CAUGHT ON VIDEO: CHRIST’S RETURN
“If the Messiah descends from the Mount of Olives as foretold in the Bible,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in an October dispatch from Jerusalem, the two largest Christian television networks in the U.S. promise to cover the arrival live from a hilltop in the city. Daystar Television has already been beaming a 24/7 webcam view, and Trinity Broadcasting Network bought the building next door to Daystar’s in September and has already begun staging live and pre-recorded programs using the broad expanse of the Holy Land city as background.
CAN’T POSSIBLY BE TRUE
Once again, in September, the upscale Standard Hotel, in New York City’s lower Manhattan, made headlines for the views it provides to amazed pedestrians. In 2009, it was the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows showcasing amorous couples at play (unless the guests knew to draw the curtains), especially delighting out-of-towners seeking inexpensive entertainment. Now, a September 2012 report in the New York Daily News revealed that the restrooms at the hotel’s Boom-Boom Room restaurant posed a bigger problem: no curtains at all. One restroom user, from Australia, said, “Sitting on the royal throne, you don’t expect a public viewing.” On the other hand, the Daily News noted one gentleman relieving himself and waving merrily at the gawking crowd below.
WEDDING BLUES
Valerie Spruill, 60, of Doylestown, Ohio, disclosed publicly in September that she had unknowingly married her own father following the dissolution of her first marriage, which had produced three children. Percy Spruill, a “nice man,” she said, died in 1998, and Valerie told the Akron Beacon Journal that she had heard family rumors after that but only confirmed the parentage in 2004 (with DNA from an old hairbrush). After eight years of silence, from embarrassment, she went public, she said, as an example to help other women who come from tumultuous childhoods in which many men are in their mothers’ lives.
FOOTBALL FOLLIES
Earlier this year, the National Football League suspended some New Orleans Saints players and the head coach for having a reward system that paid players for purposely injuring opponents. In September, coach Darren Crawford of the Tustin (Calif.) Pee Wee Red Cobras team was suspended when former players reported that the coach ran an apparently similar scheme among his 10- and 11-year-olds, using a cash reward of up to $50 for the “hit of the game” (with last year’s top prize going to the boy who left an opposing running back with a mild concussion). At press time, the investigation was ongoing, and no charges had been filed.
BECAUSE WE CAN, THAT’S WHY
In September, the National Geographic show Taboo featured three young Tokyo partiers as examples of the “bagel head” craze in which fun-lovers inject saline just under the skin of the forehead to create a swelling and then pressure the center to achieve a donut look that lasts up to 24 hours before the saline is absorbed into the body. Some adventurers have injected other areas of the body–even the scrotum.
SCAMTASTIC!
In Ventura, Calif., in September, once again, a scammer tried to bilk victims out of money by assuring them that he could double their cash (in this case, $14,000) merely by spraying it with a secret chemical. Of course, the victims had to wait several hours for their newly doubled cash to dry and eventually discovered that the scammer had substituted blank paper and by that time was long gone. But the weirdest aspect of the scam is that people who are so unsophisticated as to fall for it somehow managed to amass, in this tight economy, $14,000 cash to begin with.
TRUE BEAUTY
For a September beauty contest of female college students in China’s Hubei province, certain minimum body requirements were established at the outset (beyond the traditional chest, waist and hip sizes). Among them, according to a report in China’s Global Post: The space between the candidate’s pupils should be 46 percent of the distance between each pupil and the nearer ear, and the distance between a candidate’s nipples should be at least 20cm (7.8 inches).
WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY
Eric Carrier, 24, was charged once again in September, in Hampton, N.H., with attempting to commit indecent exposure by his scheme of faking a brain injury so that he could hire an in-home nurse to change his diaper regularly. He was similarly charged in July 2011 in Hooksett, N.H., after soliciting five women on Craigslist, and convicted in July 2012. (Though not explicit in news reports, the nature of the charges suggests that Carrier can very well control his bowel movements.)
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