Why stamps cost so much:
A New York Daily News investigation revealed in March that the Postal Service has spent at least $3.6 million of stamp buyers’ money in recent years sending its inspector general staff through a series of executive conferences that featured exercises in wrapping each other in toilet paper and aluminum foil, building sand castles in freezing weather at the beach, and freely making animal noises, all because the conference sponsors convinced Inspector General Karla Corcoran that those exercises would improve job performance and make the staff work together better. Other therapeutic tasks included dressing in cat costumes and asking make-believe wizards for advice.
Outmaneuvered:
A 36-year-old man from Arcadia, Fla., checked himself into a counseling clinic in March after being identified as the one who had been pretending in public to be choking on food and persuading women to grasp him in the Heimlich maneuver, after which he would hug them lavishly and attempt clumsily to develop a relationship. A sheriff’s spokesman in Charlotte County, site of the most recent reports, said the man probably had done nothing illegal. (Novelist Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, recently published Choke, whose storyline roughly matches the man’s actions, but apparently some Florida incidents predated the book’s publication.)
Latest protests:
Belgian actor Benjamin Verdonck lived nearly naked in a cage with a pig in Ghent for three days in November hoping the pig would “teach” him why there is such strife in the world (results not reported). And James Albert Ernest Togo, 20, of Brisbane, arrested for mooning a policeman, claimed in December that Australia’s Constitution gave him the right to stick out his bare buttocks in political protest, which he said was part of his Aboriginal tradition. And in October, in the midst of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals anti-milk demonstration at an Aberdeen, Scotland, high school, about 100 milk-loving students spent 10 minutes angrily drenching PETA’s cow-costumed spokesman with milk.
Loaded Logans:
In March, after someone reported a brick thrown through his window, authorities went to the neighboring home of Phillip and Jerry Logan in Wyandotte, Okla., to question them. The Logans put out the word for other family members to come by and help them, and there soon broke out a series of fights that eventually involved 30 law enforcement officers from eight agencies. Six Logans (including the 61-year-old patriarch and the 55-year-old mother) were taken into custody. According to the Ottawa County sheriff, the immediate members of the Logan family have been charged with 250 crimes in the last five years.
Recent street prices of kids:
1) $2,000 (Virginia C. Ramsey pleaded guilty in January in Seattle of selling hers, using the money to buy two Sony PlayStations and pay a traffic ticket, among other things). 2) $1,150 each for twins, plus a used car and other considerations (Kelly Lutz gave up the kids for adoption to a subsequently suspended Medina, Ohio, lawyer, revealed in December court papers). 3) $500 (Kenneth Parnell, who served time for kidnapping, admitted in a January newspaper interview from his Dublin, Calif., cell that he had recently tried to buy a young boy after he got out). (Despite the interview, Parnell pleaded not guilty.)
A nation at war:
Top Pentagon and CIA officials met with the author of The Bible Code, who said Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts can be detected by connecting letters from ancient Hebrew (February). And eight hours before the U.S.’s “Orange” alert Feb. 7, four heavily armed Cuban military men wandered through downtown Key West, Fla., unknown to anyone in Washington. (Turned out they had arrived by boat to defect and were looking for someone to surrender to.) And Jake Greenwald announced he would offer “terror tours” in Israel for $5,000 each to visitors wanting helicopter and simulated-games tours of West Bank bomb and battle sites (but has suspended the venture because of the war in Iraq) (March).
Also, in the last month … :
A 43-year-old woman, wanting some fruit, was arrested at around 5 a.m., angrily throwing bricks through the front window of a grocery store just because it wasn’t open yet (Hot Springs, Ark.). Hillside Cemetery received a bill in the mail from the phone company addressed to one of its “residents” (buried, 1997) for a call he supposedly made early this year (Auburn, Mass.). A first-grader became the latest kid suspended from school for having a nonweapon “weapon” (a plastic school cafeteria knife), but his parents threatened criminal charges against the school (for arming 6-year-olds with weapons) if the suspension stood.
2003 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2003.
