Weird News Thread ....

[Jolie Rouge]

The duck that should have ducked


VIRGINIA, Minnesota (AP) -- This is hardly a lame duck.

A mallard swimming on Silver Lake isn't letting a dart in its head stop it from eating, swimming, socializing or paddling away from rescue attempts.

Authorities don't know who shot the duck with a metal blowgun dart, but the bird hasn't been able to remove the shaft from its left cheek behind its bill.

Department of Natural Resources personnel tried without success Monday to capture the mallard, an agency spokeswoman said. The wound caused by the dart isn't infected, and the duck is swimming and eating, she said.

The Mesabi Humane Society has received several calls about the duck, said Mary Peliska, executive director, and animal control officers also have been checking on the duck.

"You just want to pull it out," she said of the dart. "You have to catch the duck first. They go fast."

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Toe Wrestlers Gather for World Championship


Jun 23, 9:28 am ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Competitors from around the globe will be on their toes when the 10th annual World Toe Wrestling Championship gets underway in Britain Saturday.
More than 100 contestants from America, Australia and Canada will lock toes in a English pub -- Ye Olde Royal Oak Inn, Wetton, in the English Midlands.

Competitors have to force over an opponent's foot on a "toe-dium" in the best of three "toe-downs." If a competitor is in too much pain he can give in by calling out the words "Toe Much."

According to the championship's Web site -- www.worldtoewrestling.org -- no steroids or other artificial stimulants are permitted, apart from tobacco and alcohol.

The current Men's World Champion is Alan "Nasty" Nash the Dominator, while Women's Champion World Karen "Kamikaze" Davies is seeking to win a fifth successive title.

[Jolie Rouge]

'Survivor's' Heidi Tells Nauseating Tale

Heidi Strobel almost died.

The beautiful and sexy "Survivor: The Amazon" alum who will make an even bigger name for herself posing nude for Playboy magazine, says she barely escaped the jungle with her life. The tale that Strobel reveals in a series of interviews with Ozarks Newsstand and The New York Post's Page Six gossip column will turn your stomach.

When Strobel straggled out of the Amazon, the marathon runner weighed a meager 86 pounds. Her stomach and intestines were infected with parasites. A tarantula bite on her left knee created an open wound that oozed pus. "I had holes in my knee, and there was stuff oozing out of it," the 24-year-old told Page Six columnist Richard Johnson. "I couldn't walk. It was very, very gross." When Strobel returned to her teaching job, the students weren't teasing her about taking off her shirt in an attempt to get food. "They saw me passing out at school and throwing up blood. They knew I was very sick." While her hair didn't fall out, she said it did snap off--something she blames on poor nutrition. "It doesn't take long for the body to begin to deteriorate, and then you have no strength left," she told Ozarks Newsstand. What was the best part of coming home and getting well? Eating Hip Pocket pizza. "Hip Pocket is my favorite pizza in all the world, and it was so good to have one again," she told Ozarks Newsstand. "You've been so hungry so long, that you can't get over that feeling for a long time."

"I told my students don't do what I do, but believe what I do. Mentally, always try to be a better person than the day before," she told Ozarks Newsstand. "Every day we would start class by saying what are we going to do today, and they'd know the answer, we're going to be a better person than yesterday. The kids start believing that, and that's what I want them to believe. I want them to be people that believe in themselves and won't give up. People who say I'm not a role model don't really know me."

[Jolie Rouge]

A Favorite Best-Selling Novelist Dies

Leon Uris, the man who wrote "Exodus," "Battle Cry," "Trinity," "QBVII," and 10 other novels died on Saturday of heart and kidney failure in his home on New York's Shelter Island. He was 78.

Known for his assiduous and extensive research, Uris drew on his own experiences and natural sense of adventure to produce his lengthy and richly detailed stories of war, salvation, and heroism. "Exodus" told of the Arab-Israeli wars, while "Trinity" explored the conflict in Northern Ireland. Published in 1958 and 1976 respectively, the books' messages seem as relevant today as they did all those decades ago. The Associated Press describes Uris as "energetic and unafraid" and "as much an adventurer as a writer, traveling tirelessly and sometimes risking his life."

