December 4, 2008
Various projects are coming due for me this week. I had good intentions, but I can't make my afternoon post today, either.
This had to be one of the most unusual movie screenings ever. From the
New York Times, Jan 11, 1955:
SILVER SPRINGS. Fla. -- More than 150 members of the press from New York and Hollywood, Calif., gathered in this village for the premiere of a motion picture -- "Underwater" -- underwater.
The contingent was led by the star of the picture, Jane Russell. She and about forty others, wearing oxygen masks, sat on four long benches, placed twenty feet down in the clear water of the springs.
A large plastic screen, sprinkled with reflecting aluminum dust, was suspended fifty-two feet from the projection machine, housed in a glass-wall boat. Loudspeakers were scattered about the sand.
Apparently the screening
didn't turn out very well. According to an RKO publicist, "Several journalists kept bobbing to the surface."
Some more trivia about the movie. That's not Jane Russell's body in the poster. The artists
swiped the body from the August '54 issue of Collier's magazine.
and the Morning Edition of Chuck's News of the Weird Daily for Thursday, December 4, 2008
Mumbai perhaps wasn't randomly chosen as a terror target among Westernized cities
The Times of India reported that in Mumbai (population 50 percent greater than New York City's), law enforcement owns a total of 577 guns and that many cops authorized to carry them have never fired once, even in practice. (Target-shooting is hard because there are no police firing ranges; if a cop wants to shoot, he has to book time at a private range. And besides, ammunition is scarce, so it kinda defeats the purpose to target-shoot it all away.)
The Times of India
Comments 'gunshy_mumbai'
Fine points of the law (foreign edition)
(1) Sweden's Social Insurance Agency halted disability payments to a car-accident woman, pointing to a doctor's conclusion that her continued pain was actually from too-large gazongas and that if she had reduction surgery, she'd be pain-free.
(2) Germany's Federal Constitutional Court tossed out the ladies-only rule for inmates' right to buy skin moisturizers.
(3) Italy's Court of Cassation sent a dismissed libel case back to the lower court for trial, ruling that accusing a woman of having a "Lewinskian nature" was insulting enough.
The Local (Stockholm) ///
Agence France-Presse via Yahoo /// ANSA [Italy's leading news agency]
Comments 'swedgermital_law'
Your Daily Loser
William Santiago was caught improperly in a handicapped parking space, and then got attitude about it when gently confronted by the father of two muscular-dystrophy sons. Santiago works for the Mesa (Ariz.) Public School system, where he is director of special education programs.
The Arizona Republic
Comments 'william_santiago'
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Cabdriver Ted Smith, 57, charged with sexual assault of a Down syndrome passenger, 34 (mental age: 4) (Even worse: He said she consented to the relationship.)
Daily-News Record (Harrisonburg, Va.)
[with mug shot]
Comments 'ted_smith'
Your Daily Jury Duty
[no fair examining the evidence; verdict must be based on mugshot only]
This case is all over the news now: emaciated 17-yr-old, looks 10, shackled and wearing only underwear, says he escaped from a year's custody. The three suspects don't quite fit the profiles suggested by the charges, but the charges are still serious, so justice requires that you
look very, very carefully at the photos
[scroll down to all three]. Very carefully. OK, once more. Have you reached a verdict?
Associated Press via MSNBC
Comments 'emaciated_shackled'
More Things to Worry About on Thursday
Another fine piece of detective work (and by an ambulance crew!): They spotted the DUI driver based merely on . . the broken-off gasoline hose still hanging out of her tank.
Reno Gazette-Journal
Just can't control herself: Jessica Cohen, 20, went to the Public Defender's Office in Cincinnati to get help on a shoplifting charge, and a lady took down her information and said they'd get back to her, and so on the way out, Jessica stole the lady's cell phone.
Cincinnati Enquirer
Comments on More Things to Worry About on Thursday?
Comments 'emaciated_shackled'
According to
The Overview Institute, the Overview Effect "refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, the astronauts tell us, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide us become less important and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this 'pale blue dot' becomes both obvious and imperative."
The purpose of the Overview Institute is to "promote and support widespread experience of [the Overview Effect], through direct space travel, and newer, more powerful and more publicly available space art, multi-media and education."
