Weird News Thread ....

[Jolie Rouge]

Surprise Pick! Sexiest Vegetarians Alive

The "Sexiest Vegetarians Alive" are presidential niece Lauren Bush and actor Josh Hartnett. That's the word from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which gets a little press coverage every summer when it picks two vegetarians and names them the sexiest of all the people on Earth who don't eat meat.

Tommy Hilfiger model and Princeton student Lauren Bush beat out the likes of Pamela Anderson, Shania Twain, Kim Basinger, and Shannon Elizabeth, while Josh Hartnett won the crown over Jude Law, John Corbett, Richard Gere, Noah Wyle, and Apu from "The Simpsons."

Last year's winners were "Spider-Man" stud Tobey Maguire and "Star Wars" siren Natalie Portman. PETA insists the winners are chosen not only for their sexy bodies, but also for their passion and compassion.

We're still trying to figure out why they don't call it the "Most Passionate Vegetarian Alive." Oh! We get it! They wouldn't get the press coverage if they did that.


Warning: The next few sentences are pretty gross.

Hartnett's decision to go meat-free came several years ago and happened in an instant as he tells it. "One day I was cutting up a chicken for my mom, and I hit a tumor with the knife," Hartnett said. "There was pus and blood all over the place. That was enough for me." Meanwhile, Lauren Bush has been a vegetarian since she was 4 years old. She didn't have any gross tales to tell other than insisting the only part of her family's Thanksgiving meal she will make is the pie.

[Jolie Rouge]

Hmmm...should we ALL be vegetarian?

Could you ever give up that hamburger and steak?

Find out the pros and cons of a plant-based diet as well as five reasons to eat meat.

www.time.com/time/covers/1101020715/story.html


FIVE REASONS TO EAT MEAT:
1) It tastes good
2) It makes you feel good
3) It's a great American tradition
4) It supports the nation's farmers
5) Your parents did it

Oh, sorry ... those are five reasons to smoke cigarettes.

Meat is more complicated.

It's a food most Americans eat virtually every day: at the dinner table; in the cafeteria; on the barbecue patio; with mustard at a ballpark; or, a billion times a year, with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun. Beef is, the TV commercials say, "America's food"—the Stars and Stripes served up medium rare—and as entwined with the nation's notion of its robust frontier heritage as, well, the Marlboro Man.

But these days America's cowboys seem a bit small in the saddle. Those cattle they round up have become politically incorrect: for many, meat is an obscene cuisine. It's not just the additives and ailments connected with the consumption of beef, though a dish of hormones, E. coli bacteria or the scary specter of mad-cow disease might be effective enough as an appetite suppressant. It's that more and more Americans, particularly young Americans, have started engaging in a practice that would once have shocked their parents. They are eating their vegetables. Also their grains and sprouts. Some 10 million Americans today consider themselves to be practicing vegetarians, according to a Time poll of 10,000 adults; an additional 20 million have flirted with vegetarianism sometime in their past.

To get a taste of the cowboy's ancient pride, and current defensiveness, just click on South Dakota cattleman Jody Brown's website, www.ranchers.net, and read the new meat mantras: "Vegetarians don't live longer, they just look older"; and "If animals weren't meant to be eaten, then why are they made out of meat?" (One might ask the same of humans.) For Brown and his generation of unquestioning meat eaters, dinner is something the parents put on the table and the kids put in their bodies. Of his own kids, he says, "We expect them to eat a little of everything." So beef is served nearly every night at the Brown homestead, with nary a squawk from Jeff, 17, Luke, 13, and Hannah, 11. But Jody admits to at least one liberal sympathy. "If a vegetarian got a flat tire in my community," he says, "I'd come out and help him."

For the rancher who makes his living with meat or the vegetarian whose diet could someday drive all those breeder-slaughterers to bankruptcy, nothing is simple any more. Gone is the age of American innocence, or naiveté when such items as haircuts and handshakes, family names and school uniforms, farms and zoos, cowboys and ranchers, had no particular political meaning. Now everything is up for rancorous debate. And no aspect of our daily lives—our lives as food consumers—gets more heat than meat.

