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News Of The Weird
BREAST NEWS EVER

December 29, 2005

The Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands, announced recently that retail studies student Wendy Rameckers had designed a wall with rows of silicon breasts in various shapes, primarily, she said, to help male shoppers decide what size bra to buy for their women. And prominent British futurist Ian Pearson of BT Laboratories told reporters in October that he could see the day when breast implants house MP3 players to give the implants some actual functionality.







GOOD MEDICAL COVERAGE



The increased expectations of fans have driven today’s bullfighters to use riskier moves than their predecessors did, and competition has pressured them to return to work quickly after being gored. As a result, according to a November Wall Street Journal dispatch from Madrid, up to three dozen elite surgeons, highly skilled in complicated procedures, follow the bullfight circuit, on call to repair serious injuries that formerly would kill or maim a matador. In fact, most bullfighters today have already endured several critical gorings but remain eager to work.







LEADING ECONOMIC INDICATORS



The hit TV series Frasier grossed $1.5 billion during its 11-year run, but according to the show’s executives (responding to a recent lawsuit by the program’s creators for a greater share of the “profits”), the traditional Hollywood accounting methods reveal that the show earned no profit over its lifetime but actually lost $200 million.







ANIMALS BEING ANIMALS



In November in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, as the staff of the television company Endemol NV were working to set up 4 million dominoes in an attempt at a new Guinness Book record, a sparrow flew in through a window, landed on the formation, and toppled about 23,000 of them before built-in gaps stopped the collapse. An exterminator with an air rifle tracked the bird down in the building and killed it, to the outrage of animal rights advocates.







LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS



Michael Drennon, 26, was charged with bank robbery in Bensalem, Pa., in October after accidentally dropping his pay stub at the scene, even though he had cleverly blotted out his name and address with a black indelible marker. (Bensalem’s director of public safety said the stub was easy to read: “We just (held) it under a light.”) And Louis Jasick, 34 and a friend who were involved in a scavenger hunt knocked on the back door of the police station in Fruitport Township, Mich., in November to ask if officers would please help with the next item on their list and pose for a photograph of a cop eating a doughnut. The officers obliged but one of them recognized Jasick from a recent felony warrant and arrested him.







CHILD SUPPORT FOLLIES



News of the Weird has reported several times about hard-luck men who, believing they are biological fathers, agree to child support, only to learn via a DNA test that they are not, but whom judges will not let rescind those agreements. An even more ironic case emerged from the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal in December. A man had originally agreed to support his new wife’s daughter, but then he and his wife divorced, and the court ruled he must continue to support the girl even though the wife has now married the man who is the girl’s biological father. MTW