NEWS OF THE WEIRD CALENDAR

9/4/2014
News of the Weird - Anchorage Press: Anchorage Press News
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Posted: Thursday, August 28, 2014 10:23
am
Chuck Shepherd
0
Like
NOTE: Last week's column cited
1
a London Daily Mirror
compilation of foods from
Tw eet
around the world. It appears
not only that "Squeez Bacon"
was merely an April Fool's
0
joke from 2009 but that,
sadly, in the ensuing five
years, food science has not
yet been able to make a real
squeezed bacon.)
It's Facebook's World Now
NEWS OF THE WEIRD
(1) Up-and-coming Sicilian
mobster Domenico Palazzotto,
28, was outed in August by
Sam Trout illustration
0
Italy's L'Espresso magazine as
the owner of an ineffectively
pseudonymous Facebook page
showing off his muscled, barechested body and perhaps
recruiting members. One fan asked, "Do I
need to send a (resume)?" "Yes, brother,"
came the reply. "We need to consider your
criminal record. We do not take people with
clean records." Palazzotto operates out of
Palermo and listed among his "likes" the
singer Kenny Loggins. (2) Similarly young,
body-obsessed Egyptian jihadist/gym member
Islam Yaken, according to his postings on
Facebook-type social media sites, is a law
school graduate fluent in English, French
and Arabic, allowing him to describe the
particular viciousness that he and his
brothers and sisters will wreak upon
infidels.
**
**
**
Can't Possibly Be True
—A jury's murder conviction, and the 15-to-life sentence it carried, against Daniel
Floyd in Brooklyn, New York, for a 2008 killing went for naught in July when the
Brooklyn Supreme Court ordered a retrial (with witnesses forced to testify all over
again). The sole reason the court cited was a decision by the trial judge on the first
day—to seat the potential jury pool and not Floyd's mother, who, because she was
temporarily left standing that first day, argued successfully that her son's right to a
"public" trial had been violated.
http://www.anchoragepress.com/news/news-of-the-weird/article_5c740b3e-2ee0-11e4-b2f5-0019bb2963f4.html
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9/4/2014
News of the Weird - Anchorage Press: Anchorage Press News
—I (Heart) Strangers: Two age-30ish men knocked on the door of a Sebastian, Texas, woman
at 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 3, asking for water and if they could please come inside to charge
their cellphone—and the woman apparently cheerfully invited them in, later offering them
use of her backyard shed to grab some sleep. She did not learn until a short time later,
when a law enforcement manhunt widened into her neighborhood, that they were wanted for
murdering a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Officers arrested the pair inside the shed.
—A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington announced recently that
they had developed a prototype of a wind turbine that might deliver electricity in tiny
bursts to devices like smartphones— it is about half the size of a grain of rice. (Tiny
solar backpacks already exist.)
**
**
**
The New Normal
(1) The ubiquitous "sexting" phenomenon continues to flourish. A Washington state agency
suspended the license of anesthesiologist Arthur Zilberstein in June after finding that
he had exchanged sexually explicit text messages—during surgeries. (2) One of the
emerging occupational skills for Emergency Medical Technicians, according to first
responders interviewed in a June Wall Street Journal feature, is merely holding up
blankets at accident scenes—to block onlookers from their apparently uncontrollable urge
to take gruesome photos to send to their friends.
**
**
**
Anger Management Needed
(1) A 40-year-old man's throat was fatally slashed in August in Laurel, Montana, in a
fight with an acquaintance over which military service—Army or Marines—is better. (News
reports failed to identify the "winning" branch.) (2) A 37-year-old man survived, but
with multiple bullet wounds, in New York City in August after a 1 a.m. dispute during
the making of a rap music video. (The dispute was over who, exactly, would be the
"star.") (3) Roger Harris, 63, and Bryan Bandes, 42, brawled in August on the 7th tee at
the Springdale Golf Course near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, while arguing the rule for
playing a ball in a rain puddle. Harris apparently 3-wooded Bandes in the head; Bandes
landed punches causing a swollen jaw, a fat lip and a scratched eye.