For millions of vegetarians, beef is a four-letter word; veal summons charnel visions of infanticide. Many children, raised on hit films like Babe and Chicken Run, recoil from eating their movie heroes and switch to what the meat defeaters like to call a "nonviolent diet." Vegetarianism resolves a conscientious person's inner turf war by providing an edible complex of good-deed-doing: to go veggie is to be more humane. Give up meat, and save lives!

Of course, one of the lives you could save or at least prolong is your own. For vegetarianism should be about more than not eating; it's also about smart eating. You needn't be a born-again foodist to think this. The American Dietetic Association, a pretty centrist group, has proclaimed that "appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, are nutritionally adequate and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases."

So, how about it? Should we all become vegetarians? Not just teens but also infants, oldsters, athletes—everyone? Will it help us live longer, healthier lives? Does it work for people of every age and level of work activity? Can we find the right vegetarian diet and stick to it? And if we can do it, will we?


There are as many reasons to try vegetarianism as there are soft-eyed cows and soft-hearted kids. To impressionable young minds, vegetarianism can sound sensible, ethical and—as nearly 25% of adolescents polled by Teenage Research Unlimited said—"cool." College students think so too. A study conducted by Arizona State University psychology professors Richard Stein and Carol Nemeroff reported that, sight unseen, salad eaters were rated more moral, virtuous and considerate than steak eaters. "A century ago, a high-meat diet was thought to be health-favorable," says Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania. "Kids today are the first generation to live in a culture where vegetarianism is common, where it is publicly promoted on health and ecological grounds." And kids, as any parent can tell you, spur the consumer economy; that explains in part the burgeoning sales of veggie burgers (soy, bulgur wheat, cooked rice, mushrooms, onions and flavorings in Big Mac drag) in supermarkets and fast-food chains.

Children, who are signing on to vegetarianism much faster than adults, may be educating their parents. Vegetarian food sales are savoring double-digit growth. Top restaurants have added more meatless dishes. Trendy "living foods" or "raw" restaurants are sprouting up, like Roxanne's in Larkspur, Calif., where no meat, fish, poultry or dairy items are served, and nothing is cooked to temperatures in excess of 118°F. "Going to my restaurant," says Roxanne Klein, "is like going to a really cool new country you haven't experienced before."

Like any country, vegetarianism has its hidden complexities. For one thing, vegetarians come in more than half a dozen flavors, from sproutarians to pesco-pollo-vegetarians. The most notorious are the vegan (rhymes with intriguin' or fatiguin') vegetarians. The Green Party of the movement, vegans decline to consume, use or wear any animal products. They also avoid honey, since its production demands the oppression of worker bees. TV's favorite vegetarian, the cartoon 8-year-old Lisa Simpson, once had a crush on a fellow who described himself as "a Level Five vegan—I don't eat anything that casts a shadow." Among vegan celebrities: the rock star Moby and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who swore off steak for breakfast and insists he feels much better starting his day with miso soup, brown rice or oat groats.

To true believers—who refrain from meat as an A.A. member does from drink and do a spit-take if told that there's gelatin in their soup—a semivegetarian is no vegetarian at all. A phrase like pesco-pollo-vegetarian, to them, is an oxymoron, like "lapsed Catholic" or "semivirgin." Vegetarian Times, the bible of this particular congregation, lays down the dogma: "For many people who are working to become vegetarians, chicken and fish may be transitional foods, but they are not vegetarian foods ... the word 'vegetarian' means someone who eats no meat, fish or chicken."

Clear enough? Not to many Americans. In a survey of 11,000 individuals, 37% of those who responded "Yes, I am a vegetarian" also reported that in the previous 24 hours they had eaten red meat; 60% had eaten meat, poultry or seafood. Perhaps those surveyed thought a vegetarian is someone who, from time to time, eats vegetables as a side dish—say, alongside a prime rib. If more than one-third of people in a large sample don't know the broadest definition of vegetarian, one wonders how they can be trusted with something much more difficult: the full-time care and picky-picky feeding of their bodies, whatever their dietary preferences.

