[1625] in Humor
HUMOR: NoTW
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Mon Oct 7 12:14:13 1996
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 1996 11:59:34 EDT
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 18:24:08 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 18:05:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
From: notw-request@nine.org (NotW List Admin)
WEIRDNUZ.447 (News of the Weird, August 30, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd
LEAD STORIES
* Sex offender registration laws, which permit towns to learn when a sex
offender has been released from jail into their communities, have been
criticized recently as interfering with offenders' ability to start new
lives, but the main shortcoming of the laws in several states appears to
be their ineffectiveness. Said an Illinois State Police spokesman in
June, of the many bogus addresses on his state's register, "It's the
responsibility of the offender to provide [accurate] information." In
Arkansas, a state with at least 1,000 sex offenders behind bars at any
one time, the register contains only 50 names, but a State Police
spokesman in June said the fault was the sex offenders' for not being
responsible enough to register. [Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 6-28-96]
[Dallas Morning News-AP, 6-27-96]
* 'Roid Rage: In July, police in Brooklyn, N. Y., accused Gail Murphy,
47, bedridden on her stomach while recovering from hemorrhoid surgery, of
shooting her husband to death because he had gone on a six-hour fishing
trip. Said a police investigator, "She felt that her husband didn't
demonstrate that he cared for her on that particular day." [New York
Times, 7-23-96]
* Hillsborough County (Fla.) Sheriff's deputies charged Jeffrey Alan
McLeod, 29, with robbing a Chevron gas station in August, then fleeing.
He was caught after a brief chase when his car ran out of gas. Said a
Sheriff's spokesman, "When you're going to rob a gas station . . . you're
supposed to fill up the tank before you rob the clerk." [Tampa Tribune,
8-14-96]
COURTROOM ANTICS
* During a Tirana, Albania, divorce hearing in July, in which a man was
contending that his wife beat him regularly over the course of their
two-year union, the wife suddenly leaped at the man and beat him
unconscious before she was restrained. The judge quickly granted the
divorce. [Reuters wirecopy, 7-17-96]
* In August, Cleveland, Ohio, judge Shirley Strickland Saffold, 45,
attempting to counsel defendant Katie Nemeth to get her life together,
recommended in court that she should get a better boyfriend than the one
she has: "Men are easy. You can go sit in the bus stop, put on a short
skirt, cross your legs and pick up 25. Ten of them will give you their
money. If you don't pick up the first 10, then all you got to do is open
your legs a little bit and cross them at the bottom." [Cleveland Plain
Dealer, 8-15-96]
* In June, a California appeals court ruled against defendant Thomas
Keister, who had been charged with attempted lewd acts against two
underage girls in San Bernardino County. The court made the ruling even
though the victims and the defendant do not exist. The "victims" were
fictional (part of a police sting to entice pedophiles), and Mr. Keister
died last year. [San Francisco Recorder, 7-2-96]
* Detroit, Mich., lawyer Leonard Jaques, 68, was fined $11,000 for a May
courtroom outburst in which he verbally abused an opposing lawyer, then
yanked his hair and threw him to the floor. (In a widely reported
courtroom outburst in 1983 in Cleveland, Ohio, Jaques achieved notoriety
by giving a federal judge the excuse for missing a court date that he had
"screaming itches in the crotch.") Detroit Free Press, 6-18-96]
* In July, Rhode Island Workers' Compensation Court Judge Debra Olsson
awarded convicted murderer Antonino Cucinotta $18,500 in benefits.
Cucinotta, a former Mafioso serving 60 years at an undisclosed prison as
part of the federal Witness Protection Program, injured his head at a
construction site in 1988 but was improperly cut off from benefits on the
date of his arrest in 1994, rather than on the date of his conviction in
1995. [Providence Journal-Bulletin, 7-18-96]
WELL-PUT
* X-rated film actress Nina Hartley, telling a June news conference in
Sacramento, Calif., that her films serve an important need--promoting
romance by warming up the viewers: "It's no different than Hamburger
Helper." [Los Angeles Times, 6-19-96]
* Self-described "fishing fanatic" Tom Getherall of East Moriches, Long
Island, telling a New York Daily News reporter the day after the crash of
TWA Flight 800: "I felt bad when I heard about the wreck, real bad, but
to be honest with you, the first thing I wondered was how it would affect
the fishing." [New York Daily News, 7-21-96]
* John P. Royster, 47, serving a life sentence for murder, waxing
nostalgic to a New York Times reporter in June about the joyous childhood
of his son, John J. Royster, 22, who had just been charged with the
vicious killing of a New York City dry cleaner: "He's a chip off the old
block." [New York Times, 6-15-96]
* Canadian food inspector Pamela Morgan, warning the public in March after
the death of a British Columbia man: "We caution the public not to eat
seafood that glows in the dark." (Some bacteria in raw seafood are indeed
luminescent, she said.) [Sault Star, 3-27-96]
* Football star Deion Sanders, arrested for trespassing at a fishing hole
near Fort Myers, Fla., in June: "The only defense I have is that I'm
sorry but they were biting." [St. Petersburg Times, 6-20-96]
THINNING THE HERD
* In June, a heavily-suntan-oiled, 19-year-old man fell 10 stories to his
death while "crabbing" (climbing from balcony to balcony) on a beachfront
condominium in Panama City Beach, Fla. Two weeks later, in Barnstable,
Mass., an 18-year-old man fell to his death while "car surfing" (standing
atop a moving car). Also in June, at least 15 people dancing on the roofs
of two buses enroute to an election rally near Dhaka, Bangladesh, were
killed when the buses passed underneath high voltage wires. [Tuscaloosa
News, 6-4-96] [New Haven Register-AP, 6-18-96] [Tuscaloosa News-AP,
6-3-96]
UPDATE
* More Italian Justice: In August, Germano Maccari, freshly convicted of
the 1978 murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, was released
from jail pending his appeal, as is customary under Italian law. (In
March, the man who murdered an American during the Achille Lauro hijacking
failed to return to his Italian prison following a 12-day furlough for
good behavior. Last year, the Washington Post reported that members of
a traveling prisoners' theatrical group in Italy used their performance
disguises in bank robberies they pulled off while they were free between
shows. And last year, a gang of AIDS-stricken bank robbers were released
to pull off more jobs because Italian law forbids imprisoning people with
AIDS.) [Boston Herald, 8-4-96] [Washington Post, 8-21-96]
Copyright 1996, Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.
No commercial use may be made of the material or of the name
News of the Weird.
