Weird Universe Archive
March 2009
March 31, 2009
[News] More Things to Worry About Today
Readers' Choice: DUI on a lawnmower, a mobility scooter, a horse, fine. Now, DUI on a tricked-out barstool. Associated Press via CBS News [photo!]I've known 100 lawyers who'd take this case for free: Air-O-Matic's iPhone app Pull My Finger was the best-selling electronic whoopie-cushion until recently when InfoMedia's iFart overtook it, but it wasn't fair, said A-O-M because InfoMedia was using its "trademarked" p-m-f phrase in its marketing (because InfoMedia says the phrase is way-generic and therefore un-trademarkable). Denver Post
Your Daily Loser
Marckenly Estima, 23, an enterprising rapper in Port St. Lucie, Fla., wanted police cars in the background of his new video, and he and his cameraman were chatting it up with officers in the parking lot of the police station when the cops ran his name through the computer and found a warrant for skipping out on a trial. TCPalm.com
Today's Newsrangers: Paul Music, Bruce Alter, Gerald Sacks, Karl Olson, Emory Kimbrough, Gary Goldberg, Scott Langill, and many finders of the barstool story.
Posted By: Chuck - Tue Mar 31, 2009 -
Comments (6)
Category:
Follies of the Mad Men #61
Oh, yeah, a belt your Dad would wear back in 1971 could trigger all that groovy hippie stuff. Note the sign that uses Frank Zappa's name for cachet. Did he sue, I wonder?
Posted By: Paul - Tue Mar 31, 2009 -
Comments (10)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Fashion, Bohemians, Beatniks, Hippies and Slackers, 1970s
New York City Driving—1928
I have no idea of the provenance of this material. Is that Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd driving? Is that really Babe Ruth in the back seat? But I do know it's amazing.
Posted By: Paul - Tue Mar 31, 2009 -
Comments (5)
Category: Animals, Motor Vehicles, Movies, 1920s
[News] Things to Worry About Today
Religious cult member Ria Ramkissoon had been refusing to testify against Queen Antoinette for her ritual that ultimately killed Ria's son, in that she thought maybe the Queen could resurrect him, but now Ria's driven a hard bargain with Baltimore prosecutors: She'll testify, but they have to agree in writing to drop all charges when her son comes back to life. (Yeah, we can do that, they said.) Washington PostIs Marc Beaumont, Esq., such a cad that he'd charge his client for the time they spent in bed, or is she (also a lawyer) just nuts (and by the way, how did she ever get any clients at all when her actual name is Anal Sheikh)? Daily Telegraph
U.S.'s World-Famous Higher Education: Northern Illinois Univ. researchers found that people who do consensual S&M have higher stress and testosterone during, but calm down afterward! New Scientist
An arbitrator chastises an employer for "willfully" and over a long period of time violating the venerable Fair Labor Standards Act (the "employer" in this case being, um, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). Washington Post
Worse Sex Life Than Yours: He was arrested after being spotted lying on his back in a dressing room at a Kohl's Department Store peering up at the woman in the next booth. Associated Press via Boston.com
Your Daily Jury Duty
["In America, a person is presumed innocent until the mug shot is released"]
Michael Shoemaker, 42. Doesn't matter what he's charged with. WMAR-TV (Baltimore)
Posted By: Chuck - Tue Mar 31, 2009 -
Comments (12)
Category:
Defense Mechanisms
Strange forms of defensive behavior, from the animal kingdom. Camponotus Saundersi is a species of Malaysian ant that can cause itself to explode at will. It does so by contracting its abdominal muscles, which ruptures its body and sprays poison in all directions. This ability is known as autothysis. [wikipedia]Then there's the horned lizard found in the southwest United States. When threatened, it increases the pressure in its sinus cavities until the blood vessels in the corners of its eyes burst. This causes blood to squirt at its attacker. Check out the National Geographic video. I don't understand why coyotes would be deterred by the squirting blood, but apparently it works.
Posted By: Alex - Tue Mar 31, 2009 -
Comments (10)
Category: Animals
Das Kapital, the Musical
I've found a new musical to add to my ongoing list of strange musicals. It's Das Kapital, the Musical. It comes to us from China. Here's the plot, such as it is:In the first half of the story, the employees discover that their boss is exploiting them and learn of the “surplus theory of value.” However, they react differently to the knowledge of their exploitation: some are willing to be exploited by the company, and the tighter they are squeezed, the more they feel they are worth. Others rise in mutiny, but this ruins the company and leaves them out of work. Still others band together and use their collective wisdom to deal with the boss.
Sounds thrilling. Here's the rest of the list:
- Thalidomide, the Musical
- The Elements of Style (an opera based on the Strunk & White style guide)
- Fight Club, the Musical
- Men are from Mars, Woman are from Venus (the musical)
- An unconfirmed musical based on the Labour Party's 1997 election manifesto
- Menopause, the Musical
- The Diary of Anne Frank, the Musical
- Evil Dead, the Musical
- The Fly (an opera based on David Cronenberg's 1986 movie)
- Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical
- An Inconvenient Truth (an opera based on Al Gore's film and book)
- Jerry Springer: The Opera
- C U Next Tuesday: The Amy Fisher Story, A Karaoke Musical.
