News & Blues 1/13

Issuing a Challenge to Bioengineers

Growing demand for chicken wings has given rise to “boneless wings,”
fashioned from skinless boneless chicken breasts, which are now cheaper
than wings. As recently as May 2008, skinless boneless breasts sold for
57 cents more than wings, but in seven of the past 11 months, wholesale
wing prices have topped breast prices, according to the Agriculture
Department. The New York Times reported that most experts expect wing
prices to continue to rise at least until the Super Bowl in February.
Noting the days of cheap wings might be gone forever, Adam J. Scott, a
founder of the Atlanta-based chain Wing Zone, told the Times, “If they
can figure out how to grow chicken with four wings, we’d be in really
great shape.”

Follow-Ups

Paul Romero and Brandy Romero pleaded guilty in October in
Evangeline Parish, La., to trading their cockatoo and $175 to Donna
Greenwell for two children she was caring for. Authorities suspended
the couple’s five-year prison sentences in exchange for their testimony
against Greenwell, who prosecutors said “instigated” the transfer in
February when she responded to the Romeros’ advertisement to sell the
bird.

Dennis LeRoy Anderson, 62, pleaded guilty in October to DWI charges
resulting from hitting a parked vehicle last August in Proctor, Minn.,
while driving a motorized La-Z-Boy chair. Anderson claimed he was
driving the chair without incident until a woman jumped on it and
knocked it off course. The Duluth News Tribune reported that Anderson
had to forfeit the chair—powered by a converted lawnmower with a Briggs
& Stratton engine, and equipped with a stereo, cup holders and
other custom options—to Proctor police, who plan to auction it with
other forfeited items.

Handy Pants

The British store Debenhams began selling underpants for left-handed
men, allowing them to go to the bathroom as quickly and efficiently as
right-handed men. The garments, made by Hom, have a horizontal opening
instead of a vertical slit accessed from the right-hand side, breaking
a 75-year tradition. Almost 10 percent of British men are believed to
be left handed, but Y-fronted underpants have traditionally had a
right-handed opening. “As a result,” Debenhams said, “left-handed men
have to reach much further into their pants, performing a Z-shaped
maneuver through two 180-degree angles before achieving the result that
right-handed men perform with ease.” Previously, the store added, boxer
shorts, with an adaptable, ambidextrous opening in the middle, have
been the underpants of choice for left-handed men. “Switching the
opening from vertical to horizontal may sound like a small step, but
it’s the major breakthrough that many have been waiting for,” said
Debenhams’ Rob Faucherand.

Faith-Based Follies

Atheists are offering to look after the cats and dogs of Christian
believers after the Rapture. For $110, Eternal Earth-Bound Pets
promises lifetime care for pets whose owners are transported to heaven
within the next 10 years. “Each of our representatives has stated to us
in writing that they are atheists, do not believe in God/Jesus, and
that they have blasphemed in accordance with Mark 3:29, negating any
chance of salvation,” says the group’s Web site, which advises
subscribers who lose their faith or are not taken to heaven in the next
10 years that the fee is nonrefundable.

After being rescued from a stalled elevator in Vienna, Austria,
Gunther Link, 45, went to church to give thanks, only to be crushed to
death when the 860-pound stone altar fell on him. “He seems to have
embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched, and it
fell on him, killing him instantly,” police official Roman Hahslinger
told Britain’s Daily Telegraph, adding, “He was a very religious man.”

Walk, Don’t Run

The mayor of Wellford, S.C., banned the town’s police officers from
chasing suspects on foot. Sallie Peake told WSPA-TV she issued the
order because the city had to pay for an officer who missed work after
chasing a “guy who had a piece of crack on him.” She said a
drug-possession charge wasn’t worth the cost to taxpayers, although her
written order said she did “not want anyone chasing any suspects
whatsoever.”

Know Your Rights

Japan’s largest organized crime outfit, the Yamaguchi-gumi, is
requiring gang members to take a test in order to reduce costly
lawsuits, according to police, who noted that the revised
Anti-Organized Crime Law allows higher-ranking gang members to be sued
for the actions of their subordinates. The Mainichi Daily News reported
that police learned of the 12-question “gangster exam” while
investigating a member of the gang’s affiliate in Shiga Prefecture. A
sample question was, “What kind of activities are banned?” The answer:
“dumping industrial waste, bootlegging fuel, theft of construction
vehicles and other expensive items, phone fraud scams” and other
crimes.