Nice idea, but being the cynic that I am, I'm pretty sure it's going to take more than being blasted into space to cure people of their prejudices and tribal loyalties.
December 3, 2008
Apparently, the
Albert Lea (Minn.)
Tribune does things differently, and its links to stories expire whenever something changes in the story. If you tried to link to the story from Monday's or Tuesday's News of the Weird Daily feed, but were unsuccessful and gave up, you can try again
here. If you don't know what I'm talking about but want to find out, go to Tuesday's post
here [first story]. Other websites have solved the problem by screen-capturing, and then posting, the story, which is a copyright no-no for a news-aggregater site like ours even though newspapers have not yet been active in chasing violators (and we'll leave it to others to be the ones caught on the end of a roll of the dice if that time comes).
The year 2008 marks the twentieth anniversary of a classic tome:
HIGH WEIRDNESS BY MAIL.
In those antique pre-internet days of the book's debut, your only resources for contacting and receiving strange information was the USPS. There are plenty of cheap copies of HWBM available online, if you want to get a nostalgic snapshot of that era.
But the SubGeniuses behind the book have also launched
THE HIGH WEIRDNESS PROJECT, which strives to replicate the book as a web-based experience.
Pay them a visit, and get your slack on.
and the Morning Edition of Chuck's News of the Weird Daily for Wednesday, December 3, 2008 [and, although there's probably enough news for an Afternoon edition today, I'm too busy to handle it so I'll see ya tomorrow morning]
Business plans, civic plans
(1) An academic adviser at Ohio State and an 8-yr-veteran children's sex-abuse case worker were involved in a Consumer Reports-type rating service of hookers around Columbus (the case worker was a best-buy). Then the adviser tried to run a raffle on the chance to win the aforementioned platinum-standard woman from a mere $10 ticket. The adviser requested low bail from the judge because after all, he's a married man and has a respectable job with a venerable institution.
(2) "I'm seeing a level of ignorance out there like you wouldn't believe," said Daniel Essek, 47, talking about his organization Society for Liberty and Prosperity and explaining why it's important to once again challenge whether the President-elect is a natural-born American. The SLP will meet Saturday night at his home in Whitley County, Ky., and he hopes to have more members by then than just himself ("president") and his wife ("treasurer"). SLP is against "barbarism, collectivism, Communism, conformitism
[sic], despitism
[another sic], fachism
[again], favoritism, imperialism, institutionalism, liberalism, Nazism
[perhaps, perhaps not], nepitism
[OK, last one], progressivism, racism, sexism, and Socialism." And of course, tax increases.
Columbus Dispatch /// Lexington Herald-Leader
Comments 'business_civic'
Prodigies
(1) A first-grader in Pembroke Pines, Fla., was suspended for (allegedly) holding a kitchen knife up to a classmate's nose and stealing his dollar.
(2) An 11-yr-old in Estero, Fla., was actually arrested and cuffed for pointing a steak knife at his mother and threatening to kill her (something about "homework").
(3) The 8-yr-old Arizona boy being held for murdering his father and another man last month has given several explanations, but the best IMHO is that the kid kept count of the number of spankings he'd endured in his life, and when the magic "1,000" was reached, his father was going down (but remember now, he's eight; he didn't exactly have a pre-built grasp of numbers when his mother squeezed him out)
South Florida Sun-Sentinel /// Naples Daily News /// Arizona Republic
Comments 'three_prodigies'
Your Daily Loser
Benedict Harkins, 46, submitted an insurance claim for a trip-and-fall back injury from a badly-placed rug at the entrance of the Farm Fresh Market in Jamestown, N.Y. But then police informed him that the entrance has a surveillance camera, and video caught him lowering himself to the floor and arranging the rug in such-and-such a way. Claim, er, withdrawn (but charges filed against him, nonetheless).
Buffalo News
Comments 'benedict_harkins'
People Whose Sex Lives Are Worse Than Yours
Earl Brown's sex life
used to be worse than yours because he's no longer with us, since he was (allegedly) shot by Mrs. Brown because she was weary of his constantly pestering her for sex. As you can see from her photo . . ..
