yet more weirdo stuff...


>
>LEAD STORIES
>
>Rapidly gaining viewers in the competitive Moscow TV market is a program
>called "The Naked Truth," on an obscure channel, which features straight
>news
>delivered by a 26-year-old female anchor, but who appears from time to time
>topless, or while undressing, or while being fondled on-camera. According
>to
>an October New York Times report, however, the station's policy is that any
>news of President Putin or other leading officials must be delivered while
>fully clothed.
>
>A Quebec-based sect, the Raelians, announced in September that it would
>start
>work immediately, in an unidentified Third World country's laboratory,
>toward
>cloning a human being, specifically the American girl who died recently at
>the
>age of 10 months and whose parents paid the Raelians $500,000 to duplicate
>her. According to a Princeton University researcher, the technology exists
>right now to carry out the work within a year. Founder "Rael" (the former
>Claude Vorilhon) believes that all humans are clones of extraterrestrials
>and
>says Raelians could eventually offer a cloning service for about $200,000.
>
>
>Electric Chair Mania!
>
>"Rides" called "The Original Shocker" at a Rockville, Md., arcade and "The
>Electric Chair Game" at various parks in Italy are simulated fatal
>experiences
>in a death-row electric chair, from the strapping-in to the controlled dose
>of
>electricity (voluntarily administered, enough to cause heavy vibrations) to
>the sound of sizzling juice to the cloud of smoke, and capped by a flat
>line
>on a heartbeat monitor. "Winning" involves staying in the chair until the
>machine declares you dead; losers release the electrodes early. And among
>America's best-selling toys last summer was Death-Row Marv (McFarlane Toys,
>$24.99), in which a man strapped into an electric chair trash-talks his
>"executioner," almost begging to be lit up with more jolts of electricity.
>
>
>Unclear on the Concept
>
>State officials near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, issued $100 citations in August
>to
>two drivers whose U.S. Government water trucks were on their way to fight
>the
>Montana fires. The officials discovered that the trucks exceeded the
>highway
>weight limit of 17 tons (by 1 and 2 tons, respectively). According to the
>Helena Independent Record newspaper, the trucks were permitted to head out
>to
>the front lines only after they had dumped enough water to satisfy the
>inspectors.
>
>In a video outtake mistakenly telecast on a Cape Cod (Massachusetts)
>public-access cable channel on July 31, the organizer of a cat-adoption
>service was shown being yelled at by her cameraman-husband (who was
>off-camera) to get the adoptable cat she was offering to stop squirming
>during
>the taping. One viewer told the Cape Cod Times, "The (cameraman) must have
>used the 'F' word 50 times, along with verbal threats to the kitten (to
>strangle it)."
>
>
>Schemes
>
>In July, a federal grand jury in Charlotte, N.C., indicted 18 people in an
>interstate cigarette-smuggling ring (profitable because of the wide
>disparity
>in state taxes), accepting the government's evidence that at least part of
>the
>motivation for the scheme was to raise money for the Lebanese terrorist
>organization Hezbollah.
>
>Cristal Campbell, 29, was re-arrested on July 12 in Boston after pulling a
>prank to escape and spending five days on the lam. At a court hearing on
>July
>7, she urinated on the floor but claimed that she was pregnant and that her
>"water had broken" and thus was rushed to a hospital by concerned court
>personnel (most of whom were males who accepted her claim uncritically).
>Campbell is wanted on more than 50 con-artist warrants, and indeed, after
>court personnel took her to the hospital on July 7, she escaped twice more
>before her July 12 capture.
>
>
>Cliches Come to Life
>
>Yell What in a Crowded Theater?: In June, Sasha Aleksandr McClain Coe, 22,
>was
>charged with reckless endangerment in Sevierville, Tenn., after setting off
>a
>string of firecrackers in a theater during the movie "The Patriot." The 78
>panicked patrons struggled angrily to get out the doors but once outside,
>they
>surrounded Coe and held him for the police.
>
>Man Bites Dog: Richard Nelson, 40, fleeing on foot after being stopped in a
>stolen car, found his arm in the grip of Bear, a Canton, Ohio, police dog,
>and
>decided to retaliate by biting the dog on the nose to get it to loosen its
>grip. Instead, Nelson's bite caused Bear to tighten its jaw, so hard in
>fact
>that one of Bear's teeth broke off in Nelson's arm and had to be surgically
>removed.
>
>
>In Their Own Words
>
>John Roberts (executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the
>American
>Civil Liberties Union, commenting in the Chicago Sun-Times on the ACLU's
>support for the speech rights of the North American Man-Boy Love
>Association,
>which is being sued by a Massachusetts couple as having inspired a
>pedophile
>to rape their son): "My wife's an early-childhood educator. (Because of the
>ACLU's position) I was expecting to find my clothes out on the lawn when I
>got
>home."
>
>
>Update
>
>Innocent Middle-Named Waynes? In July, CBS News and three newspapers
>jointly
>offered to underwrite DNA testing of an already-executed man to determine
>whether, for the first known instance in U.S. history, the judicial system
>had
>put an innocent man to death. The subject of the test would be the Perry,
>Ga.,
>man convicted on conflicting evidence of a 1981 rape-murder and executed in
>1996, and who made News of the Weird because of his name: Ellis Wayne
>Felker.
>Also, in August, Texas Gov. George W. Bush issued a pardon to convicted
>rapist
>Roy Wayne Criner (the victim was also murdered, but Criner was charged only
>with the rape) because his DNA did not match that found on the victim, as
>reported in News of the Weird in July 2000.
>
>
>Least Competent Criminals
>
>Traffic patrol officers often find that a suspected drunk driver will try
>to
>switch seats with a passenger after a stop, before the officer can reach
>the
>car. However, that strategy succeeds only if the passenger is more sober
>than
>the driver. In July, police in Lake City, Tenn., witnessed a
>driver-passenger
>switch, but it did not matter because both failed sobriety tests (along
>with
>the two people in the back seat). And in August, Hackensack, N.J., police
>stopped a weaving van to discover an open bottle of Scotch, an impaired
>20-year-old man in the driver's seat, and an impaired 22-year-old man
>sitting
>in his lap; apparently, the two men got stuck trying to execute the seat
>switch.
>
>
>Also, in the Last Month ...
>
>A female placekicker who was cut from the Duke University football team won
>$2
>million when a jury attributed her release primarily to her gender, despite
>evidence that several competitors were better kickers. Two prison guards
>were
>indicted for smuggling out sperm belonging to organized-crime inmates, who
>recently became fathers despite their long incarcerations (White Deer,
>Pa.).
>The Tampa Bay Devil Rays apologized to members of a local high school band,
>who were to play the national anthem on the last day of the season, for
>requiring them to buy tickets to get into the ballpark. A 54-year-old
>ex-Marine stabbed his new son-in-law (Air Force) during a heated discussion
>of
>which military service is best (Linwood Township, Minn.).

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