News of the Weird
Jun. 12th, 2007 06:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneIn May, doctors at Schneider Children's Hospital in New York, operating on a 3-year-old girl, removed a brain tumor that had made her one of only a tiny number of people in the world to suffer from a syndrome that caused her to laugh uncontrollably when experiencing a seizure. Her mother described the girl's facial expression before the corrective surgery as similar to that of the Batman character the Joker. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 5-4-07]
Spectacular: Last year (according to a March 2007 Associated Press report), a computer technician for the Alaska Department of Revenue accidentally erased a disk containing all the data for paying the state's 600,000 residents their annual oil-revenue dividends, and a duplicate disk was also erased, and the fail-safe backup tape was discovered to be unreadable. It took two months of around-the-clock work for state employees to re-computerize all paper records. [CNN-AP, 3-20-07]
John Brandrick told London's Daily Telegraph in May that he will seek compensation from Royal Cornwall Hospital in Treliske, England, because he's still alive. He was diagnosed in 2006 with pancreatic cancer, with about a year to live, and he quit his job, stopped paying his bills, and used his life's savings to enjoy his last days. However, he was recently told he merely had (non-fatal) pancreatitis, and now he's broke. [Daily Telegraph (London), 5-7-07]
A team of biologists from Yale University and the University of Sheffield in England reported in April that some species of ducks have genitalia so complex that they provide the female with unusually effective mating control. Both the male and female sex organs are sort of corkscrew-shaped, but the female's spirals in the opposite direction, allowing her (in the event of rape or opportunistic, nonmating sex) to "lock down" her procreative organs. Only when the female relaxes, the researchers point out, can sperm approach her eggs. [Reuters, 5-1-07]
Men continue to consider that having themselves shot (nonfatally, of course) might provide them sympathy and a valid excuse to avoid some unpleasant task. In February, John Amos wanted pal Emanuel Houston to shoot him, to get his upcoming rape trial in Martins Ferry, W.Va., postponed, but Houston refused, and the two then struggled over the gun until Amos forced Houston's hand (and the gun) against Amos' stomach and pressed on Houston's finger. [The Intelligencer (Wheeling, W.Va.), 3-1-07]
And in May, in Baltimore, police said two college students had a third shoot them so they could avoid an onerous fraternity hazing ritual, but then later confessed that they are National Guardsmen and had themselves shot to avoid deployment to Iraq. (A National Guard spokesman said there is actually no deployment scheduled for their unit.) [Baltimore Sun, 5-23-07]
Timothy Rouse, 19 (and who had been charged with assaulting an elderly person), was matter-of-factly released from the Kentucky Correctional and Psychiatric Center in LaGrange in April after jailers accepted as official a crudely written, ungrammatical fax ordering him freed, supposedly from the state supreme court but whose originating line clearly showed a local grocery store. Furthermore, it took the jailers two weeks to realize they had been scammed. (Fortunately, Rouse was easily re-arrested at his mother's house.) [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-AP, 4-21-07]
In April, a woman in Braintree, England, took her 2-1/2-year-old son to local firefighters (according to a Reuters dispatch) to ask if they would remove the toilet seat that had become tightly stuck to his head. (No explanation was reported.) [Reuters, 4-26-07]
Spectacular: Last year (according to a March 2007 Associated Press report), a computer technician for the Alaska Department of Revenue accidentally erased a disk containing all the data for paying the state's 600,000 residents their annual oil-revenue dividends, and a duplicate disk was also erased, and the fail-safe backup tape was discovered to be unreadable. It took two months of around-the-clock work for state employees to re-computerize all paper records. [CNN-AP, 3-20-07]
John Brandrick told London's Daily Telegraph in May that he will seek compensation from Royal Cornwall Hospital in Treliske, England, because he's still alive. He was diagnosed in 2006 with pancreatic cancer, with about a year to live, and he quit his job, stopped paying his bills, and used his life's savings to enjoy his last days. However, he was recently told he merely had (non-fatal) pancreatitis, and now he's broke. [Daily Telegraph (London), 5-7-07]
A team of biologists from Yale University and the University of Sheffield in England reported in April that some species of ducks have genitalia so complex that they provide the female with unusually effective mating control. Both the male and female sex organs are sort of corkscrew-shaped, but the female's spirals in the opposite direction, allowing her (in the event of rape or opportunistic, nonmating sex) to "lock down" her procreative organs. Only when the female relaxes, the researchers point out, can sperm approach her eggs. [Reuters, 5-1-07]
Men continue to consider that having themselves shot (nonfatally, of course) might provide them sympathy and a valid excuse to avoid some unpleasant task. In February, John Amos wanted pal Emanuel Houston to shoot him, to get his upcoming rape trial in Martins Ferry, W.Va., postponed, but Houston refused, and the two then struggled over the gun until Amos forced Houston's hand (and the gun) against Amos' stomach and pressed on Houston's finger. [The Intelligencer (Wheeling, W.Va.), 3-1-07]
And in May, in Baltimore, police said two college students had a third shoot them so they could avoid an onerous fraternity hazing ritual, but then later confessed that they are National Guardsmen and had themselves shot to avoid deployment to Iraq. (A National Guard spokesman said there is actually no deployment scheduled for their unit.) [Baltimore Sun, 5-23-07]
Timothy Rouse, 19 (and who had been charged with assaulting an elderly person), was matter-of-factly released from the Kentucky Correctional and Psychiatric Center in LaGrange in April after jailers accepted as official a crudely written, ungrammatical fax ordering him freed, supposedly from the state supreme court but whose originating line clearly showed a local grocery store. Furthermore, it took the jailers two weeks to realize they had been scammed. (Fortunately, Rouse was easily re-arrested at his mother's house.) [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-AP, 4-21-07]
In April, a woman in Braintree, England, took her 2-1/2-year-old son to local firefighters (according to a Reuters dispatch) to ask if they would remove the toilet seat that had become tightly stuck to his head. (No explanation was reported.) [Reuters, 4-26-07]
no subject
Date: 2007-06-12 02:43 pm (UTC)