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Cunning Move
Canada’s second-oldest magazine is changing its name because its
unintended sexual connotation has caused the history journal to run
afoul of Internet filters and turned off potential readers. The Beaver, founded in 1920 as a publication of the Hudson’s Bay Company, will become Canada’s History
with the April issue, editor-in-chief Mark Reid announced. “Market
research showed us that younger Canadians and women were very, very
unlikely to ever buy a magazine called The Beaver, no matter what’s about,” Reid said.
Community Investments
Hoping to capitalize on their success, Somali pirates have set up an
exchange to sell shares of their raids to investors. Operating mostly
out of Haradheere, sea gangs have made tens of millions of dollars from
ransoms, according to Reuters, and their success is attracting Somali
financiers in other nations to back their sea raids. “The shares are
open to all, and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or
on land by providing cash, weapons or useful maters,” a pirate named
Mohammed explained, adding, “We’ve made piracy a community activity.”
Haradheere’s deputy security officer agreed. “Piracy-related
business has become the main profitable economic activity in our area,
and as locals we depend on their output,” Mohamed Adam said. “The
district gets a percentage of every ransom from ships that have been
released, and that goes on public infrastructure, including our
hospital and our public schools.”
A group of inner-city activists in Los Angeles announced the start
of bus tours of rundown public housing, sites of deadly shootouts and
racial unrest, and the birthplace of many of the city’s most famous
gangs, including Crips and Bloods. “This is ground zero for a lot of
the bad in this city,” former gang member Alfred Lomas, who is
spearheading L.A. Gang Tours, told The Los Angeles Times. “It could be ground zero for a lot of the good, too.”
Lomas calls the venture “true community empowerment.” The nonprofit
group is charging adults $65 for the two-hour tours of South L.A.,
Watts and Florence-Firestone, and notes it uses the money to create
jobs and start similar tour franchises in other inner cities.
Organizers will sell souvenir T-shirts painted on the spot by a
graffiti tagger, and one organizer said he hopes to stage a dance-off
among the locals where tourists pick the winner. Organizers did decide
against having kids shoot tourists with water pistols, followed by the
sale of T-shirts that read: “I Got Shot in South-Central.”
When Guns Are Outlawed
When a man spotted a prowler at a nearby vacant home in Kelso,
Wash., he grabbed his hunting bow and chased the suspect for more than
three blocks before shooting him with an arrow when he refused to stop.
Police Capt. Vern Thompson told The Daily News that a 32-year-old suspect later sought treatment for an arrow wound at a hospital.
Authorities charged Joseph Stancato, 33, with assault after they
said he hit another man upside the head with his banjo. Noting the
banjo is considered “a deadly weapon” under Colorado law, the Aspen Daily News reported the incident occurred on New Year’s Eve when Stancato got into an argument with two men at a bus stop.
Indianapolis police broke up a drugstore robbery by arresting
suspect Dustin Abney, 27, who they said was armed with a water-hose
nozzle. The Indianapolis Star reported that Abney approached an
employee who was taking a smoking break outside the store, announced he
was going to rob the store and asked whether the employee wanted any
money or pills. The employee declined the offer but called police.
Guilt-Free Pleasures
A British company introduced a kitchen appliance that kills lobsters with electricity. Inventor Simon Buckhaven told The Times of London
that his CrustaStun system is a humane alternative to boiling lobsters
that spares the crustaceans “pain or distress.” The microwave-size
device costs about $3,500. A Canadian manufacturer is developing an
industrial version that will sell for $100,000 or more.
The animal rights group PETA bought two CrustaStuns and paid for
Buckhaven and his wife to fly to Tucson, Ariz., for a demonstration at
a fund-raising lobster dinner for the Family Resource Center. The
courier service lost the two machines, however, and volunteers had to
kill hundreds of lobsters in boiling water to serve the center’s hungry
supporters.
