LEAD STORY -- Disgraced but Not Contrite
Chutzpah! The former
police chief of Bell, Calif., Randy Adams, had resigned in disgrace after
prosecutors charged eight other city officials with looting the municipal
budget. Adams had been recruited by the alleged miscreants (at a sweetheart
salary twice what he made as police chief of much larger Glendale), and his
resignation left him with a generous state pension of $240,000 a year. Rather
than quietly accept the payout, Adams immediately appealed to a state pension
panel, claiming that his one inexplicably rich year in Bell had actually upped
his pension to $510,000 a year. In September, with a straight face, Adams
pleaded his case to the panel, but 20 times during the questioning invoked his
right not to incriminate himself. [Los Angeles Times, 9-21-2012]
The Continuing Crisis
-- Doctors Just Want to Have Fun: (1) Navy medical examiner
Dr. Mark Shelly was notified of disciplinary action in July after admitting that
he let his children handle a brain (and pose for photos with it) that he was
transporting for autopsy to Portsmouth, Va. (2) A 15-year-old Swedish student,
working at Malmo University Hospital on a "practical work-life" internship, was
allowed by a doctor to make part of the incision for a cesarean section
childbirth and to examine the patient vaginally. One alarmed cesarean patient
alerted news media after reading about the orientation program in May and
wondering if she had been a "hands-on" patient. [Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.),
7-13-2012] [The Local (Stockholm), 10-1-2012]
-- IRS agents, investigating tax-fraud suspect Rashia
Wilson, 26, turned up "thousands" of identification numbers in a September home
search in Tampa. Wilson had already laid down a challenge in May, when she wrote
on Facebook: "I'm Rashia, the queen of IRS tax fraud. (I'm) a millionaire for
the record. So if you think that indicting me will be easy, it won't. I promise
you. I won't do no time, dumb (expletive unpublished)." The search also turned
up a handgun, and since Wilson is a convicted felon (with 40 arrests), she was
jailed, and denied bail in part because of the Facebook post. [Tampa Bay Times,
9-22-2012]
-- Many visitors to San Francisco's historic Castro
neighborhood are shocked at the city's culture of street nudism (virtually all
by males). Only if the display is "lewd and lascivious" (with the purpose to
arouse) is it illegal, but a September report in SF Weekly suggests that the
nudity must be total -- that calling any attention at all to the genitals may
suggest lewdness, such as by rings worn around the scrotum. [SF Weekly,
9-7-2012]
Bright Ideas
Way Too Many Apps: (1) The Swiss company Blacksocks offers
an iPhone app that utilizes radio frequency identification chips inserted into
socks so they can be automatically sorted. (2) The iPoo app, reported Wired
magazine in November, "(l)ets you chat with your fellow defecators from the
comfort of your own toilet." (3) "In development" now, according to Harvard
freshman Olenka Polak, is a "Code Red" app that creates an exchange network so
that women and girls who find themselves unexpectedly spotting can locate an
emergency source for a tampon or pad. [New York Times, 9-22-2012] [Wired,
November 2012] [Harvard Crimson, 10-3-2012]
Latest Religious Messages
-- The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that an insane person
cannot be executed, no matter how heinous the crime, because he cannot
understand why he was being killed. Notwithstanding that, Florida Judge David
Glant has ordered John Ferguson, 64, to death for a 1978 multiple-murder
conviction, despite evaluations from 30 doctors that Ferguson is an insane
paranoid schizophrenic. (At press time, the U.S. Court of Appeals is considering
Ferguson's lawyers' last-second challenge.) Judge Glant acknowledges that
Ferguson is delusional, but found that he nevertheless understands why he is
being executed. Ferguson's belief in a Jesus-like resurrection upon death, with
a glorious afterlife, is not, Glant said, "so significantly different from
beliefs (that) other Christians may hold so as to consider it a sign of
insanity." [The Guardian (London), 10-14-2012; CNN, 10-23-2012]
-- Spare the Rod: Former Arkansas state legislator Charlie
Fuqua is running again after a 14-year absence from elective office. In the
interim, reported the Arkansas Times in October, he wrote a book, "God's Law:
The Only Political Solution," reminding Christians that they could put their
super-rebellious children to death as long as proper procedure (set out in
Deuteronomy 21:18-21) was followed. "Even though this (capital punishment) would
rarely be used," Fuqua wrote, "if it were the law of the land ... it would be a
tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents."
