November 4, 1999
PASS THE AFTER-BIRTH
A British television program called TV
Dinners was taken to task by the government's Broadcasting
Standards Committee due to an episode aired in February that
featured a woman preparing a dish based on her own just-born
daughter's placenta. The fried placenta with shallots & garlic
on focaccia was sampled by the mother, father and 20 audience
members. (UPI)
MIND OVER MATTER
Twelve years of tightly
controlled laboratory experiments with over 100 subjects and
thousands of tests have led researchers at Princeton
University to claim "conclusive proof" that psychokinesis (PK)
is real. Using a random number generator that, left alone,
will produce an unpredictable sequence of ones and zeros,
people were asked simply to influence the output of numbers
using only their minds. The subjects proved capable of
altering the output of the devices so much that the chances of
getting such a bias by fluke alone is calculated to be less
than one in 1,000 billion. Professor Robert Jahn of the
Princton Engineering Anomalies Research Project states "we
would now lay claim to have the largest datasets and the most
systematic experiments ever performed...we now have pretty
incontrovertible evidence for this phenomenon."
WRONG
PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME
When fire authorities found a man in
a full wet suit, with dive tank, flippers and a facemask,
lying dead in the middle of a burnt out section after a forest
fire, they started investigating. It turns out the man was out
diving when the forest fire began over 20 miles away, and
firefighters sent out a fleet of helicopters with very large
buckets to get water from the ocean to dump on the fire. You
can guess the rest. (California Examiner)
THE END IS
NEAR
Chinese authorities have organized a crackdown on
religious cults in order to prevent "social unrest instigated
by religious fanatics" as the millenium approaches. Leaders of
doomsday cults who have preached that the end of the world
will come in the new millenium have been arrested and
executed, and followers of these religions have accused the
government of torturing their members. Authorities stress that
"only normal religious activity, such as worship in officially
registered churches," will be tolerated. (South China Morning
Post)
THE END IS REALLY NEAR
A Newsweek poll discovered
that 40 per cent of all Americans believe that the world will
end as the Bible predicts, and 47 per cent believe that the
Antichrist is on the earth now. But as long as they worship in
officially registered churches we can't accuse them of being
doomsday cultists.
TABLOID LOVE
That pillar of hard
journalism, The Weekly World News,reports that a Japanese
woman and an extraterrestrial she learned to love are nearing
their seven year wedding anniversary. Miyoki Tanaka, 25,
married X1431 to "bolster the cause of interplanetary
cooperation and peace." Tanaka has just a few complaints: "He
has a nasty habit of floating around the room at night, which
is distracting when you're trying to sleep," she said. And the
alien hates Tanaka's cooking, and subsists on a diet of "show
polish and brine." Charming.
TOTALLY
UN-HIP MDs
Doctors in emergency rooms have come across a new
problem: how to remove body piercings. Apparently, very few
doctors have any idea about how to remove jewelry from
tongues, lips, nose, eyebrows or genetalia, and this can cause
potentially life-threatening complications if bleeding,
swelling or infections develop during medical emergencies.
(Reuters)
POWER OF PRAYER
Researchers at the Mid-America Institute at
St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City concluded from a study of
almost one thousand heart patients that those who were the
unknowing recipients of prayers from stangers generally needed
less medication and recovered faster than those in the control
group. (Annals of Internal Medicine)
BEST OF FRIENDS
South Korean president Kim Dae-jung says he will end the cold
war with North Korea by the end of his term of office in 2003.
Unfortunately, the North Korean Central News Agency recently
ran this cheerful warning: "A war on the Korean peninsula is
neither a war like a military drill of unilateral offensive as
in Yugoslavia and Iraq nor a dispute like a simple conflict. A
war here is a large thermo-nuclear war in which more than a
thousand nuclear bombs with explosive power of 13,000 kilotons
deployed in South Korea will go off..." This on the heels of
last new year's address from the the government, calling on
their citizens to "love rifles, earnestly learn military
affairs and turn the whole country into an impregnable
fortress." Oh, and have a nice day.
MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DEAL
Police in Dhaka, Bangladesh, have captured two
monkeys‹Munni and Hamid‹who had been trained to deliver drugs
to addicts and collect their money. (Fortean Times)
GET
IT FREE ON THE NET
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has
approved a bill to outlaw "crush" videos, in which women are
shown crushing small animals with spiked heels. These,
apparently, satisfy the fetish some people have to see
"animals killed in cruel fashion."
SMILE FOR THE
MUGSHOT
A man who had taken pictures of his friends with
their stolen loot in order to "show friends in prison how well
they were doing," was caught when he took the pictures in for
developing at a supermarket they had robbed two weeks earlier.
The store staff recognized the men in the photos and police
arrested Roland Tough, 22, when he returned to pick up his
pictures. (London Times)
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Copyright 2000 by Andreas Ohrt
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Email:aohrt@hotmail.com
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