[1727] in Humor
HUMOR: NoTW
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
Tue Nov 26 13:43:24 1996
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 13:31:46 -0500
To: humor@MIT.EDU
From: abennett@MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 16:05:00 -0500 (EST)
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
From: notw-request@nine.org (NotW List Admin)
WEIRDNUZ.456 (News of the Weird, November 1, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd
COMMERCIAL MESSAGE
* The Concrete Enema (and Other News of the Weird Classics) is Chuck
Shepherd's latest paperback, available in bookstores everywhere and
reasonably priced for holiday giving ($6.95). Just ask that B.Dalton
clerk to give you a Concrete Enema! Or order from Baltimore's Atomic
Books, 1-800-778-6246 or http://www.atomicbooks.com
LEAD STORIES
* Right Place, Right Time: In Pittsburgh, during the Steelers-Ravens
football game in September, Allen E. Adams was picked up on a previous
arrest warrant when a police officer recognized Adams's name as a winner
in the halftime field-goal kicking promotion and waited for him to come
down onto the field. And a few days later, in Victoria, British Columbia,
a federal tax agent heard the announcement of the winner of radio station
CKKQ's song-identification contest, recognized him as a prominent tax
delinquent, and within an hour had the winner's $1,000 signed over to the
government.
* Within two days of each other in August, in the Kansas towns of Lawrence
and Dodge City, runaway tourist-attraction stagecoaches crashed. The
Lawrence coach veered into a ditch, injuring one man. A horse on the
Dodge City coach slipped down on the street, then took off, carrying the
coach into a parked car, after which it overturned and bloodied five
elderly passengers.
* Opponents of Thailand's prime minister Banharn Sipla-archa said he lied
about his birthday this year when he claimed it was August 19 and not July
20, and they claimed that he changed the date on the advice of an
astrologer so he could be a Leo and thus a better leader. And in June,
India's new prime minister, H. D. Deve Gowda, said he moved into his
official residence a week ahead of schedule because his astrologers said
it would be better for him.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY
* A Washington Post story in May on marital abuse in central and southern
African nations found that among certain ethnic groups, only 3 per cent
of wives think they should report a beating to the police. Said one
social worker, "A lot of men -- and women -- think that beating your wife
is something you do if you really care about her." In some groups, said
another, if a man's wife dies without his having beaten her, he
rehabilitates his manhood by beating the corpse.
* The New York Times reported in September on Tokyo's trendy "host clubs"
which feature young men as servers and dance partners and which cater only
to women -- largely middle-aged women who say such clubs are virtually
the only places in the country in which they can be treated well and not
be expected to wait on men. And the Los Angeles Times reported in August
on the success of the longstanding, 370-female Takarazuka Revue, whose
most successful production number has its women crossdressing and
portraying the kind of man many Japanese women do not often get to see,
according to them: the suave, romantic, affectionate, considerate male.
* In August, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported on the modernization
of the traditional Mongolian meal of boodog, which is goat broiled inside
a "bag" (which is merely the carefully cut and tied skin of the goat):
The goat is no longer barbecued over an open fire; it is now typically
cooked with a blow torch.
* The Islamic Court that sets rules for the northern half of Mogadishu,
Somalia, announced in September that men must have beards, as did the
prophet Mohammed. Said the Court chairman, "Those who shave like Elvis
Presley, Sylvester Stallone, and the U. S. Marines will not go
unpunished." Two weeks later, Afghanistan's new ruling Taleban leadership
made a similar decree for male government employees.
* In September, Peggy-Sue Khumalo, 23, the recently-crowned Miss South
Africa, said she would soon sacrifice a goat to her ancestors in gratitude
for her success. She also said that if she won the Miss World title in
India in November, she would step up her spiritual gratitude to slaughter
a cow and 10 oxen.
* By custom in the mountain region of northern Albania, a teenage daughter
whose father passes away may make a lifetime commitment to dress and
behave and conduct business as a male so as to assure that her family is
not left unprotected by the absence of a man. According to a July
Knight-Ridder report, other males in the villages know about the
transformation and generally accept the new "men" with full male
privileges.
LATEST SURGES OF TESTOSTERONE
* The Latest in Pervert Technology: Police in Toronto, Ontario, arrested
a 62-year-old retired school teacher in September for allegedly
videotaping under the skirts of about 30 women via a "shoe cam"
pinpoint-sized lens connected by wires to a camera hidden in his waist
pouch. And in July, Portland, Ore., police accused Jess Mitchell
Townsend, 36, of rigging a "toilet cam" in public ladies' rooms over the
last two years with the wide-angle lens barely visible from inside the
tank.
* In August, Tennessee became the latest state to recognize the inadequacy
of its anti-perversion statutes when it charged an Eagleville man only
with indecent exposure because the state has no law against what police
really believe he did, which was to have sexual intercourse with a
miniature horse. But on September 30, a previous oversight in Florida
was corrected when its first-ever anti-necrophilia law took effect.
* Physicians writing in the February 1996 issue of the journal
Genitourinary Medicine reported having to prescribe surgery for a man with
genital pain. The man reluctantly admitted that about 12 years before,
during sex play, his wife had inserted a mascara brush into his urethral
opening and that the tip of the brush broke off. Doctors found that
fibrous tissue had covered the brush piece, trapping it.
* This year as usual, summertime brought out foot fetishists, including
a man described as age 25 and husky, who posed as a national shoe company
representative in August and got at least one woman in Parsippany, N. J.,
to remove her shoe so he could inspect it nasally, and including a Boston
high school teacher who was suspended in June for allegedly sucking the
toes of a female student after school.
UPDATE
* For at least the fifth time in News of the Weird's nine years, a girl
or young woman has been convicted of dressing as a male for the purpose
of improving her chances of dating another girl or young woman. A
17-year-old girl was convicted in Kingsport, Tenn., in September of three
counts of sexual assault by fraud against another 17-year-old girl.
WORKPLACE TRAGEDIES
* A 28-year-old expert mountain climber fell to his death near Redding,
Calif., in September as he was demonstrating safety techniques to a group
of teenagers. He had severed his main line to demonstrate the security
of the second line, but the second line failed. And two racehorses with
eight victories between them died at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.,
in August, when they crashed into each other head-on during a morning
workout.
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
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