Born in 1924 in Baltimore, Md., Uris was the son of a Russian immigrant who grew up in Norfolk, Va. "I used to think of myself as a very sad little Jewish boy, isolated in a Southern town, undersized, asthmatic," Uris once told AP. "When I read all my correspondence again, I realized I was a hustler. I was tough. I used everything to my advantage. I could be very ruthless. I hurt a lot of people on the way up." His final book, "O'Hara's Choice," will be published in October. It tells the history of the Marine Corps and its struggle to expand after the Civil War.

[Jolie Rouge]

Find out the embarrassing reason the Department of Education pulled back its summer reading list for kids.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/06....ap/index.html

Thursday, June 5, 2003 Posted: 9:57 AM EDT (1357 GMT)




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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Education Department pulled its summer reading list from its Web site after learning the list misspelled and misidentified book titles and authors. Librarians also said the list was outdated.

The list included children's classics such as Beverly Cleary's "Ramona the Brave," Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" and George Orwell's "Animal Farm." But librarians say it recommends few titles from the last decade.

"I don't know if someone pulled out a really old bibliography from a file cabinet somewhere," Nancy Margolin, a media specialist at McDougle Elementary School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said Wednesday. "These don't seem like the kinds of lists that would be provided by librarians."

Margolin added that because of the dated nature of many books, the suggested titles "are not as reflective of a diverse population."

Department spokesman Dan Langan said "proofreading and clerical errors" led to the misprints.

"The minute this was called to our attention, we immediately took action," he said.

The department is working to put a corrected list back on the Web site, but Langan said he did not know when that would happen or whether the content would be updated.

The department compiled the list from elementary and middle school specialists from Atlanta, Georgia, public schools. More than 40,000 students in the Atlanta school district are participating in the department's "No Child Left Behind" reading program this summer.

[Jolie Rouge]

Martha Stewart's Unusual Sunday Visit

Never let it be said that Martha Stewart forgets her friends in bad times. The queen of crafts, who will face trial on January 12 on insider stock trading charges, paid a Sunday evening visit to the elderly parents of ImClone founder Sam Waksal, reports The New York Post. Sam has been sentenced to seven years, three months in the slammer for his role in the ImClone stock trading scandal. It's her friendship with the Waksals that has led her to the "brink of disaster," notes The Post.

Driving a Toyota Land Cruiser, she arrived at the East Hampton home of Sabina and Jack Waksal on Sunday at 6:30 p.m. wearing a black sweater, slacks, and flip-flops. (Sabina is 83 and Jack is 80.) Martha tried hard to avoid the cameras, even going so far as to pull down the visor while a friend tried to drape a jacket over her head. Meanwhile, it seems that Sam, who plead guilty to eight federal counts including securities fraud and obstruction, will be able to delay his prison start date by three weeks so he can complete some dental work for an inflamed and decayed molar. That means he will surrender to authorities on July 23. Martha faces five charges stemming from her sale of 4,000 ImClone shares.

According to a Gallup poll taken on June 9-10, only 34 percent of the American public has any sympathy at all for Martha Stewart. Most Americans also think she's guilty. But they still want to buy her stuff. Of the 43 percent of Americans who report having bought Martha Stewart products, fully 78 percent tell Gallup they are no less likely now to buy her products.


Martha's lawyers hint at her defense.

Do you think this will work?

http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/10/news...ense/index.htm

Stewart's attorneys post statement on Web site that may preview defense strategy.
June 10, 2003: 1:11 PM EDT



NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Martha Stewart's attorneys have presented a series of arguments on behalf of their client on her Web site, statements that may give a partial preview of her defense of federal charges filed against her last week.



CNNfn's Mary Snow takes a look at the arguments presented by Martha Stewart's lawyers on her Web site.


Play video
(Real or Windows Media)



On the Web site Marthatalks.com, the two attorneys, Robert Morvillo and John Tigue, say they are correcting "frequent errors" in media reports about Stewart in the wake of her indictment. The posting from the lawyers is dated Tuesday.

