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Curious Times No. 286
March
3, 2005
THE WAGES ARE AWFUL, THE TIPS SUCK, AND THE CUSTOMERS WILL VOMIT ON
YOUR ROBE
Last week we learned about a festival in India during which women have
evil spirits physically beaten out of them with broomsticks. This week,
a more scholarly approach has been created by a prestigious Vatican-backed
college in Milan, Italy, which is rolling out a two-month long course
in exorcism. The Athenaeum Pontificium Regina Apostolorum (it’s name
is easier to pronounce if you’re actually possessed by the devil)
has created the course in order to give would-be Roman Catholic priests
the proper tools for battling Satan over the souls of the possessed. No
word on whether the school will offer a practicum in hell. (BBC)
EXTRA MARKS FOR DESTRUCTIVENESS
Of course, if exorcism is too fine of an art for you, you can always defeat
Satan by blowing him up real good... and you won’t need no fancy
college degree! Yes, a high school teacher in Florida was arrested last
week after teaching his students how to build and detonate a home-made
bomb. David Pieski, 42, taught his students the chemical composition to
create a powerful explosive, showed them how to use an electric detonator
in order to stay clear of the blast, and even took them on a short field
trip to the school’s golf course in order to videotape the explosion
of his homemade bomb. In his defense, Pieski simply argued that the project
was a chemistry experiment, and not an explosion. (Yahoo
News)
WILL THE FUTURE EVER GET HERE?
We’re still waiting for robot maids, moving sidewalks, and flying
cars, but the U.S. Air Force is already studying the feasibility of teleportation.
Not only that, but they recently spent $25,000 for a study done by a company
called Warp Drive Metrics, which concluded that “we are still very
far away from being able to entangle and teleport human beings and bulk
inanimate objects.” Hey, I could have told them that for $5,000!
(NBC
News)
BEAM ME UP, JESUS
Of course, what’s difficult for the Air Force is old hat for God.
According to an article in the Philippine
Daily Inquirer, there are two cases of teleportation documented in
the Bible. The first, in Acts 8: 38-40, the apostle Philip disappears
and is teleported to an entirely different town immediately after performing
a baptism. The second incident of teleportation occurs in John 6: 16-21,
where Jesus steps into a boat with his disciples and they immediately
find themselves on a shore about four miles away.
PRELUDE TO A LOW BUDGET HORROR FLICK
A 26-year-old Indian man is hoping to get into the Guinness Book of Records
with his plan to eat 50 cockroaches in one minute. The current record
sits at 36, but Ramesh Kumar says he has eaten cockroaches and other insects
since his childhood and feels confident that he can easily raise the bar.
After he breaks the cockroach eating record, he next plans to go after
title number two by staying in a glass case filled with 25,000 cockroaches
for three days. (Ananova)
LEAST SURPRISING NEWS OF THE WEEK
Human rights groups in Uganda who had planned to stage “The Vagina
Monologues” in order to promote their campaign to stop violence against
women in that country have been stopped by authorities who called the
play a vulgar affront to public morality. Information Minister Nsaba Buturo
threatened to arrest the organizers if the show was performed, calling
the play “a promotion of homosexuality, lesbianism and worship of
the female sexual organ”. (www.mg.co.za)
PREPARE THIS CHILD FOR A LIFE OF OSTRACIZATION BY HIS PEERS
A three-year-old boy in Leeds, England has become the youngest member
of the smart-ass group Mensa after finishing a series of tests run by
psychologists from the University of York. The tests show that the boy
has an IQ of 137, putting him in the top two percent of the population.
“We have 25,500 members,” said a spokesperson for Mensa, “and
fewer than 30 are under the age of 10.” (BBC)
WE’RE SICK OF WORKING FOR PEANUTS
Eight artists from Thailand have entered the Guinness Book of World Records
after selling a painting for $39,000. That doesn’t sound like a world
record setting amount until you realize the “artists” are elephants.
According to Anchalle Kalmapijit, director of the Mae Sa Elephant Camp,
the elephants have been trained for many years by prominent painters.
“They can draw abstract or realistic paintings,” said Kalmapijit,
“they are the only elephant group in the world who can do this.”
Their painting, named “Cold Wind, Swirling Mist, Charming Lanna Number
One,” was sold to an art lover in the United States. “At first
we didn’t aim to sell this picture, but we had a deep desire to show
the world what Thai elephants can do,” said the elephants’ trainer,
adding that the profits from the sale will be spent on care for the 78
elephants currently living at the camp. (abc.net.au)
GOOD LUCK AT YOUR NEXT DENTAL CHECKUP
The chocolate bar company Nestle is finding a boom in the sales of Kit
Kat chocolate bars in Japan, where students studying for exams have been
feverishly buying them up in order to get the good luck which the candy
supposedly brings. Nestle has had trouble keeping the chocolate bars stocked
ever since entering the Japanese market, due to the similarities between
the phrase “Kit Kat” and the Japanese phrase “Kitto Katsu,”
which traditionally has been used by students to wish each other luck
before important exams.
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