Source: Maui Time, Maui News, Best of Maui, Maui Activities

News%20of%20the%20Weird

by Chuck Shepherd

October 23, 2008

NO ‘RICARDO NIXON’?

Candidates for local office in Brazil can either register under their own names or make them up, and in the October election this year, three candidates chose “Barack Obama” (none won), and others registered under “Bill Clinton,” “Jorge Bushi” and “Chico Bin Laden,” but more than 200 offered themselves under the name of the country’s popular president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

SLEEPING WITH THE FISHES

Chilean-Danish artist Marco Evaristti is working with condemned Texas inmate Gene Hathorn, 47 (convicted killer of three in 1985), on an anti-capital punishment exhibit to be staged after Hathorn’s execution. The murderer’s body would be frozen, then made into flakes that museum visitors could feed to goldfish. Evaristti is most noted for his 2000 exhibit in which he placed live goldfish in several electric blenders and invited museum-goers to turn them on. 

FLYING CRAP

An unfortunate burst of wind disrupted an outside art installation at the Paul Klee center in Bern, Switzerland, in August, ripping an inflatable exhibit from its moorings and carrying it away. The exhibit, by American Paul McCarthy, was a sculpture entitled “Complex Shit,” and the inflatable item was supposed to be a dog dropping the size of a house. Explained the Klee center’s Web site (challengingly), the show features “interweaving, diverse, not to say conflictive emphases and a broad spectrum of items to form a dynamic exchange of parallel and self-eclipsing spatial and temporal zones.” (Or, wrote London’s Daily Telegraph in broken French, it is “what happens when la merde hits le ventilateur.”) 

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Things Government Does When It’s Not Bailing Out the Economy: (1) The municipal transit company in Austin, Texas, unveiled a rider-education campaign in August, giving step-by-step instructions in how to stand up on buses without falling over. When the bus is accelerating, “lean forward and put your weight on your front foot.” (The introductory frame on the poster features a harried rider exclaiming, “Help! I’ll never figure it out!”) (2) A British government-funded poster campaign, also introduced in August, aims to encourage those waiting for municipal buses to do Pilates-type movements to improve physical fitness. Among the suggestions: standing on one leg, pointing the toes forward, clenching the buttocks. 

DISABLE BODY

Most workers who have retired in the last few years from New York’s Long Island Rail Road have also qualified for disability payments (though most did not claim such disabilities while working), according to a September New York Times investigation of state records. Lax union work rules, plus the astonishingly cooperative “Railroad Retirement Board” (which virtually never rejects a disability application), have resulted in nearly every worker drawing about as much money in retirement as he made on the job. In October, the Times also discovered that many of the same retirees were apparently so confident that their “disability” status would be approved that they also purchased private disability insurance to make retirement even more lucrative. 

HOODLUMS

Police in Dortmund, Germany, arrested six Romanian men in June and charged them with stealing from trucks on the open highway. Allegedly, the thieves would drive their own truck carefully up behind a tractor-trailer at highway speed, and a man on the hood would reach out and open the back of the rig with a bolt cutter. He would climb in and loot the rig of computers and cell phones by passing them out to a partner sitting on the hood of the trailing truck. 

BAD SEX

1) Police in Fort Myers, Fla., said Jonathon Guabello, 29, who was angry that his girlfriend had denied him sex when they came home from a bar in October, left the room, shot himself twice in the arm, fell, and hit his head on a kitchen appliance, knocking himself out. (2) In Anderson Township, Ohio, in July, another frustrated lover, angry that his girlfriend kept falling asleep one night during sex, retaliated, according to police, by attempting to set fire to her van. (The 46-year-old man who couldnsustain his lover’s interest is Gregory Smallwood.) 

HONEST DEATHBED 

From the self-composed obituary in the Casper (Wyo.) Star Tribune of James William “Jim” Adams, who died September 9: “Jim, who had tired of reading obituaries noting other’s [sic] courageous battles with this or that disease, wanted it known that he had lost his battle…primarily as a result of…not following doctor’s orders…He was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.” MTW