[Prev][Next][Index]

[Rich Kulawiec: GSP Digest #279]

------- Forwarded Message

From: kds@blabla.intel.com (Ken Shoemaker)
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 90 08:30:59 PDT
Subject: how wierd is my garden?

September 16, 1990

AND HOLD THE ANCHOVIES ON ALL 312

Inmates at a prison in New South Wales, Australia, took advantage of a
wardens' strike to break into an office and telephone an order for 18 tons
of concrete to be delivered as a prank.  While they were at it, they called
out for 312 pizzas.  (The concrete was sent back, but the prison had to pay
for the pizzas.)

THE CONTINUING CRISIS

In India, Moloy Kundu, 32, and his wife, Tapati, 27, reported in May that
each had sold a kidney to enable them to purchase a desktop publishing
machine so they could resume issuing the weekly newspaper Bela, for which no
other financing could be found.

A Camden County, N.J., grand jury declined in May to indict a 102-year-old
woman for having shot her granddaughter last December in a dispute over a
radio.  In New York City, Oliver Barre, 95, was indicted in July in the
death of an 88-year-old neighbor.  He had accused the woman of poisoning
people in the building and of putting a voodoo hex on this roommate. (Barre
died three weeks later.)

An annual festival at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis
Obispo was called off in April after revelers got out of hand.  At one
point, police officers (who eventually arrested 100) quelled the partyers by
shouting over bullhorns, "Assault on police officers will not look good on
your resumes!"

The New York Post reported in April that Powerules, a gang in the Bronx, has
an initiation rite that requires a prospective member to shoot someone at
random in the leg as proof of fitness to be a member.

NON-STOP GRIDLOCK

Greg Weiler resigned in April after five years on a citizens advisory
committee to the Orange County Transportation Commission studying traffic
problems, saying he was constantly unable to get to meetings on time because
of freeway gridlock.

A ninth-grade boy was in intensive care in Wauwatosa, Wis., in May after a
track meet.  He had just cleared the bar while pole-vaulting when a gust of
wind blew him past the landing pit onto the concrete.

A federal judge in Portland, Maine, handling the challenges to the takeover
by Georgia Pacific Corp. of Great Northern Nekoosa Corp., in January,
ordered that legal papers be copied at a local store rather than, as custom,
in the courthouse.  The judge believed the quantity of legal papers
generated by the nation's two largest paper companies would unduly tie up
the courthouse copying machines.

Carl Williams, 22, was indicted in Cleveland in December for having made 32
phone calls to 911 because he was bored and needed conversation.  His mother
had had their telephone service fixed so Carl could no longer dial 900
numbers for conversation because he had been running up huge bills.

Ralph Armstrong, a retired firefighter in Santa Rosa, complaining a
construction company had reneged on its promise to build a noise shield
between its site and his home, erected his own shield in January - a solid
wall made of horse manure.

September 23, 1990

SWIMMERS, KEEP YOUR EYES CLOSED

A Palm Beach County, Fla., commissioner in July proposed getting bids from
reef construction firms to slip the bodies of dead indigents into reefs to
reduce the county's burial expenses.  A federal fish and game office in
Southern California is considering a proposal to junk soon-to-be obsolete
(five-gallons-per-flush) toilets, which would badly clutter available
landfills, by creating toilet bowl reefs offshore.  (An illegal toilet reef
in Santa Monica Bay has become a haven for huge oyster beds.)

WELL PUT

Louisiana state Rep. Carl Gunter, opposing an exception to an anti-abortion
bill for victims of incest: "Inbreeding is how we get championship horses."

Secretary of State James Baker, on the July accord between Helmut Kohl and
Mikhail Gorbachev that would allow a united Germany to choose whether or not
to join NATO: "This is a delightful surprise to the extent that it is a
surprise, and it is only a surprise to the extent that we anticipated."

Wendy Kemp, an eighth-grader who won a regional spelling bee in Texas in
April, commenting on her motivation: "After I lost last year, I went outside
and said, 'I'm going to kick some butt next time.'"

NASA spokesman Bob McMillan, commenting on the photographic success of the
Galileo spacecraft in February: "No problems.  Everything has gone
tickety-boo."

The sister of the Japanese soldier who resurfaced last year in Malaysia,
where he had been hiding since World War II: "I did not hear from him for
nearly 50 years, so of course I was worried."

Hernando, Fla., Circuit Judge Richard Tombrink, barring reporters and the
public from a January meeting with three county administrators on recent jail
escapes: "If you want a free and open discussion, you can't allow the public
or the press in."

University of California, Davis graduate student Anne Perkins, on her study
of the sexuality of sheep: "It is very difficult to look at the possibility
of lesbian sheep because if you are a female sheep, what you do to solicit
sex is stand still.  Maybe there is a female sheep out there really wanting
another female, but there's just no way for us to know it."

The wife of Argentina's president Carlos Menem, who was recently barred by
her husband from the presidential palace as part of their ongoing domestic
troubles, responded to a previous divorce filing in which Menem claimed she
was not of a suitable cultural level for him.  She argued that his claim
proves his "moral mediocrity" since he has lived with her for many years.

SCIENCE FAIR

A Wisconsin man who had been in a vegetative state for eight years as a
result of a traffic accident spontaneously snapped out of it in March after
being given Valium in a routine dental procedure in Madison.  After walking
and talking for five minutes, he fell back into the state but was revived
with yet another dose of Valium.

Doctors in Beijing report they observed the body of a 4-year-old boy
spontaneously ignite four times in a two-hour period in April, burning his
armpit, right hand and private parts.  The body had an unusually large
electrical current running through it.

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine believe they have
disproved the idea that limbless animals use less energy than do legged
animals.  Biologist Bruce Jayne and crew monitored snakes' movements
slithering on treadmills while wearing tiny oxygen masks.

------- End of Forwarded Message