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i before e except in weird

>From: kds@blabla.intel.com (Ken Shoemaker)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 90 11:44:12 PDT

November 11, 1990

THE JUDGES JUST COULDN'T STRING ALONG

Blumita Singer of Brazil was invited, as one of 52 finalists, to perform at
the International Violin Competition in Indianapolis in September as the
result of an audition tape she submitted.  However, when she started to
perform, she played so poorly it became apparent that she could not have
been the person on the audition tape, and some of the judges walked out
while others began giggling.  She did not offer an explanation.

DOGGEDLY DEVOTED

Fran Trutt, 33, pleaded no contest in April to charges that she attempted to
kill the president of a supply firm that uses anesthetized dogs to help
train surgeons on new procedures.  She expressed hope that her own pet dog
would be allowed to visit her in prison.

Responding to the New York law banning dwarf-tossing contests, promoter
Baird Jones complained that "we're being lumped with bar sports.  This is
not someone promoting Jell-O wrestling.  It's performance art designed to
satarize the values of mainstream America."

In May, 200 people participated in the Third Annual Hill Country Machine Gun
Shoot near Helotes, Texas, firing rounds from more than 100 automatic
weapons, shredding washing machines, refrigerators and other targets.  Said
one: "Can you think of a better way to spend a holiday weekend?"

Birmingham, Ala, talk show host Tim Lennox was suspended in July after
announcing on the air that, for a segment on crime, he wanted to hear only
from white callers.

TALK ABOUT TALL TAILS

Steven Walter Henderson, 21, St. Charles County, Mo., was involved in an
auto accident in July when his car slammed into the back of a police car.
He said he lost control of his car as he was applying Vaseline to the tail
of his pet bulldog, which had just had tail-trim surgery.

Robert C. Jackson, 21, was arrested in Silver Spring, Md., in July for
carrying a handgun, and during a bodysearch, police found in Jackson's
rectum a brown paper bag with 78 plastic packets of rock cocaine and a razor
blade.  A police sergeant told reporters, "That's a pretty large amount (to
be inside a rectum)."

Workers at a Ford plant in Cuautitlan, Mexico, staged a "nude-in" in July to
protest layoffs.

When police arrested Thomas "Tommy Karate" Pitera in June as a suspected
Mafia hitman in New York City, they found a well-stocked library in his
home, including such books as "The Hitman's Handbook." Kill or Be Killed"
and "Torture, Interrogation and Execution."

Denver police announced in June they could not arrest the man who
occasionally stood in the doorway of his apartment, wearing only a diaper
and calling to neighbors, "Hi, I'm wearing a diaper," because he was on his
own property at the time.

Animal trainer Arian Seidon, 60, who kidnapped two elephants five years
before in order to protect them from abuse by their owners, was arrested in
April.  Seidon supposedly had to procure 600 pounds of food per day during
that time and dispose of 500 pounds of droppings.

Darlene Brown's house in Lusby, Md., was destroyed by fire in May after a
neighbor tried to help her get rid of a non-poisonous black snake.  The
neighbor ignited the snake outside a bedroom window, 10 feet from a pilot
light of the furnace.  Thirty-five firefighters were called, and damage was
reported at $50,000, but the snake was killed.

The Arlington County, Va., School Board announced last spring that it was
cutting back some sex education classes, including the popular game "Pin the
Organ on the Body."

November 18, 1990

YOU'LL LAUGH, YOU'LL CRY, YOU'LL THROW UP

At the Minnesota State Fair in August, passengers on the "Enterprise" (a
flat board that starts parallel to the ground and then spins for four
minutes until it is perpendicular to the ground) became violently nauseated
when operators couldn't bring the ride down from the perpendicular position
for 15 minutes.

A WORLD OF TROUBLE

Dolphin-protection activists Richard O'Barry and Russ Rector claimed in
August that they had been run over repeatedly by Navy boats near the Dry
Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico as they maneuvered a small boat around a Navy
site to try to prevent underwater bomb testing.

Citing decades of environmental neglect, civil defense officials in Poland
proposed in July to distribute 100,000 gas masks to citizens in the southern
region of Katowice, a population-dense area that contains more than
one-fifth of the country's worst pollution sites.

A Coast Guard report issued in June revealed that personnel on duty at the
Exxon pipeline that ruptured in January near Linden, N.J., spilling 567,000
gallons of heating oil, manually overrode the automatic warning system 10
times over a six-hour period before checking to see if oil was actually
spilling.  Workers merely pushed the "reset" button because they assumed the
10 signals were false alarms.

Doctors in an April medical journal article reported that of more than 1,000
people who had undergone surgery for skin cancer from 1983 to 1987, 24
percent were back to sun-tanning and 38 percent still did not use sunscreen.
Most of the recidivists were females whose attitude, said a doctor, "was
that skin cancer was not enough of a problem to give up a tan."

The Yellow Ribbon Coalition, an Oregon timber industry organization,
complained to the U.S. Forest Service in August that an environmental
group's scheduled retreat in the Cascade Mountains should be canceled
because it posed a "fire hazard" and because the group's annual owl-hooting
contest would "constitute harassment of area owls."

LEGAL EAGLES

Johnnie Lee Jones, 27, in prison since 1985 - when he stole a truck in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla. (even though he'd never learned to drive), and smashed it
into several cars, killing a young mother - is on the verge of a large
financial settlement from Broward County Prison, which wants to save the
expense of a lawsuit.  In his getaway from the collisions, Jones ran in
front of a car and had one leg chopped off; he later filed a lawsuit
charging that the prison had caused him "pain and suffering" because of its
lack of facilities to help his recuperation. (The prison offered evidence
that Jones had urinated on a fellow prisoner and beat another with his
artificial leg.)

Anna Vincenza, 26, charged with helping her boyfriend murder her husband
last November in Detroit with a car bomb, demanded that the funeral home
that handled her husband's body give her custody of the ashes.

Boxer Jerry Quarry's latest comeback attempt ended in June when he was
denied a license to fight in Wisconsin because of fear for his safety.  His
handlers then said Quarry couldn't have fought anyway because he had banged
his eye on a kitchen cabinet, but in fact he had been beaten up in Walworth
County, Wis., by one of his own handlers, John Ellis, a former boxer of
little note.

A New Jersey judge rejected Manuel Antonio Mauricio's defense to a charge of
murder with a sawed-off rifle in September.  Mauricio had claimed a
"machismo" defense - that his Dominican Republic upbringing had made him
easily offended by insults to his manhood.

In June, U.S., Sen. Strom Thurmond requested a $25 refund from Lexington,
S.C., for a water deposit he paid in 1938.  (He was eligible for the refund
because he had recently sold the property.)  Asked the mayor, "How in the
hell can anyone save a receipt for 52 years?"