for those who care...


>Originally published 11.26.00
>
>News of the Weird(.668)
>
>LEAD STORIES
>
>*      The attorney for alleged San Francisco dog-abuser Steven Maul said in
>November that Maul only bit the dog in the neck as part of an unorthodox
>but
>loving discipline method and that in fact Maul "is very oral" and "has
>French-kissed his dog." According to a report in the San Francisco
>Chronicle,
>Boo, an 80-pound Lab, had darted out into traffic in November (again), and
>Maul, intending to teach against that, clamped down on Boo's neck in a way
>he
>said dogs signal dominance to each other, but did not break the skin.
>(Researchers have written about bite-training, but the method is currently
>far
>out of favor.)
>
>*      In October, Rev. Derek McAleer revealed to his 350 small-town St.
>Marys (Ga.) United Methodist parishioners that their church had become the
>recipient of what is believed to be the largest one-time church donation in
>history: $50 million from the estate of the recently deceased man who
>founded
>the local telephone company. Actually, the donor, Warren Bailey, was a
>long-time church supporter but was also known in town for not having
>attended
>services in more than 20 years.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>In an Ordinary Year, This Would Be Weird Election News
>
>In the Sept. 19 primary in New Ashford, Mass., none of the town's 202
>registered voters cast ballots, including the disgusted town clerk, who
>manned
>the polls for 14 hours. And a Green Party candidate for the Maine
>legislature
>failed to vote for himself in the June primary, leaving him with zero votes
>and forcing him to return his public financing. And Texas Lt. Gov. Rick
>Perry
>sent a fund-raising letter in July that not only shook down lobbyists but
>asked lobbyists to rank their clients as to how much they could be expected
>to
>be shaken down for (from $1,000 to $25,000). And the money flowed so freely
>at
>the GOP convention in August that Philadelphia Inquirer reporters
>discovered
>an accidentally discarded $5,000 lobbyist's check to a congressman stuck to
>the bottom of a utility cart outside the hall.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Great Art!
>
>*      The Golden Tower Project, an installation by Seattle artists at this
>year's Burning Man festival, consisted of 400 jars of urine from other
>artists, stacked and electroluminescently lighted ("gorgeous," "faintly
>blue
>and gold," "warm, kind of like biological stained glass," according to
>Seattle's The Stranger weekly). (In 1993, News of the Weird reported that
>New
>York City artist Todd Alden had asked 400 art collectors worldwide to send
>him
>samples of their feces so he could offer them for sale in personalized
>tins.
>Said Alden, "Scatology is emerging as an increasingly significant part of
>artistic inquiry in the 1990s.")
>
>*      News of the Weird has reported on scientists who borrow the jellyfish's
>"green protein" for medically productive genetic modifications, but Chicago
>artist Eduardo Kac created controversy in September by proposing to create
>embryos with the jellyfish's green-light-producing gene just to make
>visually
>appealing organisms, such as a glowing rabbit. (Kac's major work so far is
>"Genesis," a sentence from the Old Testament, translated into Morse Code,
>transposed onto DNA, inserted into fluorescent bacteria, and lit up when
>anyone accesses the piece on Kac's Web site.)
>
>*      In a summer contract with the city of Montreal, artist Devora Neumark
>performed "The Art of Conversation," which consisted of her standing at the
>entrance to a subway station from noon to 4 p.m. every Tuesday and
>"conducting
>spontaneous interchange with interested parties on a variety of topics."
>
>Frontiers of Science
>
>*      A U.S. Forest Service researcher announced in August that her team
>had discovered the largest living thing ever found, a 24-centuries-old
>fungus,
>covering 2,200 acres in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon; DNA testing
>confirmed that the underground, stringlike structure was all the same
>organism. And three weeks later near Lake Okeechobee, a University of
>Florida
>biologist discovered what he called an "evolutionary relic," a previously
>unknown, carnivorous, flowering plant that grows entirely underground but
>by
>photosynthesis.
>
>*      An August British Broadcasting Corp. documentary, "Brain Story," featured
>a man whose cranial lobes were surgically severed in order to treat
>epilepsy
>and who now is able to do what he calls the "party trick" of drawing
>different
>designs, with each hand, at the same time.
>
>*      Japan's Mizuno Corp. has developed a synthetic material for men's
>underpants that would keep the covered area one Celsius degree cooler than
>cotton underwear and therefore helpful, for example, to skiers (and, say
>doctors, to those desiring increased sperm production), according to an
>August
>New Scientist report. However, Canadian polyester-mesh underwear
>manufacturer
>Stanfield's Ltd. disputed Mizuno's claim of superiority; said a spokesman,
>"We
>just haven't got up the guts to measure the temperature of someone's crotch
>yet."
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>"Winning Isn't Everything; It's the Only Thing"
>
>Thomas Lavery, 56, was indicted in Akron, Ohio, in August on nine counts of
>roughing up two of his high-achieving, home-schooled daughters when they
>performed worse in their endeavors than he expected. According to the
>indictment, when one daughter came in second in the National Spelling Bee,
>botching "cappelletti," Lavery threatened to kill her and had to be
>physically
>restrained. The girl told the Akron Beacon Journal that Lavery would punch
>them in the head for their failures and that screaming and profanity were
>common. Lavery complained to the Associated Press that he was "easier on
>(his
>kids) than my father was (on me)."
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Update
>
>News of the Weird reported in 1999 on the lawsuit by 5,400 descendants of
>the
>18th-century Welsh pirate Robert Edwards, claiming ownership of 77 acres of
>lower Manhattan (including the World Trade Center and the New York Stock
>Exchange). In August 2000, four descendants claimed to have found a copy of
>a
>1778 lease for the land, which had been given to Edwards shortly before by
>a
>grateful King George, stating that Edwards' heirs would get the land back
>in
>1877. The value of the land now is conservatively estimated at $750
>billion,
>or $140 million per descendant. Courts in South Wales, New York City and
>Pittsburgh have opened proceedings.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Least Competent Criminals
>
>Customs Agent Adventures: Cocaine "mule" Jose Antonio Campos-Cloute was
>arrested at the Melbourne, Australia, airport, in September after a
>momentary
>lapse; as he was filling out the Customs form, he absentmindedly checked
>the
>"yes" box on whether he was carrying illicit substances, and that led to a
>search. And Briton Alison McKinnon was sentenced in August to five years in
>prison in Turkey for attempting to smuggle six pounds of heroin out,
>strapped
>to her chest; she was ready to board a plane home from Istanbul but was
>designated for searching only because one of her body-piercings set off a
>metal detector.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Also, in the Last Month ...
>
>The U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn a Californian's drug-possession
>conviction even though one juror admitted he decided guilt by flipping a
>coin
>(which the juror defended by noting that he did two out of three). An
>Atlantic
>City casino introduced a row of stationary bicycles rigged with 25-cent
>slot
>machines. In separate incidents four days apart in Chicago, two cab drivers
>accidentally drove off with customers' toddlers sleeping in the back seat
>and
>required police help in reuniting the families. Doctors revealed that
>transplanting part of a woman's ovaries into her arm was successful in
>growing
>new eggs, for in vitro fertilization (San Diego).

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