Lead story: “Freegans” are non-homeless Dumpster divers with a political or at least philosophical commitment not to waste perfectly usable discarded goods, including food, according to reports in Newsday (September) and the Houston Press (November). Most are driven by a belief that too many Americans have a fetishized view of newness, pointing out that restaurants discard much unspoiled food simply because they need to sell even fresher food. (Freegans don’t eat table scraps.) Still, many restaurants elaborately protect their garbage from “Dumpstering” foragers, with locks and razor wire or by coating it with bleach. (Not usually counted as freegans are less-philosophical people who obsessively explore trash piles to carry away anything potentially useful.)
Chess glandmaster: Controversial former chess champion Bobby Fischer, who fled to Japan to avoid U.S. visa-violation charges, and who is smarting from a recent Time magazine description of him as something less than a babe magnet, defended his virility to a Mainichi Daily News reporter in October by pointing out that he wears “size 14 wide shoes. Just keep that in mind when [they] say I’m not a dreamboat.” After recounting an episode at a hot spring nude bath in Japan in which two fellow customers seemed in awe of his “size,” Fischer then accused Americans of having persuaded Japanese authorities to lock him up in a facility close to a nuclear plant so that the U.S. government could make him impotent.
Compelling explanations: According to a transcript obtained by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in September, convicted rapist John Horace, 60, was turned down by the New York Parole Board after offering a new excuse for his crime (which was committed against a nursing home resident in a near coma). Horace, then an aide at the home, said he had read in a medical book somewhere that the sensation of pregnancy would snap a woman out of a coma and that he was thus only trying to help.
In a September issue of the London Review of Books, trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek made the point that the essential ideological differences in German, French and British-American societies, as noted by G.W.F. Hegel and others, can be represented by their countries’ respective toilet designs. The German toilet’s evacuation hole is in the front, facilitating “inspection and analysis,” but the French design places the hole in the rear, so that waste disappears quickly. The British-American toilet allows floatation, which of course signals that society’s “utilitarian pragmatism.” Zizek described his theory as an “excremental correlative-counterpoint” to a framework identified with French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss.
Creme de la weird: In a June lawsuit in Albany, N.Y., Mark Hogarth, 45, asked a court to protect his constitutional right to privacy by exempting him from child-pornography laws so that he can reclaim 269 lewd photos of himself, taken when he was a kid, but which his now-deceased father had hidden away in another country. In his petition, he said that his father approved of, but did not participate in, the photo sessions (some of which featured other children) and that Hogarth would like to keep the pictures as, basically, mementos of his childhood.
Least competent criminals: Jason Rodd, clocked at 90 mph on Interstate 91 near St. Johnsbury, Vt., in November, tried to evade police by the clever ploy of pulling off the highway, dousing his headlights, and turning into a farmer’s field for cover. Unable to see very well without lights, however, he promptly drove into a manure pit, immobilizing his car, and was tracked down a few minutes later.
Recurring themes: More than one month ago, News of the Weird reported on two New Hampshire mothers who had been arrested for viciously assaulting their own children over rather petty provocations. Later, in November, came Nicole Mancini, 29, who was arrested in Rochester, N.H., after she, wearing pajamas, walked into the St. Mary’s Church with her three children and was overheard mumbling about the need to “sacrifice” the kids on the “altar” “before 3 o’clock.” After charging her with three counts of child endangerment, a police lieutenant said, “Eighteen years I’ve been doing this, and I’ve never come across anything like it.”
Readers’ choice: On Thanksgiving Day in Worcester, Mass., Frank Palacios, 24, apparently got tired of being criticized for picking at the turkey with his fingers, and stabbed his cousin and his uncle, sending both to the hospital.
Signs: Among the latest “miracles”: a fiberglass statue of Jesus, which washed up on a sandbar on the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass, Texas, and which has now drawn thousands of worshipers (September); an inflated balloon with a rubber smudge in the image of the Virgin Mary, decorating the car lot of Payne Weslaco Motors, Weslaco, Texas (giving at least one worker there “chills”) (August); and the spontaneous falling over of the statue of the Virgin Mary at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, which was taken to be a holy signal that the church, which had been scheduled for closing by the Boston Archdiocese, should remain open (October).(c)
2004 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in Dec 22-28, 2004.