We know that fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes and nuts are healthy. There are any number of studies that show that consuming more of these plant-based foods reduces the risk for a long list of chronic maladies (including coronary artery disease, obesity, diabetes and many cancers) and is a probable factor in increased longevity in the industrialized world. We know that on average we eat too few fruits and vegetables and too much saturated fat, of which meat and dairy are prime contributors. We also know that in the real world, real diets—vegetarian and nonvegetarian—as consumed by real people range from primly virtuous to pig-out voracious. There are meat eaters who eat more and better vegetables than vegetarians, and vegetarians who eat more artery-clogging fats than meat eaters.

The International Congress on Vegetarian Nutrition, a major conference on the subject, was held this spring at Loma Linda (Calif.) University. The research papers presented there included some encouraging if tentative findings: that a predominantly vegetarian diet may have beneficial effects for kidney and nerve function in diabetics, as well as for weight loss; that eating more fruits and vegetables can slow, and perhaps reverse, age-related declines in brain function and in cognitive and motor performance—at least in rats; that vegetarian seniors have a lower death rate and use less medication than meat-eating seniors; that vegetarians have a healthier total intake of fats and cholesterol but a less healthy intake of fatty acids (such as the heart-protecting omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil).


{{{ Article is about five pages long ... click the link to read the rest ... It is interesting. ******

[Jolie Rouge]

Drug Turns Crime Victims Into Zombies
By Phil Stewart

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus.

Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone.

Fernandez is just one of hundreds of victims every month who, according to Colombian hospitals, are temporarily turned into zombies by a home-grown drug called scopolamine which has been embraced by thieves and rapists.

"When I woke up in the hospital, I asked for my baby and nobody said anything. They just looked at me," Fernandez said, weeping. Police believe her son Diego was taken by a gang which traffics in infants.

Colorless, odorless and tasteless, scopolamine is slipped into drinks and sprinkled onto food. Victims become so docile that they have been known to help thieves rob their homes and empty their bank accounts. Women have been drugged repeatedly over days and gang-raped or rented out as prostitutes.

In the case of Fernandez, the mother of three was rendered submissive enough to surrender her youngest child.

Most troubling for police is the way the drug acts on the brain. Since scopolamine completely blocks the formation of memories, unlike most date-rape drugs used in the United States and elsewhere, it is usually impossible for victims to ever identify their aggressors.

"When a patient (of U.S. date-rape drugs) is under hypnosis, he or she usually recalls what happened. But with scopolamine, this isn't possible because the memory was never recorded," said Dr. Camilo Uribe, the world's leading expert on the drug.

Scopolamine has a long, dark history in Colombia dating back to before the Spanish conquest.

Legend has it that Colombian Indian tribes used the drug to bury alive the wives and slaves of fallen chiefs, so that they would quietly accompany their masters into the afterworld.

Nazi "angel of death" Joseph Mengele experimented on scopolamine as an interrogation drug. And scopolamine's sedative and amnesia-producing qualities were used by mothers in the early 20th century to help them through childbirth.

Finding the drug in Colombia these days is not hard.

The tree which naturally produces scopolamine grows wild around the capital and is so famous in the countryside that mothers warn their children not to fall asleep below its yellow and white flowers. The tree is popularly known as the "borrachero," or "get-you-drunk," and the pollen alone is said to conjure up strange dreams.

"We probably should put some sort of fence up," jokes biologist Gustavo Morales at Bogota's botanical gardens, eyeing children playing with borrachero seeds everywhere.

"If you ate a few of those, it would kill you."

Although scopolamine can be easily extracted from the seeds, experienced criminals hardly ever bother with them, police say.

Pure, cheap scopolamine is brought across the border from neighboring Ecuador, where the borrachero tree is harvested for medical purposes, Uribe said. The alkaloid is used legally in medicines across the world to treat everything from motion sickness to the tremors of Parkinson's disease.

The use of scopolamine by criminals appears to be confined to Colombia, at least for now, and it's not clear why the drug is such a rampant problem in Colombia. Some analysts blame it on a culture of crime in the Andean nation, home to the world's largest kidnapping and cocaine industries, not to mention Latin America's longest-running guerrilla war.

