A highlight of the recent upmarket surge in Brooklyn, New York, as a residential and retail favorite, was the asking price for an ordinary parking space in the garage at 845 Union St. in the Park Slope neighborhood: $300,000 — also carrying a $240-a-month condominium fee and $50 monthly taxes. That’s similar to the price of an actual one-bedroom apartment in less ritzy Brooklyn neighborhoods like Gravesend — a few miles away.
Compelling Explanations
Saginaw, Michigan, defense lawyer Ed Czuprynski had beaten a felony DUI arrest in December, but was sentenced to probation on a lesser charge in the incident, and among his restrictions was a prohibition on drinking alcohol — which Czuprynski acknowledged in March that he has since violated at least twice. However, at that hearing, which could have meant jail time for the violations, Czuprynski used the opportunity to beg the judge to remove the restriction altogether, arguing that he can’t be “effective” as a lawyer unless he is able to have a drink now and then. At press time, the judge was still undecided.
Fine Points of the Law
Residents in southern Humboldt County, California, will vote in May on a proposed property tax increase to fund a community hospital in Garberville to serve a web of small towns in the scenic, sparsely populated region, and thanks to a county judge’s March ruling, the issue will be explained more colorfully. Opponent Scotty McClure was initially rebuffed by the registrar when he tried to distribute, as taxpayer-funded “special elections material,” contempt for “Measure W” by including the phrase “(insert fart smell here)” in the description. The registrar decried the damage to election “integrity” by such “vulgarity,” but Judge Timothy Cissna said state law gives him jurisdiction only over false or misleading electioneering language.
Can’t Possibly Be True
News of the Weird has written several times, as technology progressed, about Matt McMullen’s “RealDoll” franchise — the San Marcos, California, engineer’s richly detailed flexible silicone mannequins that currently sell for $5,500 and up. Even before the recent success of the very humanish, artificially intelligent (AI) android “hosts” on TV’s Westworld, McMullen revealed that his first AI doll, “Harmony,” will soon be available with a choice of 12 “personalities,” including “intellectualism” and “wit,” to mimic an emotional bond to add to the sexual one. A recent University of London conference previewed a near future when fake women routinely provide uncomplicated relationships for lonely — or disturbed — men. Recently, in Barcelona, Spain, a brothel opened offering four “realdolls” “disinfected after each customer” — though the business still recommends customers use condoms.
Scientists at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center announced that they have digitally stored and retrieved a movie, an entire computer operating system, and a $50 gift card on a single drop of DNA. In theory, wrote the researchers in the journal Science, they might store, on one gram of DNA, 215 “petabytes” (i.e., 215 million gigabytes — enough to run, say, 10 million HD movies) and could reduce all the data housed in the Library of Congress to a small cube of crystals.
An office in the New York City government, suspicious of a $5,000 payment to two men in the 2008 City Council election of Staten Island’s Debi Rose, opened an investigation, which at $300 an hour for the special prosecutor, has now cost the city $520,000, with his final bill still to come. Despite scant evidence and multiple opportunities to back off, the prosecutor relentlessly conducted months-long grand jury proceedings, fought several court appeals, had one 23-count indictment almost immediately crushed by judges, and enticed state and federal investigators to, fruitlessly, take on the Staten Island case. In March, the city’s Office of Court Administration finally shrugged and closed the case.
Ironies
A chain reaction of fireworks in Tultepec, Mexico, in December had made the San Pablito pyro marketplace a scorched ruin, with more than three dozen dead and scores injured, leaving the town to grieve and, in March, to solemnly honor the victims — with even more fireworks. Tultepec is the center of Mexico’s fireworks industry, with 30,000 people dependent on explosives for a living. Wrote The Guardian, “Gunpowder” is in “their blood.”
Economic Indicators
1.) Bentley the cat went missing in Marina Del Rey, California, on Feb. 26 and as of press time had not been located — despite a posted reward of $20,000. 2.) British snack food manufacturer Walkers advertised in February for a part-time professional chip taster, at the equivalent of $10.55 an hour. 3.) An Australian state administrative tribunal awarded a $90,000 settlement after a cold-calling telemarketer sold a farm couple 2,000 ink cartridges — for their one printer — by repeated pitches.
Perspective
American chef Dan Barber staged a temporary pop-up restaurant in London in March at which he and other renowned chefs prepared the fanciest meals they could imagine using only food scraps donated from local eateries. A primary purpose was to chastise First World eaters — especially Americans — for wasting food, not only in the kitchen and on the plate, but to satisfy our craving for meat (for example, requiring diversion of 80 percent of the world’s corn and soy just to feed edible animals). Among Barber’s March “WastED” dishes were a char-grilled meatless beetburger and pork braised in leftover fruit solids.
Undignified Deaths
1.) A 78-year-old man in Easton, Pennsylvania, died in February from injuries caused when he lit his cigarette but accidentally set afire his hooded sweatshirt. 2.) A Mexico City man fell to his death recently in the city’s San Antonio neighborhood when he climbed up to turn off a highway video sign on the Periferico Sur highway that was showing a pornographic clip apparently placed by a hacker.
Least Competent Criminals
Oops! An officer in Harrington, Delaware, approaching an illegally parked vehicle at Liberty Plaza Shopping Center in March, had suspicions aroused when the driver gave him a name other than “Keyonna Waters” — which was the name on the employee name tag she was wearing. Properly ID’d, she was arrested for driving with a suspended license.
The Passing Parade
1.) In his third try of the year in January, Li Longlong of China surpassed his own Guinness Book record by climbing 36 stairs while headstanding — beating his previous 34. Among the Guinness regulations: no touching walls and no pausing more than five seconds per step. 2.) The online live-stream of the extremely pregnant giraffe, April, at New York’s Animal Adventure Park, has created such a frenzy, that, as of March 3, viewers had spent a cumulative 1,036 years just watching.
A News of the Weird Classic (June 2013)
Maryland state troopers stopped when they caught sight of a drummer playing percussion all alone on the side of traffic-packed Interstate 695 near Windsor Mill Road in Baltimore on May 21 (2013), at about 10:30 a.m. As the troopers later reported, the man had run out of gas and, rather than just sit around in his car, had set up his full drum kit on the shoulder and practiced while he awaited assistance. After a utility truck arrived, with gasoline, the drummer packed up and went on his way.
Editor’s Note: If you’re lucky you can catch a percussionist on the side of the road in the Pioneer Valley, too. When there’s no snow on the ground, passersby can sometimes see a lone drummer pounding away along Route 5 in Northampton by the Easthampton border.
