Subject: Daily Dose - 040526 - GORGEOUS EX-GIRLFRIEND, News of the Weird, express lane, DDL, Rotten News

GORGEOUS EX-GIRLFRIEND

I phoned up a really gorgeous ex-girlfriend of mine the other day. We lost track of time, chatting about the wild nights we used to enjoy together. I couldn't BELIEVE it when she asked if I'd like to meet up and maybe rekindle a little of that magic.

"Wow!" I said. "I don't know if I could keep pace with you now! I'm a bit older and a bit balder than when you last saw me!"

She giggled and said she was sure I'd meet the challenge!

"Yeah," I said, "Just so long as you don't mind a man with a waistband that's a few inches wider these days!"

She laughed and told me to stop being so silly! She teased me, saying she thought tubby bald men were cute.

"Anyway", she said, "I've put on a couple of pounds myself!"

So I hung up on the fat bitch.

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News of the Weird....

In April, choreographer Jenefer Davies Mansfield staged her "NASCAR Ballet" production at the Roanoke (Va.) Ballet Theatre, featuring 20 colorfully unitard-clad dancers, wearing corporate patches of the theater's sponsors, prancing and leaping around a banked-racetrack stage (to new-age music and the sounds of revving engines), "racing" but occasionally crashing into each other, to be rescued by other dancers who are the "pit crews." Mansfield was hoping for a big crossover audience of NASCAR fans gathered for a big race in nearby Martinsville. "In this business," she said, "you've got to take chances." [Washington Post, 4-7-04]

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Lame Excuses:

In Los Angeles in February, Michael Marks, 25, raising an insanity defense to attempted murder, said he was drug-crazed at the time of the crime because someone on a balcony above him had spilled PCP on top of his head and that it must have affected his thinking. (He was convicted.)

Michael Cammarota, 57, asked a judge in New York City in February not to imprison him for engineering a multi-victim investment fraud but rather to send him to a mental institution because he needs help with what he called his "addiction" to "money." (He got four to 12 years.) [KNBC-TV-AP, 2-24-04] [New York Post, 2-4-04]

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Missouri high school principal Robert D. Blizzard, 58, was arrested in Oklahoma in December and charged with indecent exposure after he was reported driving with his inside light on and his pants down, flashing motorists. When the arresting officer asked him how he could still keep control of the car like that, Blizzard modestly explained that it was no more difficult than "talking on a cell phone."

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Not My Fault

In Cleveland in March, John Struna won his lawsuit against a convenience store owner who had sold him Ohio Lottery tickets, claiming that the man ought to have explained a Lottery rule to him (even though the rules are printed on every ticket). Struna had bought 52 tickets playing the same numbers in a game that pays $100,000 per winning ticket, but somehow he never noticed that the payout would be capped at $1 million, meaning that his 52 winning tickets would be worth only $19,230 each. Despite being a heavy lottery player (spending $125,000 a year), Struna said it was up to the store owner to explain that rule to him, and the jury agreed. [Plain Dealer, 3-25-04]

Frank Chancellor filed a lawsuit against Burger King in Greenville, S.C., in March, claiming that, unknown to him beforehand, his chicken sandwich was too hot and that it scalded his mouth. And two months earlier in West Palm Beach, Fla., Thomas Gould filed a lawsuit against Raindancer steak house, claiming that, unknown to him beforehand, his baked potato was too hot and that it scalded his mouth and esophagus, sending him to the hospital. [WASV-TV (Spartanburg), 3-11-04] [Palm Beach Post, 1-17-04]

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A 20-year-old Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario) student plunged to his death in February during a contest to see who could spit the farthest off an 11th-floor balcony. He had taken a running start. [San Francisco Chronicle, 3-30-04] [Toronto Sun, 2-23-04]

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I was in the express lane at the store quietly fuming.  

Completely ignoring the sign, the woman ahead of me had slipped into the check-out line pushing a cart piled high with groceries.  

Imagine my delight when the cashier beckoned the woman to come forward, looked into the cart and asked sweetly, "So which six items would you like to buy?"

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DDL

A hardware debugger named Court,
Shoved his tool in an Ethernet port.
But its buffer array
Only handled 1K,
So the port's driver cut it off short.