There are so many scopolamine cases that they usually don't make the news unless particularly bizarre. One such incident involved three young Bogota women who preyed on men by smearing the drug on their breasts and luring their victims to take a lick.

Losing all willpower, the men readily gave up their bank access codes. The breast-temptress thieves then held them hostage for days while draining their accounts.

The U.S. Embassy in Bogota takes scopolamine very seriously and offers staff tips on how avoid being drugged. One piece of advice may seem obvious: Don't let your drinks out of your sight when at a Bogota bar or nightclub.

Still, at least three visiting U.S. government employees here have been drugged and robbed over the past two years. Other American victims from time to time appear at the embassy seeking help, still shaking off a scopolamine hangover.

"I remember one case, an American reported being drugged," an embassy official said. "He says to his doorman 'Why did you let them walk out with my stuff.' The doorman says, 'Because you told me to."'



06/17/03 08:43

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BETHEL, Maine (AP) - Rockie Graham and Dave Hart met at the town's transfer station, where he had just begun working and she had just begun bringing her recyclables.

Now the couple is planning to get married at the spot they first met. For their wedding, they plan to be transported in a bucket loader driven by a transfer station attendant.

Hart said the transfer station - what used to be called the dump - is the ideal spot for their wedding. After all, he is now the manager and she is a part-time employee.

"I think it's perfect," Hart said. "This is where everybody knows us."


Graham admits she was reluctant at first.

"He was so enthusiastic about it," she said. "I think he just broke down my resistance."

The two met when Graham began using the Bethel transfer station after Newry, where she lives, became part of Bethel's service area.

For their first date, on the day before Thanksgiving in 2001, she offered Hart a cup of coffee if he would fix a bad burner on her stove. She figured he could handle the job since he is a retired Sears service technician.

In preparation for the wedding, people have been donating returnable containers for the couple's honeymoon fund. They plan to fly to California and drive back to Maine for their honeymoon, visiting family and friends along the way.

Graham expects to wear a conservative dress for the wedding, and he will wear a tuxedo, but they're also looking for ways to incorporate recycled items into their wedding outfits.

Hart's four grown children and his grandchildren will participate in the wedding, but it's taking some time for everybody to get used to the idea. Hart and Graham were both previously married.

"I guess I have traditional ideas when it comes to getting married," said Dave's daugher-in-law, Rosey Hart. "But people get married at Wal-Mart, ice cream shops or the movies, so hey..."

Hart and Graham have yet to set a date. But that's not stopping transfer station regulars on making suggestions on how to make the perfect dump wedding.

"Everybody we tell has put in their two cents worth of ideas," he said. "We're trying to pick through them."

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) - Farmers are mailing parcels of sheep and cow manure to lawmakers to protest a so-called "flatulence" tax on greenhouse gas emissions from their flocks and herds, the New Zealand's postal service complained Tuesday.

The service said about 20 reeking packages and envelopes had been sent to the nation's Parliament and that the protest - dubbed the "Raise a Stink" campaign - was endangering the health of postal workers.

Farmers are angry that the government has levied the tax to raise 8 million New Zealand dollars (US$4.7 million) a year - about 300 New Zealand dollars (US$177) for average farms and ranches - for research into methane gas emissions from agricultural animals.

Millions of sheep, cattle and other animals that graze on New Zealand's lush farmlands are thought to produce 55 percent of the country's greenhouse gases.


New Zealand Post spokesman Ian Long said sending manure by the mail was a crime.

"Our main concern is for the health and safety of our people," said Long. "The police have told us that they will prosecute if they can prove wrongdoing."

Mail sorting workers were wearing protective gloves and placing suspect parcels into bags, he said.

Parliamentary security officials said some stained and damp mail items had been intercepted before they made it to government ministers.

Adam Fricker, editor of the Rural News newspaper which encouraged the protest, said farmers had taken "radical" action to get the ear of the government.

