News of the Wired

[nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)]

Subject: 
             News of the Weird [486] - 30May97
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORIES

* Ms. Courtney Mann, the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of White People, who is
a tax preparer and single mother, was rebuffed in an attempt to join
a Ku Klux Klan-sponsored march in Pittsburgh in April, according
to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  Though she has been in the
NAAWP for at least four years, the Pennsylvania KKK Grand
Dragon turned her down because Mann is black.  "She wanted me
to send transportation [for the rally]," said the Grand Dragon. "She
wanted to stay at my house [during rally weekend].  She's all
confused, man.  I don't think she knows she's a black."  

  And we have Kent Crispin. When's the trading deadline?

* April's annual religious fertility celebration in Nagoya, Japan,
designed to improve the rice harvest, featured as usual a 12-foot-
long, bright pink, plastic penis, carried through the street, followed
by displays of smaller organs and a giant banner of a blood-
vesseled penis, testicles, and pubic hair.  Souvenir candy of the
same shape was sold during the event, and at the end of a parade,
the giant organ was placed on the fertility shrine. 

  Don't they do the same thing in North Dakota?

* In mid-April, five weeks before the national elections, the
governing party in Indonesia announced, via "scientific
calculation," according to one leader, that President Suharto had
won re-election with 70.02 percent of the vote. 

  There's a standard joke in Mexico about thieves breaking into
a government office and stealing the results of next year's
election.

COURT DOCKET

* In February, Maryland circuit court judge Thomas Bollinger Sr.
agreed to wipe the record clean of Charles Weiner's spousal battery
charge after he completes probation--for the sole purpose of
helping Weiner join the Chestnut Ridge Country Club, which had
until then rejected him because of his criminal record.  (In 1993,
Bollinger gave a rapist probation for an attack against a drunken
woman, remarking that finding an unconscious woman on a bed
was "the dream of a lot of males, quite honestly.")  Four days later,
Bollinger reversed his decision and removed himself from all
domestic violence and sexual offense cases. 

  Hey! Everyone _knows_ that "snoring" implies consent!

* In Santa Cruz, Calif., in February, Mr. Danis Rivera, 25, rejected
a plea bargain that would have sent him to prison for one year for
having sex with underage girls.  However, at his trial he was in
such a foul mood that he constantly spit at court personnel and
finally had to be outfitted with a Hannibal Lecter-type bonnet over
his face.  He was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison. 
And in a Providence, R. I., courtroom in April, Latin King gangster
George "Animal" Perry, on trial for murder and racketeering and
frustrated at the length of the prosecutor's closing argument, which
denied him a much-needed restroom break, rose from his chair,
unzipped his fly, and took one, anyway. 

  It seems reasonable that if one petitions the court for relief,
and is denied, then the only recourse is to relieve oneself.

SCHEMES

* St. Charles Catholic Church (Picayune, Miss.) and nearby St.
Margaret Mary Church (Slidell, La.) posted security ushers at the
doors in February to make sure that parishioners were not
pocketing communion wafers.  Devil-worshiping ceremonies often
use wafers for symbolic desecration, and when six people were
seen leaving St. Charles in December with their wafers, the
churches' leaders began to fear a local Satanic conspiracy. 

  Nonsense. They were probably just trading them for drugs and
child pornography.

* In April in Houston, Tex., Robert Perry Russell, Jr., 44, was
sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexual assault and diapering of a
14-year-old boy, but police say the number of victims may have
been as many as 10.  According to police, Russell liked to take
boys out in a boat, tell them a tale about a headless killer seeking to
rescue a toddler from the dangerous lake and who kills all other
people, and suggest that putting on the diapers he happens to have
with him would be a good way, should the killer appear, of
convincing him of his toddler status. 

  And, as compensation for their pain and suffering, the victims
accepted the deed to Russel's prime real estate in Florida and
a bridge in the New York area.

DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES

* Dishwashing:  In March, a busboy at a Key West, Fla., Marriott
resort allegedly shot and killed a supervisor who had apparently
made some constructive criticism of the busboy's loading of the
dishwasher.  And in May, police in Helena, Ark., detained a 15-
year-old boy they suspect shot his older sister to death after a
dispute over which one would wash the dishes. 

  I'll wash, you die.

==============================

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of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
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1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

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