A Precious Right Restored in Swaziland
King Mswati III has rescinded his human-rights-stifling decree of last month that made it illegal to shoot a bare moon in protest of the monarch, thus restoring a tradition that is one of the few areas in which Swaziland appears to be more advanced than the U.S. (There was much international protest of the decree, including U.S.-threatened trade restrictions, but that mostly had to do with displeasure at the King’s accompanying ban on newspapers and court rulings that tended to disrespect the royal family.) [The Times (London), 7-26-01]
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The Continuing Americanization of China
CNN reported on Thursday that a Ms. Tao of Guanghan has filed a lawsuit against a driver who hit her, asking about $4,700 to compensate her for her loss of kissing ability (broken front teeth and a swollen lip). On the other hand, it’s not too much like America because the accident happened on June 1, and she has a hearing on the lawsuit on August 3. [CNN, 7-26-01]
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Bad Day for Law Enforcement
Officers believing they were tailing livestock-theft suspect Bob Harold Leach surrounded “his” car when it overturned near Tioga, Tex. (north of Dallas), and called in backup, with the total reaching more than 20 officers pinning Leach down for two hours, employing full bullhorn demands for surrender and eventually lobbing in tear gas. The car was empty. [Dallas Morning News, 7-26-01] Mitchell Dennis Long of Denver, N.C., was cited 3 different times on Tuesday for speeding and driving on a revoked license, each time bonding out. A couple of hours after the third ticket, police discovered that the car he was driving each time had earlier been reported stolen. [Greensboro News & Record, 7-26-01] The link is to the first story
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Below the Fold
The National Education Association said it will soon offer optional classroom-homicide coverage on life insurance policies it sells to the nation’s teachers. [Los Angeles Times-AP, 7-26-01]
Man on a Mission
Bristout Bourguignon, 33, was convicted in Bridgeport, Conn., Wednesday of trashing his (electrical-contractor) boss’s home, including breaking every single window and every single piece of furniture in the house and then writing “Beastmaster” on a wall with his own blood. [Boston.com-AP, 7-26-01]
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Los Angeles Times Backgrounder on Dog-Poop Services
Joseph Brito’s touchingly American entrepreneurship was touted in a Tuesday front-pager on his Poo Nanny Pet Waste Removal Service (Sherman Oaks, Calif.), one of 340 U.S. businesses that will clean your yard at $7-$15 per dog per visit. One of the pioneers wrote a how-to manual, and there’s a website, naturally. At least one court has held that you can’t re-dump the poops if the customer fails to pay up. Some of Brito’s customers look for him to inspect, also, for worms or blood in the stool (and he does it “as a courtesy”). Said Brito, “I’m just happy that I found my calling. Some people go through life and never find it.” [Los Angeles Times, 7-24-01]
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Below the Fold
Roofing-contractor driver Quincy Arnold was arrested in Suffolk, Va., Tuesday for grabbing a shingle-scraping shovel and smacking Avery Miller in the head, sending him to intensive care, because he had grown tired of Miller’s backseat driving on the way to a roofing job. [Virginian-Pilot, 7-25-01] Michael D. Tydings filed a $50G lawsuit in Baltimore City Circuit Court against an emergency-room doctor who, in the course of treating his facial laceration in 1999, accidentally spilled suture-substitute bonding glue in his eyes, closing them off for a while (and, said the lawsuit, the doctor actually uttered “Oops” when it happened). [Daily Record (Baltimore), 7-24-01] A police ethics committee in Montreal ruled that two officers were out of line when they arrested a man in a car because it appeared to them that he was receiving oral sex from a young girl sitting beside him, and at the time, the officers would not listen to the man’s protestations; upon later review, the man and the girl convinced authorities that the girl with her head under the dash was merely trying to dislodge a stuck cassette tape. [Winnipeg Free Press-CP, 7-24-01]
Alleged Sex-Predator Bar-Jonah Having Difficulty with the "Fair Trial" Thing
At a court hearing Wednesday in Great Falls, Mont., lawyers for Nathaniel Bar-Jonah (charged with several vicious sex crimes against little boys, including murder) lamented how their client can’t get a fair trial because as soon as you mention “Bar-Jonah” anywhere in the state, people’s hair stands on end. (And there’s also that detail where he is alleged to have cooked the 10-yr-old murder victim and innocently fed him to neighbors in a stew.) His main line of defense right now: The police search that turned up a stun gun and a list of the victim’ names was illegal, he argues. But Bar-Jonah is persevering, newly concerned about his appearance, in that he has shaved off his bushy beard, favoring a stylish goatee. [Montana Standard (Butte)-AP, 7-26-01]
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Australian Tourists Stand on Dead Whale, Pat Sharks on Head
Film turned up this week of tourist boat operations near Cape Jervis (near Adelaide) allowing people to stand on a dead whale and watch the great whites munch off the carcass, even patting the preoccupied sharks on the head. Wot a photo op! The local environmental minister said he was appalled and will ask for legislation “to protect people too stupid to protect themselves” (a category of legislation which Yr Ed views with alarm). [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News-AP, 7-24-01]
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Couple Tries to Keep the Sixties Alive in Tunbridge, Vermont
