News of the Weird/Pro Edition
"You're Still Not Cynical Enough"
Exceptionally Inexplicable Dispatches from Last Week
March 8, 2010
(datelines February 27-March 6) (links correct as of March 8)
The Cheese Whiz, Plus Howling Women, Time-Delay Quadruplets, and Perhaps Too Much Mons News
His Media Instincts Better Than His Dishes?
A-List New York City chef Daniel Angerer stepped up the buzz by acknowledging that, yes, he is preparing cheese from his nursing wife's breast milk. It's open-source, though: He published the recipe, and offered aspiring
cordon bleus some of the couple's "back-up" milk that their 8-week-old won't be able to get to. "[W]hoever wants to try it is welcome."
New York magazine
Know Your Prophets
(1) The omniscient Sean David Morton, who has "called ALL
[ed: his capitaliz.] the highs and lows of the [stock] market giving EXACT DATES
[his capitaliz.] for rises and crashes over the last 14 years," was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He didn't call any of that, even though he was supposedly trained in "remote viewing" by monks in Nepal. However, he did manage to lighten investors' bank balances by about $6 million. (2) More measured is Lenny Dykstra
[ed.: yep, the baseball player], who debuted his yearly investment service ($999). He acknowledges that he's not a registered advisor, but says "his proven track record has caught the attention of many." (3) Minister "Calypso Louie" Farrakhan resurfaced, reminding his Nation of Islam that he has helped them over the years by uniquely recognizing warning signs like the earthquake in Chile, which currently portends trouble for President Obama. "The word 'prophet' is too cheap a word. I am a light in the midst of darkness. It ain't ego; it's my love for you."
New York Times ///
Wall Street Journal ///
Associated Press via Salon.com ///
YouTube [Farrakhan sings calypso]
The Staff of Life
Sarah Burge, 49, is well-known in Britain as the recipient of more than 100 invasive cosmetic procedures (cost: at least £500,000 [$750,000], which should surely render her perfect by now). Not wanting to be a hypocrite, she acceded to her daughter's cries of vanity, by administering her Botox at age 15. Hannah is now 16 and still deathly afraid that, without "B," she'd "get that frozen-face look" when she's older.
Daily Mail [includes before and after photos of Mom]
Two Things You Didn't Expect
(1) Afghanistan has a National Environmental Protection Agency. (2) Last week, it moved to save the endangered large-billed red warbler and 13 other critters, running its "save the" list up to 48.
Scientific American
Your Periodic Roundup of "Intelligent Design"
(1) Deepak Paswaan, 7, in Bihar, India, is looking for (a) a qualified surgical team and (b) a little health-care reform to pay for it, to remove the parasitic twin he was born with. (There's a Not Safe For Stomachs, all-eight-limbs photo.) (2) A woman in England had triplets, arriving two years after the birth of her first daughter, and doctors determined that all four had come from the same egg. Time-delay quads! (3) And it says here that this little fella was born without pores, creating predictable problems plus skin resembling fish scales.
Daily Telegraph (London) via Fox News ///
BBC News ///
Daily Telegraph (London)
Meanwhile, Over on the Left Tail of the Bell Curve . . .
It doesn't work, but it's what he knows how to do: Jonathon Smith, 22, was arrested in Fairbanks, Alaska, after his fourth consecutive try at scoring a used truck by presenting a forged check (that is, arrested while out on bail from the previous failures).
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
Barney Fife, Back to Life: Adair County (Ky.) Sheriff's deputy Charles Wright was fired on the opening day of the new county judicial center after he accidentally locked himself in a cell and tried to shoot the lock open.
WKYT-TV (Lexington)
In the District of Calamity II, a Detroit firefighter got written up after he lost a $600,000 fire truck responding to a call. He must have skipped over the part in the handbook about not parking on railroad tracks.
Detroit News
Unclear on the Concept: An undercover agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nosing around a neighborhood in Kissimmee, Fla., was busted by local sheriff's deputies and had to reveal his ID. The ICE agent's undercover persona: "FBI agent."
Orlando Sentinel
Allen Nguyen, 22, allegedly stole lottery tickets from a store on Thursday; found out on Friday that one of his cards was a $50 winner; and then tried to cash it in . . . at the same store he stole it from.
Orlando Sentinel
Bad enough that Megan Barnes, 37, got caught driving her car the day after a judge had suspended her license for five years and ordered the car impounded. The reason she drew state troopers' attention was that she rear-ended a car while she was shaving . . her bikini lines.
Key West Citizen
Below The Fold
New Frontiers in "Breast Augmentation" Surgery: Maria Alaimo, 47, aiming only for 36C's, wound up (said her lawyer) with "essentially four breasts," due to lumping. Trial in her New York City lawsuit against Dr. Keith Berman, for $5 million, commenced last week.
[LINK CORRECTED] New York Daily News
Write Your Own Punch Line: Every year around this time, women gather at the Attukal temple in Trivandrum, Kerala, India, to shriek—literally. This year there were three million prideful howlers, seeking the graces of goddesses Kali and Saraswati.
BBC News
The family of the late Alison Hume learned during the inquest in Scotland last week that the firefighters who were on the scene when she accidentally fell down a mine shaft in 2008 had equipment on hand to save her, but couldn't because government rules specify that they can only do that kind of rescue for their own colleagues. Instead, Hume had to await a "mountain rescue" squad. She died at the scene.
