Recent Alarming Headlines: 1) “Man Says Tight Jeans Caused Aggravated Assault Charge” (Sean Duvall, arrested for pulling a gun on police in Belle Vernon, Pa., said he was holding it only because it was impossible to stuff it in his pants; USA Today, December). 2) “Man Arrested for Dumping Dirt in a Forest” (federal law prohibits unloading anything on federal land, even soil being returned to the Earth for ecology’s sake; Associated Press dispatch from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, November).
Alcohol Blues: Among recent troubling news: After Rafer Wilson crashed into a parked car in Sydney, Australia, his blood-alcohol content (according to evidence at his trial in December) was tested at an almost death-defying .462, nine times the legal presumption of impairment. (Three weeks later, in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, doctors said a 67-year-old man had produced a blood-alcohol reading of .914, which supposedly stood up through four re-tests, and have stuck with the story despite worldwide alarm.) And Gary W. Rodgers was arrested in November in Lexington, Ky., and according to the county’s offender database, it was his 96th arrest for public drunkenness in 2004.
Great Art!: A survey of 500 art experts, conducted in November by the sponsor of Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize, named as the most influential work of modern art Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain,” which is merely a white porcelain urinal. In November at the Tate Britain gallery, sculptor Antony Gormley presented “Bed,” a pile of 8,000 slices of bread arranged to resemble a large mattress but from which Gormley had first eaten an amount out of it that represented the volume of his body. Apparently Gormley did not devour the bread so much as chew it and then remove it and form different-shaped pieces, which he then dried out, chemically preserved, and displayed. The Tate Britain was so thrilled with the installation that it became the centerpiece in a room devoted to Gormley’s lifetime body of work.
Government in Action: After five years of the New Mexico government always accepting Viola Trevino’s child support claims against Steve Barreras (over the vasectomied Barreras’ objections), a court in Albuquerque finally ruled in December that the child never existed. The judge concluded that Trevino had lied numerous times and had forged DNA evidence, birth certificates, and other documents and that Barreras had been unjustly forced to pay $20,000 in support, even though Trevino had never publicly produced the child. In December, having run out of excuses, Trevino borrowed a little girl from a stranger on the street and took her into the courtroom to “be” her and Barreras’ daughter (but the stranger followed Trevino inside and exposed the ruse). Gov. Bill Richardson ordered an investigation as to how so many state officials had been hoaxed for so long.
Least Competent Criminals: In Vancouver, Wash., in January, Cuitlahvac Renteria-Martinez, 26, was arrested for jumping into an idling 18-wheeler and taking off. The rig, however, had a global positioning system that made it easy to track Renteria-Martinez, and he was quickly arrested. He later admitted to police that he had taken a swig out of what he thought was the driver’s coffee cup but learned too late that it was actually the driver’s tobacco spit cup.
Recurring Themes: News of the Weird recently mentioned the Sinulator, a vibrating device operated over the Internet that permits thrusting movements (typically, by a male) at one computer to be mimicked by an insertable wand (typically, for use of a female) at another computer. For less excitable people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently developed the Hug, which allows one user to squeeze a velour-covered, human-shaped pillow connected to a wireless phone and have that squeeze received on his or her own human-shaped pillow, as if delivered by the grandparent in person. The pillow will also speak in the sender’s voice and warm itself up appropriately.
Readers’ Choice: Management consultant William Fried, who is a popular motivational speaker in public schools in the San Francisco area, probably wore out his welcome in January at the Q&A session following his “Secret of a Happy Life” presentation at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto, Calif. Asked why he had included “exotic dancing” on his list of attractive careers for girls, Fried said the pay was great: $250,000 a year or more, depending on a woman’s chest size. “For every two inches up there,” he told the class, “you should get another $50,000 on your salary.”
© 2005 chuck shepherd
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2005.