The indictment alleges obstruction of justice by Stewart in the probe of her sale of nearly 4,000 shares of ImClone Systems (IMCLE: Research, Estimates) stock in December of 2001, just before news was released that the Food and Drug Administration had rejected an application involving the biotech company's proposed cancer-fighting drug Erbitux. ImClone's CEO Sam Waksal, a friend of Stewart, has pled guilty to insider trading charges himself, and is due to be sentenced in his case Tuesday.

Stewart appeared in court last Wednesday. She was fingerprinted and photographed by law enforcement officers Monday. The photographs of the well-known domestic style trendsetter will not be released to the public.

Stewart's lawyers argue that their client's indictment does not allege she was provided inside information by Waksal about ImClone's application for its cancer drug Erbitux -- or about anything else. It also argues that the indictment does not allege that Martha Stewart knew the reason why Waksal placed an order to sell ImClone shares, only that he was trying to sell. It also points out that Stewart is not facing criminal charges of insider trading.

"Even though insider trading was the subject of the criminal investigation that she supposedly obstructed, the insider trading charge is included only in the civil complaint," said the lawyer's statement.

The attorneys also point out that she is not charged with perjury in the case.

"Martha did not produce an inaccurate telephone log to government investigators," said the lawyer's statement. "The government acknowledges that she 'temporarily' made changes to the log and then 'directed her assistant to return the message to its original wording.'"

Finally the lawyers point out that Stewart and members of the Waksal family were not the only ones to sell ImClone shares in advance of the official announcement about FDA action on Erbitux.

"On that day, (Dec. 27, 2001) more than 7.7 million shares were traded and the price fell from $63.49 at the opening of trading to $58.30 at the close of trading," said the lawyers.

Stewart started the Web site last week the day after the indictment, using it to proclaim her innocence and thank her supporters.

[Jolie Rouge]

What do Martha Stewart, Ken Lay and Saddam Hussein all have in common?

They're all in the cards.


Corporate crooks in the cards : Web site launches deck of cards featuring notorious executives, officials.

June 19, 2003: 11:08 AM EDT

http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/18/news...deck/index.htm


NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - A small outfit in Atlanta, capitalizing on the Pentagon's now famous deck of cards featuring the most wanted outlaw Iraqis, is selling a deck of cards featuring some of the most notorious of America's latest crop of corporate villains.

"Sales are well beyond our expectations," said Douglas Quinby, one of the founders of www.thestackeddeck.com

The deck, which sells for $12.95, features a variety of executives and officials who have been in the news recently, including Enron ex-CEO Ken Lay (Ace of Spades), Martha Stewart (Queen of Hearts), and ex-SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt (Joker).

Some of the biggest customers have been employees at the scandalized companies, Quinby said. The deck was officially launched early this month.

Quinby said that given the cards' early success, the outfit may update the deck or develop new products with similar themes.

"Unfortunately, there's lots of fodder for future decks," he said.

[Jolie Rouge]

Lottery Draws Same Number Twice in 1 Day

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news...40.htm&sc=1120

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - The Pennsylvania lottery hit the same number twice in its ``Big 4'' drawings, making 3-1-9-9 a very lucky number indeed for anyone who picked it for both the midday and evening drawings.

Those four numbers were randomly generated by a computer for the Monday midday drawing and then also selected in the traditional random pingpong ball drawing in the evening.

Bill Powell, a lottery representative, said it was the first time the same four numbers have appeared during the same day in Pennsylvania, but it has occurred elsewhere.

Powell noted that the drawing of a particular set of numbers in the midday drawing has no effect on the possibility of those numbers being picked later. The odds of any four numbers being picked in the Big 4 drawing is 1 in 10,000.


``It's completely random,'' he said. ``The balls do not have a memory.'' The Pennsylvania Big 4 game paid 225 winners a total of $49,600 for the afternoon drawing and 1,887 winners a total of $759,200 in the evening.



