Fun_People Archive
16 May
WhiteBoardness - 5/16/97

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Fri, 16 May 97 23:37:57 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: WhiteBoardness - 5/16/97

[For some reason I find these four items pretty encouraging...  -psl]

Excerpted-from: WhiteBoard News for Friday, May 16, 1997

Hamden, Connecticut:

With cheering students watching, the principal puckered up and kissed a
squealing pig. From all accounts, the pig didn't like it.

Bear Path Elementary Principal Richard Balisciano promised students he would
smooch the swine if they read 3,000 books during April.

They did.

On Tuesday, Balisciano, dressed in a pink pig costume, got up on stage in
the school's auditorium. While the students chanted "kiss a pig," he planted
four wet ones on Petunia, a 25-pound porker.

Petunia did not seem pleased, and squealed loudly during the ceremony.

Balisciano said the reading program went far beyond his expectations. Many
parents reported their children turned off the television to read instead,
he said.

"Reading is important for their whole lives. I would do anything to
encourage and challenge them to read, and humor is important to education,"
Balisciano said.
==========

Oslo, Norway:

A Norwegian cabbie thought he'd landed the fare of the century when a Dane
hopped into his taxi for a 1,300-mile ride from Copenhagen to Rome.

Jorgen Gilberg's bliss ended at the Vatican, where his customer said he had
to collect the $3,570 cab fare from Pope John Paul II.

"That's when it hit me. A bad fare to Italy. I was about to collapse from
laughter," Gilberg, 24, said yesterday by telephone from Aarhus, Denmark.
"I could hardly contain myself when he said the pope owed him money."

Gilberg, an economics student from Fredikstad, Norway, drives part-time for
an Aarhus taxi company. So when the owner asked him to drive the 66-year-old
man to Rome last week, Gilberg assumed everything was in order.

So did the taxi company, because the man took a cab to Rome last year.
During the 24-hour drive through Denmark, Germany, Austria and most of
Italy, the customer seemed unusually quiet.

"I thought he was filthy rich, so I didn't ask too many questions. But I
did wonder who would take a 2,600-mile round trip in a taxi," said Gilberg.

At the Vatican, the customer claimed the pope owed him $7,140, and then
admitted that "the voices in his head might have misled him," said Gilberg.

Gilberg stopped for a quick tour of the Vatican, then drove the man home to
Denmark.
==========

Harderwijk, Netherlands:

A museum in the Netherlands is staging an exhibition showing the ascent of
man through the types of toilets used, from stinking latrines to
self-cleaning machines.

The Veluws Museum at Harderwijk is staging the exhibition from May 17 to
November, with exhibits of bed pots, holed chairs, lavatories, toilet paper
and diapers as well as accounts of how people defecated throughout history.

"What do we have more in common than excrement? Young, old, human being or
animal, we deal with it everyday," the museum says in a promotional
brochure.

Visitors can read scatological jokes on posters at the museum entrance,
study plastic models of human and animal excrement, stick their nose up the
behind of a hippopotamus or play flipper with the intestines of a zebra.

The museum also takes a more serious tone by showing the problem of dogs
defecating in cities and condemns environmental damage caused by improper
waste disposal.
==========

Ottawa, Canada:

Canada's capital is poised to allow women to go topless at municipal pools
and beaches, a city councilor said Thursday.

If approved by the city council next week as expected, Ottawa would become
the first city in Ontario -- Canada's most populous province -- to permit
topless sun bathing at city-run facilities.

The move comes amid a controversy over topless women that was sparked in
1991 when a woman from Guelph, Ontario, about 50 miles southwest of Toronto,
was fined for strolling topless. A wave of topless solidarity protests
followed.

Last December Ontario's highest court overturned the woman's indecency
conviction, effectively making it legal for women to go topless in public.
The Ottawa policy would mean women could sun themselves topless at city
facilities as well.

"We don't want our lifeguards to become the breast police," City Councilor
Diane Deans said in a phone interview.

© 1997 Peter Langston