14To the reviewers:
**Serena102**: I really, really hope I don't get your science teacher next year! Thanks muchies for reviewing! I'll review your fanfic real soon.
**Ares-Artemis**: If whatever happened to the referee happened to me, I would just shoot myself and avoid the humiliation. Lol. I always use The Week because 1) It has a collection of weird stories in one special section and 2) The Week is this big assortment of stories from different magazines/newspapers in the world. They just use the most important ones and stick 'em in The Week. However, sometimes they don't say where they quoted the information from, so I don't usually know where the original stuff came from. Heh heh, you know my dirty little secret now.
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::The Week::
-Police escorting a runner carrying the Olympic torch across the island of Crete stumbled onto a 600-foot-wide grove of cannabis plants. Bad time for Greek dopers.
-A British man who accidentally blew off his testicles with a shotgun after downing 15 pints of beer was sentenced to five years in jail for prossession of an illegal firearm. What happened to mercy?
-Erik Hobbi of Ely, Minn. Attached his grandmother's heirloom diamond ring to a fishing hook so he could reel it out of a lake and propose to Pamela Gahr. When Hobbie pulled the line up, the ring was gone. "He just looked at it in a kind of horror," said Gahr.
-An Iowa doctor is refusing demands by women (note: WOMEN) patients that he remove framed 'Playboy' centerfolds from his waiting room. "I put those pictures up simply as examples of healthy female bodies," said general practitioner Dr. Wilber Quately. "It gives my patients something to aspire to." But his women patients say if that's the case, he should also have photos of naked men. "Come on," said Quately, "that would be gay." (Jeez. Excuses, excuses.)
-A British driver who realized an automated camera had caught him speeding got out of his car, smashed the camera open, and stole the film. Police will now need to replace the $61,000 device. "It's all because someone wanted to avoid the $100 fine," sighed a police spokesman.
-A lesbian activist has introduced a line of "dyke dolls", featuring "Bobbie," who comes dressed in a "wife beater" undershirt and is equipped with a miniature vibrator. Doll maker Stephanie Prod says Bobbie would make a better companion for Barbie than her new surfer-boy paramour, Blaine. "He won't know what women want," Prod says. "But Bobbie does." (And we're talking about dolls here?...)
-A member of the American Medical Association proposed that doctors start refusing to provide care to lawyers who specialize in medical malpractice cases.
-The state of Virginia began an ad campaign to dissuade men from sleeping with underage girls. Billboards and bar napkins will bear such messages as "Isn't she a little young?" and "Sex with a minor, don't go there." At the same time, Wal-Mart has ordered 50,000 units of SheAgra, a new herbal sexual stimulant for women.
-Officials of Lincoln, Neb., are drafting a law to require cats to be on leashes whenever they are outdoors. "I've had people complain because the neighbor's cat was doing its business on their deck or backyard, and say 'What can we do about it?'" said health board president Ed Schneider. Debbie Borner, who rescues abandoned cats, questioned the law's practicality. "Have you ever tried to walk a cat?" she asked.
-David Beckham is only incidentally a soccer player, says Steven Daly in 'Vanity Fair'. The most famous Briton ever to boot a ball, who's now playing for Madrid in the Spanish soccer league, is a brand unto himself. He's been paid to sell everything from Gillette razors to Castrol motor oil; by 2002, he was extracting $32,000 a week from his old team, Manchester United, just for his "image rights." Everything the flamboyant "Becks" wears becomes a style statement aped by thousands of adoring fans, including a plaster cast he once wore on his injured wrist. These days, when he steps out with his wife, former Spice Girl Victoria Adams, Becks is experimenting with sarongs, pink nail varnish, and diamond earrings. "I've always dressed different, I must admit," he says. "When I was 6 years old, I was a page boy at a wedding, and the outfit I wanted to wear was knickerbockers, knee-length socks, frilly shirt, and ballet shoes." He doesn't care, he says, that he's regarded as the gayest straight man in all of sport. "I woke up one day and someone called to tell me I'd been voted the gay style icon of the year. I think it's quite cool, actually."
-A Munich bus driver named Slobodan Milosevic had his bank account frozen when German officials assumed it belonged to the former Yugoslav dictator. "I tried to explain that in Serbia my name is as common as Hans Schmidt here," said Milosevic, "but they told me Hans Schmidt was not a war criminal." The Muenchner Postbank gave him one week to prove that his account did not belong to the Butcher of the Balkans, or his savings would be seized.
-A tiny Mexican village, fed up with a series of political scandals, elected a mule as its new mayor. "The previous mayor had been arrested for bribery and so had the chief of police," said Elian Santiago, a resident of Mesa Blanco. "One day in church, as our priest, Father Manuel, denounced corruption, he said that it would be better to have an honest donkey as mayor than a dishonest man." The town soon rallied behind a mule named Pickles, who defeated two other candidates by a wide margin of 80 votes. "Everyone in town trusts Senor Pickles," said Santiago. "He is known for his honesty and good nature."
-The soaps and other toiletries we use in our daily grooming rituals may be making us sick, a new study suggests. The Environmental Working Group examined the ingredients of 7,500 brand-name soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, and other products. One in three, researchers found, contained at least one ingredient classified as a possible carcinogen; one in 100 had ingredients certified by the government as known or probable causes of cancer. (As usual, everything causes cancer.) The hazardous ingredients included the hormone progesterone, used in sunscreen and moisturizers and coal tar used in more than 70 different hair dyes. The average adult, according to the study, uses nine person-care products a day.
-A man wrongly accused of murder has been exonerated thanks to an HBO camera crew. Police arrested Juan Catalan, 26, for allegedly killing 16- year-old Martha Puebla in the San Fernando Valley last August. Catalan insisted he was at Dodger Stadium with his daughter when the murder took place, but the authorities didn't believe him. Then Catalan's lawyer learned that HBO had been at the stadium that night filming an episode of its hit series 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'. A scan of the time-coded tapes revealed Catalan amid the thousands of spectators. The case was dismissed. "To hear the words from the judge's mouth, I just broke down in tears," said Catalan. "It was the happiest moment of my life."
-A Portland lawyer said a man charged with beating his 2-year-old son suffered from "post-traumatic slave syndrome," and was compelled to whip the boy because his own ancestors had been beaten by slave masters. The defense will probably not be allowed unless it's recognized by the psychiatric establishment, which is unlikely. "We have enough trouble with people saying we are trying to make everybody mentally ill," said psychiatrist William Narrow, "without trying to include something like this."
-Orthodox rabbis warned that New York City drinking water might not be kosher because it contained harmless micro-organisms that are technically shellfish.
-A British cable channel introduced a reality program called 'Watching Paint Dry', in which viewers watch gloss, satin, matte, and other types of paint dry in real-time web casts, and then vote out their least favorite.
-Malaysia finally suspended the controversial practice of flogging dummies in front of schoolchildren to show them what would happen if the committed a crime. Tough love.
-The American Council for Saving the Family is calling on Americans to call homosexuals "sads" instead of gays. "When I was growing up, the word 'gay' meant happy, carefree," said the Rev. Bob Soterly. "To me, there's nothing 'gay' about staring across the locker room at some hunky quarterback, pining about some love that could never be."
-A Georgia man who was eating while driving got a piece of his lunch stuck in his throat and began suffocating. As Eddie May lost consciousness, his Ford truck slammed into a tractor-trailer. The impact thrust May's stomach against the steering wheel, forcing the chunk of food to be expelled from his throat. May began breathing again, crawled out of the wreckage, and was treated for minor injuries. (Wow.)
-A Kansas woman is making a fortune on the Internet selling tumbleweeds to city folk looking to add an Old West touch to parties, TV shows, and other events. "At first I felt guilty selling tumbleweeds," said Linda Katz." But then I got these wonderful letters about how happy and nostalgic the tumble weeds made people feel."
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::Other Magazines/Newspapers::
-The simple trick of calling one thing something else is suddenly enriching the few, bamboozling the many and threatening the Western world's belief in the sanctity of the label. At a Times Square movie palace last week, patrons who shelled out $10 each to see a new Tom Cruise movie, only got David Hasselhoff as the star instead, angrily rushed the box office to demand full refunds. The studio admitted saving millions with the celluloid bait-and-switch but denied shortchanging their customers. "Hey, guy," noted a senior executive, "Tom and Dave are both adult male Americans with all their limbs and facilities intact. Both of 'em can talk and kiss and land a punch, am I right? Let's not split hairs!" And, he pointed out, the movie was two hours long and in surround sound and Technicolor, hallmarks of a Tom Cruise feature. "It's unfair," he summarized, "but come on, pal, it isn't dangerous."
**Time**
-Mislabeling has spread to taking the consumer's money for things that are supposed to happen but don't. Indignantly denounced by baseball fans as unfair if not dangerous-and really annoying as well- is the Philadelphia Phillies' alleged practice of selling seats in an empty home stadium when the team is on the road. "Paying steep admission prices simply to sit there watching the grass grow, with not even loud rock music or Diamond Vision by the way of entertainment, is a new high in boredom, even for Philadelphia," carps one disgruntled Philliephile. Team executives maintain that the practice is entirely legitimate, pointing out that since nothing happens 90% of the time at an actual baseball game, and that the average fan is at a refreshment stand or in a rest room the other 10% of the time, there is no substantial difference in the experience whether the game is being played or not.
**Time**
-More than 11,000 pieces of Ronald Reagan memorabilia went on sale on eBay after his death, including a $39 set of parfait glasses emblazoned with the inaugural seal, a 1951 newspaper ad for the film 'Bedtime for Bonzo', and two locks of Reagan's hair. Experts in collectibles warned that many of the items were probably fakes.
**Associated Press**
-The number of 18-year-old women getting breast implants nearly tripled last year, from 3,872 in 2002 to 11,326 in 2003. One NY doctor said many parents were now paying for the surgery as a high school graduation present.
**New York Post**
-The Internet is now home to an estimated 2.5 million blogs, but 96 percent of online users never look at any of them.
**The New York Times**
-Although DDT was banned in the U.S. a generation ago, a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that traces of the insecticide were still present in 99 percent of Americans.
**Toronto Globe and Mail**
-More than 8,100 U.S. troops from the Korean War are still listed as missing in action.
**Associated Press**
-Amusement park attendance often increases after a fatal accident. "Oddly enough, if you get a high-profile death on one of the extreme rides, that's the place where every enthusiast worth their salt wants to go," said Kathy Fackler, president of , which lobbies for improved safety at the parks.
**Westchester, NY, Journal News**
-Forty percent of NASCAR's 75 million fans are women.
**AARP Magazine**
-Seventy percent of women own a two-piece swimsuit, including 42 percent of those who describe themselves as "obese".
**USA Today**
-Seventy percent of Americans sign the names of their pets on greeting cards.
**The Dallas Morning News**
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A/N: So R/R! I got some great quotes to add to the next chappie, but my hands are cramping up from typing this one. Toodles!