Avoirdupois Follies
More than two dozen seniors at Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University
risk not being able to graduate this spring because they were too fat
when they were freshmen and have taken no measures to stem their
obesity. Inside Higher Ed reported that 92 entering freshmen in
2006 had body mass index scores below 30 and were required to lose
weight or take a one-semester class called “Fitness for Life.”
Twenty-five of the students did neither, and James L. DeBoy, chair of
the health, physical education and recreation department, notified them
they failed to meet the school requirement. “No student should ever be
able to leave Lincoln and not know the risks of obesity,” DeBoy said.
Conspiring Contrivances
Firefighters investigating a house fire in Dubois, Wyo., determined
the cause was a magnifying glass. The Associated Press reported that
the sun was shining at just the right angle to hit the glass, which
magnified the sunbeam and ignited a nearby pile of mail. Sheriff’s Sgt.
Jerry Evagelatos said the fire was extinguished before it damaged the
home.
Falling furniture causes 300 deaths a year and 14,700 injuries, according to a study in the journal Clinical Pediatrics
by researchers from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at
Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio, who reviewed reports from 100
emergency rooms. Television sets caused almost half the injuries. The
injury rate has risen significantly over the past 17 years, despite the
increase in the number of households replacing heavy cathode-ray TVs
with lighter flat screens, which are not front-heavy.
Secondhand Smoke Follies
Less than a week after the world’s fastest train began service in
southern China, a smoker triggered an alarm that delayed the train for
2 1/2-hours—about the time the train takes to make its 684-mile
journey. “Smoking is strictly forbidden on the Wuhan-Guangzhou
high-speed train, even in the toilet,” a railway official told Reuters,
which reported the unidentified smoker fled the scene before the alarm
sounded.
As God Is My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fry
Allegedly intending to demonstrate the dangers of frying a turkey,
morning disc jockeys on radio station WFLZ in Tampa, Fla., planned to
use a crane to drop a turkey carcass through the open roof of a
plumbing van into a vat of hot oil. The stunt began to unravel,
according to the St. Petersburg Times, when the vat on a burner
burst into flames that shot through the van’s roof. By the time the
turkey landed in the vat, flames had engulfed the van. Station
employees tried to put out the fire with handheld extinguishers before
giving up and summoning the fire department. Noting that one of the
firefighters injured himself pulling hoses off the truck, fire Capt.
Bill Wade called the incident a violation of an understanding that,
because of several previous stunts involving burning objects, the
station needed permission anytime DJs planned to set anything on fire.
Temper Tantrum
A dispute over a $70 electric repair bill caused a member of a
church in Spokane, Wash., to use his truck to ram the church several
times with his truck, apparently trying to break in. KREM.com reported
that when Mark Heitman did get inside, he broke nearly every window,
television and computer screens, and most of the lighting fixtures. He
also reportedly smashed the church instruments and even crushed the
toilets. “He’d done work on the church, and we paid him with a check,
not cash,” pastor Dan Eubank of Country Crossroads Christian Church
said. “I didn’t have cash, and he got mad.” Eubank added that before
his rampage at the church, Heitman had stopped by and broken the
windows in the parson’s truck.
Acts of Cow
Authorities in Hawkins County, Tenn., reported that Jerry Lynn Davis
called to complain because a neighbor’s cows had been licking his house
and caused about $100 in damage by ripping off a screen window,
cracking the glass and pulling down a gutter. The Kingsport Times-News
noted that Davis’ home is just a couple of feet from a fence enclosing
the cows’ pasture, but Deputy Chris Funk, who investigated, didn’t
indicate what might have attracted the herd to the house.
Central Unintelligence Agency
Dennis Montgomery, head of a small software company in Reno, Nev.,
duped the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland
Security into believing he could decode secret messages from al-Qaida
to its operatives sent via television. Playboy magazine, citing
former CIA officials, reported that the Bush administration raised the
terrorism alert level and canceled several transatlantic flights in
December 2003 after Montgomery claimed bar codes on Al Jazeera TV
contained targeting information for al-Qaida attacks. The CIA
eventually concluded there were no secret messages after French
intelligence convinced the agency that the bar codes were bogus.