**
**
**
Wait—What?
In Multnomah County, Oregon, in July, a Romanian princess pleaded guilty to
cockfighting. Irina Walker, 61, was born in Switzerland where her father, King Michael
I, lived after abdicating the throne. She came to Oregon in 1983, where, in a second
marriage in 2007, she fell in with former deputy sheriff John Walker, who had moved on
to the gambling and cockfighting business, and, according to a USA Today report, she was
assisting him.
**
**
**
Solutions to Non-Problems
(1) Chung-Ang University in South Korea announced in April that its traditional-sport
Department of Sport Science would begin accepting—as legitimate "student athletes"—video
gamers. (2) Also in April, Berlin's Lutheran Georgen Parochial cemetery inaugurated a
4,300-square-foot area of its grounds as reserved exclusively for lesbians—for women
who, said a spokesman, "want to be buried among other lesbians."
**
**
**
New World Order
—Japan is noted (as News of the Weird has reported in 1997 and 2008) for several
traditional fertility festivals and theme parks at which explicit, oversized male
genitalia are revered by joyous visitors, including children. In July, on the other
hand, police quickly arrested the artist Megumi Igarashi after she scanned her vulva and
then distributed the data online to allow others to create 3-D printed reproductions.
That effort was the most conspicuous of several attempts she has made as an
artist/designer to call attention, she said, to the underrepresentation of female
genitals in Japanese society compared to males'.
—Who Knew? Researchers from England's University of Lincoln revealed in July that redfooted tortoises are not only "inquisitive" but make decisions in their brain's "medial
cortex" region, associated with "complex cognitive behavior" (because they have no
"hippocampus," which is a typical decision-making area). The tortoises thus pecked-out
(and learned) touch-screen decisions (for rewards of strawberries), and in fact, said
researcher Anna Wilkinson, learned as quickly as rats and pigeons and faster, actually,
than dogs.
**
**
**
Movies Come to Life
1) In July, officials at the Djanogly City Academy in Nottingham, England, broke up an
attempt by five students (aged 11 to 14) attending a daytime-locked-down school to
escape by tunneling under a security fence. They had discovered the boys' metal cutlery
hidden at the scene. (A World War II tunneling escape from a Nazi prison was partially
successful and became the story for the 1963 movie The Great Escape starring Steve
McQueen.) (2) In a deadly ending reminiscent of scenes in several crime movies, a 22year-old man fleeing police in Brooklyn, New York, in June crashed his car at a high
speed into the back of a flatbed truck and was decapitated as the body of the car (but
not the part above the dashboard) continued on under the truck.
**
**
**
Least Competent Criminals
Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) A 40-year-old man (not named by the Seattle PostIntelligencer) was arrested in that city on July 31 after a several-hour, epically
inept, crime spree. Attempting to rob a restaurant, he was turned down by employees and
customers, then turned down by two potential carjack victims (the first of whom added
insult by pulling out her cellphone camera and shooting video), before giving up just as
police arrived. (His only take was the $15 he had swiped from the restaurant's tip jar.)
(2) Joshua Pawlak, 27, entered a total of four businesses in Woodbridge, New Jersey, on
July 27 and similarly met resistance and/or indifference to his money demands—and came
away from the four with only $2, also from a tip jar.
**
**
**
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Ironies: (1) An airborne banner being towed by an airplane came loose in Fremont,
California, in July and floated down, landing on a house, frightening the residents. The
sign advertised GEICO insurance. (2) A 10-foot-tall pine tree in Los Angeles's Griffith
Park, dedicated in 2004 with a plaque to the late musician George Harrison, was recently
destroyed by an infestation, and another will be planted in its place, according to a
city councilman. The infestation was by beetles.
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Posted in New s, Breaking new s on Thursday, August 28, 2014 10:23 am.
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