"Farmers feel marginalized. They don't have the voice in Parliament they once had ... to really get traction on an issue when a ridiculous tax like this is being foisted on them," he said.

Agriculture Minister Jim Sutton said climate change from greenhouse gases "is the world's biggest environmental problem. We have to do something about it."

He said farmers could be "responsible guardians" of the environment and help generate new technology to deal with animal methane.

Dismissing the manure protest as "nonsense," Sutton said an alternative to the tax was for farmers pay emission levies like other industrial sectors. That would cost them tens of millions of dollars more a year.

Greenhouse gases, such as methane and carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil, are being blamed for a feared warming of the atmosphere.

Environmentalists fear it will cause havoc with global weather patterns and trigger sea level rises.

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BEIJING (Reuters) - China's legendary "Lake Tianchi Monster" has surfaced anew, with local officials reporting sightings of as many as 20 of the mysterious and unidentified creatures in a lake near North Korea.
Sightings of the strange beast -- China's version of the "Loch Ness Monster" -- date back more than a century, but like Scotland's famed "Nessie" reports vary and remain unconfirmed.

On the morning of July 11, several local government cadres caught sight of a school of mysterious creatures swimming through the lake in the Changbai mountains, in northeastern Jilin province, the Beijing Youth Daily said on Tuesday.

"Within about 50 minutes, the monsters appeared five times," it quoted one of the officials, provincial forestry bureau vice-director Zhang Lufeng, as saying. "At times there was one, at times there were several. The last time, there was as many as about 20."

He said the creatures, two to three kilometers (1.25-2 miles) in the distance, appeared only as white or black spots. But from the ripples in the water, he and others determined the spots were "living beings."

Officials were not reachable for comment.

In 1903, according to local records, a creature resembling a huge buffalo with a deafening roar sprang out of the water and attempted to attack three people before one them shot it in the belly six times. The beast roared and disappeared back into the water.

A more recently documented sighting compared the head of the monster to that of a human -- except with big round eyes, a protruding mouth and a neck 1.2 to 1.5 meters long. It also had a white ring separating its neck and torso and smooth, gray skin

[Jolie Rouge]

Too Much Flesh! MTV Censors Aguilera

She may have a whole new look with the dark brown hair, but Christina Aguilera is still up to her "dirty" ways. The New York Post and Knight Ridder Newspapers report that MTV has "put the brakes" on Aguilera's new video, "Can't Hold Us Down" because there's just too much flesh and a suggestive scene that isn't suitable for broadcast.

The video was shot by celebrity photographer David La Chappelle, who has been ordered by MTV to tone it down. And Christina is not happy about this. No, no, no. Knight Ridder describes her as "livid." An Aguilera spokeswoman told the Post's Page Six gossip column, "She doesn't say that a male performer would get away with it, but she does feel that there are double standards."

The video will air because La Chappelle and Aguilera made the required changes. MTV's representative curtly informed the Post, "MTV has a standards department like any other network. We asked them to make changes, and they did it. The video will air."

TOO HOT FOR MTV ??

What do Foo Fighters, Christina Aguilera, Audioslave and Madonna have in common? They've all made videos that MTV deemed too hot to handle. Check out these UNCENSORED clips and see if you can tell why the censors gave them the red flag.

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/music/default.jsp

[Jolie Rouge]

47 Horses May Have Starved in Nevada
By SCOTT SONNER

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...89.htm&sc=1110


RENO, Nev. (AP) - Federal agents and sheriff's deputies in northeastern Nevada are investigating the deaths of 47 horses that may have starved after they were taken from two American Indian sisters following a dispute with the government.

Necropsies are planned to determine the exact cause of the deaths of the horses - mostly foals. Deputies found the carcasses over the weekend where they had been dumped at two sites on Bureau of Land Management land in the Little Smokey Valley, about 18 miles south of Eureka, BLM spokesman Mike Brown said Tuesday.

Most ``appear to have died from malnutrition or trampling,'' Brown told The Associated Press.

Authorities suspect the horses are part of a group of 500 that once belonged to the Shoshone sisters Mary and Carrie Dann. The sisters have been at odds with the BLM for years over horses they grazed on land they claim belongs to the Western Shoshones.


