Brother Cesare Bonizzi, 62, of a Capuchin Friars monastery near Milan, Italy is the lead singer in a heavy-metal band that recently released its second album, Misteri (Mysteries), following a successful performance at Italy’s Gods of Metal festival (headlined by Iron Maiden and, ironically, Judas Priest). On stage, the white-flowing-bearded Brother Cesare booms out gritty but non-proselytizing lyrics while wearing his traditional brown robe. He told BBC News in July that his superiors have never interfered with his sideline and that he plans to send a copy of the new album to the pope. “He’s a music lover, and metal is music.”
The entrepreneurial spirit!
• High Point University (just south of Greensboro, NC) is not quite Club Med (“Club Ed,” it was called by the Chronicle of Higher Education) but provides free ice cream for students, a hot tub in the middle of campus, wake-up calls and a concierge service, all run by a cam pus “director of WOW,” whose job it is to thrill the “clients” and attract new ones. This is the strategy of President Nido Qubein, a motivational speaker and “customer comes first” businessman, and so far, enrollment is way up (even at higher tuition), new construction is transforming the campus and $100 million is in the bank.
• Challenging New Products:
(1) stilettos for toddlers (though with soft heels), from Bel levue, Wash. designer Britta Bacon, selling recently in Toronto for $39.95 (Cdn) a pair; and (2) a rotating ice cream cone on which the scoop gently revolves counter-clockwise, so that lazy people merely stick their tongues out and need not actively lick (sold by Kitchen Craft in the UK).
Leading economic indicators
•
The US government’s $100 billion stimulus distributed to taxpayers this
spring achieved mixed results, according to economists, but at least
the internet pornography industry flourished (according to a July trade
association spokesman). Adult Internet Market Re search Co. reported
that “20 to 30 percent” of “adult” Web sites reported that sales rose
during the time checks were being issued. However, Nevada brothels were
suffering, even though Hof’s Bunny Ranch ran a stimulus-check special:
Hand over your $600 check and get the usual $1,200 “party” (“three
girls and a bottle of champagne”).
• A July Los Angeles Times
investigation revealed that professional fundraisers keep so much of
the money donated to charity by conscientious, generous-minded people
that 430 different California charities over the last 10 years got not one penny of the contribu tions.
In
fact, in 337 cases, the charity paid an additional fee on top of
getting nothing back (but did come away with the donors’ names and
addresses, for further solicitation). Phi lanthropy watchdogs say
fundraisers should never keep more than 35 cents on the dollar, but the
Times found the overall average was 54 cents, and for missing-children
charities, fundraisers kept 86 cents. (Fundraisers for an organization
called Citizens Against Govern ment Waste kept 94 cents.)
Frontiers of science
•
A 10-year-old British boy had such a severe obsessive-compulsive
disorder that he was overwrought with guilt that he had caused the
Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks, in that he had not been able that
day to make his ritual step upon a particular mark in the street.
Writing
in June in the journal Neurocase, psychologists at University College
London said the boy recovered only when they convinced him that the
attacks had already started by the time he would have made his usual
step.
•
Many nations are exploring how to curb cattle’s release of the
greenhouse gas meth ane, including altering cows’ diets to reduce
flatulence (which requires monitoring the gas compositions from the old
and new diets). To collect the gas for measurement (according to a July
report in London’s Daily Telegraph), researchers at Argentina’s
National Institute of Agricultural Technology rigged a large plastic
tank to the cow’s back, with a tube to the backside to directly capture
each emission. (The alternative, researchers pointed out, would require
a human to follow a cow around with plastic bags.)
• Higher-Order Animal Research:
(1)
Britain’s Sea Life Centre announced a study in July that would give
octopuses Rubik’s Cubes to play with, to ascertain whether they use a
cer tain tentacle for such activities, or any tentacle at random.
(2) Writing in the journal Nature in July, a team of University of Oregon biologists showed that roundworms do “calculus” type computations, using chemosensory neurons, to determine how to find food or avoid trouble.
One obsessive american
Sam Bloomfield, 58, grew up poor on Tonga but arrived here in 1976 and says he has tried to show his gratitude ever since, according to a July 4 profile in his hometown Herald of Everett, Wash. He has tattooed “God Bless America” under his left eye, “Land of the Free” un der his right eye and a large “USA” across his forehead, and last year underwent another 15 painful hours with the needle to cover the rest of his face with stars and stripes resembling an American flag so that he can toast his beloved country in the mirror every morning.
Least competent corrections department
In July, convicted drug dealer Marcus Anderson opened the door of the corrections de partment van taking him to court, climbed out and walked away into downtown Balti more. It was an ordinary van without a prisoner cage and whose driver had no gun, hand cuffs, phone or radio (because Anderson had arrived late at the pick-up point for the regular prisoner van). An exasperated Judge Charles Bernstein later asked whether the driver had given him bus tokens, too. “If I were a young enterprising criminal,” said the judge, “I’d come to Baltimore to set up my practice. This is the place to be. This is the Promised Land.”
Update
“Brain fingerprinting,” reported in News of the Weird in 2000 and 2003 from the experi mental work by former Harvard research associate Lawrence Farwell, achieved a break through in July in India, when two murder suspects were convicted based in part on that technology. Though Farwell’s theory is somewhat different, the “Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature” used in Mumbai operates on a similar principle, that a different brain area acti vates when one recalls an actual experience than when one recalls something he merely learned about. Thus, in the India cases, neurologists concluded that the defendants either were present at the murder scene or had actually looked for or transported the murder weapon (and not that they had just read or been told about those facts).
News that sounds like a joke
(1)
After complaints by neighbors, police went to an apartment in
Framingham, Mass. in July to quell a raucous screaming match between
two women who, it turns out, are deaf.
(2) In Crawley, England in July, police were called to a supermarket to break up a fight between two grandmothers, who were ramming each other in their mobility scooters.
The Aristocrats!
(1)
Donald Seigfried, 55, and Diane Whalen, 54, were arrested in June and
face several charges of having sex with various dogs. Police were
alerted after Whalen’s son found the evidence of his mom in action.
(2) In June, a woman walking in a parking lot near Fort Walton Beach, Fla. with her two children was nearly struck by a car, but gently approached the driver to let her know the kids were unhurt. Inexplicably, the driver erupted, and when the woman tried to calm her by offering her a church brochure, the furious driver grabbed it, pulled her own pants down, and, according to a police report, “wipe[d] her female anatomy” with it (as the mother shielded her children’s eyes).
Copyright 2008 Chuck Shepherd Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate
