CURIOUS TIMES: Trippy News from a Dysfunctional Planet

Curious Times No. 402
May 24, 2007

WHAT BETTER INITIATION INTO MANHOOD THAN BEING SCREWED OVER BY A USELESS GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE?
The City of Montreal has been ordered to pay $27,000 to a family who suffered a “party from hell” thanks to a drunk janitor at the cultural centre where the family was trying to celebrate a bar mitzvah. Instead of making sure everything was running smoothly at the venue, the janitor spent his work day sexually harassing the female guests, stealing ice from the machine and trying to sell it to the family, and refusing to put toilet paper in the bathrooms. When several paraplegic guests got trapped in a broken elevator, the janitor did nothing, and when a member of the band suffered a heart attack, the janitor claimed not to know the address of the cultural centre during the 911 call. Having survived the worst party of their lives, the family lodged a complaint with the city in order to receive an apology. Instead, the city wrote a 40-page defense statement in which they accused the family of lying about being Jewish. (CBC)

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU HAVE A GAMBLING PROBLEM? DEPENDS...
Although I couldn’t find the website that actually sells these things, according to several very reliable Canadian newspapers there is now a company out of Kitchener, Ontario which is marketing adult diapers to gamblers who frequent all-night casinos and don’t want to have to be interrupted by nature’s call. So the next time you’re playing Blackjack and you wonder where that smell of urine is coming from, you can pin it on that guy at your table wearing a pair of soggy pants. (Canada.com)

TOO BAD THERE’S NO REWARD FOR BEING A MORON
Time now for another tale from the “People Unclear on the Concept” department: last week a woman in North Carolina who robbed a Bank of America turned herself in to the Sheriff’s office hoping to claim the reward for her arrest. (wwaytv3.com)

IT’S OFFICIAL -- WORK SUCKS
Big surprise! French workers have come out on top as the world’s biggest whiners in a study which tracked the workplace satisfaction levels of 14,000 employees in 23 countries. Final stats showed that the French complain the most about their work followed by the British, Swedish and Americans. In contrast, Dutch, Irish and Thai workers complained the least. The lowest morale of all was found in the workers of Japan, but the study found that the Japanese don’t tend to complain about their lot. (AFP)

THE WORLD FATNESS CHART

SEXUAL FRUSTRATION IS THE KEY TO A SUCCESSFUL CAREER
A professor at a German University who surveyed almost 32,000 men and woman has concluded that having less sex can lead to having no sex at all. The survey found that having less sex tends to make people seek more work commitments in order to relieve their sexual frustrations. Then, the stress of working too much cuts into your time and ability to have sex at all, turning you into a sexless workaholic (welcome to middle-age!). On the other hand, the survey also found that people who have sex at least twice a week don’t want to work very much and aren’t nearly as involved in extracurricular activities. (Spiegel.de)

EVER GET THE FEELING YOU’RE BEING WATCHED?
Since all of the world’s serious problems have now been solved, bored scientists in the UK decided to study the walking speed of pedestrians in the world’s largest cities and found that people are now walking 10 percent faster than they did in the nineties. They also ranked each city by walking speed and found that the citizens of Singapore are in the biggest hurry, followed by pedestrians in Copenhagen and Madrid. (ITV.com)

SOON TO BE FOLLOWED BY BEER-FLAVOURED PIZZA
We all know that most men are obsessed with pizza and beer, so it’s kind of odd that nobody has ever combined their two passions. Until now, that is. A man in Illinois has created the world’s first pizza-flavoured beer, aptly called “Mamma Mia,” which he is brewing in his home with hopes of someday getting national distribution. “It's pizza and beer in a bottle,” says creator Tom Seefurth, who brags that there are actually real pieces of pizza stirred into the mix. Kind of similar to the beer you usually barf up at the end of the night. Check it out at MammaMiaPizzaBeer.com

EVERYTHING FUN IS BAD FOR YOU
I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but new research has discovered that people who perform oral sex have twice the risk of getting throat cancer than those who don’t, and people who have more than five oral sex partners in their lifetime are 250% more likely to get the cancer. (New Scientist)

I-READ-IT-ON-THE-INTERNET-SO-IT-MUST-BE-TRUE FACT OF THE WEEK
If all the Lego bricks in the world were distributed evenly everybody on Earth would get 30 pieces.