WEIRDNUZ.503 (News of the Weird, September 26, 1997) by Chuck Shepherd
(Editorial comment added. <g>)
LEAD STORIES
* One of the four annual Pennsylvania rattlesnake-bagging tournaments was held in June in Curwensville. Teams of two amateurs who have paid an entry fee race the clock in an 8-foot-by-8-foot cage to bag five rattlesnakes; one person holds the bag above knee level while the other puts the snakes in, always tail first. Entry fees and admissions benefited the local fire department. Said a spectator, "It's a lot like going to a NASCAR race . . . like waiting for a crash." Some people do get bit (it's a 3-second penalty if it draws blood), but, said one contestant, "Why do something sissy, like play golf?" Said another, "It's [only] $5 to get in [here, but] $100 for cocaine. This is a whole lot cheaper."
This is your brain on drugs......
* Restaurant Openings: La Nouvelle Justine, an S&M-themed restaurant that offers diners mild spankings, food served in dog bowls, and the opportunity to command and be commanded as they eat, opened in May in New York City. And in Beijing, the most successful of recent nostalgia restaurants, noted for serving the food of the cultural revolution, is Fang Li's Compare Past Misery with Present Happiness. It serves mostly peasant food (ant soup, fried crickets); one woman eating corn cake chewed on it for a few moments, then pushed it away, saying, "It tastes the same, not any better than what I remember."
Guess she forgot the goat piss chaser.
* According to an August Los Angeles Times story, the use of water recovered from sewage has increased 30 percent in California in the last year. Though formerly limited to lawn-watering and toilet-flushing, recycled water is now in the drinking supply in San Diego and will soon be in South Bay and Livermore.
Make mine a Evian, please. Keep the glass. And, please don't wash my salad. (By the way, have you ever noticed what Evian is spelled backwards? Hmmmmm?)
GREAT ART
* Ming-Wei Lee's recent performance-art exhibit in a New York City gallery featured him merely eating dinner, in private, with a new guest each night. "Both of us are performing," he said. "Both of us are participating. The food acts as a medium for conversation. For me, art is about process."
How much you want to bet the NEA had a hand in that?
* San Francisco "conceptual artist" Guy Overfelt, 29, was prominently, if not favorably, reviewed for two recent projects: For a show at the Refusalon gallery in San Francisco, he called 2,000 toll-free numbers to request that information be sent to the gallery. (That's it.) For a show at New York City's White Columns Gallery in the winter, he exhibited two 1,000-name mailing lists of art collectors, one for the East Coast and one for the West Coast. (Overfelt offered for sale a "signed" edition of the mailing lists, on PC and Mac diskettes, for $20 each.)
Sorry, but my (lack of) appreciation for this "conceptual" art is exceeded only by my (lack of) appreciation for rap music.
* To publicize an April poetry show at the Hyperdisc coffee house in Los Angeles, poet-psychiatrist Robert Carroll released one of his recent pieces, entitled "Am I Really Going to Veg Out in Front of the TV Again Tonight?" The text of the poem is: "Yes."
He's widely recognized as "a psychiatrists' psychiatrist.
* Sculptor Anthony-Noel Kelly, who works in the medium of corpses and severed body parts, was arrested in London in April on suspicion of illegal possession of cadavers that he received through an associate in the Royal College of Surgeons. Kelly is a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk, and some of the 30 human body parts police seized were found at his family's ancestral castle in Kent. Kelly formerly worked as a butcher.
His current exhibit was a piece to disprove the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall..."
* During the summer, the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London featured a functioning toilet entitled "The Great Flood" by the highly-touted sculptor Sarah Lucas. The piece sold for about $20,000 last year, and the buyer loaned it to the ICA under the proviso that it be plumbed to work. Visitors are allowed to pull the chain but not to use the toilet (although two visitors during a Berlin show did, in what the ICA curator said was "the ultimate involvement of the audience").
The Great Flood became a reality when the exhibit was changed to a bidet while touring in Paris, and the visitors just couldn't resist.
CHUTZPAH
* In February, after his conviction in Nashville, Tenn., for drug trafficking, Clemmie Jones, 35, complained to a federal judge that he was upset by the circumstances of his arrest. Jones had been the object of a manhunt that sheriff's deputies grew so intense about that they had T-shirts made with photos of Jones on the front and his wife on the back, and were wearing them when they collared Jones. Said Jones to the judge, "I felt as though I was being targeted."
Now there's a man who truly appreciates what that lobster in the tank feels like when seeing his picture on the patrons bibbs.
* In August, Sebastiano Intili, 43, on a hot, summer frolic at the Piazza Navona in Rome, Italy, jumped twice off of a beloved statue into a fountain and accidentally broke off a piece of a dolphin's tail that restoration authorities said would cost about $8,500 to fix. Two days later, Intili was sentenced to three months in jail for trespassing, but his lawyer immediately announced that the fountain was "in decrepit state," that his client jumped in at great personal risk, and that he would sue the city for about $6,000.
The city immediately made him a settlement offer he couldn't refuse.
* In July, police in Lexington, Ky., were searching for Delbert Buttrey, 47, who they believe is the man who kidnapped a transient couple from Indiana, took them to an isolated spot, and forced them to perform oral sex on him while Buttrey's girlfriend snapped photographs. After that, according to police, Buttrey took the
couple home with him and forced the man to mow his lawn.
He was know to have recently participated in a water tasting contest in San Diego, CAuliflower.
* Five third-graders were suspended from school in April in Eaton, Colo., for drug use. Not only were they caught smoking marijuana during recess, but they had rolled the joints using pieces of paper torn from their homework.
I'll bet they were pretty damn harsh. They probably caught a buzz just from the paper.
JOBS
* An August Associated Press feature on Fowler, Mich., pedicurist Jim Rondy, 26, reported that he makes more than $100,000 a year working exclusively on the hooves of milk cows. He tends cows at 90 farms, making $10 a head trimming the hoof and removing mud and manure.
I'll bet he keeps his own fingernails trimmed pretty damn close!
* The February Scientific American reported on how conservation biologist Joel Berger (University of Nevada at Reno) field-studies moose, which are notoriously unfriendly to humans. Berger needed to be able to hurl fresh bear and wolf dung accurately enough to assure that a moose immediately smelled it, to see if it made the moose fearful or aggressive. To be able to get that close to a moose, he engaged a designer who worked on the movie "Star Wars" to make a moose suit, which worked so well that Berger said he spent much of his time in the suit worrying about being mounted.
Guess it never occurred to him to dress up in a male moose suit.
* To research his recent book on highway bug kills, "That Gunk on Your Car," University of Florida graduate zoology student Mark Hostetler said he hung around Greyhound stations and peeled bugs off the buses' windshields. Also, as he told the Los Angeles Times in May, he took a 12,000-mile road trip with a net on top of his car to trap bugs that bounced off the windshield, stopping each time he heard a splat that sounded unusual.
When traveling near Reno, he stopped only to find a load of bear and wolf turds plastered all over his net.
THINNING THE HERD
* In March, a 36-year-old man choked to death on a 6-inch tropical fish he had popped into his mouth while showing off for friends in Bayou Vista, La. And in April, a 12-year-old boy was electrocuted in East Palo Alto, Calif., after he climbed a high-voltage transmission tower in the rain, dared his three companions to join him, and then accidentally touched a wire. And in July, a 22-year-old man, described by his grandmother as "smart in school," died in a bungee-cord accident on a railroad trestle in Fairfax County, Va. (Said a police spokesman: "The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the ground.")
Darwin prevails.
Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate. |
