more weirdo news...

>LEAD STORIES
>
>Legitimate Chinese cricket-fight promoters once again staged their
>national championship matches in Beijing in October despite fears from
>their
>ranks that illegal gambling was ruining their "sport" that has endured for
>1,000 years, according to a New York Times dispatch. Thousands of men
>descend
>on farmers in Shandong province each summer, seeking crickets of the proper
>physique and character to endure rough matches inside 8-inch-wide plastic
>containers. Matches end when one contestant tries to flee or gets tossed
>around hopelessly by the other.
>
>The University of Surrey (Guildford, England) announced in October
>that it was adding to its curriculum in service-sector management by
>appointing a professor of airline food. A Surrey official said the school
>intended to beef up its graduate and undergraduate course offerings in
>in-flight catering and told The Guardian newspaper that the professor would
>be
>appointed from either the field of gastronomy (how food is served) or the
>field of food science (concentrating, for example, on freshness).
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Middle Fingers in the News
>
>Janet Woods, the acting principal of Strong Vincent High School in Erie,
>Pa.,
>angry at reporters' questions about a rumored gun incident, allegedly
>displayed a middle finger and told camera operators to "Shoot this!"
>(August).
>And in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Kamol Kaewmora, 50, recipient of the gesture,
>was
>arrested and charged with shooting to death the 41-year-old German
>motorcyclist who had displayed it to him (August). In August, a state court
>in
>Lancaster County, Pa., and a federal court in Fayetteville, Ark., dismissed
>criminal charges against people who had made the gesture, and the Arkansas
>judge in fact ruled the defendant's right to flip the bird at a state
>trooper
>was protected by the U.S. Constitution.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Oops!
>
>Newcastle, England, body piercer Lorna Larson accidentally hit a vein
>while working on the tongue of Gemma Danielson, 18, in July and by the time
>Danielson got to the hospital, she had lost four pints of blood. Said
>Danielson, "(Doctors) said they had never seen anything like it." Larson
>said
>she was mortified: "That's the last tongue I do."
>
>Joseph Pileggi, 69, filed a lawsuit in Akron, Ohio, in July seeking
>money damages over his 1997 marriage to Carli Buchanan, 61. He claims he
>intended to marry not Buchanan, but his long-time girlfriend, who is
>Buchanan's mother, Ducile Palermo, 83. He claimed that he did not realize
>until May 1999 that the "wrong" woman's name was on the license (despite
>Buchanan's insistence that Pileggi consummated the marriage with her on the
>wedding night).
>
>Latest Highway Truck Spills: 26 alligator carcasses, weighing nearly
>5 tons (headed for a processing plant near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., October);
>U.S. Army Multiple Launch rockets (from a military truck, adjacent to an
>elementary school near Hugo, Okla., August); and a load of completed
>Advanced
>Placement tests (being taken from a New York City testing center to
>Educational Testing Service in New Jersey, of which 84 were never
>recovered,
>thus hindering those students' college careers, May).
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Adventures in Ignorance
>
>In August, Davidson, N.C., police officer Scott Searcy asked to search a
>woman's car for drugs, giving as his legally required basis ("reasonable
>suspicion") solely the fact that on the front seat was a copy of the weekly
>newspaper Creative Loafing, whose cover story on local drug enforcement was
>illustrated by a photo of a marijuana plant. Said Assistant Chief Butch
>Parker, "(Searcy) thinks he had reasonable suspicion, and we do, too." (The
>woman consented to the search, and nothing illegal was found.)
>
>In July, Rev. Nelson W. Koscheski, a delegate from Dallas to the national
>Episcopal convention in Denver, was seen scattering salt under the tables
>of
>openly gay and lesbian delegates. According to some authorities, tossing
>the
>salt is a symbolic gesture to rid the premises of Satan. After some
>participants expressed their outrage, Rev. Koscheski resigned as a
>delegate.
>
>Lisa Alger of Roy, Wash., had to take her claim all the way to state
>judge Paul Treyz in June, but she finally got a dismissal of one of the
>municipal citations against her for housing an unlicensed cat named
>"Patches."
>Reason: "Patches" is a stuffed animal. (The local Humane Society monitors
>for
>violations of licensing law by knocking on doors and asking kids the names
>of
>their pets, so it can check license lists. When Alger's 7-year-old son
>mentioned the highly regarded "Patches," and the Humane Society found no
>license for it, it wrote Alger up without investigating.)
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Payback
>
>Jail guards employed by the Nova Scotia government had their "privilege" of
>being able to eat free in the inmates' dining room taken away in July
>because
>of budget cuts and must now pay $2.50 to get their prison meal. And
>Brazilian
>multimillionaire Jair Coelho, 68, was arrested in August and locked up
>before
>trial; he had made a fortune on the country's jail contracts, supplying
>nearly
>inedible food, but the government proved that he got the contracts through
>bribery, and thus he must now eat his own food.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Recurring Themes
>
>News of the Weird mentioned in 1999 that the Safety Tanteisha detective
>agency
>in Osaka, Japan, was selling about 200 aerosol spray kits a month (at $400
>each) to help women find out whether their men are having affairs, by
>detecting the presence of fresh semen on their underwear. In July 2000,
>according to a Phoenix New Times report, a venerable local medical lab has
>introduced Forensex, which charges spouses and lovers from $350 up to test
>partners' underwear for semen (hers, to see if sperm is present; his, to
>see
>if he has ejaculated at inappropriate times).
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>The Only Way Out
>
>In August, a 20-year-old man who worked at a landscaping business in
>Phoenix
>proposed to his girlfriend (she accepted), took her to the worksite, turned
>on
>a woodchipper, climbed in, and tried to pull her in, too. He was killed,
>but
>she escaped. Also in August, the style and etiquette columnist for The
>Times
>of London was found dead, clad only in a shirt, beneath his fourth-floor
>apartment window, but colleagues said the suicide scenario was too tacky
>for
>the man. Said one friend, "(H)e'd have wanted to be really dressed
>appropriately." Said the coroner, "It would be likely that he would write a
>letter to explain, and no doubt on the Smythson's notepaper that was found
>in
>the (apartment)."
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Also, in the Last Month ...
>
>The new head of a Hudson River environmental organization, on a
>well-publicized maiden kayaking voyage around New York City, discovered a
>floating corpse. A Zambian man was granted a divorce after testimony that
>his
>wife routinely locked him in the bedroom at night to stop his philandering
>(Lusaka, Zambia). Police said two burglary suspects, left alone briefly in
>a
>stationhouse storage/interview room, stole some Twizzlers and the change
>from
>the office coffee fund box (Albuquerque). Police-dog trainee Ben, let out
>of a
>squad car on a rural road to relieve himself, picked up the scent of a
>nearby,
>125-plant marijuana field (Perkins Township, Maine).
>

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