State police arrested a squatter couple, aged 38 and 26, who had casually commandeered an unoccupied (but hardly abandoned), isolated house in central Vermont and had begun remodeling it (tearing down walls, ripping out old plumbing, redoing the bathroom, painting some rooms), acting on their belief (as they told police) that property should be shared rather than privately owned (and also that they are opposed to this get-a-job thing that seems to consume people). They had financed the remodeling by selling off some of the house’s antiques. The “owners” live in Massachusetts and had last been in residence three weeks ago, and the looks on their faces when they walked into the house on Saturday must not have done justice to a word like “stunned.” Said a trooper of the squatters: “They knew it wasn’t abandoned. It’s definitely somebody with a different mindset.” [Rutland Herald, 7-24-01]
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Below the Fold
Though Yr Ed has No Longer Weirded the genre, there seem to be more instances than ever (which is newsworthy in itself) of burglars trapped in ceiling vents, such as the 51-year-old man found in a ventilation shaft at the Midori Japanese Restaurant near Fort Belvoir, Va., on Saturday. [Washington Post, 7-24-01] A woman called the Alamo car rental people at 3 a.m. Sunday, about an hour after she picked up her car at the Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va., and told them to come get it, just because it came equipped with a 4-ft African ball python that had slithered down from the dashboard. [Washington Post, 7-24-01] In Port Arthur, Tex., on Saturday, Kevin Wayne Coffey was arrested and charged with murder. [Dallas Morning News-AP, 7-24-01] Police in El Paso, Tex., said Dale Smith, 47, started menacing a waitress early Sunday morning because she wouldn’t serve him more beer and so pulled out a pellet gun and aimed it at her with his prosthetic arm, but then the crisis was averted when the arm (with gun attached) just fell off [Ed.: an inebriated prosthesis?] [El Paso Times, 7-24-01]
Church of England's Newspaper Gets Down
A piece in the current issue of the 138-yr-old official weekly, on problems today’s nuns sometimes face, reports London’s Sister Helen Loder giving as good as she gets to a young fellow who yells at her on the street. He yells “[Newting] nun” [Ed.: The Church of England used the actual term, which Weird Central, being respectful of our tender readers, euphemizes]; she shouts back, “One or the other, but I can’t be both!” [Daily Telegraph, 7-22-01]
Animal Psychics on the Rise
The New York Times visited this emerging profession (“hundreds” now in the business) on Monday in a, well, balanced story that displays leading practitioners’ anecdotes of success right next to some clear-thinking academics who say that something else besides telepathy is going on (for example, the keen ability of certain animals, especially dogs, to read humans’ body language). One “informal study” showed 48% of dog owners accepted pet telepathy, which is even more amazing because, technology being advanced and all, most pet psychics do their work entirely by phone, channeling in on the correct pet solely by knowing name, age, breed, and favorite hangout. [New York Times, 7-23-01]
Below the Fold
According to yesterday’s Irish Times, Parsees in India have been forced to install solar panels to speed up the decomposition of the dead bodies they place on their burial towers for vultures; too many bodies lately, for too few vultures, has resulted in the birds’ overstuffing themselves and getting sick. [Irish Times, 7-23-01] And the New Yorker is apparently reporting that the Lizzie Grubman incident (upper-class chick, angry at being dissed by a “white trash” bouncer at a club, backs hard into him with her Daddy’s SUV) may provoke a new “SUV Defense” (that unintentional acceleration of SUVs is not uncommon and happens disproportionately to the elderly, women, short people, and those unfamiliar with driving the tanks). [New York Post, 7-22-01] And as the New York Post pointed out on Sunday, consider the $50M lawsuit by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston (their jeweler allegedly promised to throw away the mold for their wedding rings but instead is duplicating them); it’s 6 times as much money as Abner Louima got for getting beaten up by New York City cops and having a plunger shoved up his orenthal. [New York Post, 7-22-01]
Bank Officials Diss Kids, Thwart Robbery
A 13-yr-old girl (wearing a towel-mask) and her 10-yr-old partner tried to stick up a PNC Bank in Baldwin, Pa. (near Pittsburgh) on Friday (correctly picking the high-money-inventory day), but bank officials didn’t believe they had a gun and merely locked the front door and called police on them. The girls had wanted $2G for school supplies and cosmetics and said they got some ideas about the heist from television. The older kid is apparently a pretty good student, and her parents were mortified when police called them up. [Ed.: As a matter of anti-sexist journalistic style, if the girls are tried as adults, Yr Ed will begin referring to them as “women.”] [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7-21-01]
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Below the Fold
The Daily Telegraph reported a job opening in Exeter, England, over the weekend: The Austern Electric Circus’s knife-thrower Jayde Hanson’s assistant walked off the job after being nearly hit in the foot, which would have been the third wound this season, which is the number of hits his former girlfriend took before she walked off the job last year. [Daily Telegraph, 7-23-01]
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A Day the DMV Customers Will Never Forget
South Carolina’s Dept. of Motor Vehicles has pared services, anyway, so that lines are longer, but it also privatized its janitorial service, which makes an appearance only once a day to clean, so, in a disaster waiting to happen at the Fairforest Road DMV office in Spartanburg on Wednesday, the helms hit the fan. An elderly man had an accident while waiting in line to renew his driver’s license. Neither he nor his adult daughter waiting with him wanted to lose their place in line, so he had held it in and held it in, and finally, his bowels won. There were “piles” of waste on the floor, according to a Herald-Journal report, and no one to clean it up, so the lines re-snaked around them. But the guy waited around (in a chair isolated from the lines) and got his renewal. Said the office’s deputy director, “You can’t keep someone from getting a driver’s license for incontinence.” [Spartanburg Herald-Journal, 7-20-01]
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©
2001, Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