Procurement Follies
Cities that installed energy-efficient traffic lights are
discovering the new LED bulbs don’t burn hot enough to melt snow and
can become crusted over in a storm, leading to accidents. As a result,
the Associated Press reported, crews are being dispatched after storms
to clean off the snow by hand. “It’s a bit labor-intensive,” said Green
Bay, Wis., police Lt. Jim Runge.
Justice Just Isn’t
Munir Hussain, 53, fought off three knife-wielding intruders who
broke into his home and threatened him, his wife and children, then
chased them down the street in Buckinghamshire, England, joined by his
brother. They managed to bring down one of the fleeing men, Walid
Salem, and conked him on the head with a cricket bat. Salem, who has 50
previous convictions, received a two-year supervision order, yet as
reported in The Independent, Munir Hussain was sentenced to 30
months in prison, and his brother, Tokeer Hussain, got 39 months, both
for using “excessive force.”
The Nose Knows
Rather than stimulating the appetite, aroma may be the key to
controlling it, according to scientists at an independent food-research
firm in the Netherlands, who say they’ve found a way to enhance the
familiar smells in food enough to activate areas of the brain that
perceive stomach fullness. “It’s all about flavor release,” lead
researcher Rianne Ruijschop explained in The Washington Times, “without adding anything artificial.”
Exploding Underpants Aftermath
Full body scanners being introduced at British airports to improve
security may be breaking that nation’s child pornography laws.
According to The Daily Telegraph, Terri Dowty of Action for
Rights of Children warned that the scanners could violate the
Protection of Children Act of 1978, which makes it illegal to create an
indecent image or a “pseudo-image” of a child. Dowty and others want
the government to exempt people under 18 from the scans.
Patriotic Duty
Champion hurdler Jana Rawlinson had her breast implants removed to
better her chances of winning a medal for Australia at the 2012
Olympics. Rawlinson told Woman’s Day magazine she “loved having bigger boobs” but didn’t want to “short-change Australia.”
When the Heimlich Maneuver Fails
While handcuffing assault suspect Andrew Grande, 23, sheriff’s
deputies in Bay County, Fla., said they observed him swallowing what
turned out to be a “large bag of marijuana.” When deputies ordered him
to “spit it out,” reported the Panama City News Herald, he
continued to resist. Deputies tased him, whereupon he fell to the
ground and choked to death, sheriff’s officials concluded, on the
marijuana.
Where’s Waldo?
Five years after Mark Weinberger, 46, fled from justice, authorities
found him living in a tent high up in the Italian Alps, surviving on
dried and canned food and snow he melted on a portable stove. Sought by
U.S. law enforcement for performing unnecessary surgery to defraud
insurance companies, Weinberger ran a clinic in Merrillville, Ind., and
earned, according to his abandoned wife, Michelle, $200,000 a week
before he wound up on the FBI’s most-wanted list. He had been sighted
as far away as China before two Carabinieri officers located him atop
Mount Blanc. After his capture, New York City’s Daily News
reported, Weinberger asked to use the lavatory, where he pulled a
hidden knife and cut his throat. Despite being an expert surgeon and an
ear, nose and throat specialist, he missed the artery he appeared to be
aiming for and was treated for a minor wound.
Marketing Partners
Melt Bar & Grilled in Lakewood, Ohio, began offering 25 percent
off to customers who show a tattoo of a grilled cheese sandwich.
Meanwhile, according to WJW-TV, neighboring Voodoo Monkey Tattoo is
offering discounts on its grilled cheese designs.
News and Blues is compiled from the nation’s press. To
contribute, submit original clippings, citing date and source, to
Roland Sweet in care ofThe New Times.