[Arkansas Times, 10-8-2012]
-- Evangelicals' Nightmare Come to Life: A city official in
nominally Catholic Tupa, Brazil, granted, for the first time, official "civil
union" status to a man and two women, who thus enjoy all the legal benefits of
marriage (as per a recent Brazilian Supreme Court decision). A CNN reporter,
translating Portuguese documents, said the union was called "polyfidelitous."
[CNN, 8-31-2012]
Family Values
"Why You Little ...!" (1) A teenager, apparently fed up with
his parents' commandeering of their home's basement for an elaborate
marijuana-growing operation, turned the couple in in August. The Doylestown
Township, Pa., couple (a chiropractor mom and software engineer dad) had
sophisticated hardware and 18 plants. (2) Police in Athens, Ga., searching for
Homer Parham, 51, at his house in September, came up empty, and his wife said he
wasn't there. But as officers were leaving, the couple's young daughter said,
"Mommy locked Daddy in the closet." Parham was found hiding in a high-up crawl
space. [PhillyBurbs.com, 8-19-2012] [Athens Banner-Herald, 9-20-2012]
First-World Problems
America now has about 700 pet "aftercare" facilities,
providing funeral services to the nation's companion animals, according to a
September NBC News report. Oakey's, in Roanoke, Va., performs 800 to 900 pet
cremations annually and provides about 20 customers a year with pet caskets,
part of the estimated $53 billion America spends on pets (higher than the Gross
National Products of more than 100 countries). The basic charge of Heartland Pet
Cremation of St Louis is $275 for a private cremation, including a "basic" urn
and memorial video slideshow. (For the more upscale, other facilities offer
deluxe urns, taxidermy, freeze-drying pets and creating a synthetic diamond out
of pet ashes.) [NBC News, 9-17-2012]
People Different From Us
Gareth Lloyd, 49, admitted that he is the one who made about
5,800 random phone calls (over a 90-day period -- averaging 64 a day!) to people
just to listen to their reactions when he told them that his penis was stuck in
a household object (usually jars or a vacuum cleaner). A Flintshire, Wales,
court sentenced Lloyd only to probation (with restrictions on telephone use).
[Daily Mail (London), 10-11-2012]
Least Competent Criminals
Latest Negative-Cash-Flow Robbery: Two men robbing an Open
Pantry store in Madison, Wis., in October escaped, but with less money than they
came with. The lead thief grabbed a handful of cash that the clerk had been
counting when the pair entered. The clerk pleaded, then sternly demanded that
the man give back the money. The thief thought for a moment, became remorseful,
threw all the money in his pocket to the floor, and fled. The clerk told police
that when she re-counted the money, there was $1 more than in her original
count, meaning that the thief had accidentally tossed in a dollar of his own.
[WISC-TV (Madison), 10-22-2012]
Readers' Choice
(1) The Red Flower Chinese Restaurant in Williamsburg, Ky.,
was shut down by health authorities in September after a customer said he
witnessed a roadkill deer carcass being wheeled through the dining room into the
kitchen. The chief Whitley County health inspector said the owners did not
appear to understand that they should not do that. (2) Edward Archbold, 32, died
in October following his victory at the bug-eating contest sponsored by the Ben
Siegel Reptile Store in Deerfield Beach, Fla. Archbold (described by friends as
a "life of the party" type) had stuffed handfuls of insects into his mouth
(which people do harmlessly around the world in various cultures), but collapsed
a short time later. [WKYT-TV (Lexington, Ky.), 9-30-2012] [South Florida
Sun-Sentinel, 10-9-2012]
Thanks This Week to David Swanson, Jeff Powell, John McGaw,
Peter Smagorinsky, Jan Wolitzky, Doug Smith, Paul Peterson, Peter Swank, Nate
Tracy, Gary Davidson, Scott Huber, Gary DaSilva and William Ellis, and to the
News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.
(Are you ready for News of the Weird Pro Edition? Every
Monday at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com and www.WeirdUniverse.net. Other
handy addresses: WeirdNews at earthlink dot net, http://www.NewsoftheWeird.com,
and P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 CHUCK SHEPHERD
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK
www.newsoftheweird.com
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