1997_02 The Daily Collegian February 1997

              4
THE DAILY
COLLEGIAN
Wednesday, Februarys, 1997
News
News Editor: Matthew Hart
Telephone: (209) 278-2556'
OF THE
OOoooo That hurts	
• Texas A&M student Jonathon Culpepper
and his fraternity. Kappa Alpha, were indicted
in College Station. Texas, in December on a
criminal hazing charge because of a severe
"wedgie." The grand jury found that frater¬
nity members lifted a candidate, unnamed in
news reports, off his feet by the waistband of
his briefs, causing the man to require the sur¬
gical removal of a testicle.
Waiting room blues
• Clarence Mulloy. weary of doctors who
don't keep their appointments, filed a law¬
suit in November against one of them. Dr.
Lawrence Amato of Round Lake Beach, III.,
and won $ 10 plus court costs. Mulloy claimed
lhat Dr. Amato once cancelled merely be¬
cause his nurse was away and didn't want to
hook Mulloy up to a heart monitor alt by him¬
self.
• In December. McDonald's opened res¬
taurants in it's 100th country, Belarus, amid
about 4,000 eager customers and 500 pro¬
testers, and a few days later, in it's 101st —
Tahiti. According to New York Times col¬
umnist Thomas Friedman, no two countries
with McDonald's restaurants have ever gone
to war against each other — because, as
Friedman theorizes, countries prosperous
enough to support a McDonald's are surely
stable enough to resist most provocations.
Can't possibly be true
• The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette re¬
ported in December that a female inmate at
the Yell County Jail in Dardanelle had been
receiving regular shipments of mcthamphet-
amines via Federal Express. Jail officials had
finally become suspicious and obtained the
necessary search warrant to check her fre¬
quent deliveries. <*
• During the Christmas Handicap race at
a track in Melbourne, Australia, the horse
Cogitate threw it's rider and bumped the
horse Hon Kwok Star, sending Hon's jockey,
apprentice Andrew Payne, into the air. To
break his fall, Payne grabbed the neck of
Cogitate and then climbed into the stirrups
and rode the horse across the finish line
(though the official records would show that
both horses were disqualified).
• In November, ballroom dancing cham¬
pion Michael Keith Withers was convicted
in Perth. Australia, of the attempted 1994
' murder of his wife/dance partner. Stacy
Larson. He had said it was an accident, but
the jury found that he had doused her with
gasoline (set aside to use in a Whipper Snap¬
per lawn trimmer he had borrowed from a
neighbor) and set her afire, burning 70 per¬
cent of her body. Larson testified that she had
not seen Withers since the incident, but un¬
der cross-examination finally admitted that
she had slept with him IS times since then,
and another witness said Larson had bought
Withers' Christmas gifts in 1995. including
his very own Whipper Snapper.
• Results of a University of Minnesota
study, announced in July and pertinent to the
dispute between large animal feedlots and
their neighbors who object to the smell,
showed that home values nearer the feedlots
were higher than those farther away. (No
explanation was given by researchers, but
some experts interviewed by the Minneapo¬
lis Star Tribune said increased employment
opportunities at feedlots had driven up de¬
mand for housing).
• A 1985 lease fixed the annual rent the
US pays for its Moscow embassy at 72.500
rubles. That was worth about $60,000 at the
lime, but now with nine years to go on the
lease, the devaluation of the ruble has reduced
the rent to the equivalent of $22.56 a year. In
August, the Russian government stepped up
its demands to renegotiate, but the U.S. con¬
tinues to resist.
Inexplicable
• The New York Times reported in De¬
cember on a Jordanian company thatemploys
veiled Palestinian women stitching together
women's exotic underpants for Victoria's
Secret stores and catalougues. Adding to the
irony is that the products, which in 1997 will
also include brassieres, are sold with a "Made
in Israel" label in order to take advantage of
Israel's favorable trade status with the United
States.
• In Qecember. Frederick Lundy was to
report for a court hearing in Akron. Ohio, in
which he had been told: Plead not guilty to a
parole violation and be released until trial,
or plead guilty and go to jail immediately.
Lundy pleaded guilty and was abruptly led
away. That decision could be explained, per¬
haps, by Lundy's desire to get on with his
punishment. What could not be explained
was why he had come into the courtroom
under the circumstances with 41 rocks of
crack cocaine in his pocket, which were dis¬
covered in a routine, pre-incarceration search.
• In November at the Presbyterian Hospi¬
tal in Albuquerque. Anthony Valencia and
Fitzgerald Vandever, both age 20. were ar¬
rested and accused of roaming the Intensive
Care Unit, looking io steal patients' food off
warming cart:. (Said a hospital spokes¬
woman, "Actually, we've got some pretty
good [food] down there.")
• In December in London, the first fraud
cases against the parent company of Hoover
vaccum cleaners went to trial, four years af¬
ter the company's disastrous giveaway cam¬
paign in which it promised two free air fares
With all vacuum cleaners, which retailed for
as little as $165 in Great Britain. The com¬
pany sold more than a half million units dur¬
ing the campaign and has so far paid out about
$72 million in airline tickets to about a third
of the purchasers.
