News of the Weird, October 23, 2011
Chuck Shepherd
by Chuck Shepherd
Copyright 2011 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
(Naughty-Language Alert: 9th item)
Lead Story
* London Fashion Week usually brings forth a shock or two from
cutting-edge designers, but a September creation by Rachel Freire
might have raised the bar: a floor-length dress made from 3,000
cow nipples (designed to resemble roses). Initial disgust for the
garment centered on implied animal abuse, but Freire deflected that
issue by pointing out that the nipples had been discarded by a
tannery and that her use amounted to "recycling." The 32-year-old
Freire, who has worked with mainstream entertainers such as
Christina Aguilera, was kept so busy with the animal-abuse angle
that she was largely spared having to explain another issue--why
anyone would want to wear a dress made with cow nipples.
[Ecouterre.com. 26-2011]
The Entrepreneurial Spirit!
* Death is big business in Japan, with 1.2 million people a year
passing away and overtaxing the country's cemeteries and
crematoriums. With the average wait for disposal at least several
days, and space running short in funeral homes, "corpse hotels" have
opened in many cities, with climate-controlled "guest rooms" renting
for the equivalent of about $155 a night, with viewing rooms where
relatives can visit the bodies daily until cremation is available.
[National Post (Toronto)-Reuters, 9-13-2011]
* The world's real economy may be flagging, but not necessarily the
make-believe economy of online multi-player games, according to
reporting by the Wall Street Journal (July) and the website
Singularity Hub (August). For example, entrepreneur Ailin Graef's
Anshe Chung Studios is worth "millions" of real U.S. dollars, earned
mostly by managing rentals of make-believe real estate and
brokering make-believe money transactions in the game Second Life.
Graef also commands top (real) dollar for her designs of make-
believe fashions for players' game characters ("avatars"). Two other
companies are suing each other in federal court in San Francisco
over the copyright to their lucrative business models of creating
make-believe animals (horses, rabbits) that sell very well to players
who take them on as game pets for their characters or breed them to
make other make-believe animals. [Singularity Hub, 8-23-2011]
[Wall Street Journal, 7-30-2011]
* No sooner had Anthony Sowell been convicted in August of
murdering 11 woman in Cleveland and burying their remains around
his property than entrepreneur Eric Gein of Florida had hired
someone to fill sandwich bags of soil from Sowell's property so that
he could sell the souvenir dirt for $25 a gram on the Internet. (Gein
follows well-publicized salesmen who have famously collected the
pubic hair of New York prostitute-killer Arthur Shawcross, the
crawlspace dirt from the house of John Wayne Gacy, and the "fried
hair" of Ted Bundy--that fell on the floor as he was executed.) [AOL
News-AP, 8-23-2011] [Philly.com, 8-13-2011]
Weird Science
* In July, a surgeon from Britain's Oxford Radcliffe Hospital
announced a cure for a 57-year-old man with a rare condition that
made, in his mind, audible and ever-louder sounds whenever his
eyeballs moved. "Superior canal dehiscence syndrome" elevates the
interior sounds of the body (such as heartbeat and the "friction" of
muscles moving against muscles) to disturbing levels. [BBC News,
7-27-2011]
* Artificial meat (grown in a test tube from animal stem cells) has
been theoretically planned for about 10 years, but a European
Science Foundation audience in September heard predictions that
lab-grown sausage might be available as soon as next year. The meat
is produced in sheets ("shmeat") and would be prohibitively
expensive at first, in that the largest specimen produced so far
measures only about one inch long and a third of an inch wide. The
biggest drawback facing artificial muscle tissue: that even lab-grown
muscles require exercise to prevent atrophy. [Mother Jones, 9-7-
2011]
* Recent Alarming Headlines: (1) "Miami Invaded by Giant, House-
Eating Snails" (NPR.com, 9-17-2011) (up-to-10-inch long snails that
attach to, and slowly gnaw on, stucco walls). (2) "Scientists Develop
Blood Swimming 'Microspiders' to Heal Injuries, Deliver Drugs"
(Engadget.com, 9-8-2011) (spider-like "machines," made of gold and
silica, smaller than a red blood cell yet which can travel through
veins carrying drugs and be directionally controlled by researchers).
