ULTIMATE GATED COMMUNITY
Condo developer Larry Hall is already one-quarter sold out of the upscale doomsday units he is building in an abandoned underground Cold War-era Atlas-F missile silo near Salina, Kan. He told an Agence France-Presse reporter in April that his 14-story structure would house seven floors of apartments ($1 million to $2 million each, cash up front), with the rest devoted to dry food storage, filtered-water tanks and an indoor farm, which would raise fish and vegetables to sustain residents for five years. The nine-foot-thick concrete walls (built to protect rockets from a Soviet nuclear attack) would be buttressed by entrance security to ward off the savages who were not wise enough to prepare against famine, meteors, nuclear war and the like. Hall said he expects to be sold out this year and begin work on another of the three silos he has options to buy.
PEOPLE WITH ISSUES
In March, West Des Moines, Iowa, police opened an investigation, with video surveillance, of a 59-year-old employee of the state’s Farm Bureau on suspicion of criminal mischief. According to police documents cited by the Des Moines Register, the man would look through the employee database for photos of attractive female colleagues and then visit their work space after hours and urinate on their chairs. Not only does the man allegedly have a problem, but the Farm Bureau figured it is out $4,500 in damaged chairs.
PERILS OF MYSTERY MEAT
Finally, a nationally prominent judge has taken on prison “nutriloaf” as a constitutional issue. In March, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner reinstated a dismissed lawsuit by a Milwaukee County Jail inmate who claimed that the mystery meat gave him an “anal fissure.” Posner wrote that the lower courts needed to rule on whether the food of indeterminate content is “cruel and unusual punishment,” since (citing a Wikipedia entry) an anal fissure seems “no fun at all.”
UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT
In January, Ms. Navey Skinner, 34, was charged with robbing the Chase Bank in Arlington, Wash., after passing a teller a note that read, “Put the money in the bag now or [d]ie.” According to investigators, Skinner subsequently told them she had been thinking about robbing a bank and then, while inside the Chase Bank, “accidentally robbed” it.
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