The Danns contend the land belongs to the Shoshone tribe under an 1863 treaty and that the BLM has no authority to regulate their grazing practices.


The BLM maintained the Danns grazed hundreds of cattle and horses illegally for decades, to the detriment of the range and other ranchers who have permits to graze livestock in the region.


Last fall, the BLM seized and sold 227 cattle belonging to the two grandmothers. In February, the agency rounded up more than 500 horses belonging to the Danns.


That's when California rancher Slick Gardner stepped in and offered to give the horses sanctuary, authorities said. Gardner moved about 250 horses to his ranch about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, and arranged to temporarily leave the rest - many of them pregnant mares that could not be moved - at the Fish Creek Ranch near Eureka, not far from where the dead horses were found.


In May, Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescuers, an animal rescue group based in Lancaster, Calif., intervened and took about 150 of the horses Gardner had left in Nevada after reports surfaced that the animals had become malnourished.


Gardner, who is under investigation in California for his handling of the 250 horses he transferred to his ranch, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment Tuesday.


A lawyer for the Danns blamed the BLM Tuesday for rounding up the horses in the first place.


``Those horses were fine out on the range where they were. This is the result of misguided federal policy - your taxpayer dollars at work,'' said Julie Fishel of the Western Shoshone Defense Project in Crescent Valley.


As many as 10 of the dead horses found by deputies were adults and the rest young offspring, some newborns. Death by trampling in a corral ``is what would happen to foals that are too weak and they just don't get up after they are born,'' Brown said.


There's no indication any of the horses were shot or otherwise physically harmed, he said.


A veterinarian estimated some had been dead for two to three weeks, but some may have been dead as long as two to three months, Brown said.



07/15/03 18:52

There's no indication any of the horses were shot or otherwise physically harmed, he said.

I guess failing to give them food & water does not count ??

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TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Their weird glowing green color makes them look like they've been swimming in a nuclear plant's spent fuel pond.

But the zebra fish on sale in Taipei shops have an even stranger background: They're the latest in genetically modified fish, and their bodies contain DNA from jellyfish, making them shimmer in the dark.

Shopkeepers call the modified zebras "Night Pearls." Some have nicknamed them "Frankenfish," but their makers at the Taipei-based Taikong Corp. use the less catchy name of "TK-1" for the world's first genetically engineered fluorescent fish.

They've been on the market in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and Malaysia for about three months, said Bill Kuo, a spokesman for Taikong, which owns a chain of pet stores.


The fish are expected to swim into the U.S. market later this month and, beginning in August , the company expects to produce more than 100,000 a month, Kuo said.

So far, only the greenish TK-1 has been on sale. But next year, the fish should get the company of a red mate, the TK-2, and later the two colors will be combined in the TK-3, Kuo said.

"The original zebra fish are all colorless," he said.

Not everyone is satisfied with the genetic engineering.

"It must be really dark to see it," said Maria Hung, who offers the glowing fish for sale at her Goldfish Family store in Taipei.

The fish flit so quickly they come out as blobs in photographs. And at about $17 each, they don't come cheap. At Hung's shop, the goldfish in the next bowl cost only about $0.29 apiece.

"Since I started selling the fluorescent fish last month, I haven't found a single buyer," she said.

Taikong says its project is still in its infancy.

"We spent NT$100 million (US$2.9 million) developing this fish," Kuo said, defending the retail price.

He said Taikong was aware some people might fear the genetically modified animals would harm the environment or grow into uncontrollable "Frankenstein pets." Thus it took extra precautions in developing the fish - for instance, ensuring they cannot produce offspring.

At an Azoo store - a chain that's part of Taikong's operation - a clerk pulled a curtain to darken a corner of the shop in Taipei's upscale Asiaworld Plaza mall. Then she switched on a blue light above the tank and the fish became visible, silvery bodies crowned by a greenish glow.

Kuo noted that admiring fluorescent fish in the dark is an acquired taste.

"It's still a curiosity," he said. "We're covering new territory here."

