." The navel is a popular theme in the
Japanese language; for instance, a favorite kids' insult is, "Your mother
has an outie." [Wall Street Journal, 10-4-95]
QUESTIONABLE JUDGMENTS
* Earlier this year, Michael Eugene Price was granted retrials in two
armed robbery cases after an Oklahoma appeals court ruled that trial
judges had been erring in telling juries that defendants are "presumed
not guilty" instead of "presumed innocent." He had been serving 32 and
35 years, respectively, but in his first retrial in March, he was again
found guilty and sentenced to 60 years, and in his second retrial, in
October, he was again found guilty and sentenced to 65 years. [Dallas
Morning News-AP, 10-6-95]
* In September, police in Meadville, Pa., announced that the summer
drought in the area was responsible for their success in finding marijuana
farmers. Said a police spokesman, almost all of the vegetation is brown
because of the drought, but the marijuana stays green because the owners
take such good care of the plants. [USA Today, 9-12-95]
* A San Diego, Calif., couple, both 35, suffered only minor injuries in
September when their car went off of I-10 at 75 mph. The couple, who
police said were nude when they arrived on the scene, were having sex in
the front seat, and the driver lost control. And in San Antonio, Tex.,
five days earlier, motorcyclist Liem Ngo, 38, was killed when he collided
with another cyclist, probably, according to police, because the other
cyclist's passenger, a 38-year-old woman, had just bared her breasts at
Ngo, distracting him. [Detroit Free Press, 9-17-95; San Antonio
Express-News, 9-12-95]
* In July, a 25-year-old female sixth-grade science teacher in Muroran,
Japan, exasperated at the rowdiness of her students, slashed one of her
wrists in front of them in an attempt to scare them into being quiet.
She had to be rushed to the hospital. [The Daily Mainichi, 7-12-95]
* When a band called On the Edge played the largest prison in Maryland,
outside Hagerstown, in August, three female band members engaged in risky
behavior. According to a corrections officer, they were "straddl[ing]
the stage poles" and lying down on the stage "in every provocative
position and imitat[ing] sex acts." The women "were yelling suggestive
things to the inmates, who were responding in a sexual frenzy, climbing
the fences." (The fences were sturdy; no inmate-band contact occurred.)
[Washington Times-AP, 8-18-95]
* In August, hotel owner Robert W. Vermillion, 52, died in Williamsburg,
Va., from smoke inhalation. He had rushed into his flame-filled garage
to attempt to save his Porsche but was overcome before he could get it
out. And in August, six people on a farm near Nazlat Imara, Egypt,
drowned after diving one at a time into a well trying to capture a chicken
that had fallen in. The chicken survived. [Washington Post, 8-2-95;
Toronto Sun-AP, 8-4-95]
* In September, police in Gadsden, Ala., were able to arrest Bobby Joe
Dedeaux and Anitra Freeman and charge them with bank robbery because the
two had relaxed their getaway by stopping at a nearby strip mall for a
haircut and a little shopping.
[Tuscaloosa News-AP, Sep95; USA Today, 9-14-95]
* A 43-year-old man was hospitalized in Edmonton, Alberta, in July after
he fell out of the upper deck at a stadium during a Canadian Football
League game. He was attempting to grab a toy football thrown into the
stands but went over the rail, landing on a pregnant woman, who was not
seriously hurt. [The Tennessean, 7-19-95]
* In August, Rozlan Othman, 25, had just been sentenced to three months
in prison in Singapore for assaulting a police officer. However, he
persuaded Judge Yong Pung How that what he really needed in order to be
a better citizen and to get his life together was to spend even more time
than that in a Singapore prison. How gave him 12 months. [Globe and Mail-
Reuters, 8-31-95]
CLICHES COME TO LIFE
* A July international men's conference in Ottawa was attended by nearly
150 men (who paid $350 each), which was a vast improvement over the
previous year's attendance of five. One difference was that this year,
the conference was not organized in-house but was contracted out to two
women. [Barrie Examiner-CP, 7-3-95]
* A March Gallup Organization survey for CNN and U. S. News & World Report
found that 80% of men considered themselves above-average drivers.
[Columbus Dispatch, 3-19-95]
* Poland's leading "playwright of the absurd," Stanislaw Ignacy
Witkiewicz, was buried in Soviet territory when he committed suicide in
1939, but his casket was sent to his beloved Polish mountains for reburial
in 1988. In May 1995, a special commission celebrating Witkiewicz's work
discovered that, somehow, Witkiewicz's casket contained the body of a
woman. [Edmonton Journal, 5-6-95]
THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY
* A 64-year-old Dade City, Fla., man accused by authorities in March of
fathering at least one, and perhaps all nine, of his 44-year-old sister's
children recently had his trial postponed until early 1996. The man,
identified only as William, warned authorities that prosecuting him will
doom society because he needs six more months to finish up his work on
"the prism" (a wooden table with a hole in the middle in which William
stands), which he promised would enable him harness all the world's energy
to control the weather, end the fighting in Bosnia, and make the state's
child welfare office obsolete. Said William, the prism is "the only way
humanity will get out of limbo." [Tampa Tribune, 10-19-95]
Copyright 1995, Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.
Released for the entertainment of readers. No commercial use
may be made of the material or of the name News of the Weird.
