In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's"
HMMM!
Bottoms up
A Serbian businessman has invented an underwear range fitted with an alarm that is activated whenever the wearer's bottom gets pinched. The device emits a high-pitched squeal to alert fellow office workers. The inventor is reportedly on the verge of a contract, so perhaps they'll be on sale in time for this year's round of office Christmas parties.
Drug money, tax write-off
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- The government said Thursday it may consider reforming tax laws after a court allowed a heroin dealer to claim as a tax write-off money stolen from him in a drug deal.
Federal Court Justice Robert Nicholson ruled Wednesday that Francesco Domenico La Rosa earned his taxable income as a drug dealer and could therefore legitimately deduct losses incurred in his illegitimate business.
Under federal law the proceeds of crime are taxable, which --- according to Wednesday's ruling --- means criminals can also have it the other way -- claiming deductions for expenses.
WEIRD NEWS
No bones about it
Recently Timothy Lewis of Elgin, Illinois, was charged with disorderly conduct after he walked into a bar with a bone tied to a string around his neck. Several people at the Old Town Inn said it looked as if it came from a human pelvis. "It was probably a deer or a dog or maybe even a hog," the 43-year-old replied. "It was just a joke. I think the public's reaction to this is sissy-like."
A month ago, police questioned Lewis after he left a skull in the Penny Lane Pub. He said he found the skull floating in the Fox River and left it with the pub's bartender because she claimed to have a background in forensic pathology.
Beyond starving artists
The Pain of Performance Art: The annual "Fierce!" festival in London in May featured Mr. "Franco B" lightly slicing up his abdomen and
keeping the wounds open for six hours, inviting patrons to observe the blood in order to "re-examine their own notions of what's beautiful and what's
suffering."
In May, the Artspace gallery in Sydney, Australia, featured artist Mike Parr having his only arm nailed to a wall, for 36 hours, to show "the possibility of confloating the body."
Performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli chopped off a pinkie finger in June at a festival in Cali, Colombia, to symbolise the nation's loss after a popular politician was kidnapped by the revolutionary group FARC.
Government in action
San Francisco elections supervisor Tammy Haygood was fired in April for cost overruns and irregularities but continues to fight for her job so that her husband can maintain his transsexual treatment under the city government's liberal employee health-care plan.
In March, Fremont County (Montana) officials passed a resolution prohibiting "the presence" of grizzly bears within the boundaries of the county.
In May, a Magistrate Anurag Rastogi of the Gurgaon district near New Delhi, India, issued an order forbidding the assembly of four or more pigs.
Almost rehabilitated
In April in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Shirley Brigman Turriff, 63, was sentenced to six years in prison for embezzling $1.1 million from the law firm for which she had been office manager (Anderson Johnson), which had hired her shortly after she had been convicted for embezzling from her first employer. Anderson Johnson was fully aware that she was an embezzler when it hired her because one of its lawyers had defended her in that earlier case.
Update
Last January, News of the Weird reported that a 6-year-old boy had been removed from his mother's home in Champaign, Ill., because she insisted on continuing to breastfeed him. A judge later released the boy back to the mother, and in July 2002, the woman, Lynn Stuckey, 34, appeared on an ABC's "Good Morning America" videotape showing that she is still to this day breastfeeding him (every two weeks or so). Stuckey continues to call it "a perfectly normal practice": "We are your standard middle-class American family, and we're not doing anything wrong."
ALSO, IN THE
LAST MONTH ...
A 13-year-old boy was arrested after he allegedly pulled out a gun and robbed a convenience store of just a sex magazine (Martinsburg, W.Va.).
Police officer Thomas Richmond applied mouth-to-snout CPR and revived an apparently dead pit bull that had been hit by a car (West Bridgewater, Mass.).
A man in his 20s, identified only as Mr. Hsu, was rushed to a hospital from an Internet cafe suffering paralysis after what was believed to be three consecutive days of playing a computer game (Chungho City, Taiwan).
COPYRIGHT 2002 CHUCK SHEPHERD/
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