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April 03, 2008
HOT CHICKS
In February Dakota Abbott, 16, edged out Samantha Phillips, 17, to become Miss Outdoors 2008 in Maryland's Eastern Shore region's annual beauty-contest-and-muskrat-skinning festival. The two were the only beauty contestants (out of eight) who entered both competitions. Abbott won her skinning division, but while she sang a song for the judges, Phillips won the talent trophy by skinning a muskrat on stage. "I'll be honest," she said to a Washington Post reporter. "I can't sing. I can't dance, and I don't play any musical instruments." But she took her four-inch blade, sticking it just above the tail, and sliced. "You want to take your knuckles and separate the meat from the hide, just like this," she told the judges, with her hand inside the muskrat.
COMPELLING EXPLANATION
In the 2006 take-off crash of a Comair commuter airliner at the regional airport in Lexington, Ky. (which the FAA blamed on pilot error), all 47 passengers were killed, and 21 lawsuits have been filed, with attorney William Johnson defending the only cockpit survivor (the first officer). The Lexington Herald-Leader reported in January that, in court papers filed in the lawsuits, Johnson had offered the defense that the seat-belted-in passengers should share the blame for their own deaths, in that they should have chosen other airports that might have been safer. Shortly after the newspaper report, Johnson withdrew the defense.
EXPLAINS A LOT
A prominent British novelist (former winner of the prestigious Whitbread Prize) announced in January that she had won a settlement of the equivalent of more than $200,000 from a shoe manufacturer in the town of Totnes because fumes from its factory so sapped her creativity that she was forced to write down-market thrillers instead of literary works. Joan Brady said numbness in her hands and legs, caused by pollutants, made her settle on simpler plotlines involving violence as she worked out her aggression toward the factory-owners.
PRIORITIES
In January, a man in Citrus Heights, Calif., had a one-car accident that left him with serious head and body injuries that were perhaps exacerbated because he was not wearing a seat belt (even though the 12-pack of beer on the seat beside him was securely buckled, and survived).
GREAT MOMENTS IN MATURITY
Lawyer Kathy Brewer Rentas, 49, was charged with assault in February after asking to shake hands with federal lawyer Jennifer Keane (who was prosecuting Rentas' husband for probation violation). The handshake began in businesslike fashion, but according to a court security guard, Rentas squeezed the hand, then yanked it up and down hard, "almost pull[ing] Keene's arm out of its socket" and nearly sending her tumbling to the ground.
CAN'T STOP MYSELF
In February, a court in Cardiff, Wales, once again released Thelma Dennis, 50, to get therapy for her addiction of making bogus emergency ("999") telephone calls, even though she has been prosecuted about 60 times in 24 years on similar charges. In an earlier case, Dennis agreed to a therapy that sent painful shocks through her body every time she dialed 999, and she remained free of problems for four years but reoffended recently by making up a bomb threat against a store. MTW
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