Leftovers

I don't know much about murdering people, but I'm pretty sure that when you kill someone and then dismember their corpse, you might want to dispose of those body parts before you move.

Malaysian police have arrested a woman in connection with the murder of a man whose body was chopped into 11 pieces and stuffed into a refrigerator in a posh apartment in the capital.

The remains were discovered in black bin bags when a man who bought the apartment at a bank auction went to clean the unit, which had been vacant for more than three months, the Star newspaper said on Tuesday.

A strong stench led the owner and security guard to the refrigerator, which had been sealed with masking tape.

Newspapers in neighboring Singapore said the victim was believed to be a Singaporean who had been married to the woman and who had been out of touch with his family for nearly two years.

Well, I guess that excuses him from missing all those holidays and family birthdays.

Selling crap to tourists, literally

You know, if any of you are taking a trip to China this summer, you don't have to get me a souvenir. Really, you don't.

The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base has come up with a dung-for-profit scheme that turns droppings from the endangered species into odor-free souvenirs ranging from bookmarks to Olympic-themed statues of the animals, state media and base officials said Monday.

The facility in the southwestern province of Sichuan houses about 40 bamboo-fed pandas who produce less than a ton of excrement a day.

"We used to spend at least 6,000 yuan ($770) a month to get rid of the droppings but now they can be lucrative," Jing Shimin, assistant to the base director, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The products will be made at a local handicraft company mostly from undigested bamboo culled from the panda waste through a special process, Xinhua said.

An official who answered the phone at the Chengdu facility said the dung is "carefully selected, smashed, dried and sterilized at 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit)." He refused to give his name but said the products will be of all colors because they will be dyed.

"They don't smell too bad because 70 percent of the dung is just remains of the bamboo that the pandas are unable to digest," Jing said.

Um, let me make a suggestion here. How about instead of fishing the bamboo out of the panda crap, you just cut out the middleman and, you know, just make the stuff out of regular old bamboo?

Off kilter

Hey, you can't fault a guy for trying to be authentic. I mean, Scotsmen aren't supposed to wear anything underneath their kilts, right? But I guess they frown on that in North Dakota:

A man was arrested on sex charges after an early morning escapade while wearing a kilt.

Police say Nathan Blair, 24, of Moorhead, Minn., was wearing a black kilt when he exposed himself to motorists near a busy street and had sex with a woman in the backyard of a house.

"In 17 years in this job I've seen a lot of different things. This is a new one," Fargo Police Lt. Pat Claus said Friday.

Claus said Blair and a 20-year-old woman were arrested about 3:30 a.m. Friday after police found them having sex behind a home. The couple first ignored orders to "cease and desist," and then refused to cover up, Claus said.

Both of them had been drinking, Claus said.

You don't say. And here I thought a guy who flashes traffic in his kilt and screws some girl in somebody's backyard was probably as sober as a Deacon.

Dead sexy

If you're into necrophilia (and I know you are!) you may want to consider a move to Wisconsin:

Three men who dug up a young woman's corpse to have sex with it after seeing her obituary photo cannot be charged with attempted sexual assault because Wisconsin has no law against necrophilia, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

A judge was correct to dismiss the charges against twin brothers Nicholas and Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radke, all 21, because lawmakers never intended to criminalize sex with a corpse, the District 4 Court of Appeals said in a 3-0 ruling.

The three men went to a cemetery in Cassville in southwestern Wisconsin on Sept. 2 to remove the body of Laura Tennessen, 20, who had been killed the week before in a motorcycle crash.

The men used shovels to reach her grave. They abandoned their plan and were eventually arrested after a vehicle drove into the cemetery and reported suspicious behavior, authorities said.

Well, hey, it's not like they even got to get it on with the corpse, so no big deal.

Anyway, I find it fascinating (and, yes, deeply disturbing) that these three guys were sitting around, saw the woman's obituary photo, and apparently came to an agreement that it would be a good idea to dig her up and have sex with her corpse. That must have been an interesting conversation.

