COLON WITH A VIEW
The usual 20,000 or so visitors every year to Belgium’s Verbeke Foundation art park have the option (365 of them, anyway) to spend the night inside the feature attraction: a 20-foot-long, 6-foot-high polyester replica of a human colon created by Dutch designer Joep Van Lieshout. At one end, of course, another body part is replicated (and gives the installation its formal name, the Hotel CasAnus). The facility, though “cramped,” according to one prominent review, features heating, shower and double bed, and rents for the equivalent of about $150 a night. The 30-acre art park is regarded as one of Europe’s “edgiest” art destinations.
WHAT WOULD JESUS DRIVE?
The issues director of the fundamentalist American Family Association told his radio audience in November that God’s feelings will be hurt if America stops using fossil fuels for energy. “God has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us find them,” said Bryan Fischer, who described Americans’ campaigns against fossil fuels as similar to the time when Fischer, at age six, told a birthday-present donor that he didn’t like his gift. “And it just crushed that person.”
CHUTZPAH!
Mauricio Fierro gained instant fame in December in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as the reported victim of a car theft (captured on surveillance video) when he dashed into a pharmacy. He went to a police station to file a report, but encountered the pharmacy owner making his own report–that Fierro was actually robbing him at the moment the car was taken. More surveillance video revealed that while Fierro was standing outside the pharmacy, wondering where his car was, a man ran by and stole the stolen cash. Fierro then immoderately complained to the police even more about Sao Paulo’s crime rate and lack of security. Afterward, Fierro admitted to a local news website that in fact he had stolen the very car that he was reporting stolen.
THE CONTINUING CRISIS
Former undercover cop Mark Kennedy filed for damages in October against the London Metropolitan police, claiming post-traumatic stress syndrome based on the department’s “negligence” in allowing him to have such a robust sex life on the job that he fell in love with a woman whose organization he had infiltrated. Kennedy’s wife has filed for divorce and is also suing the department, and 10 other women (including three of Kennedy’s former lovers) have also filed claims.
PEOPLE WITH ISSUES
New York’s highest court ruled in November that subway “grinders” (men who masturbate by rubbing up against women on trains) cannot be charged with felonies as long as they don’t use force to restrain their victims (but only commit misdemeanors that usually result in no jail time). And police in Phuket, Thailand, announced that their all-points search for a public masturbator who harassed a restaurant’s staff had produced no suspects–although a spokesman said they did find “a few people [nearby] who were masturbating in their vehicles, but none of them were the man we are looking for.”
PERSPECTIVE
Four months have passed since News of the Weird mentioned that at least 60 North Carolina prisoners have been improperly incarcerated–legally innocent based on a 2011 federal appeals court decision. (Still others are at least owed sentence reduction because they had been convicted of offenses in addition to the incorrect one.) A June USA Today story revealed the injustice, and the federal government took until August to release holds on the inmates, but since then, only 44 of the estimated 175 affected prisoners have been correctly adjudicated. USA Today reported in December that the recent delay has been because of the obstinacy of some North Carolina federal judges, including cases involving citizens by now wrongfully locked up for more than 18 months.
LEAST COMPETENT PARKING ENFORCERS
The week before Christmas, a Nottingham, England, officer wrote parking tickets to drivers of two ambulances that were taking too long to board wheelchair-using schoolchildren who had just sung carols for an hour downtown to raise money for the homeless shelter Emmanuel House. Following an outpouring of complaints, the Nottingham City Council revoked the tickets.
LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS
Marquis Diggs, 29, entering the county administration building in Jersey City, N.J., in December for a hearing in family court over his mother’s restraining order against him, became the most recent drug possessor not to have realized that he might be subjected to a search. Police confiscated 32 baggies of “suspected marijuana.” And Cleland Ayison, 32, got a sentencing break in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in December when federal judge William Dimitrouleas pitied him. Ayison got only house arrest and community service because his crime–trying to pass a U.S. Federal Reserve note with a face value of $500 million–was so “silly.”
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