HERE AT OFF/BEAT we often pick on frivolous and/or absurd lawsuits, but I'd like to take this opportunity to compliment a lawsuit that, while absurd, is so perfectly ironic that I have to tip my hat.
The newspaper industry is shrinking, and journalists powerless to do anything — but lawyers apparently are not. The News & Observer reports that Keith Hempstead, a Durham lawyer and loyal reader, is suing the newspaper for cutting the size of its staff and the quantity of content.
Continue Reading "Paper Cuts: Subscriber Sues Over Reduced Staff, Content" »
WELCOME TO JULY 9! On this date 468 years ago, Henry VIII of England annulled his marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.
Future News Prediction: Sasha Baron Cohen gets the crap beaten out of him somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line.
Here is your Wednesday Top 5:
5) Gassing the Oldest Profession
Prostitution may be recession proof, but it's not immune to high gas prices. According to its Web site, a Nevada brothel has started offering patrons free petrol in an effort to stimulate business. Customers who pony up $50 at the Shady Lady Ranch, 130 miles northwest of Las Vegas, receive a $50 gas voucher. Go for a three-hour, $800 session and you get 150 bucks! "It's rocking along," says owner James Davis, who has already had to order more vouchers to keep up with demand. Can special orgy rates for those who car pool be coming soon?
4) Gangsta?
In a move which probably won't help his street cred, British rapper Nzube "Zuby" Udezue claimed that being arrested by police was scary and embarrassing. On his MySpace blog, Zuby, a self-proclaimed "hip hop phenomenon," said he has "never been so traumatised [sic] in [his] life," by the aggressive manner in which Bournemouth's finest took him into custody. Then again, I'm guessing since he's a computer science major at Oxford, his thug status probably doesn't have that far to fall.
3) No News Is Good News
Bad news for Romanian optimists. The European nation's high court today ruled that the government's new law requiring radio and television stations to give equal coverage to "good" and "bad" news was unconstitutional. The legislation had been passed unanimously by the Senate earlier this year, but was then challenged by opposition Liberal Democrats who claimed it infringed on freedom of expression. Proponents had argued that negative news has an "irreversible effect" on the well-being of citizens. Apparently that effect was less negative than the effect of forcing journalists to be positive.
2) Record Package
Stuff a T-bone steak down your pants and it may be flattering. Stuff two down there it's probably criminal. Stuff eight and you might break a world record, though you'll still probably get arrested. According to reports, at least two Cincinnatians have been arrested in the past week for doing just that: elevating shop-lifting to a competitive sport. First came a Winton Place man who was busted after "stuffing three packages of T-bone steaks down his shorts at a Walnut Hills Kroger." Then on Tuesday, Christopher Penn allegedly "stuffed eight T-bones down his pants at a Marsh supermarket, putting the old record to shame and landing himself behind bars on a theft charge."
1) Finger Biting Good
Of course when you can't get you hands on a T-bone, there's always cannibalism. Just ask Pamela Bumpers of Tampa, who is accused of biting off the finger of a woman while the two were waiting in line at a butcher shop. The 41-year-old allegedly got in a dispute with Jacqueline Wimbush, 39, about who should be served next at Aliana Meat Market. Wimbush had reportedly been given the number of a customer who left, leading to Seinfeldian ethics dilemma, which then degenerated into a Coen brothers moment.
And for dessert, here is your moment of schadenfreude:
Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post
Raising the dead got a whole lot harder on Monday after a Moscow court found re-animator Grigory Grabovoy guilty of 11 counts of fraud. Grabovoy sat stoically behind bars of iron as he was castigated for what his followers consider to be "miracles."
Grabovoy has long been the target of those skeptical of alleged claims that he could resurrect the dead, cure cancer and AIDS, teleport and pinpoint mechanical problems on airplanes (and I'm not talking about the jet mechanics' local). But the Kazakh-born Grabovoy jumped to national prominence in 2005 after offering mothers of the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis help resurrecting their children for a nominal fee (no more than $2,000).
As his fame and support grew so too did his detractors, who both feared his power and claimed that he was exploiting parents in mourning. Other said he was a charlatan and demanded "proof" of his resurrecting powers.
Grabovoy has been sentenced to 11 years of hard labor. It remains unclear whether Monday's verdict could be overturned were he to teleport out of his cell, or if he would instead be charged with breaking out of prison.