[Jolie Rouge]

Capitol Hill. Intern. Scandal. Again

It's summer in Washington. Time for a Capitol Hill intern scandal. This tawdry little affair is brought to you by the office of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas). The main player is an intern named Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr. who told his story in gory detail to Washington Post "Reliable Source" columnist Lloyd Grove. (Tripplehorn is young. He doesn't know yet he's not supposed to talk about it.)

The cast: Paul Kelly Tripplehorn. Age. 20. When he's not in Washington, he's an Amherst College sophomore.

The plot: A brutal breakup after a brief romance and the scandalous e-mail that made its way from Tripplehorn's computer to his girlfriend's and then around the world several times.

The audience: Capitol Hill staffers who responded to this with "arched eyebrows and wagging tongues," reports The Post.

The curtain rises: Tripplehorn broke up with this girlfriend, whose name has (amazingly) not been revealed. All we know about her is she is 20 years old and a student at the University of Texas. Tripplehorn wrote her this e-mail, creatively titled "you suck." It said, complete here with all his spelling errors, but his expletives deleted: "I was planning on ruining your career by making phone calls to all of my parents [sic] friends and have you blackballed from the workplace as well as every prestigous [sic] law school in the country, but then (lucky for you) I decided not to do that because you are a sad sad person and I will just let your life self destruct right before my eyes...I am sorry, I don't care how big of [a] sadistic [expletive] crush you have on me but people like me simple [sic] don't date people like you." Somehow it has become a hit in the land of forwarded e-mails. A big hit. He later admitted to The Washington Post that he was wrong to send it. He wrote it in a fit of anger. Bad. Bad.

The curtain closes: The vitriolic missive resulted in Tripplehorn being fired from Sen. Hutchison's office.

The sequel: Tripplehorn bounced back fast. He's now interning in the office of a Republican House member. He may be learning his lessons, too. He won't name the representative.


Washington has had scandals since Thomas Jefferson, who--are you ready to be shocked?--liked to greet diplomats in his bedroom slippers. Find out what Abe Lincoln and Harry Truman did to arch eyebrows and wag tongues in the nation's capital.

http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/TV/9808/1...ril/index.html

[Jolie Rouge]

Airport screeners find loaded gun in teddy bear
From Patty Davis and Beth Lewandowski `` CNN
Thursday, July 17, 2003 Posted: 6:01 AM EDT

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TRAVEL/07/17...ear/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Screeners at a passenger checkpoint at the Orlando International Airport last Friday found a loaded handgun hidden inside a stuffed teddy bear belonging to a 10-year-old boy, the Transportation Security Administration has told CNN.

The boy was part of a family of five that had been on vacation in Orlando and was returning home to Ohio, the TSA said.

"The family reported it had been given to the child at a hotel in Orlando two days earlier," TSA spokesman Robert Johnson said. The .22-caliber Derringer, according to another TSA official, was "artfully hidden" inside the bear.

Screeners became suspicious after the teddy bear was x-rayed, and a small hole was found on the bottom of the stuffed toy, the official said. Johnson said the FBI is examining who gave the child the bear and why. The family was questioned and sent on their way, he said.

The TSA said the gun had been reported stolen in 1996 in Barstow, California, after a residential burglary.

"We are critized a lot for screening grannies and babies: 'Why are they checking this? My two-year old isn't a terrorist.' This underscores the need to screen everyone and everything," said Johnson. "It's lucky that we kept it off the flight," he added, noting it could have fired mid-flight while the child was playing with the stuffed animal.

Johnson stressed passengers should never accept anything from a stranger and take it on a flight.

Federal screeners have made two other catches recently. In Hartford, Connecticut, screeners stopped a man who had slipped a knife down the back of a six-year-old child's shirt to try to slip it past security, Johnson said.

Also at that airport, screeners stopped a 67-year-old man who had hollowed out his prosthetic leg to conceal a nine-inch knife in a scabbard.

Both were arrested, Johnson said.

"These sorts of things make the point that we need to screen everything," he said. "We can't allow terrorists any opportunity."