[530] in Humor
HUMOR: WEIRDNUZ.350 (News of the Weird, October 21, 1994)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Wed Nov 9 10:57:30 1994
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 1994 10:50:50 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN%ARIES@VAXF.Colorado.EDU>
Date: Sat, 05 Nov 1994 18:27:08 -0500
From: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
From: notw-request@nine.org (NotW List Admin)
WEIRDNUZ.350 (News of the Weird, October 21, 1994)
by Chuck Shepherd
Lead Story
* The Associated Press reported in September on Ray Barnes's new
Baltimore, Md., enterprise--a service to clean up bloodstained death
scenes after police investigators have finished their work. Barnes and
his wife use a variety of sponges, mops, and air fresheners, including an
enzyme that digests blood, but sometimes they have to tear out carpeting
and wallpaper if they can't clean them. Barnes says business is good,
even at fees of $200 and up: "I don't know too many people who would want
to go in and clean up the remains of their loved ones." [Rock Island
Argus-AP, 9-11-94]
The Democratic Process
* Missouri state Rep. Beth Long pleaded guilty in June to the theft of
four pairs of salt-and-pepper shakers taken from a Rocheport, Mo.,
restaurant during a legislative dinner the month before. She said she
doesn't know how they got into her purse. [Columbia Tribune, 6-11-94]
* High points in recent references to underwear in the Taiwan parliament:
In May one legislator waved a pair of women's underpants symbolically to
complain about the low state of Taiwan's national flag, and in June, a
female legislator charged the podium and slapped another female legislator
who had remarked that the first woman's underwear was showing. [Iowa
Daily, May94; Syracuse Herald-American-AP, 6-5-95]
* Bill Frist, a Republican challenging U. S. Sen. Jim Sasser in Tennessee
this fall, revealed in a 1989 book that, while a Harvard medical student
in the 1970s, he procured cats for experiments by claiming at animal
shelters that he wanted them merely as pets. A woman who worked for the
Tennessee Humane Association during that time said Frist violated at least
three state and federal laws with his scheme. [Knoxville News-Sentinel,
7-27-94]
* After voting earlier this year to disband their police force, residents
of Osage, W. Va., voted in June to disband the whole town government. A
major reason was dissatisfaction with the large number of traffic tickets
being issued. [Cumberland Times-News-AP, 6-16-94]
* In June Kansas state Rep. Richard Alldritt accused his colleague Melvin
Neufeld of attempting to extort a vote from him on a budget bill by
threatening to tell Alldritt's wife that Alldritt was fooling around with
women. Alldritt failed to change his vote, and according to the district
attorney, Neufeld squealed on him. [Rochester Times-Union-AP, 6-30-94;
Washington Post, 7-5-94; Washington Times, 7-1-94]
* Minnesota state Sen. Steve Dille offered an amendment to a
welfare-reform bill in March intended to reduce the number of single
parents receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The amendment
would have required the government to study the possibility of
establishing a dating service among single parents, thus potentially
getting them married to each other and off the rolls. (It was defeated,
44-2.) [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 3-18-94]
* In St. Joseph, Mich., Harry Caldwell III won the Democratic primary race
for county commissioner despite being jailed three weeks before the August
voting day because he had paid up only $5 of the $34,980 he owed in child
support. In San Jose, Calif., George Shirakawa was re-elected to the city
council in June, a month after he died, but in nearby Martinez, Calif.,
voters soundly rejected a dead man, Dan Hallissy, who was on the ballot
for county assessor. [Syracuse Herald-Journal-AP, 8-4-94] [San Francisco
Chronicle, 6-9-94; San Francisco Examiner, 6-8-94]
* According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, U. S. Rep. Jay Dickey
(R-Ark.) told a Little Rock radio station audience in July that fear of
malpractice lawsuits leads some physicians to overprescribe tests. Said
Dickey, "They might take you in there and perform a C-SPAN even though
you don't need it." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Jul94]
Grown-Ups
* In February, a jury in New Orleans ordered Dr. James Bennett to pay
$5,000 to a nurse whom Bennett shot (as a "joke") in the buttocks with a
surgical staple gun. Bennett had shot the woman as she bent down to
retrieve sponges in the operating room only seconds after he had used the
gun to close a surgical wound. [New Haven Register, 2-6-94]
* In April, in a quiet Wheaton, Md., neighborhood of split-level homes,
police said Gilmore "Bo" Addison and his son, Mark Anthony Addison, got
into a gunfight over whether Dad had taken his son's money. Mark
retrieved his AK-47 assault rifle and peppered Dad's bedroom door, and,
Dad, returning fire with his .22-caliber rifle, hit Mark in the leg and
buttocks as he scurried down the stairs. [Washington Times, 4-25-94]
* In New Brighton, Minn., in February, a 32-year-old man and his
24-year-old girlfriend were arrested after a food fight in a grocery
store. After arguing loudly, the couple began throwing sweet potatoes at
each other. Eventually, the man allegedly threw the woman into several
vegetable racks, sending the contents spilling to the floor. As both
continued to brawl on the floor, she allegedly stuffed lettuce into the
man's mouth. [Focus News (Fridley, Minn.), 3-1-94]
Cries for Help
* In August in Council Bluffs, Iowa, seven relatives ranging in age from
10 to 71, piled into the family car intending to commit suicide over money
troubles. The driver smashed into a second car, injuring the three
occupants but leaving the seven depressed people uninjured. [Des Moines
Register, Aug94]
I Don't Think So
* In a May San Francisco Chronicle story on traffic tickets, Officer Cliff
Kroeger of Martinez, Calif., said he once gave a ticket to a man clocked
at 87 miles an hour in a car that had a large flexible tube sticking out
of a rear window, extending to an aquarium in the back seat. When
stopped, the driver said he had mathematically calculated that 87 was the
exact speed he needed to aerate the aquarium to keep his fish alive. [San
Francisco Chronicle, 5-3-94]
Undignified Death
* On September 28, Baptist minister Reginald P. Wiggins, 48, passed away
in Philadelphia after slipping into a diabetic coma. Wiggins had
announced recently that, after a decade of intensive, scholarly study of
the scriptures at the Christ Memorial Reformed Episcopal Church, he had
concluded that the apocalypse would occur in September 1994.
Copyright 1994, Universal Press Syndicate. All rights
reserved. Released for the personal use of readers.
No commercial use may be made of the material or of the
name News of the Weird.