Oh, and by the way, you necrophiliacs may not want to move to the Dairy State after all. A State Senator has introduced legislation that would make it illegal. The spoilsport.

It's so hard to find good help these days

I guess maybe this is the downside to being rich and idle enough to have someone else literally carry your water for you:

An Indonesian maid has been jailed for six days in Hong Kong for serving her boss a cup of water containing urine, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

The 29-year-old pleaded guilty to a charge of "administering poison or other destructive or noxious substance with intent to injure," but insisted she had used the urine to treat a skin condition and its appearance in her employer's cup was a mistake.

Mistake or not, I'd make damn sure that all the drinking vessels in the house were thoroughly cleaned.

Her boss, Szeto Ching-han, smelled the urine after asking for a cup of water, and then asked the maid to drink it -- which she did. Szeto, however, kept the liquid to have it tested in a lab, the South China Morning Post said.

The defense argued that the maid's employer had not drunk the urine and the substance was not poisonous.

"The only contact the former employer had with the so-called poisonous mixture was the smell," her lawyer was quoted as telling the court.

The magistrate who heard the case said there was no evidence that the maid had suffered any harm after drinking from the cup, but still gave the maid a six-day jail sentence, saying the court "must send a message to the public."

I guess that message would be to use the toilet like a normal person. And if they have to send a message to the public, does this mean that there's an epidemic of people being handed cups of pee to drink?

Exciting news!

In addition to not reading what I post here, you can now also disregard what I write over here!

I hope that wasn't too confusing.

Drink up!

Dude, Allah (the deity, not the blogger) would probably frown on a party like this:

A Middle Eastern businessman spent over $210,000 in a five-hour, champagne- and vodka-fuelled spending spree in a London nightclub at the weekend.

Fraser Donaldson, a representative of Crystal, a club favored by Prince Harry, said in 20 years working in the industry it was the biggest bill he'd seen from one customer.

The unnamed big spender entered Crystal at midnight on Saturday with friends -- nine women and eight men -- and ordered a $50 bottle of white wine, a spokesman for the club said.

But before long he was ordering magnums of Dom Perignon at $1,400 each and then called for a Methuselah -- eight bottles in one -- of Cristal Champagne at $60,000 and the party spread.

The festivities ended with a "night cap" consisting of a Methuselah of Belvedere vodka, which cost $2,800. "He basically just said, 'keep the drinks flowing,'" the club spokesman said.

Now, to be fair, he could be, say, a Lebanese Christian, but if he's a Muslim, I'm guessing he's not a fundamentalist.

Whatever his faith is, it sounds like he's a generous guy. And a hell of a drinking buddy.

Wrong place, wrong time

This dude is one very, very unlucky thief:

A woman whose purse was stolen and the thief who took it inadvertently stood next to each other at a Prescott [Arizona] bookstore _ she to complain about the unauthorized use of her credit card, he to get some cash.

The 59-year-old victim went to Hastings Books and Music on Tuesday to tell the store that someone had stolen her purse and used her credit card to buy $200 in DVDs.

Minutes later, while the woman was standing there, a man came up to the counter and tried to return eight DVDs in exchange for cash. The two didn't recognized each other, and the woman even politely made room for the man when he walked up.

When the manager came to handle both transactions, she connected the dots.

It was "as if the world had stopped," said Susan Murphy, another customer who had been browsing through magazines.

The manager "looked at the receipt, looked at the elderly lady and then at the young man standing next to her and said, 'This is the transaction,'" Murphy said. "It just blew us all away."

The cops caught his unlucky ass and he admitted to using her card to rack up over $700 in charges. Which, I guess, means that Arizona cashiers aren't too stringent about checking for ID on credit card transactions. Unless the guy's name actually was Edith or something like that.

"She's a very nice woman"

How come nothing like this ever happens to me while I'm at work? Probably because I do most of my work from home. But, still...

A mysterious blonde paid a visit to a petrol station shop in the small eastern German town of Doemitz on Sunday -- wearing nothing but a pair of golden stilettos and a thin gold bracelet.

