Timothy J. Gibbons

Friday, April 19

Weekly news round-up - a regular feature spotlighting things you would have read if you happened to wander onto some really freaky websites:

Usually I just dive right into the linkage when I do these round-ups, but today I thought I'd give a note of warning: I don't know how I found most of this stuff, but there's been some weird news goin' on this past week. If at least one of the quotes below doesn't make you spit up on your keyboard or shudder, at least slightly, there's something wrong with you.

"In his opinion, he looked in her eyes and he thought she was going to say the word 'New Jersey.' Then he went in his bedroom, got his gun, loaded it. She knocked on the door and he answered it and shot her three times." Prosecutors say there are other words that Mitchell does not like, words like "Snickers" and "Mars Bar."
What makes this even more bizarre is that the woman he's accused of shooting didn't even say New Jersey; he just thought she was going to. The story goes on to say that two psychiatrists have examined the man and judged him to be "sane and competent." If that's so, I never want to meet someone who's insane.

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Ritter hedged his responses for much of the time but eventually accepted responsibility for the brutal assault. At one point he told the judge: "I came back outside to check on him.'' Thonus, in turn, replied: "When you came back outside, you brought toilet paper with you and you, in fact, defecated on him.''
I remember, years ago, watching a video on interviewing techniques. Among the reporters they spoke with was Dave Barry, who said something to the affect that "You know when you get a good quote 'cause it makes your nipples hard." If that's so, I think the judge's reply there made a lot of happy reporters.

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A Danish man having surgery on his backside broke wind and set his genitals alight. A surgeon was removing a mole on his backside with an electric knife when the man broke wind, lighting a spark.
I don't even have a comment for this.

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As the amount of atrazine increased, as many as 20 percent of frogs exposed during their early development produced multiple sex organs or had both male and female organs. Many had small, feminized larynxes. Asked if atrazine might be a threat to people at low levels, Dr. Hayes said he did not know, adding that, unlike frogs, "we're not in the water all the time." "I'm not saying it's safe for humans," he said. "I'm not saying its unsafe for humans. All I'm saying is it that it makes hermaphrodites of frogs."
And another amazing quote. I'm waiting for that to show up in an ad for Mountain Dew.

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Now he and Mahmed sprinted alongside the train as it rolled slowly along and reached for a handhold. They scrambled aboard. They wedged themselves between two cars and braced for the 35-minute ride through the tunnel at speeds as high as 100 miles per hour. They waited.
Actually not a freaky story. I included it just because it's amazing well written and because of my own train-hopping adventures.

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And lastly, a news-related link that isn't actually a story: Condolences for the Queen Mum

posted at 6:41 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Thursday, April 18

So we're working on the next issue of the magazine, which is slated to contain a story on Salem, Mass., an article that was supposed to take a look at the town's historical wackiness in the context of its current tourism business
(Because of the magazine's semi-educational focus, we have a history story in each issue. Being a history fan, I think that's a great idea, but don't particularly believe the more didactic articles done in previous years fit with the magazine's style. Instead, I’ve suggested that we move toward stories that look at an aspect of history with some type of modern angle, an idea they’ve seem to like.)
Anyway, for whatever reason, the freelancer we had writing the piece decided he was more interested in doing an article on neo-paganism in Salem -- a fact we discovered only when he turned the story in Monday. Oh, and did I mention that the deadline for the entire issue is tomorrow?
Doesn't sound like that big a deal, perhaps, except for one thing: Oskar's main distribution point in the United States is through high school German classes -- and we figure your typical high school teacher isn't, for some reason, a big fan of stories about modern day witches. So we're ending up changing the story, which isn't that big a deal, but the article worries me for more personal reasons: I'm a bit afraid of messing around with witches.
We descend now into the misty reaches of history ...
When I was in college, at a fairly conservative school, I served for two years as editor in chief of the school paper. We had this editorial writer, a woman who I must assume -- for the sake of the English language, humanity and my belief in a just God -- now has no contact whatsoever with writing. And I don't just mean writing professionally. I mean this woman shouldn't be allowed to make out shopping lists and must be required to have friends sign checks for her.
She ended up working for the paper because all students in the journalism program were required to sign up for some sort of practicum; she ended up writing editorials because, you know, there's only so much room that I could devote to corrections during the time she "wrote" news stories. So we sent her to the editorial section, where we could routinely trash can whatever she excreted that week.
Until the day she got a bug in her bonnet about Halloween, a holiday she decried as evil because of all the nasty witchery associated with it. (I'm guessing some type of childhood trauma associated with being nicknamed Jack o'Lantern or an attempted drown·ing,in an apple-bobbing tub was really responsible for her feelings.) Unfortunately, the week she chose to write up this piece of crap was a week in which everybody else on staff came down with the flu, went out of town or otherwise decided to bugger off, so, with nothing else to fill space, and after massive rewrites, I decided her dreck was marginally better than a chunk of white space.
The paper was published Tuesday. I wander into the newspaper office Wednesday to find the staff clustered around the answering machine, upon which some off-campus caller had left a message in which she claimed to be a witch, berated us for the story and then began screaming. The scream portion lasted a good minute or so.
Now, I know all about the "An ye harm none" and the threefold law and all the other philosophical underpinnings, but it's still a bit freaky to have somebody screaming on your answering machine, leaving the type of message I associate more with ex-girlfriends than complete strangers.
It didn't particularly help matters when I checked my mail a few days later and discovered I'd been sent a curse. Really! An honest-to-goodness (eh ... would that be the correct phrase?) curse, complete with melted wax, a brown smear that was either dried blood or the remnants of a Hershey's bar and a badly rhyming stanza that was supposed to result in me getting a broken leg. The worst part was that it wasn't like I'd done anything. Dang, if they wanted to curse somebody, I would have cheerfully provided contact info for the writer: I'd certainly cursed her enough.
Nothing ended up happening to me -- and while I'm not sure what the statue of limitations is on curses, I figure if I was going to break my leg, it would have happened by now -- but I'm still not completely comfortable with the idea of pissing off more of the neo-pagan set.
It's not, now that I think about it, that I'm afraid of another curse; I'm actually worried more about getting strange phone calls. I have enough trouble dealing with normal people calling me up. If some screaming German Wiccan gets my number, I might totally lose it.