You don't expect to see a monkey peeing on a person at a baseball game — even in Philly. But that was just part of what took place yesterday, which was one of the more surreal sports experiences of my life.
It's not so much that the Mets-Phillies game lasted seven hours, or that a monsoon turned Citizen's Bank Park into a concrete slip-n-slide, or even that a drunk fan ran on the field, taking refuge for several minutes inside the tarp tube before security could coax him out. No, it was more that between innings, the team's mascot, the Philly Phanatic, and his plush friends Reggy the Purple Party Dude and Spanky the Nine-Foot Monkey silly-stringed a villainous-looking "Mets fan" on top of the Phillies' dugout.
The bizarre act carried with it all the subtlety of "Birth of a Nation" and all the innocence of Teletubbies. As children looked on in glee, the Purple Party Dude, the pear-shaped green mascot, and the cuddly ape corralled the marauding Met. As he attempted to attack them, they deftly threw him to the ground, sprayed him with silly string, and then appeared to urinate on his prone body. As if to rub it in, literally, the Phanatic then rubbed his hindquarters against the man's mustachioed face.
Parents scoffed and children cheered with joy while Mets fans looked on in horror, no doubt wishing they hadn't drunk that last beer. From then on, any Orange and Blue spotted near a urinal was greeted with a jovial "watch out here comes the monkey!" Truly family fun for all.
Now, despite my Philly Phan loyalty and the accompanying hatred of the New York Metropolitans, I can't help but wonder whether Sunday's display went too far. There is a fine line between sports fanaticism and mob-fascism, but the sports stadium is supposed to be an outlet to express those base urges without the ugly consequences. True, the public, broad daylight golden shower was an act, but did it cross that line?
Photo by Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post
With both animal rights and robot technology advancing at disturbing rates, I find myself wondering, should apes be able to marry robots? Perhaps I should backtrack a little.
Over in Spain, the Parliament's environmental committee last week approved resolutions urging the legislature to give monkeys some of the same rights as humans. Inspired by the Great Apes Project, these updates to Spain's penal code would make it illegal to perform harmful experiments on our primate relatives, or to use them in circuses, movies or TV commercials. According to reports, the resolutions have majority support and are expected to become law next year.
And in case you were wondering, bull fighting will still remain a national pastime.
Meanwhile, during the past few months much has been made of David Levy's controversial book Love and Sex With Robots. The British AI expert (who once soundly thrashed the author of this blog at chess) argued that not only will humans and machines have sex but that by 2050 it will be common practice for them to marry. A bold supposition to be sure, but given the rapid development of robots, particularly those built for erotica, it may not be so far fetched.
Tying this all together was the breakthrough experiment carried out earlier this year at Duke, where a monkey in Durham used its brain to control the actions of a robot in Kyoto, Japan. Which of course brings me back to my original question:
With chimps, gorillas and orangutans being given rights in Spain (and possibly beyond), should they be able to marry robots?
As a weird news blogger, I'd be lying if I said I was opposed, but what do you think?
Photo by STR/AFP/Getty Images
Rather than be burdened with the cost and bureaucracy of gender reassignment, British pub singer Terry Wright has begun turning into a woman the natural way. For reasons doctors cannot explain, his body is producing abnormally high levels of estrogen and has stopped absorbing testosterone, The Sun is reporting.
Starting a decade ago, Wright began losing his hair and beard. His skin became smoother, he started having hot flashes, and even developed breasts resulting in neighborhood kids referring to him as "She-Man." Rather than celebrate his good fortune, though, the 60-year-old father of five is begging doctors to stop his miraculous journey to womanhood.
"I am a man, not a woman. And I do not want to be a woman," Wright is quoted as saying. "I just want to get my life back to normal." Doctors in Birmingham haven't been able to slow his slide into womanhood, but they have lauded Wright's internal chemistry, calling it "unique." The Sun even went so far as to contact "Specialist Professor Richard Ross" who is quoted as saying that "[t]his case seems very unusual." Indeed.
While gender reassignment typically involves many complicated steps including hormone treatments and sometimes surgery, Terry's miraculous body has cut out the middlemen. And while Wright might be a little nervous about his "changes," perhaps this inspiring song from an American youth group will help put his mind at ease:
Last week, Slate had an article explaining why Teodoro Obiang — not Robert Mugabe — was the worst dictator in Africa. What ensued at my local watering hole, and I'm sure many others across the D.C. area, was a heated, beer-driven debate over who the worst dictators in history were.
