Weird Universe Archive
October 2013
October 15, 2013
The Guy From Harlem
As always, if the trailer (and discussion) appeal, the full movie lurks below!
Posted By: Paul - Tue Oct 15, 2013 -
Comments (3)
Category: Movies, Regionalism, Stereotypes and Cliches, Stupid Criminals, 1970s
Wish you were here!
The story below is from 1939. Would the students have been dealt with as harshly today? My guess, based on all the stories of overreacting school officials that Chuck reports, probably yes.
Posted By: Alex - Tue Oct 15, 2013 -
Comments (5)
Category: School, 1930s
October 14, 2013
Lego Art
Legos aren't just for kids anymore.
Posted By: Alex - Mon Oct 14, 2013 -
Comments (4)
Category: Toys
News of the Weird 2.0 (October 14, 2013)
News of the Weird 2.0Angst, Confusion, Cynicism, Ridicule
Prime Cuts of Underreported News from Last Week, Hand-Picked and Lightly Seasoned by Chuck Shepherd
October 14, 2013
(datelines October 5-October 12) (links correct as of October 13)
Knowing how frenzied we Westerners have become (led by the 24-hour TV news cycles), Norway has decided to taunt us. Its public television station said it would soon do 5 hours, live, of knitting. Associated Press via Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record
Recurring Theme: Husbands in Orthodox Judaism can get one-party divorces, but for wives, divorce requires consent of the hubby, which is sometimes not forthcoming just out of spite. Enter rabbis (like these in New Jersey) who do a sorta-mob-like workaround (one of several Orthodox workarounds we’ve covered in NOTW, e.g., .M184), which in this case seems to require, um, cattle prods to encourage the husbands. Gotta maintain those sacred traditions, at any cost. ABC News /// NOTW .M184 (10-17-2010) [scroll to 7th story]
Readers’ Choice: (1) Under Ohio law, Donald Eugene Miller Jr., now 61, was declared dead in 1994 when he went off the grid, but he came back in 2005, and since then has been trying to become un-dead, legally. No can do, said a judge last week. (The federal law may be different, though.) (2) Lucas Burke, 21, and Ethan Keeler, 20, trying to break into a safe in Hopkinton, N.H., with an acetylene torch, succeeded (and, but for all the fireworks being kept in the safe, the men would still be around to brag). The Courier (Findlay, Ohio) /// Union Leader (Manchester)
Family Values: Cliff Oshman, 64, is no ordinary pedophile seeking an online hook-up. (Ordinary part: yes, the girl was a cop.) (Not ordinary: The hookup was not just for him but for his family, and he had brought the wife and kid along to meet their new addition.) Orlando Sentinel
Cliches Come to Life: Voting for the president of Azerbaijan was scheduled for last Wednesday and went down as expected--except for the fact that the gov’t accidentally released the final vote totals on Tuesday. (Actually, President Aliyev polled better than expected.) Washington Post
The Continuing War on Science: (1) Saudi Arabia and 5 other Gulf states announced they would henceforth bar gays from entering their countries and base their gaydar on medical science! (2) In Pakistan, when a probably-Taliban bomb goes off in a an office of anti-polio activists, killing two, it’s still not nearly the death threat among Pakistanis who will fall to the polio epidemic this year because so few people believe in vaccines. World’s Greatest Newspaper /// BBC News
Editor's Notes
Suspicions Confirmed: Reading between the lines to learn what actually happens to “the work” during a gov’t shutdown, we learn (from, for example, this Wall Street Journal piece) that the federal workforce will eventually make up almost all the work and do it on the regular clock without overtime--thus raising the question, What did they used to do during the hours of the day that, in the future, they’ll be using to catch up from shutdown work?
More Deep Thoughts: (1) London’s Daily Mail and The Guardian have both opened way-more-than-“token” bureaus in major U.S. cities, intending to compete globally with U.S. news giants. More and more, they’ll be breaking U.S. news. (2) The Onion last week devoted a story to one of Yr Editor’s favorite tasty bites: that the people at the bottom of a public opinion poll (those 3 or 4 standard deviations away, say, the 5 percent recently who actually think Congress is doing a “good” job) should be more newsworthy than the majority on the issue. (3) American fascination with the power of “one person, standing up against the system” grows, and it’s thus becoming more common that, as in Scottsdale, Ariz.,
Newsrangers: David Swanson, Rich LeVinus, David Schneider, and Kevin Kohler, and the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.
Posted By: Chuck - Mon Oct 14, 2013 -
Comments (7)
Category:
Donkey Baseball
Donkey Baseball (which is, as the name implies, baseball played while riding on donkeys) became a popular fad in the 1930s. But it wasn't always fun and games. There was one case of a donkey baseball fatality. In 1934, William Beck fell from his donkey three times in the course of trying to make first base. The fourth time he fell, he fractured his spine and died. [Gettysburg Times - Aug 6, 1934]
Posted By: Alex - Mon Oct 14, 2013 -
Comments (5)
Category: Death, Sports, 1930s
All Over Rain Cover
[Click to enlarge]
Air holes? Who need to breath so long as you're dry?