The tall, slender woman strolled into the shop in the town of Doemitz on the warm afternoon and bought cigarettes, petrol station employee Ines Swoboda told Reuters on Monday.

"I wasn't surprised because she's come in naked before -- she's a very nice woman," Swoboda said, adding none of the other customers was bothered. The woman could have faced charges of creating a public disturbance if anyone had complained.

Um, based on the description of the woman in the article, I'd be surprised if anybody had complained.

And she bought some cigarettes, huh? I guess she probably had her money in her hand when she walked into the shop. I certainly hope she had her money in her hand.

Sex ed

What, you mean they weren't using them to run e-mail scams on gullible, elderly Americans?

Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Thursday.

NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children's laptops.

"Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials," NAN said.

The organization that's been donating the computers says that in the future, they'll include filters. The spoilsports.

My civic duty is done

Heh. "Duty." Sounds like "doody."

Anyway, we reached a not guilty verdict relatively quickly. The prosecutor had a really weak case.

Did I mention that we didn't realize that they had cable in the jury assembly room until yesterday? We'd been watching stupid judge shows on the local channels all week long. Judge shows. Ugh.

Mad at the world

So, the case I'm on was supposed to be done by Tuesday afternoon. Well, we just wrapped up testimony and heard the closing arguments this afternoon, and didn't get a chance to do any deliberation before we were sent home. So tomorrow, I have to haul my ass out of bed extra-early to get down there by 8:45. Super.

God, I hope this doesn't drag out much longer.

Ewwwwwww!

Apparently, if you feel like there are bugs crawling under your skin, you might not be crazy after all:

Doctors thought the strange, bleeding bumps on Aaron Dallas' head might be from gnat bites or shingles. Then the bumps started moving.

A doctor found five active bot fly larvae living beneath the skin atop Dallas' head.

"I'd put my hand back there and feel them moving. I thought it was blood coursing through my head," Dallas told the (Glenwood Springs) Post Independent.

"I could hear them. I actually thought I was going crazy."

Dallas said he likely received the larval infestation while on a trip to Belize this summer. Bot fly infections are not uncommon in parts of Central and South America.

Adult bot flies are hairy and look like bees, without bristles. The larvae, which are about one-third the size of a penny, were living in a pit 2- to 3- millimeters wide. They were removed Thursday.

"It was weird and traumatic," said Dallas, of Carbondale. "I would get this pain that would drop me to my knees."

You know, I don't think I'm going to be vacationing in Central or South America anytime soon.

911 is no joke

I really don't know who this guy thought was going to show up. The fire department, maybe?

A 38-year-old man was arrested after he called 911 and told a dispatcher he was surrounded by police officers and needed help, authorities said.

Police officers met Dana Farrell Shelton after being called to investigate a disturbance at a bar on Sunday but had found no problems and told him to move along.

Shelton, who officers said appeared intoxicated, then called 911 to report he was "surrounded by Largo police," according to an arrest affidavit.

He was intoxicated? The hell, you say!

Anyway, he could spend a year in jail for doing this. Who's he gonna call when he's surrounded by correctional officers?

God, I hate commies

As if we needed it, here's more proof that communism is a terribly repressive ideology:

Chinese television channels should ban sexist and sexually suggestive adverts during the summer vacation to protect children, state broadcaster CCTV said Monday, citing experts and parents.

Explicit commercials that promote breast enlargements, women's corsets and cosmetics and unproven medical treatments are common on local stations.

"Advertisements that contain sexual hints or flirtatious language are easily seen on some local television channels," CCTV said on its Web site (www.cctv.com.cn).

In one breast enlargement commercial, a woman with small breasts walks by while a man is heard saying "too small to be good." Another woman with bigger breasts shows up and the man shouts "bigger is better!."

Dang, man. Can we be far from seeing people like this thrown into the gulag?

I don't know why I never mentioned this...

...but I was quoted by the amazingly funny Douchebag1 after leaving my first-evah comment at one of my favorite humor sites, Hot Chicks with Douchebags. My original comment was left on this thread.