When Harassing Phone Calls Aren’t Enough

After a security screener detected Marcellus Arellano, 68, trying to
enter a federal building in Portland, Ore., with three knives,
Arellano, who claims the Internal Revenue Service owes him $12,000,
told Federal Protective Service agent Micah Coring that he brought the
knives to scare IRS workers into releasing his money.

Dental-Vision Health Plan Combo

Sharron “Kay” Thornton, 60, who lost her vision nine years ago,
regained her sight after surgeons removed one of her teeth, drilled a
hole in it, inserted a plastic lens into the hole and implanted the
tooth-lens combination into her left eye. McClatchy Newspapers reported
the operation, the first of its kind in the United States, left
Thornton with 20/70 vision. The tooth used was a canine, sometimes
called an eyetooth.

Deflated Ego

A judge in Charles County, Md., admitted letting the air out of the
tire of an illegally parked car belonging to a woman who works as a
part-time cleaning worker at the courthouse. Circuit Court Judge Robert
C. Nalley, 65, resigned as chief administrator of the Circuit Court but
will remain on the bench. The Washington Post reported that two county
sheriff’s jail officers witnessed the incident, which Nalley said he
didn’t think was a big deal. He told The Maryland Independent newspaper
he actually did the woman a favor by letting the air out of tire rather
than having the car towed or ticketed.

To the Rescue

Responding to a 911 call that a man was bleeding from the face near
a fire station in St. Petersburg, Fla., two firefighters jumped into a
rescue unit, opened the garage bay door and pulled forward. They
promptly ran over the man they were rushing to help, Ted Allen Lenox,
41, who lay outside the station’s garage bays. “They couldn’t see him
in front of the truck” because they were too close, fire rescue Lt.
Joel Granata told the St. Petersburg Times, which said Lenox was
hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.

App for That

Authorities charged Donald Goodrich, 38, with menacing an Apple
Store employee in Cincinnati because he was frustrated that his iPhone
wasn’t working properly. WCPO News reported Goodrich told the employee
he “was so mad he could pop a 9 mm at it” and then opened his shirt and
showed her the handgun.

A new iPhone application lets users send prayers to Jerusalem’s
Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site. The price of “Send a Prayer
Western Wall” was reduced to 99 cents to promote its use in the days
leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Senders use their iPhone or
iTouch to compose the prayers, which are printed out within 48 hours
and placed between the stones of the wall.

Too Green for His Own Good

A British town council fined a bicycle shop owner for failing to
produce any commercial waste. The Daily Mail reported that Mark Howard,
50, reuses any surplus materials he can and sells any he can’t for
scrap. When the Southend Council waste contractor noticed Howard wasn’t
having any waste collected, the council refused to believe that he
didn’t have any waste to dispose and fined him 180 pounds ($285). “This
is totally stupid,” Howard told the paper. “I’m not some environmental
fruitcake trying to save the world. I’m just an ordinary person using
my brain to avoid waste. But they don’t seem to care.”

Sands of Time

Responding to a 2007 United Nations study describing desertification
as “the greatest environmental challenge of our times,” architect
Magnus Larsson proposed building a 3,720-mile-long wall across the
Sahara Desert. The wall would be made by injecting shifting sand dunes
with bacteria that produce calcite, a kind of natural cement, to bond
the sand grains together, turning them into sandstone. “The idea,”
Larsson told BBC News, “is to stop the desert by using the desert
itself.”

Mexican authorities closed off hundreds of feet of a Cancun beach in
front of a hotel accused of stealing powder-white sand. Patricio
Patron, Mexico’s attorney general for environmental protection, said
five people were detained in a raid for using pumps to move sand from
the sea floor onto the beach in front of the Gran Caribe Real Hotel.
The hotel is also suspected of using a breakwater to impede the natural
flow of sand onto other hotels’ beaches. “This hotel was telling its
tourists, ‘Come here, I have sand … the other hotels don’t, because I
stole it,’” Patron told the Associated Press.

Petty Crime of the Week

Police in Carlisle, Pa., cited Richard J. Cantor, 56, for harassment
after he reportedly flicked a toothpick on the sidewalk in front of
another man’s home. The Patriot-News said the victim, Brian Taylor, 43,
told police Cantor constantly does things to annoy him, in this case
driving out of his way to flick the toothpick on his sidewalk.

News and Blues is compiled from the nation’s press. To contribute,
submit original clippings, citing date and source, to Roland Sweet in
Care of The New Times.