Not surprisingly, "number of deaths caused" was the salient qualification, with Hitler, Stalin and Mao all vying for the top spot. But who was the strangest?
It's a tough question, but the criteria is simple. Candidates must be, or must have been, an authoritarian head of state with a record of paranoia, tyranny and irrationality. Sham elections are a plus, as is the development of a personality cult and a hatred for progress, opposition, animals, inanimate objects, science or colors. Ideally, the dictator will demonstrate delusions of grandeur so unabashedly deviant that if he wasn't supreme commander he would be committed. Simply put, the more your jaw drops when you read their history, the better. So without further ado, here are my top three:
Continue Reading "The World's Strangest Dictator (Hint: It's Not Robert Mugabe)" »
I went to a fairly progressive high school, but even there students were not encouraged to use expletives on standardized tests. Not so in England however, where 14-16 year-olds sitting for their GCSE exams (General Certificate of Secondary Education, formerly the "O" levels) are actually awarded points for cursing, as long as their usage is correct.
In one of the more egregious examples, a 2006 English exam question asked students to "Describe the room you're sitting in." One delightfully creative and succinct response came back with "F--- off." Chief examiner Peter Buckroyd graded the paper with a score of 2 out of 27. Buckroyd, who is responsible for examination standards and training, explained to The Times that it would have been "wicked" to score the essay a zero because "it does show some very basic skills we are looking for — like conveying some meaning and some spelling... It's better than someone that doesn't write anything at all."
Now, had the student put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, he or she (I'm guessing he's a he) would have fared even better, as that punctuation "would have been showing a little bit [more] skill." In order to gain minimum marks in English, student must only demonstrate "some simple sequencing of ideas" and "some words in appropriate order," regardless of how profanely they do so.
But such extraordinary grading seems not to have made it across the pond. When I asked one SAT tutor who teaches for the new essay portion of our standardized test what would happen if an American student were to write a similar essay, he told me simply, "It would not be good."
Photo by Jennifer Domenick for the Washington Post
A lot has been made recently about Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second in command, fielding questions online. After promising on December 16, 2007, to personally respond to journalists and Jihad enthusiasts via Web forums, the Egyptian doctor turned fundamentalist was inundated with at least 1,888 queries.
Of those, he reportedly answered around one fifth. And while Zawahiri "patiently" endeavored to explain away the murder of innocents and encourage the killing of Egyptian secret police, there was one topic that I would have liked to ask him about: How does it feel being number two?
Continue Reading "How Does It Feel to Be Al-Qaeda's Number Two?" »
The socially awkward and sexually deprived got lucky twice this week thanks to robots and hormones.
First came word out of Japan that a battery-powered robot girlfriend was hitting the market. Dubbed the Eternal Maiden Actualization, EMA for short, this busty 15-inch-tall companion is demure, friendly and loves to kiss. When put in "love mode," EMA uses infrared sensors to pucker up and smooch nearby suitors. Priced at $175, Sega Toys' plastic lover is primed and wired to provide "sweet and interactive" solace to geeks around the globe.
And for those who prefer old-fashioned flesh-on-flesh action but can't work up the courage to make eye-contact, let alone the first move, researchers are developing an anti-shyness drug. Oxytocin — a natural hormone that helps moms bond with their newborns — may be the cure for inhibited, introverted and otherwise awkward folks, according to scientists.
"Tests have shown that oxytocin reduces anxiety levels in users," Paul Zak, professor of neuroscience at Claremont Graduate University, was quoted saying. "It is a hormone that facilitates social contact between people. What's more, it is a very safe product that does not have any side effects and is not addictive."
And while it may be easy to wonder if scientists had some selfish interest in developing such a drug, their research also suggests that oxytocin may reduce symptoms of autism, too. As if that's not enough, it also reportedly heightens feelings of intimacy after sexual intercourse! Researchers are working on spray version which they hope to market in the near future.
But with inexpensive robot lovers and spray-on confidence, some may fear that society is expediting the extinction of the nerd. Will the Michael Cera-like sweet-and-shy character be headed to the same social scrap heap as Gary Cooper's strong-silent type? Perhaps on the surface. But while oxytocin and EMA may put a spring in the step of the pocket-protector crowd, they will also make it more likely that their genes get passed along. If anything, society will probably end up with more nerds than ever (assuming there is a genetic predisposition for nerdliness) — only now you won't be able to tell.
Photo by Stephanie K. Kuykendal for the Washington Post
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