It was quite an honor, and I wish I had thanked the DB1 here at the time.

And, yes, I am belatedly showing off. Because I'm funny, damnit.

Kumbaya

I'm so utterly confused and baffled by this story that I'm not even going to bother making any jokes about it. Nor am I going to excerpt it. You'll have to go to the link and read it for yourself.

I mean, do you believe for a moment that this actually happened? For some reason, the thought that the events described could have really transpired in that fashion fills me with a deep, dark sense of horror.

Vacation, all I never wanted

Thanks, but I think I'll save my money and just hang around in Compton for my summer vacation:

Sinaloa, the northern Mexican state that spawned the country's most fearsome drug cartel, hopes to lure tourists to rustic cabins in a rugged area infamous for opium fields and violent kingpins.

Generations of farmers have grown opium and marijuana in the hilly and remote Badiraguato region, a stronghold for powerful drug gangs and the birthplace of Mexico's top capo and most-wanted man, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

But Sinaloa's tourism minister Antonio Ibarra said renting out mountain cabins could wean some of the local population off illicit activities.

"Every well-paid job we create gives people an alternative, a decent life," he told Reuters on Thursday.

Few outsiders venture outside the state capital of Culiacan, but Ibarra said the "El Perico" cabins, in a pine forested mountain area known for its rich wildlife, could attract adventure tourists who like outdoor activities.

You know, outdoor activities like harvesting opium for heroin production, or trying to outrun homicidal drug dealers.

Sounds like fun, no?

No.

Jury duty

No, I'm not talking about the smash hit comedy starring Abe Vigoda, I mean the sit on my ass all day while the judge and the lawyers blather kind. And in spite of my work reporting on local crime and my nutty political views about taking marijuana off the black market so that it can be taxed and regulated, they put me on the jury. With eleven women. Yay.

I'm starting to think that I should've accepted my brother's offer to draw a swastika on my forehead.

Call of Cthulhu

So, they find an "octosquid" last week. And now, this.

The end is coming, people.

What we have here...

...is a failure to communicate:

Teacher Dave Barclay flew thousands of miles across the Atlantic to Wales to attend his friend's wedding, only to discover he was a year early.

Barclay, 34, was told about the wedding earlier in the year and assumed it was to take place in 2007.

It was only when he had flown into Cardiff from Toronto, Canada, and rang the bridegroom seeking details of the venue that he discovered the wedding was in 2008.

[...]

The groom, Dave Best, had emailed his friend at the start of the year.

"He just said July the 6th and I assumed it was this year because if you tell the guy July 6th, they're going to think it's this year," Barclay said.

So, these guys are obviously good friends. If they were just casual acquaintances, I doubt Barclay would've flown all the way from Canada to Wales for his buddy's wedding, right? And yet, he never bothered to call Best or even send him an e-mail saying, "Hey, I'm stoked about your wedding! See you in Cardiff next week"? Because that would seem like a good idea. The kind of thing that could, say, keep you from making an unnecessary trans-Atlantic trip.

Dumbass.

You don't say

Wow, some eggheads conducted a study and found a result that was completely, utterly obvious:

Muscular young men are likely to have more sex partners than their less-chiseled peers, researchers at the University of California Los Angeles said on Monday.

Their study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggests muscles in men are akin to elaborate tail feathers in male peacocks: They attract females looking for a virile mate.

"Women are predisposed to prefer muscularity in men," said study author David Frederick of UCLA.

No shit, genius. They're also attracted to money, expensive sports cars, and large, tastefully furnished houses. And I didn't even have to do any kind of big, fancy study to figure any of that out.

What the?

Oh no. Hell no.

Erecting a new building

Uh, good luck attracting tenants to a building that looks like, well...

The developer said his design for a 40-story resident tower proposed as a gateway to downtown San Diego looks like a flower. A city consultant said it looks like a giant phallus.