Original ad here.
Posted By: Paul - Mon Oct 14, 2013 -
Comments (8)
Category: Death, Fashion, Advertising, 1940s, Weather
October 13, 2013
Jockey—They Keep Their Fit
In 1955, Jockey Briefs ran an ad campaign featuring young boys shoving guns into their underwear.
More in extended >>
Posted By: Alex - Sun Oct 13, 2013 -
Comments (9)
Category: Guns, Advertising, Underwear
News of the Weird (October 13, 2013)
News of the WeirdWeirdnuz.M340, October 13, 2013
Copyright 2013 by Chuck Shepherd
Lead Story
A few still-primitive cultures inexplicably celebrate such female adornments as the stacking of metal neck rings and the inserting of saucer-size disks into pierced earlobes. For “civilized” society, there is the annual Paris Fashion Week in September, when renowned designers outfit brave, otherwise-gorgeous models in grotesque clothing. Among the ensembles witnessed by a New York Times critic this year: a hat resembling steroid-enhanced stalks of peas; a shoe appearing to sprout twig-studs; “a flexible cage covered in doughnuts of black satin”; and a pillow clutch with (for some reason) its own porthole. [New York Times, 9-30-2013]
Recurring Themes
News of the Weird first reported successful “stool implants” among family members in 2007 (to cure infections such as C. difficile by introducing the donor’s “good” microbes to overcome an imbalance of “bad” bacteria in a relative’s intestine). In 2012, however, two University of California, Davis, neurosurgeons boldly extended the cutting-edge treatment for three patients with a highly malignant brain tumor unresponsive to treatment. The doctors tried infusing bowel bacteria directly into the tumor, but the patients died, nonetheless. Although the patients had given fully-informed consent, the school in August 2013 pressured Drs. J. Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph Schrot to resign for having violated internal and FDA procedures. [Sacramento Bee, 7-22-2012] [KOVR-TV (Sacramento), 8-25-2013]
It is well known that hospitals charge for medical supplies far in excess of what the products would cost at drug stores, but an August New York Times investigation of "saline drips" vividly demonstrated the disconnect. Though Medicare reimburses $1.07 for a 1-liter plastic bag of salt water (supplied by a subsidiary of Morton Salt), White Plains (N.Y.) Hospital charged patients' insurance companies like Aetna and United Healthcare $91 per bag. Other hospitals decline to charge per-bag, listing only "IV therapy" of, for example, $393.50 for hooking up the drip. [New York Times, 8-27-2013]
From the world’s cosmetic-surgery capital (South Korea, where one woman in five has had at least one procedure) comes the “Smile Lipt” offered by Aone Plastic Surgery in the city of Yongin, designed to produce a permanent smile (associated with success). The Smile Lipt turns downward-drooping lip corners upward, to allow a persistent smile resembling that of Batman’s nemesis, The Joker. [BusinessInsider.com.au, 8-17-2013]
PREVIOUSLY ON WEIRD UNIVERSE: Among the more repugnant paraphilias covered in News of the Weird is toilet-peeping--men who set up underneath the seats in public outhouses (sometimes wearing a raincoat), and wait for a user to answer nature’s call. In August, Kenneth Enlow, 52, pleaded guilty after a woman found him the month before in a privy in White Water Park in Tulsa County, Okla., "standing with his head and shoulders out of the hole . . . covered in feces," according to a deputy. Enlow’s initial explanation was that his girlfriend had knocked him unconscious with a tire iron and dumped him there. [KOTV (Tulsa), 7-9-2013]
Another Hard-Working Lawyer: The Dayton Daily News reported in March that a September audit of Dayton lawyer Ben Swift (the highest-paid court-appointed public defender in Ohio, at $142,900 in a recent year) revealed several invoices demanding government payment for workdays of more than 20 hours, and in one case, 29. Swift’s attorney said his client was guilty only of bad record-keeping. [Associated Press via WBNS-TV (Columbus), 9-12-2013]
Patients with gargantuan tumors, but intimidated by the cost of treatment, create the possibility that by the time they can afford an operation, the tumor itself will be heavier than the post-surgery patient. A 59-year-old man in Bakersfield, Calif., finally had surgery in August, after 14 years' waiting during which his set of tumors grew to 200 pounds. Bakersfield surgeon Vipul Dev noted that the sprawled tumors dragged the floor when the man sat and that the surgery was complicated by the patient’s shape, which could not be accommodated by the hospital's MRI and CT scan machines. [KGET-TV (Bakersfield), 8-27-2013]
In 2010, Chinese agencies stepped up “birth tourism” packages for rich pregnant women to book vacations in America timed to their due-dates--to exploit the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born here and thus giving the Chinese children future competitive advantages against non-Americans who must apply for U.S. visas. A September USA Today report indicated that more Chinese mothers now prefer to land in the U.S. territory of Northern Mariana Islands (where birth also bestows citizenship), to the consternation of Islands officials who would prefer traditional Chinese tourists instead of the “birthers.” (Historians agree that the 14th Amendment birth right was aimed at assuring citizenship for freed slaves.) [USA Today, 9-10-2013]
