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News Of The Weird
THE OFFICIAL SHOE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
December 08, 2005
Artist Judi Werthein's high-top sneaker "Brinco" went on sale recently for $215 a pair at boutiques in San Diego and New York City. They have tiny accessories—compass and flashlight on the shoelaces, secret pocket in the shoe's tongue—but she also gives away many pairs in Tijuana because she actually designed the shoe for Mexican migrants to wear when they sneak across the border into the United States. The back of the shoe has a drawing of the country's patron saint of migrants and a removable foot support has a crude map of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a November Associated Press report.
THIS WEEK IN ARYAN TWINS
Blond twins, Lamb and Lynx Gaede, age 13, of Bakersfield, Calif., sing professionally as Prussian Blue at white-supremacy concerts and rallies and on the white-nationalist Resistance Records label. They have songs like "Sacrifice," which is a tribute to Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, according to an October ABC News story. The girls' parents home-school them and are active in the Aryan movement (rancher-dad Ted Shaw's cattle brand is a swastika). Said Lynx, "We want our people to stay white. [W]e don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle."
MISMANAGED CARE
According to more than 50 alleged witnesses in 30 pending lawsuits, former Seattle-area gynecologist Charles Momah, 48, sexually abused patients and permitted his non-gynecologist twin brother Dennis to stand in for him during some appointments during which he also sexually abused patients. Examples of suspicious behavior, according to witness statements: Sometimes their doctor was talkative, sometimes confused and nearly silent; sometimes he spoke English clearly, sometimes broken; sometimes he walked with a limp, sometimes not; sometimes there were scars on his face, sometimes not. The Momahs deny everything, but Charles was convicted in November of sexually abusing four of the patients.
POLICE BLOTTER
From the newspaper The State (Columbia, S.C., Nov. 14, 2005), regarding fugitive Rodney Dane Higginbotham, wanted for criminal domestic violence: "Alleged Crime: Police said Higginbotham argued with his wife because she had not cooked anything. When she began cooking, he started making spaghetti while eating crackers and squeeze cheese. They argued, and he squeezed cheese on the kitchen floor. She squeezed the cheese on his truck, and he squeezed the cheese in her hair before fleeing in his truck. The wife said she washed her hair before the officer arrived to take her complaint."
BRIGHT IDEAS
In November, NASCAR announced it had contracted with the romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises to arrange for steamy women's novels with car-racing themes, beginning with Pamela Britton's forthcoming book In the Groove. And according to an October Los Angeles Times report, the trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America contracted to pay two writers a "six-figure" fee to write a novel about a national panic resulting from a fear that drug lobbyists had actually been trying to spread in Congress, specifically, that terrorists might poison lower-priced drug imports from Canada. The Times reported that the association recently killed the project and blamed the whole idea on an unsupervised lower-level executive. MTW