Fun_People Archive
3 Oct
WhiteBoardness 10/2/94

Date: Mon,  3 Oct 94 12:44:29 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: WhiteBoardness 10/2/94

From: WhiteBoard News for October 02, 1994
Forwarded-by:  <joeha@MICROSOFT.COM>

==========
Forwarded-by: Niall Shanahan

London, England:

An escaped car thief was back behind bars after a
prison officer who gave him a lift turned him in, but
not before a police car had unwittingly carried the
convict 15 miles along the motorway.

David Johnston, who fled an open jail near Blackpool,
in northwestern England, told a motorist who offered
him a lift: "I hope you don't mind, but I'm an escaped
prisoner."  Driver Steve Wynder replied, "Not if you
don't mind that I'm a prison officer."

Johnston had already been given a lift by a police
patrol car, which picked him up as he tried to hitch a
ride on the motorway.

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Forwarded-by: Bob Heddle

San Francisco, California:

In this age of computers, lasers and orbiting
satellites, scientists are learning a lot from rubber
duckies.

About 29,000 rubber ducks, turtles, and other bathtub
toys spilled overboard on January 10, 1992, in the
North Pacific when a freighter carrying the cargo on
its deck was hit by a storm.

So far, 400 of the bobbing toys have been found along
500 miles of Alaska shoreline, and that is helping
researchers trace wind and ocean currents.

"This is serious science," said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an
oceanographer at Evans-Hamilton Incorporated, a
consulting company in Seattle, Washington.

"We are learning a great deal."

A preliminary study of the ducky migration was
published this month in EOS, the official journal of
the American Geophysical Union.

Also being analyzed is an earlier example of
inadvertent oceanographic science when 61,000 Nike
shoes fell off a ship in 1990 and floated toward the
West Coast.

Data from the two spills, Ebbesmeyer said, give useful
information to oceanographers in predicting where other
floating debris will go after spills.
==========

Cambridge, Massachusetts:

It's not that he's afraid of publicly honoring Virginia
Woolf; it's just that he's a modest man, his lawyer
said.

Attorney Donna Turley Wednesday cast some light on the
mystery of a finely crafted red granite bench inscribed
with the writer's words, which appeared in a public
park.

But she declined to identify the benefactor, saying
only that the man and some friends carried the 600-
pound bench into the stand of pines at Fresh Pond
Reservation last Sunday.

"He likes this grove," Turley said during the news
conference at the site.  "It is a place he enjoys
coming to, and he wants other who enjoy it to have the
bench for rest and mediation, if they want."

City officials decided to allow the bench to remain
after a spokesman for the Cambridge Water Department,
owners of the land, called it "a really positive
gesture."

One onlooker called it a beautiful act of vandalism.
Another guessed it was the work of a "rogue intellectual."
==========

Fast News Forum:

Danish comedian Jacob Haugaard, promising better
weather, shorter lines and the right of men to be
impotent, got the shock of his life by being elected to
Parliament.

A double-murder trial in a California court was halted
after a juror accidentally glued shut her right eye.

The northern English city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was
branded one of Britain's most polluted spots because
scientists misguidedly put a smog monitor right on top
of a department store's loading dock.
==========

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© 1994 Peter Langston