* In an art-science collaboration in August, Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi
and Utah State researcher Randy Lewis produced a prototype
bulletproof skin--or at least skin that would limit a .22 caliber bullet
to only about two inches' penetration into a simulated human body.
Genetically-engineered spider silk (reputed to be five times stronger
than steel) was grafted between layers of dermis and epidermis.
Mused Essaidi, we "in the near future . . . [may] no longer need to
descend from a godly bloodline in order to have traits like
invulnerability . . .." [Star Tribune (Minneapolis)-AP, 8-21-2011]
Leading Economic Indicators
* Turned down once before, liquor manufacturer EFAG convinced
Germany's Federal Patent Court in September to award trademark
protection to its schnapps with the brand name Ficken, which in
German translates directly into what in English is known as the F
word. The court acknowledged that the name is unquestionably in
poor taste but is not "sexually discriminatory" and does not violate
public morals. In fact, the court noted, the word is widely used in
Germany. (In March 2010, the European Union trademarks authority
granted a German brewery the right to call its beer "Fucking Hell"--
the first word of which is the actual name of an Austrian village and
the second a German word referring to light ale.) [Spiegel Online, 9-
14-2011]
DMV Is a Dangerous Place
* (1) The Department of Motor Vehicles office in Roseville, Calif.,
was closed for a week in July after a driving school student crashed
into the building and left a five-foot hole in the wall. (2) A young
man taking a test at the drivers' center in Brisbane, Australia, in
August lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a bench outside
the building, hitting his mother, who was waiting for him. (3) A 56-
year-old DMV driving tester was killed in July when the woman she
was evaluating ran off the road in Williamsburg, Va., and struck a
tree. [Sacramento Bee, 7-26-2011] [Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 8-9-
2011] [WTKR-TV (Virginia Beach), 7-16-2011]
People With Issues
* In October, a court in Ottawa, Ontario, sentenced pornography
collector Richard Osborn, 46, to a year in jail on several charges but
dismissed the more serious child porn counts. Judge Robert Fournier
ruled that Osborn's hard-core images of Bart and Lisa Simpson, and
Milhouse, were not illegal, on the ground that he could not be sure of
the characters' ages. (Baby Maggie Simpson was depicted, but she
was not involved in sex.) Judge Fournier was clearly exasperated at
Osborn's perversions, among them his homemade video of swimsuit-
clad youngsters, interspersed with shots of Osborn himself
masturbating, aided by a Cabbage Patch doll whose mouth had been
cut open. At one point, a disgusted Judge Fournier cut off the
presentation of evidence. "Enough," he said. "We are not paid by
the taxpayers to sit here and torture ourselves." [Ottawa Sun, 9-26-
2011, Ottawa Citizen, 10-6-2011]
Least Competent Criminals
* One would think the robber of a gas station would consider filling
the tank before fleeing. However, Moses Gift, 47, was arrested in
September in Winston-Salem, N.C., and charged with robbing the
Huff Shell station--shortly before running out of gas a short distance
away. And in Winder, Ga., Micah Mitchell was arrested in October
shortly after, according to police, he crashed through the front door
of a BP station to steal merchandise. He was arrested minutes later a
few miles from the station, where he had run out of gas. [Greensboro
News-Record, 9-11-2011] [AccessNorthGa.com, 10-7-2011]
A News of the Weird Classic (January 1995)
* In April [1994], defendant Arthur Hollingsworth, despite previous
recalcitrance, for some reason agreed, reluctantly, to waive his
constitutional right of silence and to testify on his own behalf in his
trial for armed robbery of a Houston, Tex., convenience store.
Prosecutor Jay Hileman first got Hollingsworth to admit that he was
in the store at the time it was robbed and that he was armed. Then
Hileman asked, "Mr. Hollingsworth, you're guilty, aren't you?"
Hollingsworth replied, "No." Hileman repeated the question. "Mr.
Hollingsworth, you're guilty, aren't you?" Hollingsworth: "Yeah."
Hileman said he had no further questions. [San Antonio Express-
News, 4-22-94]
Thanks This Week to Bill Bloxham and Hal Dunham and to
the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.
*****
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