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"Congratulations! You have a girl. Unless I cut the wrong cord."
--Robin Williams as Dr. Kosevich in "Nine Months".

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A mother who had just put her little boy to bed was heard to say as she shut the door and tip-toed down the hall. "One more day when I worked from son-up to son-down."

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"The highway cop said, 'Walk a straight line.' I said, 'Well, Officer Pythagoras, the closest you could ever come to a straight line would be making an electrocephalogram of your brain waves.' He said, 'You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Do you wish to retain that right?' And I thought, 'Oooh, a paradox!'"
--Emo Philips

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Rotten News....  (true)

Germany plans to fine brothels with no apprentices

Sun May 2, 2:27 PM ET 

BERLIN (Reuters) - The German government's plans to levy fines on companies that fail to hire trainees will also be applied to legal German brothels, Der Spiegel news magazine reports.

Brothels failing to employ a certain number of apprentices will not be exempted from the financial penalties that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's centre-left government wants to introduce on all companies later this year, the magazine said on Sunday.

The legislation drafted by the Social Democrats and their Greens coalition partners will fine companies that do not have one apprentice for every 15 workers.

Several members of the Greens party tried to allow an exemption for prostitutes but the Education Ministry responsible for the legislation blocked that, arguing it "would cause considerable difficulties", Der Spiegel said.

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Drunk groom gets police escort to wedding
Mon Apr 5, 9:24 PM ET 

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man was forced to invite the police to his wedding after they arrested him for drink driving the day of his marriage and had to escort him to the registry office, authorities say.

"The police escort also offered the bridal pair his most heartfelt congratulations," said police from the northern city of Bremen in a statement on Monday.

Police arrested the inebriated 36-year-old after he crashed his car and failed to disguise that he had been drinking heavily. He told police he had been out on his stag night and was on the way to pick up wedding flowers for his bride.

"All parties refrained from taking the obligatory glass of champagne after the ceremony," said police. "It became apparent during the appointment with the wedding photographer that the bridegroom was struggling to raise a smile."

While the wedding guests went on to the reception, the new husband accompanied police to the station and provided a blood sample, before being collected by his mother.

"He'll have to do without his driving licence for a bit, but at least he has a brand new marriage licence now," said police.

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Lawyer Accuses Elderly Client of Scam
Thu Apr 1, 6:32 PM ET

CHICAGO - The lawyer for a 75-year-old woman accused of writing bad checks for new cars across the Chicago area says she scammed him, too. A judge issued an arrest warrant Wednesday for Betty A. Gooch, who has been charged with five felonies for allegedly buying cars with bad checks.

She failed to show up for a bond hearing and the judge revoked Gooch's personal recognizance bond and set bail at $100,000. Authorities said Thursday that she was not in custody. A public telephone listing for Gooch could not be found.

Her attorney, Stephen Ford, said he withdrew from the case Wednesday because she gave him a bad check. "She gave me this sob story," Ford said. "She gave me a check for a retainer, and I took it."

Gooch is accused of using her age and apparent frailty to take advantage of about a dozen car dealers in the past four years. Authorities said she wrote bad checks for several new vehicles, including a sport-utility vehicle and a motorcycle.

Authorities said Gooch would negotiate a deal, write a check and ask the dealership to hold on to it for a couple of days. She'd tell the dealership she needed to transfer money from her retirement account and after a check bounced she would provide another story, police said. The dealers would eventually repossess the cars.

Gooch pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor theft charge in October 2003 for using a bad check to buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. She was sentenced to a year of court supervision and paid a $385 fine.

Six months later, a McHenry County grand jury indicted Gooch on a charge of deceptive practice for allegedly writing a bad check for $22,000 for a sport-utility vehicle.

Bail was set at $10,000 but reduced to personal recognizance after Gooch showed up in court with an oxygen tank and cane, her attorney said.

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LIPTON'S ONION DIP AD- PULLED FOR REALLY BAD TASTE

We've seen some offensive ads before, but this one from Lipton is particularly galling. In a bid to sell onion dip, the company (part of the multinational Unilever firm) produced a print ad showing a Catholic churchgoer preparing to dunk a Holy Communion wafer in a bowl of dip.

The ad, running in the current issue of the weekly New York Press, was called "an error in judgment" by a Unilever spokesman--after, of course, readers and church officials blasted it as demeaning.