Fun_People Archive
2 Oct
Weirdness [447] - 30Aug96

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed,  2 Oct 96 10:39:24 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: Weirdness [447] - 30Aug96

Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.447 (News of the Weird, August 30, 1996)
		by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORIES

* Sex offender registration laws, which permit towns to learn when a sex
offender has been released from jail into their communities, have been
criticized recently as interfering with offenders' ability to start new
lives, but the main shortcoming of the laws in several states appears to be
their ineffectiveness.  Said an Illinois State Police spokesman in June, of
the many bogus addresses on his state's register, "It's the responsibility
of the offender to provide [accurate] information."  In Arkansas, a state
with at least 1,000 sex offenders behind bars at any one time, the register
contains only 50 names, but a State Police spokesman in June said the fault
was the sex offenders' for not being responsible enough to register.
[Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 6- 28-96] [Dallas Morning News-AP, 6-27-96]

* During a Tirana, Albania, divorce hearing in July, in which a man was
contending that his wife beat him regularly over the course of their
two-year union, the wife suddenly leaped at the man and beat him unconscious
before she was restrained.  The judge quickly granted the divorce. [Reuters
wirecopy, 7-17-96]

* Detroit, Mich., lawyer Leonard Jaques, 68, was fined $11,000 for a May
courtroom outburst in which he verbally abused an opposing lawyer, then
yanked his hair and threw him to the floor.  (In a widely reported courtroom
outburst in 1983 in Cleveland, Ohio, Jaques achieved notoriety by giving a
federal judge the excuse for missing a court date that he had "screaming
itches in the crotch.") Detroit Free Press, 6-18-96]

* X-rated film actress Nina Hartley, telling a June news conference in
Sacramento, Calif., that her films serve an important need--promoting
romance by warming up the viewers:  "It's no different than Hamburger
Helper." [Los Angeles Times, 6-19-96]

* Canadian food inspector Pamela Morgan, warning the public in March after
the death of a British Columbia man:  "We caution the public not to eat
seafood that glows in the dark."  (Some bacteria in raw seafood are indeed
luminescent, she said.) [Sault Star, 3-27-96]

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

© 1996 Peter Langston