Update
• In 1995. News of ihe Weird listed four
cities in which entrepreneurs had begun busi¬
nesses to fly couples around for an hour so
that they could have sexual intercourse while
airborne. In December 1996. several
homeowners near the Van Nuys (Calif.) Air¬
port complained vociferously to the Los An¬
geles Daily News that one of the four — Mile
High Adventures (whose flights now start at
$429) — flies so frequently and so low that
they are extremely irritating. Said one
homeowner. "What people do in their own
bedroom is their business. What they do over
our heads is the community's business."
• In January, disbarred Parsonburg. MJ .
lawyer Paul Bailey Taylor. 61, finalh
snapped after years of erratic behavior and
barricaded himself inside a church, armed
wilh a rifle, for five hours before police con¬
vinced him to surrender. When he was work
ing. Taylor ran his law practice from the bath
room of his unhealed rural trailer, where ho.
had set up a desk over the toilet so that he
could sit for long periods of time because ot
an intestinal disorder. A social worker once
described the place as "clean," in that Taylor's
12 cats were neatly housed in cardboard
boxes and his legal papers were filed in an
orderly fashion in the bathtub.
Order in the court
• In September, Barbara Monsky filed a
federal civil rights lawsuit in Danbury, Conn .
against local Superior Court Judge Howard
J. Moraghan for permitting his dog to roam
the courthouse, especially since Moragrun
should know that the dog habitually sticks
his nose under women!s skirts and allegedK
did so to Monsky. Mosky's attorney. Nanc>
Burton, said the dog had sniffed her. also
Burton analogized to the traditional "one free
bite" rule for determining whether a dog is
legally "vicious." arguing that Moraghan
long ago knew that the dog had had his one-
free sniff.
Oh, that explains it...
At the trial in his racial harrassment law
suit against Pitney Bowes in Los Angeles in
September, black salesman Akinitunde 1
Ogunleye testified that he had been addressed
by one co-worker as "Akintunde. oog^i
booga. jungle-jungle." The co-worker who
is of French-Canadian ancestry, later ■sti¬
ffed that he was misunderstood, that what he
said was "Bonjour. bonjour." The jur>
awarded Akintunde $11.1 million.
(Send your Word Newno Chock Shepherd PO Bo»HV»
Si Pnmban;. FU 337J8. or 747773M6»comp»»erv* com |
Kennel Bookstore
Kennel Copy Center •_ 278-3945
funnel
Copy Center
^*S    ±    %/ ^>located on the Lower Level
/ Resumes / Color Copies
/ Thesis Ordering / Course Packets
/ Fax Service / Laminating
/ Wedding Invitations / Spiral & Tape Binding
5 Self-Service Copiers on Campus
Commons Lodge • USU • Peters Building • USU Pavilion
FRESNO STATE
'        CMl,ftr,.t Suu Ummtr,,r,. Ffr,m»
Lansky
Continued from page 3.
every few seconds because they
were riding it like an escalator and
reaching the top rather abruptly;
and a down-hill ski simulator,
which was mostly simulating the
wipe-out aspect of skiing. I think
— and I'm not trying to brag here
— I was the only one in the room
who actually broke a sweat. Most
people would lift a small weight
about four times, then lose interest
and wander off to another machine,
thinking that quick dose of exercise
had brought on instant weight loss
and muscle tone.
My next appointment led me to
the "Douches Thermales." A
bearded man named Jose ap
proached me, read the card on my
lapel, then introduced himself (pro¬
nouncing his name the French way:
Joz-SAY). He took me into a room
that looked normal enough. There
was a shower stall in one corner
with the door missing. OK. But
when Jose ordered me to disrobe,
stand in the shower, grab the
handles mounted on either side of
the stall and brace myself, I knew
something was upJose sat on a
stool about 10 feet away, facing me.
then picked up a fire hose and
blasted my backside with luke¬
warm water. Standing there naked,
holding onto the handles. I began
to feel like I was caught in a bad
prison movie. Then Jose had me
turn around so he could hose down
my front. When Jose finished, he
lead me into an adjacent, identical
room, only here the shower stall. I
was relieved to see. had a curtain.
This shower was a bit different
than your basic shower. It had 12
shower nozzles, and each one
sprayed laser-sharp shards of wa¬
ter. The nozzles blasted me at four
different levels Like a soccer player
obstructing the path of a penalty
kick, I had to stand with my hands
over my private region to prevent
direct hits.
After 20 minutes I was led to a
treatment called "Bain
Carbongazcux." It, I was told by
Jose, was the specialty of the house
This treatment involved spending
20 minutes in a copper tub lhat
looked like an oversized French
cookware pot while luke-warm, car¬
bonated Spa water bubbled up
through a valve in the bottom. It was
like sitting in a vat of tonic water;
if I'd had a bottle of gin and a couple
limes. I think it would have been
great.
* I admit I did feel relaxed (or
maybe exhausted) when the whole
shebang was over. However, with
the exception of "Bain Niagara." the
treatments were only slightly more
soothing than oral surgery.
KNOW BEFORE YOU GO
The Spa in Spa ii open all year They
recommend yoo make reservations a few
weeks in advance lo guarantee a place, but
they do accept walk-ins. Spa Monopole. 2
Place Roy ale. B 4900 Spa. telephone: 087
77 25 60. Tourist Office in Spa: Rue de la
Geronstere 10. B-4900 Spa, phone: I 087
77 34 64
Doug Lansky is a travel writer occasion¬
ally found in Minneapolis. Comments are ap¬
preciated and can be sent care of this news¬
paper or by e-mail: DoegDylan#aol com