Excerpts from News of the Weird

What a SLOOOOW night on F-Chat. Nobody has claimed all 10 commandments and not a single new joke....



So here are some recent news stories:




Super-Recidivists
According to police in Atlanta in January, Nathaniel Lee Stanley, 20, just released from jail, walked out and immediately carjacked a woman in the jail's parking lot (and was later returned to jail). And Ms. Kelly J. Handy, 37, who posted bond on burglary charges in Wheat Ridge, Colo., in March, picked up the wig and clothing that had been taken from her on her arrest, then went into a restroom, created a new look, and, according to police, immediately began stealing from residential mailboxes near the jail. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1-11-04] [Rocky Mountain News, 3-20-04]



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Litigious Society

Richard Timmons' $80 million police brutality lawsuit went to trial in April in New York City, with Timmons acting as his own lawyer to persuade a jury that he deserved to be a rich man because he was "beat(en) continuously" during his 1997 arrest. The jury turned him down after a quick deliberation, perhaps in part because his crime (for which he was convicted) was a triple murder that included the beheading of his wife and 7-year-old son. [New York Post, 4-20-04, 4-21-04]

Not My Fault: Chef Michael McCarthy, 21, with about a year's experience in the kitchen of the Dalmunzie Hotel in Perthshire, Scotland, filed a lawsuit for the equivalent of US$42,000 against the hotel in January because he had badly cut his finger while slicing open an avocado. He said no one had taught him that unripened avocados were harder to cut than ripened ones. [BBC News, 1-4-04]

After praising lawyer Brian Puricelli's courtroom work in winning a case for a client against the city of Philadelphia, federal Judge Jacob Hart cut Puricelli's loser-paid legal fees by $32,000 because his written work was sloppy, citing missing pages, missing paragraphs, and a huge number of typos (such as repeatedly referring to the court as representing the "Easter District" of Pennsylvania). Further, Puricelli's work apparently did not improve during the trial despite numerous admonishings; in a key, three-sentence paragraph in his response to Hart's fee-cutting decision, Puricelli wrote four more typos and addressed his objection to Judge "Jacon" Hart. [The Legal Intelligencer, 2-25-04]


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent Alarming Headlines
(1) "Trio Arrested for Breaking in and Performing Dental Work" (a December story in the Alexandria, La., Town Talk, about two people trying to help a friend who had lost part of a filling one night and couldn't wait until the dentist's office opened). (2) "Jail Teaches Prisoners to Shoot" (an April story in The West Australian, revealing that the Eastern Goldfields prison allows Aboriginal inmates to shoot air rifles because, upon release, they will return to a life of hunting animals for food). [Town Talk (Alexandria, La.), 12-23-03] [The West Australian, 4-30-04]



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obsessions
Among the beach attractions on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten: bracing oneself in the sand at the beach at the end of the runway at Princess Juliana International Airport and trying to remain upright as airliners take off. (Jumbo jets' blasts have been known to topple vans.) A March Chicago Tribune dispatch described the giddiness of several tourists (who defied posted warnings), one of whom was "tossed in the air like a human shot put." Said another man, slowly pulling himself to his feet after a take-off, "I couldn't resist. (My wife and I) are both doing things we'd never do (back home) in Ohio." [Chicago Tribune, 3-14-04]



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Least Competent Criminals
Another Cardinal Rule Broken (the one about keeping a low profile): John Parker and Rick Owens were arrested in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart in Athens, Texas, in April, after they were allegedly spotted by several people sitting in their car carefully cutting out individual counterfeit bills from larger sheets they had just printed. And Dennett Colescott, 41, was arrested at a drugstore in Corte Madera, Calif., in April after an employee reported to police that Colescott was standing at the store's photo printer, calmly copying child pornography. [Athens Review, 4-20-04] [San Francisco Examiner, 4-6-04]



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recurring Themes
News of the Weird reported in 1998 on the emerging Hollywood trademark battle between the creators of TV's "Ren & Stimpy" and "South Park" over who had original rights to a cartoon character who was an animated piece of excrement (John Kricfalusi's "Nutty the Friendly Dump" or South Park's "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo"). In April 2004, a South Korean company announced it was planning a major U.S. media launch of a short, philosophical children's film with the clay-animation character "Doggy Poo" (who, in one scene, asks a guru, "What am I good for?" and receives the answer, "God has not created you for no reason. He must have a good plan for you"). [Kansas City Star, 3-4-04]

 

I'm almost embarrassed to say ...thats pretty funny.