October 25, 2005
News of the Weird
+In a September rape trial in New York City, witness Roberto
Suarez testified that he saw two men in the room with a waitress
just before she told him that she had been raped, and then when
asked by the prosecutor to identify the two men, Suarez looked
past the defendants and pointed to, respectively, Juror Number 8
and Alternate Juror Number 3. The New York Daily News
reported that some jurors laughed so hard that they cried. [New
York Daily News, 9-21-05]
+Transsexual convicted prostitute Monica Renee Champion,
37, was finally picked up by police in Richmond, Va., in August;
there had been arrest warrants for indecent exposure against her in
the city's South Side as a male and in the city's North Side as a
female.
+In July, police in Lawrence, Kan., gave Ezekiel Rubottom's foot
back to him, convinced that, contrary to a neighbor's inquiry, it
wasn't evidence of a crime. Rubottom, 21, had tried to explain that
he'd had his clubbed left foot amputated and merely wanted to
keep it as a memento in a bucket of formaldehyde on his front
porch. A spokesman for Lawrence Memorial Hospital told the
Journal-World newspaper that there have been "women that want
their uterus . . . people take [home] tonsils . . . they take [home]
appendixes." Rubottom added a porcelain horse and a can of beer
to his bucket to make it what he called "a collage of myself."
[Lawrence Journal-World, 7-26-05]
+Wailing loudly and apparently incredulous at being ordered to jail, a scantily-dressed Natalia McLennan. 25, was taken directly to a lockup from a New York City courtroom in September, after being charged with prostitution; McLennan had recently posed for the cover of New York magazine, proclaiming herself to be the city's top-grossing "escort" and acknowledging that she provided sex for clients.
[Reuters, 6-22-05] [Reuters, 9-29-05]
~The wonder! (Not 'the horror', the wonder.) My whole existence pales in comparison. What could I ever say, do, or create that would be as memorable, as pure, as just one of these moments of incongruity and stupidity? It's disrespectful of me, perhaps blasphemous to the forces of order and chaos alike, to attempt to occupy your attention with my found studied contrivances. I don't know if I can go on, if I should go on.
[More excerpts on Spitting Image from past News of the Weird.]
"Behold," said she, "I am that which must ever surpass itself."
[image google: not NOTW\ caption @]