Updates
At Hong Kong’s traditional “Hungry Ghost” festival in August, in which people burn fake money on top of ancestors’ graves to support their afterlife styles, a weaker economy, and inflation, seem to have upped the ante for the gifts. An August Wall Street Journal dispatch noted that the denominations of burnable “currency” sold in stores have appreciated, including one “valued” at one trillion Hong Kong dollars (US$130 billion). (Some festival-goers asked, sensibly, about how the ancestor could expect change from such a bill if he needed to make a small afterlife purchase.) [Wall Street Journal, 8-20-2013]
The family of the great Native American Olympic athlete and Oklahoma native Jim Thorpe (1988-1953) was so disappointed that the then-governor of Oklahoma would not properly honor Thorpe on his death that one faction of his family moved the body to Pennsylvania, where he had no discernible ties but where municipal officials eagerly offered to name a town after him. Since then, Jim Thorpe, Pa. (current population, 4,800), has withstood legal challenges seeking to return the body to Oklahoma, including a recent federal court decision upholding the entire town as a Native American “museum.” One grandson said that Thorpe spoke to him at a sweat lodge in Texas in 2010, telling him to leave the body in Jim Thorpe, with "no more pain created in my name." [Associated Press via NBC News, 9-5-2013]
PREVIOUSLY: Anthony Alleyne appeared in News of the Weird in 2003 for turning his Hinckley, England, home, into a replica of the command center of Star Trek's starship Enterprise (including transporter control, warp core drive, infinity mirror, etc.). When he later tried to sell it, he learned that, somehow, potential buyers failed to value the house as much as Alleyne imagined. In September 2013, Alleyne was back in the news as Leicester Crown Court sentenced him to three months in prison for viewing child pornography--a diversion that he blamed on years of depression following marital difficulties and of course the brutal real estate market. [BBC News, 9-6-2013]
The Raelian sect initially made News of the Weird in 1998 when “Bishop” Brigitte Boisselier ran a human-cloning start-up planning to charge $200,000 to make identical twins. Raelian’s core belief is that humanity descended from extra-terrestrials arriving on spaceships whose inhabitants explained to Raelian founder Claude Vorilhon that life’s purpose is to experience sexual pleasure. Recently, a Raelian “priestess," Nadine Gary, has turned the sect’s attention to counseling victims of the anti-pleasure Female Genital Mutilation, which, though horrifyingly painful, remains traditional among some African societies, and enlisted a prominent U.S. surgeon to undo the procedure, pro bono. Wrote London’s The Guardian, in an August dispatch from the surgeon’s San Francisco clinic, "[J]ust 12 minutes of delicate scalpel work [to restore the clitoris] removes a lifetime of discomfort." [The Guardian, 8-24-2013]
The story of Kopi Luwak coffee is by now a News of the Weird staple, begun in 1993 with the first reports that a super-premium market existed for coffee beans digested by certain Asian civet cats, collected, washed, and brewed. In June, news broke that civets were being mistreated--captured from the wild and caged solely for their bean-adulterating usefulness. In August the American Chemical Society reported that a “gas chromatography and mass spectrometry” test had finally been developed to assure buyers that their $227/lb. Kopi Luwak beans had, indeed, been excreted by genuine Asian civets. (Thus, Kopi Luwak drinkers, at up to $80 a cup in California, can sip their brews without fear of being ripped off.) [USA Today, 9-11-2013]
Thanks This Week to the News of the Weird Senior Advisors (Jenny T. Beatty, Paul Di Filippo, Ginger Katz, Joe Littrell, Matt Mirapaul, Paul Music, Karl Olson, and Jim Sweeney) and Board of Editorial Advisors (Tom Barker, Paul Blumstein, Harry Farkas, Sam Gaines, Herb Jue, Emory Kimbrough, Scott Langill, Bob McCabe, Steve Miller, Christopher Nalty, Mark Neunder, Sandy Pearlman, Bob Pert, Larry Ellis Reed, Peter Smagorinsky, Rob Snyder, Stephen Taylor, Bruce Townley, and Jerry Whittle).
Posted By: Chuck - Sun Oct 13, 2013 -
Comments (6)
Category:
Much Ado About Hair-dos
Posted By: Paul - Sun Oct 13, 2013 -
Comments (2)
Category: 1950s, Hair and Hairstyling
October 12, 2013
Terminator Self-Regenerating Polymer
Is this the beginning or the "Rise of the Machines"?Maybe just a rubberized T-1000?
Posted By: gdanea - Sat Oct 12, 2013 -
Comments (3)
Category: Robots
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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 |