"With its rounded forms and swelling of the uppermost floors...this building structure is very phallic," wrote Gwynne Pugh, a Santa Monica architect hired by the downtown redevelopment agency to review building designs.

San Diego-based Sandor Shapery's proposal for a 160-unit hotel and condominium tower was expected to go before the redevelopment agency for initial feedback this month. Instead Shapery has asked for more time to "revisit" and perhaps "tone down" the design because he does not want to offend anyone.

Then you might want to rethink the whole "building that looks like an enormous cock" thing.

You can find a picture of the design here.

Thanks, SeeDub

SeeDubya over at JunkYardBlog linked to my post about the eleven-year-old drunk driver yesterday, and I got what would normally be about a week's worth of traffic over the course of a day. I think that really says something about his popularity. And my lack thereof.

Her parents must be so proud

I don't think precocious is quite the right word to describe this girl:

An 11-year-old girl was charged with drunken driving after leading police on a chase at speeds of up to 100 mph that ended when she flipped the car in an Alabama beach town.

A video camera in the police car captured the look of surprise on the officer's face when he approached the wrecked car and got a look at the motorist.

The Mobile Press-Register newspaper said the patrolman saw the Chevrolet Monte Carlo speeding and flashed his lights to signal the driver to stop. Instead, the car sped faster, traveling at up to 100 mph (160 kph) before sideswiping another vehicle and flipping over in the Gulf Coast town of Orange Beach, Alabama, on Tuesday night.

The young driver, who lived nearby in Perdido Key, Florida, was treated at a hospital for scrapes and bruises and released to relatives. Police also charged her with speeding, leaving the scene of an accident and reckless endangerment.

I don't know if releasing her to relatives was such a good idea. I mean, it doesn't exactly sound like her family was doing a bang-up job of looking after her.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

I don't like the looks of this. No sir.

For lack of a better joke, love is, apparently, blind

You know, I think I'd have probably dumped the crazy bitch after the first time she maimed me:

A Hong Kong woman who blinded her boyfriend in one eye in a fight six years ago has been jailed for jabbing a chopstick into his other eye, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Last November, Po Shiu-fong, 58, accused long-time boyfriend Kwok Wai-ming, 49, of having an affair, the South China Morning Post reported.

During the row, Po stabbed a plastic chopstick into his left eye, which she had already blinded six years ago when she poked it with her finger.

Wait, I thought she stabbed him in the other eye. Oh, she did. Apparently, being jabbed in the same eye twice wasn't enough to get this guy to leave her...

"Po became hysterical when she saw the wound and mopped it with a towel. The pair then went to bed," the paper said.

"The next morning they had another argument in which she grabbed a chopstick and stabbed Kwok's right eye," it said.

Two days later, he sought medical treatment and filed a police report against Po, whom he had dated since 1993.

The paper said he didn't report the attack six years ago, telling the court his silence was "a love sacrifice".

He says he's not going to forgive her this time, but what do you want to bet they end up back together? It's like Ike and Tina Turner, if Ike was a woman and Tina was a really whipped dude. And they were both Chinese.

We are the champions

At last, our long national nightmare is over—after six years of domination by a skinny Japanese guy, an American is once again the hot dog eating champion of the world:

In a gut-busting showdown that combined drama, daring and indigestion, Joey Chestnut emerged as the world's hot dog eating champion, knocking off six-time winner Takeru Kobayashi in a record-setting yet repulsive triumph.

Chestnut, the great red, white and blue hope in the annual Fourth of July competition, broke his own world record by inhaling 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes _ a staggering one every 10.9 seconds before a screaming crowd in Coney Island.

"If I needed to eat another one right now, I could," the 23-year-old Californian said Wednesday after receiving the mustard yellow belt emblematic of hot dog eating supremacy.

Normally, I'd write some sort of wisecrack here, but I'm just so damn proud. *Sniff* I promised myself I wouldn't cry...

Happy 4th of July!

Try not to blow any fingers off, okay?

Update: You've got to love the one night every year when the sound of sporadic explosions in the distance isn't really cause for alarm.

