Subject: Daily Dose - 040301 - GYNECOLOGIST PAINTER, BIZARRE NEWS, children of Israel, DDL, Rotten News

GYNECOLOGIST PAINTER

One day, a painter found himself short of help and went to the unemployment office to hire someone for the day.  When he arrived, they didn't have any painters available, but they did have a gynecologist there.  He reluctantly took him along to help. 

A couple of weeks later, the painter returned to the unemployment office needing temporary help again.  This time there were two painters there, but instead he asked for the gynecologist again. 

The clerk asked, "Why do you want a gynecologist when we have two professional painters you can take right now?"

He said, "Two weeks ago when I hired the gynecologist, we arrived at the house and it was locked with nobody home.  But I'll be damned if that gynecologist didn't stick his hand through the mail slot and paint the whole house!!"

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BIZARRE NEWS....

Always Has His Head Buried in a Book

A book-loving pack rat tried to squeeze even more tomes into his tiny New York City apartment and ended up buried under an avalanche of books, magazines and other stuff.

"I was hollering for two days, 'Let me out! Let me out!'" Patrice Moore tells the New York Post.

The 42-year-old former mail room clerk was trapped under his possessions for two days. His screaming finally alerted the landlord but despite breaking the door down, the avalanche kept rescuers from opening the door. Even after the landlord removed the door from its hinges it took three hours to dig out the man.

Moore says he collects books and magazines and peddles them back on the street for about $300 a week.

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Hanging by a Limb

SANTA FE, N.M. - A couple returned home from a week-long vacation to an unpleasant surprise: the legs of a dead man dangling from their ceiling.

Police identified the man as Carl Smith, 81, and he was the ex-husband of the woman who lived in the home. "He was stuck in an air conditioner duct," said Trish Ahrensfield, a spokeswoman for the Albuquerque police.

Police said it seems the man was attempting to break into the home via the roof and died while trying to enter through the air conditioner duct. The couple said their house was cold when they returned and they went to the bathroom to check if the heater had been turned off.

When they looked at the ceiling, they saw the legs hanging down.

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Mighty Python

CURUGSEWU, Indonesia - Villagers on the Indonesian island of Java have caught alive a python that is almost 50 feet long and weighs nearly 1,000 pounds, The Australian reported. If confirmed, it would be the largest snake ever kept in captivity, the newspaper reported Monday.

Hundreds of people have flocked to see the snake at a primitive zoo in Curugsewu village on the country's main island of Java. A local government official said the reticulated python measured 49 feet and weighed in at 985 pounds.

The Indonesian snake, which was caught last year but only recently put on public display, eats three or four dogs a month. Reticulated pythons are the world's longest snakes. They are capable of eating animals as large as sheep, and have been known to attack and consume humans.

The species is native to the swamps and jungles of Southeast Asia.

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Winning By the Sniff of Her Nose

MONTREAL - A Montreal housecat beat out former pro players and sports analysts in the Montreal Gazette's NFL pool, the newspaper reported Friday.

Miss Kallie, an 11-year-old brown tabby outwitted 11 humans, including radio and television sports broadcasters, two Gazette sportswriters and two former professional football players, to win the pool, which appeared weekly in the newspaper's sports section.

Miss Kallie's winning record: 101 wins, 82 losses and nine ties. Her average was .552.

Before each game, her owners would hold up slips of paper bearing the names of the competing teams. They would encourage the cat to sniff one of the pieces of paper. Her owners found her to be very species-loyal, often picking the Bengals, Lions, Jaguars and Panthers.

She also frequently demonstrated an interest in possible sources of food: the Ravens, Seahawks and Eagles.

_____________________________

"Mr. Goldblatt," announced little Joey, "there's something I can't figure out."

"What's that, Joey?" asked Goldblatt.

"Well, according to the Bible, the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, right?"

"Right."

"And the Children of Israel beat up the Phillistines, right?"

"Er, right."

"And the Children of Israel built the Temple, right?"

"Again you're right."

"And the Children of Israel fought the Egyptians, and the Children of Israel fought the Romans, and the Children of Israel were always doing something important, right?"

"All that is right, too," agreed Goldblatt. "So what's your question?"

"What were all the grown-ups doing?"

____________________________

DDL

A well hung young man from Seattle
Had a thing about romancing cattle.
He saw a young cow
And thought her a "Wow!",
But so did the bull, hence the battle!

____________________________

"She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer, made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious."
--W. Somerset Maugham

***

"He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."
--Raymond Chandler

***

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
--Mark Twain

____________________________

Rotten News...  (true)

TV star goes nude in MEP bid  
Wed Feb 25,10:51 AM ET 

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - A Hungarian TV hostess sat naked to announce she is running for a seat in the European Parliament as candidate of the upstart Union Party.

Anettka Feher, about 30, with close-cropped black hair, sat atop a table, legs crossed, displaying her petite and muscular body wearing nothing but a shy smile and some jewellery. Besides her visible assets, she believes disappointment with the political establishment will give her enough votes to secure a Brussels seat in the June elections.

