newsquirks
© Myron Campbell
Dead Men Don’t Fly
Family says man was alive when they arrived at airport
by Roland Sweet
British authorities arrested two women at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport for trying to board a flight to Germany with a dead man in a wheelchair wearing sunglasses. When check-in staff questioned Gitta Jarant, 66, she assured them her 91-year-old husband, Willi, was just resting and had on sunglasses because he wanted to spare passengers from looking at an unsightly eye. Told he was indeed dead, she insisted he’d been alive when they arrived at the airport. The other woman, Willi Jarant’s stepdaughter, agreed. “He was pale,” Anke Anusic, 41, said, “but he wasn’t dead.” (The New York Times)
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
The Japanese automation firm Super Faiths has developed recycling machines that turn used diapers, mostly those used by incontinent adults, into fuel for biomass boilers and stoves. The SFD Recycle System machines can handle up to 1,102 pounds of diapers a day. They automatically shred, dry and sterilize used disposable diapers and turn them into bacteria-free material for making fuel pellets, which can be used to help heat roads, homes or water. (CNET)
DON’T MESS WITH MATH TEACHERS
After a camera caught his wife running a red light in Collier County, Florida, math tutor Mike Mogil insisted the ticket was illegal because the yellow light didn’t last long enough. County guidelines state the yellow light should be 4.5 seconds, but Mogil tested it 15 times and found it averaged only 3.8 seconds. He challenged the ticket and a special magistrate dismissed it. Not content to stop there, Mogil said he checked 65 of the county’s 200 intersections with red-light cameras and found that only seven yellow lights are long enough. (Southwest Florida’s WBBH-TV News)
REASONABLE EXPLANATIONS
After four people reported they were shot with blow darts from a passing van while walking in downtown Stevens Point, Wisconsin, police arrested Paula Wolf, 41, who explained she “liked to hear people say ‘ouch.’” (Wausau Daily Herald)
PRIVATIZATION FOLLIES
Italian contractors helping train Afghan police recruits solved the mystery of why the trainees couldn’t shoot straight while being taught by U.S. government contractors. The Italians noticed the Americans, who were paid $6 billion to train the Afghans, had never adjusted the sights on their AK-47s and M-16s. During the eight years contractors from DynCorp International were allegedly training recruits, the death rate for Afghan police officers rose from about two dozen a month to around 125. “We’re paying somebody to teach these people to shoot these weapons and nobody ever bothered to check their sights?” said Democratic senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who chaired a Senate committee investigating contractor oversights. “It is an unbelievable, incompetent story.” (McClatchy Newspapers)
A JOB FOR THE BUM SQUAD
A California Highway Patrol officer who questioned Steven Ferrini, 60, for parking illegally at 4:30 a.m. found drugs and arrested him. A subsequent search found “a suspicious wire with an on-off switch” in the man’s front pocket leading to his anal cavity, according to a police report. When “the subject began to explain his knowledge of explosives and bomb-making,” officers called the El Dorado County Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team and evacuated the South Lake Tahoe office. The bomb squad determined the device was not a bomb but an anal vibrator. (Tahoe Daily Tribune)
LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT
Authorities in Indonesia’s Papua announced that applicants for the police or military would be rejected if they’ve had their genitals artificially enhanced. Papua police chief Bekto Suprapto said that unnaturally large penises cause “hindrance during training.” A sexologist quoted by the Jakarta Globe said Papuans often wrap their penis with leaves from the gatal-gatal (itchy) tree so that it swells up “like it has been stung by a bee.” (Reuters)
FART PARTNER PERIL
A 27-year-old Oklahoma City man told police he was sexually assaulted by a man he met online while seeking a “friend” who shares his “fetish for flatulence.” After exchanging phone numbers and text messages with graphic sexual questions, the victim said he agreed to meet the man because he agreed to “fart for me.” (The Oklahoman)
Compiled from mainstream media sources by Roland Sweet.