- Keating! (a musical theatre production which portrays the political career of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating)
Posted By: Alex - Tue Mar 31, 2009 -
Comments (7)
Category: Theater and Stage
March 30, 2009
[News] More Things to Worry About Today
Worse Sex Life Than Yours: Bob Epley, 56, Nashville, Tenn., was arrested for hiring kids for sex, specifically, to "place him in a stranglehold with their legs" "in order to create an autoerotic sensation." The TennesseanEven now, some people still have too much money: The sculpture of a cat that will go to auction in May in NYC is expected to bring $16m-$22m. Reuters
William Bieber, 35, was arrested in Chehalis, Wash., for sneaking meth into his wife's water because, nursing their 3-month-old, she seemed not to have any energy left for cleaning the house. Associated Press via Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A slightly intoxicated motorcyclist crashed into wild pigs on the road in 2003 and messed himself up badly, and a jury decided that was California's fault for not putting up "Wild Pigs" signs on the highway. (Bonus: Good luck collecting $8.6m from a state that's almost bankrupt.) Associated Press via KOVR-TV (Sacramento)
Recurring (embarrassing) Theme: A Saginaw, Mich., man [Ed.: No, not the one humping the vacuum cleaner at the carwash] got his finger stuck in his car's gas tank, and it took firefighters 4 hours to get it loose. Saginaw News [finger] /// Saginaw News [vacuum]
Recurring Theme: It says here that a newspaper in Quanzhou, China, reported a suicidal Chinese woman's jumping off a building and landing on a non-suicidal man, killing him (her boyfriend!) but sparing her. Daily Telegraph (London)
Your Daily Loser
Brian Round, Eustis, Fla., apparently one of the thousands of 17-yr-olds confident that they've got everything figured out, called up his friends and told them he had been "messing with people" using his police-style lights in his car but was sure he was home-free because none of his friends "would rat me out." Brian was making the calls on his cell phone from an interrogation room at the police station during a break, and he didn't think anybody would be monitoring. Orlando Sentinel
Today's Newsrangers: Tom Barker, Paul Woolwine, Andrew Gibson, Matt Mirapaul, and a boatload o' people who tipped me to the carwash case last week (which I had already covered when the poor guy was arrested)
Posted By: Chuck - Mon Mar 30, 2009 -
Comments (8)
Category:
The Riverbank Carousel
Posted By: Paul - Mon Mar 30, 2009 -
Comments (3)
Category: Art, Surrealism, Fairs, Amusement Parks, and Resorts, Children, 1990s
[News] Things to Worry About Today
Terry Nichols, serving a life term for being Timothy McVeigh's go-fer, filed a lawsuit against prison officials for not serving him nutritious food, which he says constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, in that it destroy God's "holy temple . . . my body." Associated Press via KMGH-TV (Denver)The Dept. of Veterans Affairs decided to impose a co-pay for a roadside-bomb-disabled soldier who thought his best hope for saving his leg was to, y'know, go outside the network, so he did, and the 13th surgery on the leg saved it, whereupon the gov't sent him a bill for $3,000 (Seriously). CNN
In Sun City Center, Fla., golf carts can use public roads as long as they don't hit 20 mph on the speedometer, but still, the geezers swap out their motors for souped-up versions, plus add fancy tires, shiny rims, and brush guards. St. Petersburg Times
The Buffalo, N.Y., city council approved a new Muslim-owned slaughterhouse to share space in a building that already houses a Subway sandwich shop. Buffalo News
A Japanese law professor who's been teaching in Australia for 10 yrs was convicted of harassing officials (via the traditional Japanese way of relentless phone-calling), whereupon she went nuts in court, "screaming," "claiming she was about to soil herself," and of course "exposing her buttocks." The aristocrat! Courier-Mail (Brisbane)
Your Daily Jury Duty
["In America, a person is presumed innocent until the mug shot is released"]
Does Mark Adams, 31, Golden Gate, Fla., look like the kind of fella who'd throw a full can of soda in the face of his 70-yr-old mother just because she accidentally stepped on his toe? WINK-TV (Fort Myers)
Posted By: Chuck - Mon Mar 30, 2009 -
Comments (7)
Category:
The Westermarck Effect
The Westermarck Effect is a psychological phenomena named after Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck. The effect is that (according toWikipedia): "when two people live in close domestic proximity during the first few years in the life of either one, both are desensitized to later close sexual attraction." Which is why most people don't get the hots for their sibling.
However, if siblings don't grow up together and only meet for the first time later in life, they may be intensely sexually attracted to each other. This is known as genetic sexual attraction, or GSA. Again, from Wikipedia:
Several factors may contribute to GSA. People commonly rank faces similar to their own as more attractive, trustworthy, etc. than average... Shared interests and personality traits are commonly considered desirable in a mate... In cases of parent-child attraction, the parent may recognize traits of their sometime mate in the child. Such reunions typically produce complex emotions in all involved.
Finally, there is the phenomena known as the Westermarck Trap, which occurs when two people who have grown up together (and thus are sexually desensitized to each other) are expected to marry each other, because of an arranged marriage. According to one theory, this is what the novel Frankenstein depicts:
Students of the Westermarck effect may be interested to know that this trap is depicted in the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, in which Victor Frankenstein is expected to marry a cousin reared with him. Instead, he creates a monster that persecutes him and murders his prospective bride before the marriage can be consummated. It is suggested that the plot owes something to Mary Shelley's own experience of the Westermarck effect, following a childhood in which she was reared with a stepbrother. Her own personal solution was not to create a monster but to elope with a married man (Percy Bysshe Shelley) at the age of 16.
Posted By: Alex - Mon Mar 30, 2009 -
Comments (5)
Category: Literature, Books, Sexuality, Psychology
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Chuck Shepherd Chuck is the purveyor of News of the Weird, the syndicated column which for decades has set the gold-standard for reporting on oddities and the bizarre. Our banner was drawn by the legendary underground cartoonist Rick Altergott. Contact Us |