BBC News
Preparation for the End of Days: Testifying at a pre-trial hearing in New Jersey, the estranged wife said that the husband had for years been raping the couple's five daughters, but that everyone was too scared to stop him. He had thought his reasoning was solid: The world was ending soon, and the more female Ayindes there were, the better the chance that the bloodline would survive, and three of the daughters did bear him six more Ayindes. (Bonus cheap shot: Mr. Ayinde's first name is Aswad.) (In a less-reliable news report last week from the town of Goya, Argentina, Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, entered into a death pact with each other, taking down their two kids and then themselves, but the youngest, age 7 months, survived her particular bullet. According to neighbors, the couple took The Only Way Out because of fear of global warming.)
[ed.: It's "less reliable" because it's from an Argentine paper called the Clarin, then cribbed by something called the Latin American Herald Tribune, then cribbed by London's Daily Telegraph, which made it acceptable to be cribbed by the New York Daily News. Similar reportorial corners were cut on the boy-with-no-pores story, above.] The Record (Hackensack, N.J.) ///
Latin American Herald Tribune
Kitchen-Sink Theory of Litigation: In Aurora, Colo., in 2008, an illegal immigrant, at 80 mph, smashed into another motorist, sending her careening into a Baskin-Robbins store, killing that driver and her passenger and a 3-year-old getting ice cream with his mother. The immigrant was convicted last week, but of course he's uninsured. Thus, little Marten Kudlis's parents have filed a lawsuit seeking compensation from: the immigrant; his common-law wife's parents (he was driving their car); the local electric company (the collision brought Marten's head together with a piece of their equipment); the state Department of Transportation and the city of Aurora (they maybe over-widened the highway seven years ago, leaving too little of a set-back in front of the store); the property owner; the lessee Baskin-Robbins; the estate of the driver hit by the immigrant (she tested positive for meth); and several law enforcement agencies (who after all failed to have deported the immigrant before he could cause this mayhem).
Denver Post
The Pervo-American Community
U.S. Ingenuity on Display: See the "network of gadgets" found inside David Delagrange's pants after he was picked up for allegedly taking upskirt photos in Castleton Mall in Indianapolis. (Bonus: Upskirts are not illegal in Indiana because Delagrange took them in a public place.)
WANE-TV (Fort Wayne)
The FBI closed its files on the late Bruce Ivins, who the Bureau said in its best judgment was the only one responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks in the wake of 9-11. The front of the file concluded that Ivins (who committed suicide in 2008) was motivated by political and psychosocial issues and had proposed a "gold standard"-like money valuation but based on cannabis rather than gold. Further back in the file, though, were revelations that he was a cross-dresser, obsessed with "blindfolding" and bondage, and had a collection of fetish magazines and 15 pairs of women's semen-stained panties. Also, he had told investigators that he had a longstanding "obsession" with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and twice broke into KKG chapters to steal "ritual books" used by the sorority.
The Smoking Gun
And representing the Pervo-
Welsh Community: Andrew Dymond, 46, appeared in court last week in Swansea, Wales, accused of possessing a little bit of porn, a little bit of child porn, a little bit of bestiality porn, and one photo of a man having sex with a dead squid.
South Wales Evening Post
Your Weekly Jury Duty
[In America, you're presumed innocent . . . until the mug shot is released]
Making Things Difficult for Their Lawyers: (1) John Angerer (jailed last week on a 2006 murder charge). (2) Michelle Parkhurst, 37 (charged with soliciting a hit man to kill a police informant). (3) Eric Spandorf, 43 (an "online minister" charged with possession of child porn).
Anchorage Daily News ///
Times-Tribune (Scranton, Pa.) ///
Tampa Tribune
More Things To Worry About
Epic Police Chase (or, judging from another angle, Montcalm County, Mich., is a good place to maybe get away with something): A 41-year-old man, with an arrest warrant for contempt of court, didn't go quietly. Either he was as elusive as Jason Bourne, or the deputies were
Police Squad; your call. Here's a 450-word report from WWMT-TV in Grand Rapids showing how, time after time, over a couple of hours one night, they corner him, and time after time, he gets away.
WWMT-TV
Not to Worry: The first report was that the guy was electrocuted by the stream while urinating inadvertently on a live, downed power line.
[ed. Thanks to readers for the ton of tips.] But the autopsy spoiled everything: He must've grabbed the wire in his hand. In fact, "scientists say" that you can't die by the stream like that. Still, he's dead, and it was his one-car crash into the power pole that loosened the wire.
Associated Press via Tacoma News Tribune
And a Correction [from
NOTW / Pro, 2-15-2010]: It was wrongly reported everywhere that South Carolina's registration law for subversive organizations had only recently kicked in. Actually, the law has been on the books since 1951, and it's not clear yet why someone chose to publicize it out of the blue this year. (Bonus: No one had ever registered under the law until the recent story got out. In February, 10 jokers tried to sign up.)
The State (Columbia, S.C.)
Reality TV in Australia: A show called "Hungry Beast" on Australia's ABC TV explored the nip/tuck procedure called labiaplasty, and it's safe to say that Americans will never see anything like it on
our ABC TV. The subject is serious, though—how a few women get so obsessed that they endure the pain and silliness of reconfiguring their private part to make it more "attractive" to men.
[ed.: The video is so-o-o Not Safe For Work that I'm not even making a link. Make your own link if you're really interested, by typing "http://vimeo.com/" (without the quotation marks, of course) and then, following the com/, typing 9924049 and then you're on your own. The news report link is quite safe, though.] Herald Sun (Melbourne)
And For Further Review . . .
You might believe that, whereas dogs do what they're told, cats have strict zones of indignation that they will not enter. If so, you will be shattered by these cat fashions from Japan (and the two tolerant models, obviously doped up on cat Ativan).
GlobalPost.com ///
The Cute Show video
Newsrangers: Jan Wolitzky, Scott Huber, Jim Dukes, Angela Hasty, Lynna Hughes, Gil Nelson, John Vacek, George Rubin, and Carl McGlone, and the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors
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