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News of the Weird

From Cuba, with love

9/30/2015

One of the remaining 116 Guantanamo Bay prisoners (a man suspected of having been close to Osama bin Laden) has a dating profile on Match.com captioned “detained but ready to mingle,” the man’s lawyer Carlos Warner told Al Jazeera America in September. Muhammad Rahim al-Afghani has relentlessly proclaimed his innocence, and Warner released a series of charming letters from his client intended to humanize him. Al-Afghani commented on Lebron James, Caitlyn Jenner, the Ashley Madison website and, for some reason, South Dakota, but with the recent publicity, Match.com appears to have suspended the account.

The continuing crisis
“Let me get this straight,” wrote an incredulous commenter in September. “(T)hose who oversee” the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, Michigan, have the park “populated with snakes that can bite and inflict serious wounds.” The remark was in response to a visitor’s having been bitten by one of at least 27 rattlesnakes loose (by design) on the grounds. On the other hand, the park has posted many snake warning signs, and the woman who was bitten had removed her shoes to walk in the lush grass.

Aluminum foil makes a comeback
City officials in Tarpon Springs, Florida, scrambled in May to find an ordinance that artist Piotr Janowski might have violated when he covered two palm trees, and then three sides of his rented home, in heavy-duty aluminum foil, to the consternation of neighbors. Janowski is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his work has been shown in that city’s Polish Museum of America.

Latest self-declared right
Officials in Carroll County, Maryland, finally released a woman in August after she had been detained for 67 days — just for declining to give her name to a traffic patrolman (who had stopped her for a broken taillight). In her idiosyncratic understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, to “not be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against (herself)” means keeping her identity hidden from police. Eventually, sheriff’s deputies captured her fingerprints, and since they matched no outstanding warrants, she was released.

Leading economic indicator
Marie Holmes tearfully disclosed in March how the $88 million Powerball lump sum she had won would allow her to finish college and help her four kids (one with cerebral palsy). Right away, though, her boyfriend, Lamar “Hot Sauce” McDow, was charged with drug trafficking and needed $3 million bail, which she took care of. Then, in August, in Brunswick County, North Carolina, “Hot Sauce” was arrested again, for selling heroin, and reporters surmised that Holmes must have been the one who posted that $6 million bail.

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Perspective
Military veteran Gary Dixon, 65, has multiple medical issues, the worst of which is stage four lung cancer, which he says he got from Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. He takes from 10 to 15 meds a day, previously supplied by the Veterans hospital in Topeka, Kansas, but for post-traumatic stress and anxiety, he also smokes marijuana when he can get it. (Kansas has not legalized medical marijuana.) A recent policy change by the VA bars pain meds for marijuana users, leading Dixon to fend for himself for the meds (about $400 a month, he said), because he so badly needs the marijuana.

Can’t possibly be true
An ovipositor is the organ that inserts or receives an egg (especially from parasites like bees — and that thing in “Alien”). A spokesperson from a startup firm called Primal Hardwere (in an August interview with Vice.com) assumes a human market for ovipositors and is now selling two hollowed-tube models at $120 and $130 (along with advice on creating gelatin “eggs” for insertion). The product, acknowledged the Primal Hardwere rep (to the wary interviewer), “can be … off-putting” to anyone who might not “fantasize about being the willing or unwilling host of alien beings inside them.”

Recurring theme
More than three-fourths of civil cases filed in the busy Tucson, Arizona, federal court in 2014 — nearly 3,000 in a courthouse open only about 250 days a year — were filed by one man, a prisoner named Dale Maisano, who was expressing disappointment with his health care as he serves his 15-year term for aggravated assault. Maisano said in July 2015 he was still getting little help for his valley fever, gallstones, sun sensitivity, leaky bladder and nerve problems in his feet. CV

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