Fun_People Archive
3 Feb
WhiteBoardness 1/23/46

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Tue,  3 Feb 98 18:53:22 -0800
To: Fun_People
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Subject: WhiteBoardness 1/23/46

[Every once in a while the good guys win, or at least the bad guys lose...
 -psl]

Excerpted-from: WhiteBoard News for Friday, January 23, 1998

Sao Paulo, Brazil:

An injured worker who was denied compensation after a court ruled that
pinkie fingers would disappear with evolution anyway has won his appeal, a
newspaper reported Thursday.

An appeals court awarded Valdir Martins Pozza a lifetime payment equal to
30 percent of his salary as a machine operator, the job he held when he
injured his little finger in 1993, the Folha de Sao Paulo said.

"The healthy human body has no disposable parts," Judge Celso Pimentel said
in his ruling, the paper reported.

Pozza filed for compensation after a grindstone broke a tendon in his little
finger. A court-appointed doctor said the accident resulted in his loss of
manual dexterity.

But Judge Edmundo Lellis Filho rejected the medical findings and said Pozza
didn't qualify for benefits.

"The pinkie serves little use for the hand and ... is considered an
appendage that tends to disappear with the evolution of the human species,"
Lellis Filho said in his decision last March.
==========

Timmins, Canada:

A man who says he's never gambled before in his life won $50,000 on his
first try at a slot machine at Casino Niagara.

"It was just a fluke," said Flarant Tanguay, a married Shillington, Ont.,
carpenter with three children. "One in a million."

Tanguay said he's never gambled in his life and that he doesn't even buy
lottery tickets.

Going to the casino was something he decided to do on the spur of the moment
over the weekend, while visiting his mother outside of Welland.

Representatives at the casino were eager to see Tanguay spend some of his
winnings.

"They asked me about 20 times to keep playing and I said "No, I'll just go
home,' " said Tanguay. "I got lucky there and I didn't want to spend it like
that."
=============

London, England:

The Soviet KGB sent a female agent to try to entrap British composer
Benjamin Britten at the height of the Cold War, not realizing he was
homosexual, newly-published Foreign Office documents have revealed,

The incident occurred in 1971, when Britten was in the Soviet Union with
his long-time partner, singer Peter Pears.

The then British ambassador in Moscow Sir Duncan Wilson reported to London
that Britten had spent much of his time "engaged in a sort of private duel"
with the agent, his official minder from the Soviet Goskoncert agency.

She was "cheated of her prey by reason of him and Peter Pears staying with
me at the Embassy," Wilson told Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

© 1998 Peter Langston