Remove ImagesNews of the Weird
July 31, 2008
RED APPLE TAPE
The European Union allows fruits and vegetables to be sold only in prescribed sizes and colors (such as its 35 pages of regulations governing 250 varieties of the apple, or rules that cucumbers must be straight and bananas curved). In June, British marketer Tim Down complained that he was forced to discard 5,000 kiwi fruit because they were 1 millimeter in diameter too small and one-fourth of an ounce too light. (It is illegal even to give them away, as that would undermine the market price.) "Improvements" in the EU system continue, according to a July Washington Post dispatch from Brussels: Despite 10 pages of standards on the onion and 19 amendments, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture recently issued a report urging further refinements, using 29 pages and 43 photographs.
THEY'RE BANANAS
Artist Michael Fernandes' exhibit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June caused a commotion because it was merely a banana on a gallery's windowsill, and Fernandes had it priced at $2,500 Canadian (down from his original thought, $15,000). Actually, Fernandes changed bananas every day (eating the old one), placing progressively greener ones out to demonstrate the banana's transitory nature. "We (humans) are also temporal, but we live as if we are not," he wrote. Despite the steep price, two collectors placed holds on the "work," requiring the gallery's co-owner, Victoria Page, to get assurance from callers. "It's a banana; you understand that it's a banana?"
WALK OF SHAME
The June transfer of a prisoner from lockup to Britain's Northampton Crown Court, just across the street, required summoning the closest prison van (57 miles away) to come give him a ride. The prisoner (accused thief Mark Bailey) could not simply be walked across the street because officials feared that public, custodial exposure (a "perp walk") would embarrass him, in violation of his "human rights."
DOMESTIC DISPUTE
Police, including SWAT officers, were called to an apartment in Mesa, Ariz., in June after neighbors reported a fight between a man and woman that included yelling and breaking things inside. When they arrived, they found only a 21-year-old man, conducting the fight by himself, alternating a high-pitched voice with a low-pitched one. He was referred for a medical exam.
QUESTIONABLE JUDGMENTS
In March, a jury acquitted the former parking manager for Fresno, Calif., Bob Madewell, of all misuse-of-funds charges, including one count for reducing the minor league baseball Grizzlies' parking fees in exchange for tickets for his brother and himself, and another count in which he paid a female worker $300 in city funds to let him touch her breasts. Juror Trish Riederer, in an interview with the Fresno Bee, said she and her fellow jurors believe that Madewell did everything that prosecutors say he did but that the city did not have clear procedures in place about Madewell's scope of authority.
SIZE MATTERS
Ronald McDade, charged with raping a teenager in Lansdale, Pa., in January, petitioned to be allowed to submit a plaster cast of his penis to the jury, to demonstrate that, since he is an "extremely large" man (according to his lawyer), he could not physically have penetrated the girl without causing genital injury (and no such injury was found). News of the Weird has reported previously on rape defendants offering to give the jury either a photograph, or a live exhibition, to make the same point. MTW