Awwwww

I guess love means never having to say you're sorry...for taking a bunch of people hostage at gunpoint.

A Brazilian woman whose estranged husband held her hostage at gunpoint on a bus for 10 hours along with dozens of passengers last year has decided to reunite with him.

"I forgave him out of love ... I believe it was an irrational act and that we can resume our life in peace," Brazil's Globo news agency quoted Cristina Ribeiro, 35, as saying on Monday, eight months after the nationally televised hostage drama.

The couple, who have three children, have decided to live together again, Globo reported.

The husband, Andre Ribeiro da Silva, 36, was paroled from prison in late April and is awaiting trial.

"I hear people warning me that he will do it again, but we've talked and grown into the idea of getting back together," the woman said.

I'm sure they'll be fine. I mean, he just took her and dozens of bus passengers hostage. That's hardly a big deal. I mean, it's not like he threatened to turn the situation into a murder-suicide, right? Right?

During the incident, he accused her of having cheated on him and threatened to kill her and then commit suicide. The two had been married for 10 years and separated four months earlier.

Oh. Nevermind.

"You don't see this every day"

Yeah, no kidding.

FBI agents worked Monday to identify burglars who burst through a bank's wall and then made off with the bank's one-ton safe. A gaping hole in the rear wall of the First Community Bank was reported at about 8 a.m. Sunday, police said. Investigators and a bank security expert said the bank's safe was missing when they entered the building Sunday morning.

"You don't see this every day," said Steve Frazier, spokesman for the FBI in Little Rock.

The burglars apparently stole a forklift from a construction site near the bank, then used it to hoist the safe out of the bank. Police aren't sure yet if the burglars used the forklift to ram into the bank, creating a hole, or if they used another vehicle or method to get in.

"I could say without a shadow of a doubt that whoever is responsible for this had (either) put forth a great deal of effort of planning and surveillance or was loosely associated with the bank," Detective Keith Lindley of the Van Buren Police Department said.

After creating a hole in the building, the burglars then disabled a bank's security camera by pulling out its wire and pointing the bank's other cameras away from the safe, Lindley said.

The burglars then drove the forklift through the hole in the wall and took the safe, Lindley said. Authorities believe the burglars may have loaded the safe into a pickup that was parked at a nearby church, where the forklift was abandoned.

"It had to have been a minimum of two (suspects)," Lindley said. "My gut feeling is three or four based on everything I've seen and the level of sophistication."

Frazier said agents were gathering information on who might have carried out the heist.

"We are in the process of trying to determine who did it," Frazier said. "We're not ready to release any names or identities."

"We will locate them, we will arrest them and then they will be prosecuted," Frazier said.

Investigators plan to check the surveillance videos of neighboring businesses to see if any of the burglary was recorded, Lindley said.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that anybody in the area who sees a neighbor lugging around or using torches to cut into an unfamiliar one-ton safe should probably go ahead and call the FBI.

The invisible hand

Economics is an interesting subject, but it's one I don't know a lot about. I do, however, understand supply and demand, and here we have an interesting (and somewhat disturbing) illustration of those forces at work:

The price of machetes has halved in parts of Nigeria since the end of general elections in April because demand from thugs sponsored by politicians has subsided, the state-owned News Agency of Nigeria reported.

NAN surveyed prices in the northeastern state of Gombe and found that a good quality machete was now selling for 400 naira ($3) compared with 800 naira before the elections, which were marred by politically motivated violence in many states.

"A price survey on machetes, which served as a popular weapon among political thugs in the state, indicated ... a drop in the price of the implement," NAN reported over the weekend.

Machetes are primarily used as a tool for farming in Nigeria but they are also popular among political gangsters.

"Before the conduct of the general elections, I was selling a minimum of seven machetes daily but can hardly sell one a day now," said Usman Masi, a trader quoted by NAN.

The article goes on to say that around two hundred people were killed during the months of campaigning before the elections, so I guess that puts our "divisive" political climate in perspective, huh?