some funny stuff...

>News of the Weird(.666)
>
>LEAD STORIES
>
>The Alberta Ferretti fashion house recently introduced, in New York
>and London, self-described "gorgeous pieces" made from hamster fur,
>including
>a reversible multicolored-fur/camel-leather coat (about $6,000) and a skirt
>suit ($6,300), a patchwork design in which the hamster pelts appear simply
>laid side-by-side and end-to-end. The London Ferretti store told The
>Express
>newspaper in late October that it had sold 11 of its 12 suit jackets (a
>size
>10 remained).
>
>Four weeks after admonishing the government for its treatment of
>scientist Wen Ho Lee, U.S. District Judge James A. Parker scolded federal
>prosecutors for demanding too harsh a sentence against a convicted New
>Mexico
>perjurer, pointing out that the prosecutors' boss, President Clinton, had
>asked for leniency for his own false testimony in the Paula Jones case. The
>New Mexico perjurer, Ruben Renteria Sr., 49, was convicted of lying about
>consenting to be searched, for which Judge Parker imposed a 15-month
>sentence
>rather than the five years the government wanted; President Clinton sought
>leniency and received no jail sentence but was fined $90,000 and is
>fighting
>to keep his Arkansas license to practice law.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>They Bought Room Freshener by the Truckload
>
>Ralph Carlone, 48, was charged with corpse abuse in July for failing to
>report
>his parents' deaths (his mother's, two weeks before; his father's, 11 years
>earlier) and continuing to live with their bodies inside the Akron, Ohio,
>home
>he shared with them. And in September, a judge in Phoenix acquitted Frank
>A.
>Martinez, 71, of killing his wife in 1987; Martinez had continued to live
>with
>her body in their trailer home until 1998, when a suicide attempt brought
>police, who found the corpse. (Martinez's neighbors had long complained of
>the
>smell, but he managed to convince them merely that a dead cat had been
>buried
>underneath the home.)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Compelling Explanations
>
>Rev. Marvin Munyon of the Family Research Forum (Madison, Wis.) told
>parents at a September seminar at the Eau Claire Gospel Center how to
>administer the loving and supportive corporal punishment demanded in the
>Bible: "You spank them right here on the gluteus maximus, which God made
>for
>that purpose." Spanking should begin by age 2, he said, and used properly,
>it
>will build self-esteem because it lets children know they are loved.
>
>A strippers' club in Hove, East Essex, England, applied for a license
>variance in September, asking for exemption from the current
>no-touching-the-dancers rule because it discriminates against customers who
>are blind, in that they would not have equal opportunity to experience the
>show unless they could touch. Dancers were said to approve the idea, if
>limited to bona fide blind people.
>
>The Florida Court of Appeals in September turned down lawyer Philip
>G. Butler's challenge to his bribery conviction. Butler had represented
>himself at trial and lost, and then claimed on appeal that the reason he
>lost
>was that he had failed to inform himself adequately that acting as his own
>lawyer was foolish.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Crises in the Workplace
>
>The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced in July that an
>employee fired for his obsessive belief in the validity of "cold fusion"
>can
>sue the employer for "religious" discrimination. As long as an employee has
>a
>seriously held conviction that in his own value system he regards as
>"religious," he is protected under federal law, even though the vast
>majority
>of physicists believe "cold fusion" is bogus. The petitioner, Paul A.
>LaViolette, worked at the U.S. Patent Office, but there was no evidence
>that
>he was assisting in the patenting of bogus technologies.
>
>"Bus driver" Darius McCollum, 35, was profiled in The New York Times
>in August after his 19th arrest for impersonating a city transit worker.
>Said
>McCollum: "I am not insane. I (just) like the (bus) activity. I like the
>noise. I like the people who work there." Said one official, "(W)hat this
>guy
>does is kind of wacky, but he is very much on the ball." McCollum
>apparently
>spends much time on the grounds talking to bus and train employees at all
>levels and is well-versed in transit procedures and techniques. Said
>McCollum:
>"To tell you the truth, I wish they would just (hire me). It would be a lot
>easier."
>
>In August, the New Hampshire Supreme Court OK'd worker compensation
>payments to a state employee, for "work-related" depression, even though
>the
>cause of the depression was merely that she had gotten bad performance
>reviews. The state appeals board acknowledged that the employee, Gail
>Sirviris-Allen, had been justifiably cited for inaccurate work and a bad
>attitude.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Driving While Involved
>
>Lucrecia Ortuno, 30, was charged in August with injuring her 8-month-old
>son
>in a car crash in Houston; according to police reports, she was driving
>while
>breastfeeding him. And Kenneth Herron, 40, was charged with manslaughter in
>August in Little Rock, Ark., after his car crossed the center line and
>collided with another car; according to police, Herron was driving (with
>his
>knees) while preparing his crack cocaine. And a 27-year-old woman was
>killed
>when she lost control of her car on I-75 near Atlanta in August; according
>to
>witnesses, she was driving while applying makeup.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Update
>
>Three months ago, News of the Weird referred to laws in Alabama, Texas and
>Georgia (until May, Louisiana was on the list) that banned the sale of
>products whose primary purpose is to stimulate the genitals. In October,
>the
>U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of Alabama's law, and in
>August, the Austin Chronicle reported on how Texas sex shops are coping
>with
>that state's law (by legally selling "anatomically correct condom education
>model" dildos). And at press time, the Augusta (Ga.) Commission had a
>license-revocation action pending against Lucy's Love Shop for violating
>that
>state's version of the law.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Least Competent Criminals
>
>Federal grand juror Mark Vincent Hinckley, 37, part of the panel that had
>just
>voted secret indictments against an alleged Denver drug dealer, was
>arrested
>in August after he went to the dealer's office and attempted to sell him
>information about the government's case, for $50,000. Hinckley had
>apparently
>forgotten some of the evidence that he had just heard: that the government
>had
>bugged the alleged dealer's office. Thus, Hinckley's proposition was
>recorded
>in full. The dealer's indictment had to be dismissed because of Hinckley's
>misconduct, but Hinckley himself was indicted a few days later.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Also, in the Last Month ...
>
>In a midday public demonstration, three martial-arts masters, without using
>their hands, pulled a truck containing 80 people 12 inches with ropes
>attached
>only to their penises (Taipei). A divorce-court judge awarded the family
>home
>to the two kids (ages 11 and 13), allowing the mother three weeks'
>visitation
>a month and the father one week (Victoria, British Columbia). USAirways
>admitted that it had allowed a 300-pound pig to ride in the first-class
>aisle
>on a flight from Philadelphia to Seattle, in the belief that it was a
>customer's emotional equivalent of a seeing-eye dog. Two female prisoners
>and
>their boyfriends were arrested for drug-partying at the South Dakota
>governor's mansion (during the first family's absence), where the women had
>work-release jobs on the kitchen staff.
>
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