06/24/03 08:32

[Jolie Rouge]

Sweden Bans Import of Alcohol Ice Pops
By TOMMY GRANDELL


STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Vodka-flavored ice pops won't be available on store shelves in Sweden after regulators said Tuesday they were worried that young kids might eat them.

The pops - made by Hilvaranbeek, Netherlands-based Evolution Enterprise - are water-based and come in three flavors: tequila, vodka and a cocktail blend.

But the company said it doesn't target the treats, called Freaky Ice, toward anyone who isn't of legal drinking age.

``We don't want to go to supermarkets, we don't want to sell them in gas stations,'' a company spokeswoman who refused to give her name said.


Instead, the company markets them to clubs and bars and discos in 30 countries, including Spain, Malta, France and Britain.


According to Laekemedelsverket, the Swedish medical products agency, a request to import and sell the ice pops, which have nearly 2 fluid ounces of alcohol in each serving, was denied.


``There is a risk that minors will be tempted to buy the ice cream, which is considered improper out of a public health perspective,'' agency spokeswoman Conny Eklund said.


In neighboring Denmark, the ice pops also have caused a stir.


Last month, a Danish importer said he would launch Freaky Ice in discos and bars, but consumer organizations and the government's Health Board criticized the product claiming it was marketing a product containing alcohol as something harmless.


There are no immediate plans in Denmark to ban such products.


Swedish law prohibits the sale of any alcoholic products to anyone younger than 18, and doesn't permit restaurants or shops to sell special items, like alcohol-flavored ice cream or candy, on a limited scale.



06/24/03 10:04



{{Boy, would sure make it easier to get them to take an afternoon nap,, tho' ****

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TAMPA, Fla., June 23 (Reuters) - Eight people were slightly
injured on Monday when passengers, apparently alarmed by seeing
flames coming from an engine, inflated emergency slides and
evacuated a plane at the Tampa airport, airline and fire rescue
officials said. The plane, a Delta Air Lines Boeing 757 bound
for Atlanta with 167 passengers on board, was pushing back from
the gate at Tampa International Airport when it experienced what
is known as a "hot start," said Delta spokeswoman Peggy Estes.
Hot start is when fuel condensation forms overnight on an engine
and a flame is briefly emitted when it is fired up for the first
flight of the day, she said. "Initial reports indicated that
some passengers may have seen flames from (an) engine and some
elected to open the emergency exits, automatically deploying
chutes," Estes said in e-mailed comments. Some of the passengers
evacuated through chutes, while the rest followed flight
attendants' instructions and got out through the normal exits,
she said. Tampa Fire Rescue spokesman Capt. Bill Wade said eight
people were taken to a hospital, mostly with soreness, bumps and
bruises from landing hard after sliding down the chutes, but
there were no life-threatening injuries.

[Jolie Rouge]

Couple Exchanges Wedding Vows Under Water


BOMBAY (Reuters) - An Indian couple married under water in a swimming pool on Monday in a Hindu ceremony lasting 36 minutes and 33 seconds, hoping to set a world endurance record.

Chandan Thakoor, 33, and his wife Dipti, 31, who got engaged in mid-air a fortnight ago, exchanged their vows wearing scuba gear over their traditional wedding clothes 12 feet under water in a Bombay suburban pool.

"The wedding was like our dream coming true," Chandan, now dressed in a gray suit and a red tie, told a post-ceremony news conference.

The happy couple said they had felt no fear despite staying submerged for more than half an hour, but the water pressure had left them feeling a little giddy and breathless.


"It was an emotional moment for us," bride Dipti said. "There was excitement and a great feeling that we had set out to accomplish a feat and we had succeeded."


Diving instructor Ravi Kulkarni, 35, who had trained the couple for more than a month before the big day, gave a commentary on the ceremony for nearly 500 invitees, and for dozens of press photographers and television cameramen.


The bride's father was among relatives who entered the water with the officiating Hindu priest to assist the couple, their clothes weighted down to hold their shape.


The pool was decorated to resemble a temple with orchids and marigolds and intricately carved pillars straight from a Bollywood film set.



06/24/03 07:42