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Curious Times No. 172
December 26, 2002HAVE A SAFE HOLIDAY SEASON
From the Australian Bureau of Statistics, some holiday mishaps you may want to try to avoid this year. According to their studies, 31 Australians have died since 1996 by watering their Christmas tree while the lights were plugged in; 19 Australians have died in the past three years by eating Christmas decorations they believed were chocolate; four people broke their arms last year while pulling Christmas crackers; 18 people have had serious burns since 1998 trying on new sweaters with a lit cigarette in their mouth; 142 were injured in 1998 by not removing all the pins from new shirts; 548 Australians have been rushed to the emergency room in the past two years after trying to open a bottle of beer with their teeth or eye sockets; and eight Australians cracked their skulls in 1997 after passing out while throwing up in the toilet.CLONES FOR CHRISTMAS
Our peculiar friends the Raelians have promised that a human clone will be born before the end of this year. Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, director of Clonaid, the company which the Raelians set up last year, told CTV News that they had implanted 10 cloned embryos last spring, and that five of them were developing healthfully. The Raelians are a "religious cult" found by Claude Vorilhon, aka Rael, who was contacted by ETs in 1973, and has since tried to build an embassy to welcome his alien friends to Earth. In testimony before a U.S. congressional panel on cloning in March 2001, Rael said that the goal of their cloning experiments are to "transfer, or download, or upload, your personality and yur soul into this new being." He also added that his is not a religious cult. "Our god is science," he said with a straight face. (CP)COULD YOU ORGASM A BIT MORE QUIETLY PLEASE?
A swingers club in Berlin was shut down last week after neighbours complained about the noises coming from the club. A Berlin courtroom heard testimoney that a constant stream of cars would stop in front of the club, and members would slams doors and talk loudly outside the club at all hours of the night. The worst offence though, was the never-ending loud and annoying "moans and shrieks of pleasure," which the court decided broke the noise regulations for that district of town. "There are other clubs and brothels in this area and the customers there don'e make so much noise. They are more discreet," said a court spokesperson (Reuters)YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS
Koko, the famous "talking" gorilla, has released her first CD, entitled Fine Animal Gorilla. According to her handlers, Koko wrote all the lyrics for the album (which was performed by humans), and listened to different mixes of the songs in order the approve of the final cuts that made it onto the CD. Jennifer Patterson, a spokesperson for the Gorilla Foundation, claims that Koko's lyrics "show a real depth of emotion. She's a complex person." Sample clips of some of her songs, such as Scary Alligator, Even Gorillas Get the Blues, and I'm Goin' to Maui, can be heard at www.koko.org.WOULD YOU LIKE COKE WITH THAT?
A drug sting at a Chicago Burger King has finally shut down a cocaine dealing operation which used the drive-through window to sell drugs. Police arrested four suspects last week after a nine-month operation in which undercover officers ordered between a half a gram to an ounce of coke from the drive-through window. Eventually they worked a deal to buy a kilo of coke for $25,000, at which point they busted the entire night shift at the Burger King outlet. (Chicago Tribune)BEAT AND BE BEATEN
A professor at Ohio State University, Dr. Bruce Weinberg, has been studying the economics behind spanking, and found the unsurprising fact that the poorer your family is, the more likely you are to be spanked. He found that children in $6,000-a-year households were spanked an average of ever six weeks, children in a $17,000-a-year household get spanked every four months, and, as income rises, spankings decrease. Although he doesn't draw any real conclusions as to why this might be so, other than that poverty breeds frustration and violence (duh!), he also found that children who are spanked are less successful as adults, so it may simply be that people who spank are poor because they were spanked as children, and so poor families (who spank) are caught in an endless cycle of spanking and poverty. I guess the moral of this story is don't spank you kids, so you can leech off them when they become successful adults. (Slate)OH, OH, OH! CANADA
Springbank high school in Calgary has offered a $300 reward to find a prankster who managed to remove the video of "O Canada" (which plays every morning in all of the classrooms in the school) and splice in about 30 seconds of hardcore porn. The video was then replaced and all the students in the school got a dose of sex ed during last week's screening of the "O Canada" vid. (AP)GAMBLING DEBTS ARE THE LEAST OF YOUR PROBLEMS, SICKO
A Detroit man is in police custody after arranging to have his gambling debt wiped clean by letting his wife be raped. The man told police that he had arranged to let a man come into his home and rape his wife in order to clear a debt of $5000 which he had lost playing pool. His wife was blissfully unaware of the scheme. (clickondetroit.com)MUST-MISS TV
One more reason to smash your television set into itsy-bitsy pieces. A new "reality TV" show called Extreme Makeover will follow three people as they receive a variety of cosmetic surgeries, including nose jobs, cosmetic dentistry, liposuction, chin implants, tummy tucks and new hairstyles and wardrobes. The show will then follow the three as they "attempt to transform their lives." Thrills! (ABC News)I READ IT ON THE INTERNET SO IT MUST BE TRUE FACT OF THE WEEK
Americans use enough foam peanuts every year to fill ten 85-story skyscrapers.
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