Fun_People Archive
26 Apr
Weirdness [426] - 5Apr96

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 96 12:34:29 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: Weirdness [426] - 5Apr96

Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.426 (News of the Weird, April 5, 1996)
		by Chuck Shepherd

* The Washington Post reported in March that the Department of Agriculture
required Iowa's Oink-Oink, Inc., last year to begin dying green its
best-selling dog treat, Pork Tenderloin (which is made from the penises of
hogs).  Oink-Oink thought the green dye would make the product unappealing
and took a $100,000 loss killing the product and enraging dog owners who
loved the treat.  The Department's only reason for requiring the dye was so
the treats would be more obviously identified as not for human consumption.
[Washington Post, 3-1-96]
[Another haute cuisine victim of too much government...  -psl]

* Former Orange County (Calif.) Treasurer Robert L. Citron, who is awaiting
sentencing for fraud in mishandling the county's finances, said in December
that the reason his investment decisions plunged the county into the biggest
local- government bankruptcy in history in 1994 was the bad advice he had
received on interest rates from a mail-order psychic.  The good news for
Citron, according to Anaheim, Calif., channeler Barbara Connor, is that
Citron told her that he learned during two trances last year that he would
receive community service but no jail time for his conviction.  [Las Vegas
Review-Journal, 3-13-96]

* Program analysts hired by the CIA to evaluate its $20 million project to
use psychics to gather intelligence concluded in November that the psychics
were accurate about 15% of the time.  Among the psychics' tasks were to
track down Moammar Gadhafi so that he could be hit in the 1986 bombing of
Libya and to locate the plutonium squirreled away in North Korea.  According
to columnist Jack Anderson, the Pentagon adopted the program in the early
1970s because the Soviet Union was making extensive use of psychics.  [St.
Louis Post-Dispatch-AP, 11-30-95][Washington Post, Oct95]

* In December, less than three months after he had sold federal land worth
$1 billion in mining rights to a Danish company for $275, Secretary of the
Interior Bruce Babbitt was forced to sell another $2.9 billion piece of land
in Arizona for $1,745.  Babbitt is required to make these sales under an
1872 federal law, which Western Senators refuse to change.  [Tampa
Tribune-AP, 12-2- 95]

* In February in Winona, Minn., firefighters had to be called to rescue Mary
Tyler, 39, after her hand got stuck in her toilet as she tried to retrieve
a deodorant container that had fallen in.  [Winona Post, 2-11-96]
[There's a moral here somewhere...  -psl]

* Reading, Pa., county controller Judith Kraines complained at a
commissioners' meeting in January about having to type letters and do other
business on a typewriter because her computer was old and no one had been
able to get it to work for two years.  "If we had a computer," she said,
"letters would go out faster." Three days later, she announced that the
computer she was complaining about in fact had not been plugged in to any
electrical outlet and that when the plug was inserted and the computer was
turned on, it worked fine. [Reading Eagle-Times, 1-21-96]

Copyright 1996, Universal Press Syndicate.  All rights reserved.
Released for the entertainment of readers.  No commercial use
may be made of the material or of the name News of the Weird.

© 1996 Peter Langston