something to chuckle about...

>LEAD STORIES
>
>In September, driving-school owner Bharat Patel, 49, became the 31st
>person convicted in a driver's-license bribery scandal at a Chicago
>examining
>station. According to testimony, Patel did not even bother to teach and
>spent
>all his time with examiners. Some of Patel's students were such bad drivers
>that examiners, who took $300,000 in bribes in two years, actually gave
>Patel
>his money back. Some subsequently licensed drivers did not know how to
>start a
>car or engage the transmission; others turned directly into traffic during
>the
>test; and sometimes, terrified examiners halted the test mid-trip and
>hitchhiked back to the station.
>
>Federal wildlife officials believe that the voracious and largely
>indestructible Asian swamp eel has somehow made its way to within a mile of
>Florida's Everglades National Park and poses an imminent threat to its
>balance
>of nature, according to a September Wall Street Journal report. The
>3-foot-long eel apparently eats anything in its path, has no known enemies,
>survives in salt- and fresh water and on land, can change genders in order
>to
>facilitate year-round breeding, lays 1,000 eggs at a time, and is so
>durable
>that one lived in a wet towel for seven months with no food or water.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Recent Nude Activities
>
>Protesting taxes (Actress "Dziewanna" rode, Lady Godiva-style, through
>Krakow,
>Poland, in July). Bicycling for charity (Three men and a woman were
>arrested
>in Vernal, Utah, wearing only helmets, in July). Burglarizing a house
>(Dwight
>Mills, 38, set off by the receipt of divorce papers, took off his clothes
>and
>broke into a neighbor's house before being gunned down, Pensacola, Fla.,
>July). Celebrating a soccer "victory" (In August, a nude fan joyously
>rushed
>onto the field and around the sidelines in the final moments of a 2-1 game,
>but he apparently also distracted his own Blackpool, England, team, because
>Torquay scored two quick goals to win, 3-2).
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>The Litigious Society
>
>Helene Canuel filed a lawsuit in August against the Rimouski (Quebec)
>Minor Hockey Association, asking about $700 (U.S.) in damages, because the
>coach of her 14-year-old son benched him for the playoffs. Canuel said she
>just wanted "justice for my son," but the coach was apparently more
>interested
>in surviving the single-elimination tournament.
>
>In June, a school district in Orange County, Calif., was ordered by a
>jury to pay $1.4 million to Taylor Steiskal, age 10, who three years ago
>fell
>off his school's monkey bars and broke his arm, which developed further
>complications and has required eight surgeries. Steiskal's lawyers argued
>that
>monkey bars for children should be no higher than 72 inches off the ground
>(thus giving a few inches' ground-clearance for a 48-inch-high boy hanging
>from his hands); the one Steiskal fell from was 79 inches high.
>
>Anne and Lucy Abolins filed a $4 million lawsuit in May against the
>owners of the house they formerly rented in Edmonton, Alberta, from which
>their 114 cats were confiscated by health inspectors, who ruled in June
>1999
>that the feces-laden dwelling was uninhabitable. Contrary to neighbors'
>claims
>that the Abolinses had lowered their neighborhood's value, the sisters now
>say
>that their own lives were ruined by the health inspectors and that
>notoriety
>has made it impossible for them to find new living quarters. (In August
>2000,
>a judge fined the sisters about $3,500 (U.S.) for housing code violations,
>and
>Lucy Abolins then called the SPCA "the Antichrist" for taking her cats
>away.)
>
>In September, a jury in Tacoma, Wash., ordered the state Department of
>Corrections to pay $22 million to the family of a woman killed when a
>convicted felon (domestic assault) on probation ran a red light and hit the
>woman's car, concluding that the department somehow ought to have
>supervised
>the man better. The governor's office said it would appeal the verdict,
>questioning the state's ability to monitor the driving behavior of its
>55,000
>probationers 24 hours a day.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Not My Fault
>
>According to an Associated Press report in August, quoting lawyers close
>to the case, the Catholic Diocese of Nashville, Tenn., planned to use the
>defense of "comparative fault" in two lawsuits filed by boys who claimed to
>have been sexually molested by former priest Edward McKeown. Such a defense
>would allow the church to reduce its damages by showing that other people
>had
>knowledge of McKeown's continued abuse and did not warn authorities of it.
>Among those other people the church regards as culpable are the 21 other
>victims who were abused but remained silent.
>
>Paralyzed inmate Torrence Johnson filed a lawsuit in July against the
>Spartanburg (S.C.) County Jail because guards failed to stop him in 1998
>when
>he was whimsically doing backflips off a desk in his cell, the last one of
>which resulted in a fall and his subsequent paralysis. Johnson claims
>guards
>should have been watching him carefully because he had been diagnosed as
>depressed, although they said he appeared to be vigorous until he landed on
>his neck.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>People Who Can't Catch a Break
>
>Mark Sims, 24, filed a lawsuit in August against Ottawa (Ontario) Civil
>Hospital, alleging that a misdiagnosis (of cancer) caused a doctor to
>remove
>one of his testicles, which at that time was the size of a "baseball." Sims
>now says it was obvious that the swollen testicle was not cancerous but
>merely
>the result of an office-party jaunt to a strip club, a visit during which
>Sims
>ultimately found himself onstage with a dancer, who "suddenly, without
>warning" whacked his scrotum. Sims says that if the doctor had waited until
>his testicle shrank to its normal size, he would still have both testicles.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Recurring Themes
>
>Last year, News of the Weird reported that a Bombay, India, collection
>agency
>had hired six eunuchs to hang around the homes and offices of obstinate
>debtors to embarrass them into paying up. According to a July 2000 report
>in
>London's The Guardian, the Tsaisheng credit agency in Taiwan has begun
>hiring
>AIDS patients at about $100 (U.S.) a day for the same purpose. According to
>the agency owner, many people in Taiwan still believe that AIDS is
>transmitted
>through mere social contact.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Least Competent Criminals
>
>Sherman Lee Parks, 50, escaped from the Dallas County Jail in Fordyce,
>Ark.,
>in August, oblivious of the fact that a judge had just ordered his release
>because he had been locked up too long; he was rearrested the next day,
>charged with escaping, and jailed. And in September, according to police in
>Shawnee, Kan., a 19-year-old clerk at a Texaco Starmart reported he had
>been
>robbed, but actually he had just looted his own cash register, and to
>conceal
>the crime, he had put tape over the store's surveillance cameras. However,
>he
>had used transparent tape; said a police lieutenant, "(I)t looks a little
>fuzzy, but I don't see any robbery in there."
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Also, in the Last Month ...
>
>Water and health officials were mystified at the continued appearance of
>half-inch-long red worms in the tap of a Deltona, Fla., woman but after
>tests,
>declared the water safe. A mayoral candidate in Vlore, Albania, promised
>that,
>if elected, he would re-open the city's long-shuttered brothels. Officials
>in
>Cairo, Egypt, began implementing a 20-year program to relocate 21
>cemeteries
>(with 109,000 graves) to the suburbs. When an arrested stripper on
>pre-trial
>release argued that wearing an ankle monitor on stage would hamper her act,
>the judge relented and dropped that condition (Cleveland).

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