Hungary joins the EU on May 1 and has been allotted 24 seats in the European Parliament.

Anettka rejects comparisons with Ilona Staller, a former Italian pornstar of Hungarian extraction, better known as Cicciolina.

Cicciolina was famed for baring her breasts during a successful campaign for a seat in the Italian parliament with the Radical Party in 1987. Cicciolina also ran for a seat in the Hungarian parliament in the 2002 general elections, but abandoned her campaign after a handful of disappointing meetings with voters in her native 10th district of Budapest.

"If they (Hungarian mainstream politicians) think I am just another Cicciolina, they are in for a big surprise: I am smart, and I have a daily four-hour presence on a national television channel," Anettka said on Wednesday.

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Tue, Feb 24, 2004
Dam beavers in row at world's end  

By Brian Winter

TIERRA DEL FUEGO, Argentina (Reuters) - The Great Beaver Plague, as some furious locals call it, began in 1946 with the same good but misguided intentions that have presaged countless other ecological disasters.

That year, Argentina's former military government imported 25 pairs of beavers from Canada, hoping they would multiply and create a fur industry among the forests on this large island at the very tip of South America.

Multiply they did. But the fur trade never quite caught on, and there were no natural predators. So today there are tens of thousands of beavers wreaking havoc across Tierra del Fuego -- felling trees, damming up rivers and stirring scandal among the humans as they butt heads over how to solve the problem.

"The beavers are an enormous headache, a plague, and the worst part is that nobody can agree on a solution," said Adriana Guillen, head of the local wildlife department.

The debate has pitted ecologists against animal rights activists, and government officials against each other. Stuck in the middle are tourism companies, who are turning the creatures into a side trip for a booming number of foreigners putting in to port on luxury cruises to nearby Antarctica.

On one recent evening, when the sun didn't fade until well after midnight, a guide took a small group to the edge of a small marsh littered with gnawed, fallen trees. After a good 15 minutes waiting in silence, the water rippled and an overgrown beaver churned through the pond.

"Look! I saw a beaver!" shrieked a Belgian tourist, jumping up and down in delight as her boyfriend snapped photos.

At the end of the night, the tourists huddled around a fire and ate a homemade stew -- made of beef. "You're not eating beaver," the guide assured them, to a round of laughter. The total cost for the four-hour trip ran at about $40 (21 pounds).

Nobody knows how many "beaver tourists" there have been so far, but the recent interest has rekindled a debate that has raged for years: by what means, and to what extent should the beaver population be controlled.

In his famous 1977 travel book "In Patagonia", the British writer Bruce Chatwin was nearly stuck in a swamp created by the misplaced animals.

"This 'beaver tourism' is a scandal," Guillen said. "The beavers need to be controlled, not idealised. They're ruining the environment."

The local government offers hunters about $1.50 for every beaver they kill, and every week somebody shows up with a truckload of bloody tails as proof of their work. But the bounty is so low that the hunting has little effect.

Another dark episode in Tierra del Fuego's past has ruled out more creative solutions. In 1900, immigrants brought in European rabbits -- which then did what they are known for. That prompted settlers to introduce the fox, which then hunted sheep on nearby farms and ravaged the local economy.

"It's a more difficult problem to solve than you might think," laughed Julio Lovece, tourism secretary in the nearby town of Ushuaia. "Some people say the beaver is a plague. But I say humans do much more damage!"

Paintings of beavers hang in Lovece's office, and can be found in restaurants and hotels all over Ushuaia. Meanwhile, a new ski resort nearby is named "Beaver Mountain," and some local entrepreneurs have just this month begun producing hats and gloves made from beavers.

The consumption of beaver is technically prohibited, but if a tourist meets the right people he or she can get a small plastic container filled with marinated meat and onions. Beaver meat is grainy and tough, and tastes a lot like deer.

Tito Baserga, a local guide, has started a business with his wife aimed at exporting beaver meat, key chains and wallets, since Argentine products are dirt-cheap in dollars following a recent economic crisis.

"I want people to love the beavers, but not so much that they can't be exploited. My wife and I want to live off the beavers," said Baserga. "Besides -- the fact they're here in Tierra del Fuego really isn't their fault, is it?"

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Two-thirds of Americans support TV executions

Updated: 3:58 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2004

NEW YORK - Two-thirds of Americans polled last month said they support the idea of televising executions — and 21 percent said they’d pay to watch Osama bin Laden put to death.

Eleven percent said they would pay to see Saddam Hussein executed.

A national telephone poll of more than 1,000 people aged 18 or older, done for Trio cable network by Harris Interactive, asked respondents who they would most likely pay to watch executed if executions were shown on pay-per-view television.

Bin Laden, accused of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was named by 21 percent of those polled. Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was named by 11 percent.

Thirty-seven percent of those polled said they did not think executions should be televised. And 54 percent said they wouldn’t watch an execution on television.

Harris Interactive interviewed 1,017 Americans aged 18 or older at random Jan. 24-26. The margin of error for the sample is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.