Fun_People Archive
21 Sep
Weirdness - [541], June 19, 1998

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 98 11:59:32 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: Weirdness - [541], June 19, 1998

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649
Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.541 (News of the Weird, June 19, 1998)
		by Chuck Shepherd

* In May, a Plainfield, Conn., religious sect called God's House filed a
$200,000 lawsuit against the state Department of Children and Families for
sending to foster care the young daughter of sect leader Sister Rachael.
According to the Sister, the little girl is very important to the sect in
that she is the result of Rachael's impregnation by God.

* In February, police in Bemidji, Minn., raided a methamphetamine lab and
discovered that several of the workers making the drug were local jail
inmates on a work-release program.  The alleged meth kingpin was also a
local contractor and had requested the inmates for his legitimate business,
but then diverted them.

* In March, a representative of the former Soviet republic of Ingushetia
made a formal plea to Boris Yeltsin for the Russian government to stop
hampering the Ingush tradition (and that of most of the surrounding
Caucasus) of a man's selecting a wife by kidnapping a woman and carrying
her away.  Said the Ingush lobbyist, "This practice should be [regulated]
by local authorities, who understand local needs."

* The French Health Ministry disclosed in March that it had produced five
short sex-education films, so graphic as to be called hard-core pornography,
supposedly for the purpose of remedying a major lapse in sexual knowledge
in France.  As one film director described it, "I had to show that if a man
has sex with two women together, he must use a different condom with each
one."  Men's ignorance in that circumstance, said a Health Ministry
spokesperson, is "a big problem."

* The Austrian parliament approved a law in February to require that
husbands assume half the household chores and child-rearing
responsibilities.  (In a recent case, a man had won a divorce because his
wife didn't use a certain dishwashing detergent.)  On the other hand, after
studying 1,000 women, Dr. Jean Claude Kaufmann, a sociologist at the
Sorbonne in Paris, reported in March that more than half found housework
pleasurable, with nearly all who worked in the home saying the work
heightened emotion in some way, even erotically.  One said she ironed
immediately after breakfast to experience "explosions of joy";  another
became "inflamed with passion" by touching "the merest dishcloth."

* News of the Weird has reported several times on charitable bingo games in
which a recently fed cow is let loose in a pasture marked into squares, with
the winning square being the one onto which the cow first relieves herself.
(The last such story, in 1997, reported Nova Scotia's banning the game
because it was deemed too easy to rig.)  In March 1998, the Bryanston
Primary school in Johannesburg, South Africa, raised about $60,000 with
"elephant-patty bingo," played the same as with cows except with larger
squares.

	Copyright 1998 by Universal Press Syndicate.

© 1998 Peter Langston