xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
State authorities raided a Honolulu artifacts dealer in December and filed criminal charges against him for possession of rare or extinct birds without a state license. However, as dealer Don Medcalf pointed out to them at the time (to no avail), not only are the rare birds merely stuffed animals, but they were killed and stuffed sometime in the 1800s, not only before the possession law was passed but before Hawaii was even a state. In January, the prosecutor dropped the case because he “felt (the charges) wouldn’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Immigration and Naturalization Service is being incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security just in time. In November, INS revealed that it had routinely granted citizenship to a man with ties to the radical Islamic group Hezbollah during a time that he was under direct scrutiny by a joint FBI-NYPD terrorist task force. One week after that, a General Accounting Office review found that INS could not find nearly half of the 4,100 supposedly registered immigrants that the federal government wanted to interview in the days after Sept. 11 because the agency had been so lax in enforcing the registration law.
For 12 days in November, Yugoslav performance artist Marina Abramovic, 56, confined herself to three raised desks at a New York City gallery, where she denied herself all external stimulation (except being stared at by visitors), subsisting on water, and carrying on all bodily functions in full public view, in order to heighten her senses so that, she said, she and the audience could efficiently transmit energy between them. (Previously, for the same purpose, she and a partner sat at ends of a long table for seven hours, not moving and trying not even to blink.)
In September, art student Nathan Banks, 22 (of New York’s Purchase College), painted randomly chosen words on about 60 meandering cows in order to see if they would inadvertently line up to form poetry. At about the same time, in England, writer Valerie Laws, 48, did the same thing with sheep (except that she chose the words of only one poem, to see if the sheep could form another poem). An arts council granted Ms. Laws about $3,400 for her project, which she said would break down the boundaries between “literature” and “quantum mechanics.”
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Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD