News of the Wierd
America is one of the craziest places in the World to live. In the U.S we hear about insurgents in Iraq or robbers in Brazil, but the rest of the World hears stories about the stuff below about us.
One of the hot new news-stories is that a preacher in Southern Florida plans on burning Qurans on September 11th. If that happens, you know the World is going to look at all of us like we all are a bunch of ignorant Americans. Well, they already do that, but you know it’s bad when an armed right-winged militia named Right Wing Extreme says, “We’ve decided against helping them because it doesn’t glorify God.”
In other news from the weird:
Least Competent Police
In March, four NYPD officers, acting on department intelligence, went to the home of Walter and Rose Martin in Brooklyn, N.Y., looking for a suspect, and broke a window as they worked their way inside. The Martins, retired and in their 80s, were clean, and a police spokesman later admitted that officers had wrongly visited or raided the Martins’ home more than 50 times since 2002 because of a stubborn computer glitch. When the software was originally installed, an operator tested it by mindlessly typing in a random address, but that happened to be the Martins’ house, and thus the visits and raids began. The Martins say they have been assured several times that the problem had been corrected, but evidently their address has wormed its way too deep into the system. [New York Post, 3-19-10]
Government in Action
A Treasury Department inspector general reported in June that, out of 2.6 million applicants for federal mortgage relief, 14,000 “home buyers” wrongly received tax credits and that in fact, 1,300 of them were living in prison at the time of filing, including 241 serving life sentences. Sixty-seven of the 14,000 received tax credits for the same house, and 87 more potentially fraudulent tax-credit applications were filed by Internal Revenue Service employees. [ABC News-AP, 6-23-10]
Things That Shouldn’t Get Backlogged:
California requires that if a sex offender’s GPS tagging device signals that he’s in a prohibited area, parole agents must immediately respond, but that law was easier to pass than to implement. As of June, according to a San Diego Union-Tribune investigation, the state had fallen about 31,000 responses behind. [San Diego Union-Tribune, 6-16-10]
Thank Goodness for Researchers
After surveying 374 waitresses, professor Michael Lynn, who teaches marketing and tourism at Cornell University, concluded that customers left larger tips to those with certain physical characteristics such as being slender, being blond or having big breasts. Lynn told the Cornell Daily Sun in May that his study was important in helping potential waitresses gauge their “prospects in the industry.” [Cornell Daily Sun, 5-7-10]
And Finally
Perhaps more usefully, University of Central Lancashire (England) researchers writing in a recent Archives of Sexual Behavior reported that women achieve orgasm more often during foreplay than intercourse but that they more frequently emit orgasm-signaling “vocalizations” just before, or simultaneously with, male ejaculation. [PubMed (National Institutes of Health), 5-18-10]