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August 13, 2009 BAD DOG!
William Dillon was released in November after 26 years in prison when a DNA test ruled him out as the murderer. He was the second Florida man recently freed by DNA after being positively identified at trial by a star police dog, Harass II. Bill Preston, the dog's trainer, had sworn Harass II could amazingly track scents through water and after months of site contamination. In June, the Innocence Project of Florida said as many as 60 other convicts might have been "identified" by Harass II. According to an Orlando Sentinel report, only one judge thought to actually test Harass II's ability in a courtroom, and he wrote that the dog failed badly.
CELEBRITY SKIVVIES
"If I had portrayed Hitler in his underpants," explained Belgian artist Jan Bucquoy at the opening of his museum in July in Brussels, "there would not have been a war." Bucquoy has displayed, in glass cases, the drawers of prominent Belgians, but also exhibits "Warhol-type" drawings of underwear-clad celebrities as he imagines them (like Margaret Thatcher). As Bucquoy told Reuters: "If you are scared of someone, just imagine them in their underpants. The hierarchy will fall." Whose knickers does the artist most covet? France's First Lady Carla Bruni's would be nice, he said, but even better, the pope's.
PANTS ENCOUNTER
After haggling for a while at its June 16 meeting, the county board in Lincoln, Neb., finally voted, 2-1, to reimburse Shum Darwin for his pants, which went missing at the jail after Darwin was arrested. The city's liability was clear; the debate was about whether the pants were worth $12 or $10.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
An investigation by the U.K. TV channel More4 revealed in June that local U.K. councils spend the equivalent of $80 million a year translating their documents into dozens of languages in the cause of "fairness," even obscure languages that few residents speak, and even given evidence that, in dozens of cases, no one has ever tried to access the documents. Translations were found in Albanian, Bengali, Kurdish, Somali, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sierra Leonean Creole, Karen (eastern Burma) and Ga (Ghana), among others.
ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE
David Shayler, 43, used to be a British MI5 intelligence officer, but apparently went downhill after a controversy with superiors and today lives as Delores Kent, in full female dress, and believes "in [his] heart" that he is the Messiah who will save mankind from its upcoming 2012 doomsday by turning billions of people on to the virtues of hemp, which is "perfectly balanced…full of omega-3, -6, and -9 to help muscles grow and repair." Shayler/Kent also believes that Americans staged 9/11 and that Jesus Christ was, like him, a transvestite.
INCOMPETENT COPS
Officers in Forrest City, Ark., arrested Lawrence Harden, Jr. in June for robbing a liquor store. They cuffed him, shackled him and head-stuffed him into their SUV, but he got out and ran away. Police dogs found Harden an hour later, and he was re-cuffed, re-shackled and re-head-stuffed into a squad car. He got out again and ran away (but was caught again and finally jailed).
UN-DUNG HEROES
News of the Weird's favorite animal was called "heroic" by Argentine researchers in a July issue of the journal Paleontology. Had it not been for high-performance South American scarab dung beetles, they wrote, gargantuan prehistoric mammals would have choked vast areas of the continent knee-deep in manure. The researchers found that, by burying tennis-ball-sized "food supplies" for their young, the beetles also improved surface sanitation by leaving less dung available for "disease-carrying flies." Maui Time Weekly, Chuck Shepherd
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| Entertainment and lifestyle news for Maui, Hawaii and the surrounding Islands. Maui Time Weekly is Mauis only independent and locally owned newspaper.
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