Return-Path: [cate3@netcom.com] Received: from netcom2.netcom.com by piccolo.cco.caltech.edu with ESMTP (8.6.7/DEI:4.41) id HAA00236; Thu, 14 Jul 1994 07:40:55 -0700 Received: by netcom2.netcom.com (8.6.8.1/SMI-4.1/Netcom) id HAA08570; Thu, 14 Jul 1994 07:10:44 -0700 Date: Thu, 14 Jul 1994 07:10:44 -0700 From: cate3@netcom.com (Henry Cate) Message-Id: [199407141410.HAA08570@netcom2.netcom.com] To: JWry.dl@netcom.com Subject: Life B.A Reply-to: cate3@netcom.com Status: R --------------- Date: 29 Nov 93 10:22:23 PST (Monday) Subject: Life B.A The following are selections that I've pulled from a collection Mike Sierra has been building over the years [sierra@ora.com] -------------------------- [[[[[[ Attached TEXT file follows ]]]]]] The following news items and quotations were taken from The American Spectator, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Harper's, Heterodoxy, Insight, The National Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, Penthouse, Reason, Spy, Time, TV Guide, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Monthly, and more "year in review" issues than I care to mention. ---------------------------------------------------- Men who were carrying refrigerators on their backs during "refrigerator races" sued the manufacturer because the appliances carried insufficient warnings of possible injury from such activity. A New York man who deliberately leapt in front of a moving subway train was awarded $650,000 because the train had failed to stop in time to avoid mangling him. The San Francisco Giants were sued for giving away Father's Day gifts to men only. A Miami woman was awarded $40,000 in workman's compensation benefits after she complained that she was so afraid of blacks that she was unable to work in an integrated office. Two Marines alleged discrimination because the Marine Corps had discharged them for "being chronically overweight." The Salvation Army has been sued on the grounds that it violated an employee's right to freedom of religion after it dismissed a woman for using agency equipment to copy materials describing Satanic rituals. A psychic won $986,000 in a suit against her doctor, claiming that undergoing a CAT scan procedure had led to the suppression of her psychic powers, and thus her ability to make a living. -------------------------- Soon after the defeat of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, in which he ran on a platform that emphasized ethics in government, it was discovered that state welfare administrators had been secretly supplying illegal aliens with fraudulent Social Security numbers so that they could receive welfare benefits. It is illegal for agencies other than the Social Security Administration to supply Social Security numbers, and it is also illegal for government agents to fail to report known illegal aliens. Extending welfare benefits to illegal aliens is, on the other hand, merely extra-legal. -------------------------- The Department of Agriculture has launched a computerized dating service for goats. -------------------------- The IRS has issued rules that require the solving of quadratic equations, yielding more than one answer. -------------------------- The State Department, in the course of issuing $15 million in erroneous travel advances, paid for the travels of Ludwig von Beethoven, perhaps unaware that he died in 1827. -------------------------- A Department of Energy audit of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider project concluded that there had already been $216 million in "unreasonable or excessive" expenses. The audit highlighted $764,000 in "extravagant expenses," including $35,000 for a holiday party at a Dallas hotel for more than 1,000 people; $56,000 for decorative potted plants; $16,000 for a Christmas party; $14,450 for a reception at a Texas ranch; and $2,425 for liquor. -------------------------- Judge Robert Collins of Louisiana, serving the second year of a 6 1/2-year sentence for taking a bribe from a drug smuggler, is still pulling down a $133,600-a-year salary. Representative Charles Canady (R-Florida) has initiated the impeachment process in the House, and Representative George Sangmeister (D-Illinois) has introduced a bill that would automatically suspend the salary of a judge convicted of a felony. Impeachment proceedings are notoriously long and difficult, however, and the Constitution prohibits slashing the pay of sitting federal judges. Although taxpayers pay for his room and board while in prison, he still got the $4,100 cost-of-living salary increase given to all judges recently. And if Canady and Sangmeister don't manage to get Collins off the rolls by his 65th birthday, he will get a lifetime pension at full pay. -------------------------- The Albany Times Union: The New York State of Environmental Conservation has fined a Buffalo firm $78,000 for illegally disposing of "environmentally harmful debris." The firm had dumped "trees, stumps, shrubs and topsoil" on a remote farm it owned 30 miles northwest of Syracuse. -------------------------- Sgt. Robert Guidara, a supervisor in the Tampa Police Department's antidrug department, has come under criticism because city records indicate he is Hispanic although he was born in Rome to Italian parents. Despite the perception that Guidara opted for the classification in order to increase his opportunities for promotion, Guidara thinks he is being unfairly criticized, telling the Tampa Tribune that the city's public relations department initiated the switch in order to look good statistically. "Through