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News Of The Weird
LIVING WAGE

May 11, 2006

In April issues of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the chief executives of two huge companies in politically sensitive industries were revealed to have received such extravagant bonuses or stock options that even veteran industry observers were said to be shocked. While customers of both companies are chronically panicked about rising prices, Lee Raymond, who retired as CEO of ExxonMobil in December, was reported by the Times to have received the equivalent of $144,000 every day for 13 years, and William McGuire, CEO since 1996 of the highly profitable health-insurance manager United Healthcare, was reported by the Journal to be sitting on stock options that, because they were mysteriously timed to kick in at the best possible date, are worth $1.6 billion.







CHUTZPAH!



Convicted drunk driver Joshua Campbell, 23, filed a lawsuit in April against the driver he hit, Bloomfield Township, Mich., police officer Gary Davis, asking the police department to pay him for the “humiliation,” “embarrassment” and physical injuries he received. Campbell claims that Davis unsafely turned around on Interstate 75 after a traffic stop and that the turnaround was the cause of the collision. Bloomfield police say that Campbell, in addition to having a 0.17 blood alcohol reading, was going 90 mph and that three patrol cars on the scene with flashing lights should have been a signal to Campbell to slow down.







AWESOME!



Unexpected childbirths happen from time to time, but the genuinely surprised mother in Ojo Caliente, N.M., in February was Kayla Alire, 18, who just two hours earlier had hit two three-pointers as a starting guard for the town’s high school girls’ basketball team.







TOUGH GUYS



Prosecutors in Chicago are proceeding with the case against Howard Morgan for allegedly shooting at a police officer. Morgan denies it, but what was clear was that in returning fire, police shots hit Morgan 25 times (from which he is recovering satisfactorily, according to a January WMAQ-TV story). Then there was the endurance of a 35-year-old man in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who, according to a February Poughkeepsie Journal report, had just been a gunshot victim for the fourth time in the same housing complex. The first and fourth incidents involved multiple wounds.







BRIGHT IDEA



Shellie White, 30, was apprehended in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., in March, two years after she fled Arizona with her two children in a custody dispute with her ex-husband. For most of the two years, she has been living as a man (with a female partner), having convinced the kids, now aged 6 and 8, that she is actually their father.







MEN’S PACKAGES IN THE NEWS



In Savannah, Ga., in March, police picked up Carlos Little, wandering around a housing complex with a head injury, which he said was from a street robbery, but they later learned from a witness that Little and another man had fought over who was the better-”endowed” (and that, in the showdown, Little proved littler). And in Mexico, according to an April Reuters dispatch, one distinct presidential campaign theme this year is how candidates explicitly tout their manliness; one radio ad, for example, praises Felipe Calderon’s “balls,” while a TV ad acclaims Roberto Medrazo for having “big ones.” MTW