[1661] in Humor
HUMOR: News of the Weird
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
Sun Oct 27 10:46:31 1996
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 10:40:02 -0500
To: humor@MIT.EDU
From: abennett@MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 22:27:12 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 19:05:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
From: notw-request@nine.org (NotW List Admin)
WEIRDNUZ.452 (News of the Weird, October 4, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd
* Commercial Announcement: Chuck Shepherd's 5th paperback book, The
Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics, is now at bookstores
everywhere ($6.95). Ask proudly for a Concrete Enema on your next visit.
LEAD STORIES
* Conspicuous Getaways: Armed with descriptions of the perpetrators,
police fairly quickly made arrests in robberies in Chicago, Ill., in
August and Oshawa, Ontario, in March as the thieves were unsuccessful in
blending with the crowds as they walked away with their loot. According
to police, Jude Bradshaw, 41, was still wearing the green hat and purple
pants he wore to rob the Chicago bank, and the 36-year-old man who robbed
the Oshawa Discount Centre had made no effort to disguise the metal hook
he uses in place of a hand.
* Productive Lunch Hours: Ollie King, 38, was arrested as he allegedly
sought to buy drugs in a suburb of Atlanta, Ga., in June during his
lunch-hour break from serving on a jury. And in July, Li Baolun, 33, was
arrested in Beijing, China, and charged with being the thief who, during
his lunch hours over a four-year period, walked into more than 1,000
government offices and stole money from unattended workers' desks and
belongings.
* Dole Mania: Just before the Republican convention in August, a man
carrying three suitcases climbed a 400-foot radio tower in Miami, Fla.,
and told onlookers he would stay there until he was selected as Bob Dole's
running mate. His political platform: more horses and bicycles, less
asphalt and pornography. And in Dallas, Tex., after becoming enraged at
Dole's nomination on August 14, Ernest Comegys, 70, went to his bedroom,
grabbed a handgun, fired several shots at his cousin and stepdaughter,
and then shot himself to death.
NEWS FROM THE JOB MARKET
* The government of Zimbabwe announced in June that it was pessimistic
that it could fill the vacant position of hangman after the resignation
of Tommy Griffiths, 72, an Englishman who had held the part-time post
since the 1950s. Though dozens of men are on death row, no local person
will take the job because of a national superstition about taking
someone's life without personal motive.
* The New York Times reported in April that entomologist P. Kirk Visscher
and two colleagues set out to challenge the conventional wisdom that a
human should only very carefully attempt to extract the stinger after a
honeybee attack. Their thesis is that speed of removal, not style, is
more important, and they tested it the only way they knew how: Dr.
Visscher took about 50 honeybees over several days, methodically rubbed
each against his skin until it stung, extracted the stinger, and measured
the welt. Said Visscher, "That's the price of fame and fortune."
* A San Francisco Chronicle Labor Day story described several local jobs
that might make its readers appreciate their own. University of
California at Davis scientist Francine Bradley was interviewed because
she trains workers to perform the manual insemination of turkeys, from
drawing the semen to implanting it. (Turkeys genetically bred for massive
breast-meat sections cannot comfortably mate on their own.) Recommended
Bradley, "You have to develop a relationship with your tom."
* Also in that issue of the San Francisco Chronicle was a report on Martha
Huerta, who pulls an eight-hour shift at ABC Diaper Service in Berkeley,
Calif., where she feeds soiled diapers through an electronic counting
machine and on to the washer. Her tools are gloves and an electric fan,
although, said her supervisor, "It helps that her sense of smell isn't
very good."
* The weekly Brazilian newsmagazine Veja reported in April that 72 of the
nation's 75 baby-chick gender-inspectors are of Japanese origin and that
Brazilians cannot seem to master the craft. A baby chick "sexer" spends
the day in a dark room with a single spotlight as he picks up and checks
16 baby chicks per minute with 99 percent accuracy. Newly-hatched chicks
have no external sex organs but just tiny appendages concealed by their
feathers.
IRONIES
* Fishing on Junior Lake in July, Phil Cram, police chief of Medway,
Maine, lost part of his hand when an explosive tube he was using illegally
to stun fish blew up prematurely.
* In April, a devoutly Christian abstinence counselor and high school
senior, Danyale Andersen, 18, of Redmond, Ore., gave birth to the baby of
a former, short-term boyfriend. She said she felt guilty about it but
still believes in abstinence.
* In Tampa, Fla., in April, Antonio Valiente Valdez, Jr., on his way to
court to answer a traffic citation for driving without his prescription
glasses, accidentally hit a car that had already crashed on the side of
the road. According to police, he wasn't wearing his glasses then,
either.
* In April, Christopher J. Kerins, a Trenton, N. J., undercover police
officer, was arrested and charged with robbing the Kenwood Savings Bank
in Cincinnati, Ohio, during a break while attending the Middle Atlantic
Law Enforcement convention. (Kerins, unfamiliar with the city, reportedly
paused after collecting the money from the teller to ask directions out
to Interstate 71, and he was spotted on his way there by a local police
officer.)
* In July, according to a fire department official in Pullman, Wash., the
cause of a fire in a parked truck was the magnification of the sun through
a plastic prism hanging from the truck's ceiling, onto a stack of papers.
The truck's owner said the prism was a gift from his insurance company.
And residents of Santa Rosa, Tex., were temporarily in jeopardy in June
when a fire broke out in the town's only fire truck, disabling it.
UPDATE
* In 1992, News of the Weird reported on Navy Department secretary Bea
Perry, who had made a daily, 340-mile round-trip commute from her home in
Trenton, N. J., to various jobs in Washington, D. C., for 25 years. An
August 1996 Associated Press story touted Geraldine Howell, 66, who for
39 years has maintained a 6-day-a-week, 9-hour- (and 200-mile-) a-day
newspaper route over mountainous terrain delivering the Clarksburg (W.
Va.) Exponent.
THE ONLY WAY OUT
* A 63-year-old man died in May in West Plains, Mo.; he had set himself
on fire in a suicide attempt, but the pain was so great that he ran into
a pond to douse the flames and drowned. Also in May, seven losing
candidates in state and parliamentary elections in India committed suicide
after their party was trounced. And in June in Exkilstuna, Sweden, Leif
Borg, 50, mired in a divorce proceeding, blew himself up with dynamite in
the courtroom and injured four others.
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.
=======================================================================
Andrew Bennett MIT Department Ocean Engineering
MIT Room 5-424 77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139 <Standard Disclaimers Apply> Phone: (617) 253-7950
===== Area 51 ============== Bureau 13 =============== Network 18 =====