their own recruitment effort, I agreed to it." According to federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines, an individual's race or ethnicity is not a matter of blood: "An employee can be included in a group [to] which he or she appears to belong, identifies with or is regarded in the community as belonging," despite any "anthropological origins." Because Guidara's wife is Hispanic, he sees his transformation, which happened shortly before he was promoted to sergeant in 1989, as falling within legal bounds. Phil Goldman, an EEOC official in Florida, told the Tribune that it would be "totally inappropriate" for the city to persuade an employee to change his ethnicity. The sergeant himself is even more adamant: "I am proud of who I am and of my selected ethnic affiliation." To prove this, Guidara went so far as to enroll in a conversational Spanish course. -------------------------- After local news stories featured 15-year-old Monique Landers of Wichita, Kansas, who ran a small business in which her friends would pay her $15 for a three-hour hair-braiding session, angry hair professionals complained to the State Board of Cosmetology -- you need a license if you accept money for touching hair. The board notified the Landers that unless she immediately ceased her braiding, she would face 90 days in jail. -------------------------- A number of chimpanzees that were used during space flight experiments by the Air Force are now officially retired on U.S. government pensions. Each chimp's retirement costs $37,000 a year. -------------------------- One of the passengers aboard a Lufthansa airliner that was highjacked to New York requested frequent-flier credit for the nonscheduled flight of about 4,000 miles. -------------------------- In 1986, developer David Lucas paid more than $900,000 for two South Carolina waterfront lots, planning to build a house for his family on one lot, and a house to sell on another. Eighteen months later, the South Carolina General Assembly passed the Beachfront Management Act, prohibiting development past a certain setback line, and effectively making his property worth less than nothing, since he still had to pay taxes and insurance on it. After exhausting his bureaucratic options, he took the South Carolina Coastal Council to court for compensation. A state trial court ruled in his favor and awarded him $1.2 million, but he lost on appeal in the state Supreme Court. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, he prevailed in what is widely regarded as one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the century. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the South Carolina Supreme Court for the calculation of damages, and Lucas decided to settle for $1.5 million to cover the cost of the two lots and to pay his bankers and lawyers. Once in possession of the lots, the Coastal Council's views changed. After nearly five years of legal combat, the council said it really doesn't make sense to maintain the lots as "open space" or "erosion control." The lots are surrounded by other houses, a spokesman for the council explained, and the beach is private. In order to recoup the $1.5 million awarded to Lucas, some of which came from the council's budget, the council plans to sell the lots -- for development. -------------------------- In Arizona, local authorities are insisting that Maricopa County's Little County Church pave their parking lot, or face closure. The tiny Baptist congregation, which comprises only three families, voted to shut down the church rather than pay $16,000 to pave the lot. Minister Michael Fahrer points out that the county roads leading to the church are not paved, either. "It's absolute lunacy... We asked the county, 'When are you going to [pave the roads]?' And they said, 'Well, we can't afford it.'" Part of the $16,000 cost consisted of complying with environmental regulations, which require a flood control plan, including a water runoff and flood ditch. "This is in the middle of the desert," he says. "They also insisted [upon] enough space for 19 cars despite the fact that we only have 16 people. Now doesn't that violate all common sense?" The church will probably be converted into a store, says Fahrer, who adds that he doesn't know if the store's parking lot will be paved. -------------------------- To comply with federal regulations set by the Environmental Protection Agency, the city of Anchorage, Alaska, is required to remove 30 percent of the solid material from their sewage water. But according to Paula Easley, director of public affairs for the city, "our water is so clean it's difficult to remove 30 percent. So we finally allowed our two biggest fish processors to dump their waste in our sewers so we could take it out again. It's ludicrous, but it saved us from building a half-billion-dollar plant." -------------------------- Denver City Councilperson Cathy Reynolds has proposed legislation that would make it illegal for teenagers to so much as touch a weapon, even with a parent's permission. It would forbid parents to take their kids hunting or teach them how to handle a gun. The definition of "weapon" is so broad that it also includes BB guns, slingshots, paint guns, water guns, baseball bats, and heavy boots. -------------------------- The Environmental Protection Agency has declared that the cedar chips sold in some "green" shops as moth repellents are pesticides and must meet all the appropriate regulatory requirements. Until the needed tests are completed, it has banned the sale of cedar as a moth