posted at 8:37 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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Wednesday, April 17

After a week or two of sunshine, the weather in Hamburg has turned nasty again (surprise, surprise), allowing me once again play my favorite game. The game doesn't actually require the sky to open up and dump a load of crap on my head -- it just makes it more fun.
Here's how to play: Find a street with plenty of people on it. Make a note of the street name and then -- preferably standing within sight of the street sign -- ask people how to find that very street. To make the game more fair, actually write the street name down; that way you know it's not your own excretable accent that's making things difficult. Then, keep track of the number of people you have to ask before somebody tells you where you are. The highest number wins -- or loses, or something ...
OK, I've never actually done that. Several times, though, I have been looking for a street -- say, Bundes Straße -- without realizing that I was already on it. When I ask people how to find the place, nobody knows.
Now, it's not like I look down upon these poor people for not knowing where the heck they are. I mean, I certainly have no clue, so why should they be expected to? And I've had my fair share of people asking me for directions, which is always amusing: some advice for people seeking directions: When you're trying to find your way somewhere, and the person you've asked for help a) doesn't speak the local language that well and b) has to pull out a map simply to find out where he is, never mind where your destination is, you probably want to flee in horror. Since people have persisted in having me help them find their destination, though, there are probably some poor tourists who are either still wandering the city or, more likely, are now lost in Poland or Denmark.
Even when I am given lines of collimation, things invariable end badly. Part of that is my own lack of directional sense; there have been days when I wake up especially groggy, get up on the wrong side of the bed and end up trying to shower in my closet. Combine that with the fact that exiting subways leaves me totally disorientated -- I've managed to get turned around upon walking out of New York City subways, and the city's laid out in a freakin' grid -- and it's amazing that I can get myself home in the evenings.
Here, tossing in the language thing makes the situation even more fun. My comprehension of German is actually good enough that I can understand and follow basic directions provided in that language. But either I look or sound American enough that most Germans resort to trying to help me in English. I'm convinced that one of the reasons I get lost even after getting directions is that Germans end up mistranslating themselves and tell me right when they really mean left. All I know is that I feel a lot more comfortable, bizarrely, when my guides start spouting rechts oder links; at least then I know that they know what they're trying to say.
On the other hand (ha! a pun) (kinda), it's possible that they can't tell their right from their left. I know people who still have to do that "L" thing -- holding up their thumb and forefinger -- before saying the Pledge of Allegiance. When I was driving around Ireland last year, I ended up doing that myself every time I pulled into traffic, which did garner me some strange looks from other motorists. It would fit in with the major themes of my life that I somehow keep finding dyslexic people to ask for directions.
Or, of course, there's the chance that people are just screwing with me. My grandfather used to tell the story of people in New York who would ask somebody for directions and then, just to make sure, go and ask somebody else. This was in the days before New Yorkers became nice and, you know, if you have to ask for directions, you're just setting yourself up to have people play head games with you.
Even if that's not true, and it's entirely my own fault when I get lost, blaming someone else is more fun. If nothing else, cursing my erstwhile pathfinders gives me something to do while trudging through the streets.

posted at 8:10 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link

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