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News Of The Weird
THIS WEEK IN COW URINE

April 21, 2005

The New Zealand agricultural company Summit-Quinphos revealed in March that it has a working model of an automated nitrogen-inhibiting sprayer that fits under a cow’s tail, and that it has a government grant to develop the device. A company spokesman said nitrogen from cow urine, concentrated in small patches in a field, currently must be neutralized by expensively treating the entire field. However, the company’s “tail-activated” gizmo immediately fires a blast of inhibiting chemical at the ground directly below every time the cow lifts her tail for a call of nature.  Summit-Quinphos scientist Jamie Blennerhasset solemnly swears that the announcement was not an April Fool’s joke.







LEAST COMPETENT PERSON EVER



In March, an Iowa administrative law judge denied Barbara J. Dutton unemployment benefits, ruling that her firing as supply clerk at a 12-person Des Moines company was justified by her incompetence. According to records cited by the judge, Dutton had earnestly ordered office supplies during an 18-month period totaling about $230,000, including 16,000 Bic pens and nearly $15,000 worth of Scotch tape. Since there was no evidence of dishonesty, the company was left with the conclusion that she was simply overmatched in her job.







COMMUNIQUES TO NOWHERE



TalkToAliens.com began taking orders in March, recording people’s messages at $3.99 per minute and beaming them into space, aimed toward the Milky Way by a huge parabolic dish antenna in Connecticut on a relatively accessible FM frequency. And in December, German inventor Juergen Broether introduced his “telephonic angel” system (at about US$2,000), which is a battery-operated, underground loudspeaker that, buried at a gravesite, allows someone to speak into a microphone and have the messages amplified  to the departed for up to a year on a single battery charge.







CHEAP THRILLS



A February

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

dispatch from El Alberto, Mexico (near Mexico City), profiled a theme park in which potential and wannabe emigrants to the United States can test their survival skills in an obstacle course that touches on the rigors migrants endure sneaking across the border. The cost of this rehearsal for a better life is an admission fee of the equivalent of US$13.







CUTTING EDGE SCIENCE



Bureaucrats in North Korea’s Communist Party, summarizing their understanding of the way the brain works, announced in January that henceforth all men would be expected to wear their hair short (two inches, maximum) in that longer hair impairs function by taking oxygen away from the nerves in the head. Balding men would be allowed another inch for comb-overs. Hair length for women was not addressed.







MODERN MEDICINE



In March, the Oregon board that enforces teachers’ standards and practices charged Salem high school coach and science teacher Scott Reed with gross neglect of duty after investigating parents’ complaints that he routinely licked the bleeding wounds of his players to help them recover. In addition to his being a science teacher, Reed had also earlier taken the standard teachers’ seminar on bodily fluid contact, which he was ordered by the board to retake.