repellent. -------------------------- ]From the 1991 Annual Report to the President by the Information Security Oversight Office, a division of the General Services Administration: In fiscal year 1991, government agencies classified as secret a total of 7,107,017 documents. This marks the first time that the total number of reported classification decisions in a year is a palindrome. -------------------------- Judy Enright, a 54-year-old artist in Brighton, Michigan, displayed a painting of the mythical phoenix -- adorned with real feathers. "I love recycling materials," she says. But on the third day of the exhibit, the painting was confiscated by three agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "These men came in and, without telling me who they were, said they were taking it," Enright recalls. They said she had used eagle feathers illegally. Enright says she got most of the feathers from her yard and that two were gifts from professors in art school -- one came from an old hat and the other from the wing of a female pheasant. "But when you collect feathers for nine years, you have no idea what you have," says Enright. She was told that her painting had been sent for testing, and soon she was in Detroit defending herself in federal court. At the hearing, a federal agent conceded that the feathers were not from eagles. Still, Enright got a lesson in federal bird-watching: "This is a shock to me. You can't pick up a blue jay feather, or a cardinal feather or a robin feather. It's illegal to pick up one single migratory bird feather in your back yard. That's against a 1918 law." Both felony and misdemeanor charges against Enright were dropped, but she still can't get her painting back. "If they don't donate it, they can destroy it," she says. But the government insists that the work must be donated to an institution that is both a public museum and research operation. Why? "It's in the law," says Enright. "Can you believe it?" -------------------------- Christopher Cotton was grabbed by Nashville, Tennessee, police after two women spotted him and thought he looked like a man they'd seen on "America's Most Wanted." Cotton was the actor who played a suspected arsonist in a reenactment. -------------------------- After construction of the 17-ton Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory satellite went 15 percent -- or $40 million -- overbudget, NASA sent a $5 million bonus check to the contractor. NASA has also sent a bonus check to a contractor that has run a project 142 percent overbudget. -------------------------- After Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, the Federal Emergency Management Agency spent $50,000 on billboards to improve its image and $73,000 on polo shirts for staff members. The agency also asked for bids for buttons and Frisbees printed with its 800 number. -------------------------- Basketball all-star Charles Barkley of the Phoenix Suns charged that he was misquoted in a new book about him. The book was his autobiography. -------------------------- Proposition BB, from the November 1993 election in San Francisco: Shall it be the policy of the people of San Francisco to allow Police Officer Bob Geary to decide when he may use his puppet Brendan O'Smarty while on duty? [YES/NO] -------------------------- Police charged Sergio Hernandez, 28, with looting during the 1992 Los Angeles riots after finding stolen television sets stored in his home. Hernandez was a 1989 state lottery winner who receives $120,000 a year in winnings. -------------------------- According to the inspector general of the Resolution Trust Corporation, which is charged with overseeing the Savings & Loan bailout for which taxpayers have already spent $100 billion, the RTC has been paying temporary employees $35 an hour to make photocopies that, at 67 cents per copy, cost far more than the going rate. Luckily, the workers were often left idle. "At times, 50 to 150 temporaries were observed playing poker during office hours... [They] would brag about sleeping on the job, taking two- hour lunches, reading the newspaper... One shift did nothing for eight hours." -------------------------- Laura Tyson, head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, explaining why the Clinton administration reduced its 1993 growth projection from 3.1 percent to 2 percent: We are now looking at a future from here, and the future we were looking in February now includes some of our past, and we can incorporate the past into our forecast. 1993, the first half, which is now the past and was the future when we issued our first forecast, is now over. -------------------------- After 27 years of shining shoes around the Bergen County Courthouse in New Jersey, county officials informed Robert Taylor that he needed a contract to continue his business, which, until then, he had operated under a gentleman's agreement. In order to get the contract, he was told that he had to go through a competitive bidding process; meet 18 pages of specifications, including requirements that he wear a regulation smock and run a cash register; and have a $1 million liability insurance policy, in case an injury occurs when a customer climbs into or out of Taylor's elevated chair. But Taylor told The New York Times that an accident would be impossible. "For 27 years, not even a woman has gotten a run in her stocking here," he said. -------------------------- After being voted out of office, a North Carolina labor commissioner filed for unemployment benefits.
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