Chuck’s Hand-Picked Overnight Weird News for Friday

Palm Beach County lost 3 percent of the votes cast in the primary last week (Ummm, nothing to see here, folks, just . . ..)
OK, so the intended-Democrat-friendly butterfly ballot from 2000 turned out to be way-un-friendly to Democrats. And the entire state has chucked the touch-screens from 2004 (paper-trail problems). So now they're onto state-of-the-art Sequoia optical-scan machines. In one judicial race, fella won by 17 votes, triggering a statute-mandated recount, which he proceeded to lose by 60 votes, and in the process the total of all ballots cast in the county fell from 102,523 scanned by precinct machines to 99,045 scanned by central-office machines. La-de-dah-de-dah . . .. Just move on along . . .. Palm Beach Post
Comments 'palmbeach_ballots'

Particle accelerators in the news
In France, they're being used to examine the glass content in bottles of wine to authenticate the age. But of course on September 10th in Switzerland, they'll turn on the mother of all particle accelerators, which will either devour life as we know it or reveal stuff that might make Stephen Hawking's toes curl, e.g., Hey, a Higgs Boson! Expected results: more knowledge of hadrons, quarks, thingies, and doohickeys, and also of whether people involved in this expensive project will ever be trusted with grant money again. Reuters via Yahoo // Agence France-Presse via Yahoo // "Large Hadron Rap" on YouTube
Comments 'particle_accelerators'

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals foiled again in its continuing campaign to de-emphasize the "justice" angle in capital punishment
Charles Hood's departure date was to be next week, but this time, a panel of outsiders convinced the state att'y-gen'l and governor to intervene and actually hold a hearing on whether Hood had been convicted by a prosecutor who was shtupping the judge during the trial. "Everybody" around the courthouse at the time knew they were hittin' it, but it was a small town, and nobody would go on the record. (On top of the story since 2005: Salon.com) New York Times
Comments 'charles_hood'

Update: By the way, Lizardman was at that Ripley's opening, too (not just yesterday's Cat Man)
Erik Sprague is also a News of the Weird Hall of Famer, he of the surgically split tongue that he has trained to do the woman-delighting trick of moving both halves independently. [Link has straight-up interview snippet with Cat Man] Daily Telegraph (London) // The Lizardman
Comments 'lizardman_ripleys'

Your Daily Loser

Eyewitness News
[news videos goin' around]
Apparently a big volcano in El Salvador erupted in 1922, which is why they have this-here annual festival where people actually throw fireballs at each other. The Sun (London)
Comments 'salvador_fireballs'

More Things to Worry About on Friday
Reuters headline: "Elephant Beats Heroin Habit with Detox" . . . . . One of the last legal brothels in Taiwan shut down, and the madam, 48, had to lay off her last two babes, 41 and 50 (pre-1974 whorehouses are grandfathered-legal) . . . . . The 44-yr-old annual British festival celebrating a village's hero on horseback will this yr have the hero walk through town because insurance for a horse-rider was too expensive . . . . . Organic frozen yogurt for dogs at $9 a 4-pack (Translation: Look how cool my dog and I are! Look at meeeeee!) (Bonus: In a taste test, 4 out of 5 dogs preferred regular frozen yogurt) . . . . . The three Filipino surgeons who YouTube'd their removal of a perfume canister from a patient's un-sunshiny place in January [NOTW M059, 5-25-2008] were reinstated by the hospital after 90 days in purgatory (Un-bonus: No link to the video because all versions I've ever seen were too grainy, with narrative in Tagalog). Today's Newsrangers: Jessica McRorie, Rob Snyder, Vic McDonald, Paul Music, Bruce Townley
Comments 'worry_080905'