KSHB-TV (Kansas City)
Comments 'earl_brown'
Your Daily Jury Duty
[no fair examining the evidence; verdict must be based on mugshot only]
These ladies might have come from a family of hand-me-down assaulters (mother beat daughter; daughter beat younger brother).
News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)
Comments 'handmedown_assault'
More Things to Worry About on Wednesday
Michael Schwab, 52, said he had received an urgent message from God last Friday that a certain lady driver up ahead of him "was
not driving like a Christian" and "needed to be taken off the road," which led him to chase her, and eventually both crashed (with (minor injuries).
USA Today
People Different From Us: A 20-yr-old F State woman would like to help police find her ex-boyfriend, who she says stole the wig right off her head and whom she has lived with for eight months, but she only knew him
by his first name (and the first letter of his last name).
TCPalm.com (Stuart, Fla.)
News that sounds like a joke . . well, no, it must be a joke, except that it's tough to make jokes about animal abuse: London's
Daily Telegraph reported a case of bestiality with what purports to be a photo of the actual victim (a horse), but since it was a sex crime, the newspaper placed a black
privacy bar over the victim's eyes.
[Ed.: In any event, out of solidarity, Weird Universe is not releasing the victim's name.] Daily Telegraph
(Recurring Theme) Public-housing activists in Malaysia used the quaint Third World protest tactic (which, of course, should be widely embraced in the U.S. but is not) of
demonstrating while butt-naked.
Agence France-Presse
New York City's real-estate-registration procedures are so Ehhh-Whatever that a
Daily News reporter walked into the city property office, filled out paperwork, and 90 minutes later had a legitimate-looking deed to the Empire State Building.
New York Daily News
Today's Newsrangers: Stephen Taylor, Mindy Cohen, Sam Gaines, Tom Barker, Bruce Leiserowitz, Harry Farkas, Sandy Pearlman, Bruce Alter
Comments on More Things to Worry About on Wednesday?
Comments 'worry_081203'
The CasAnus was designed by the Dutch artist
Joep van Lieshout. He
writes:
This house takes its shape from the human digestive system. While CasAnus is anatomically correct, the last part has been inflated to humongous size. CasAnus is made to function as a hotel, including a bed and a bathroom.
If you stayed there, you could say "This place is crap," and not necessarily mean it in a pejorative sense.
Also by van Lieshout, along similar lines, is the
BarRectum (aka Asshole Bar):
The bar takes its shape from the human digestive system: starting with the tongue, continuing to the stomach, moving through the small and the large intestines and exiting through the anus. While BarRectum is anatomically correct, the last part of the large intestine has been inflated to a humongous size to hold as many drinking customers at the bar as possible. The anus itself is part of a large door that doubles as an emergency exit.
via
corporeality.net
Wikipedia offers this definition of
Couvade Syndrome:
Couvade syndrome is a medical/mental condition which "involves a father experiencing some of the behavior of his wife at near the time of childbirth, including her birth pains, postpartum seclusion, food restrictions, and sex taboos".
Another term for it is a sympathetic pregnancy. But some cultures take the concept a step further. From
The Art of Folly by Paul Tabori:
In Brazil the new father is deliberately made ill. They use the sharp teeth of the aguti to gash his body. Then the wounds are washed with poisonously burning tobacco juice or a liquid in which black pepper has been mixed. The "father/mother" suffers duly while playing his strange role. In some other tribes he is subjected to a strict diet, not for days, but for weeks, during which he gets so little to eat that he becomes skin-and-bone. Among the Vaga-Vaga tribe, for instance, he is forbidden to eat bananas, coconuts, mangoes, sugar cane, poultry, pork, and dog meat.
No dog meat. That's rough. But my favorite Couvade ritual comes from the
Huichol Indian tribe:
During traditional childbirth, the father sits above his labouring wife on the roof of their hut. Ropes are tied around his testicles and his wife holds onto the other ends. Each time she feels a painful contraction, she tugs on the ropes so that her husband will share some of the pain of their child's entrance into the world.
The thumbnail shows a yarn drawing owned by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco that depicts this ritual.
All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.
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