News of the Weird newspapers illustration
Cliché Come to Life
For her Advanced Placement World History class at Magnolia (Texas) West High School in December, Reagan Hardin constructed an elaborate diorama of a Middle Ages farm—which her dog ate on the night before it was due. Veterinarian Carl Southern performed the necessary scoping-out on Roscoe, extracting the plastic chicken head, horse body, sheep and pig, along with wire that held the display together. Warned Dr. Southern: “Don’t put anything past your dog. We all say my dog would never eat that, and that’s the main thing he’ll eat.”
The Entrepreneurial Spirit
■ Meg C Jewelry Gallery of Lexington, Ky., introduced a limited line of Kentucky-centric gold-plated necklaces and earrings in June (recently touted for Christmas!)—each dangling with genuine Kentucky Fried Chicken bones. All stems were picked clean from KFC wings, washed, dried, sealed with varnish and conductive paint, copper-electroformed and then electroplated with 14k gold. Small-bone necklaces go for $130 (large, $160), and earrings for $200 a pair—and according to Meg C, accessorize anything from jeans to a lady’s best little black dress.
■ “Ethical” fur designer Pamela Paquin debuted the first of her anticipated line of roadkill furs recently—raccoon neck muffs (“I can literally take two raccoons and put them butt to butt and then they clasp neck to neck”) that will sell for around $1,000. Raccoons yield “luscious” fur, she said, but her favorite pelt is otter. The Massachusetts woman leaves her card with various New England road crews (“Hi, my name is Pamela. Will you call me when you have roadkill?”) and does business under the name Petite Mort (“little death” in French, but also, she said, a euphemism for a woman’s post-orgasm sensations).
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■ Not too long ago, “generous” job perquisites were, perhaps, health insurance and little more, but Silicon Valley startups now race to outdo each other in dreaming up luxuries to pamper workers. A November Wall Street Journal report noted that the photo-sharing service Pinterest offers employees classes in the martial art muay thai and in August brought in an “artisanal jam maker” to create after-work cocktails—a far cry from most workplaces, which offer, perhaps, a vending machine downstairs. (Several companies have hired hotel-concierge professionals to manage their creative add-ons.) Not every perk is granted, though: Pinterest turned down an employee’s request to install a zip line directly to a neighborhood bar.
Fine Points of the Law
Caitlyn Ricci, 21 and estranged from her divorced parents, availed herself this year of a quirky New Jersey law that requires divorced parents to provide for their children’s college educations (even though Caitlyn was a toddler at the time of the divorce, chose a more expensive out-of-state college, and already had a blemished community-college record). Mom Maura McGarvey (who claims to be especially hard hit by the tuition bill) and dad Michael Ricci are helping sponsor “corrective” legislation—because, generally, parents are not required to pay for college (but in New Jersey, divorced parents are).
The Continuing Crisis
Historians at the Wellcome Collection museum in London placed on display in November their rendition of the “orgone energy accumulator” developed in the 1940s by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who thought it could stimulate orgasms for those who sat inside one. (The device is thought to have inspired the “Orgasmatron” in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper. Among 1950s-era “testers,” Albert Einstein is said to have panned it, but not author J.D. Salinger.) The museum’s curator tried to lower expectations—that visitors should expect an historic sex “education” and not a sexual experience.
Police Report
Messages Not Received: On Nov. 30, an allegedly intoxicated Dwayne Fenlason, 48, drove his pickup truck into a ditch in Pomfret, Vt., bringing a DUI citation—and then subsequently drove an SUV to the scene to pull the truck out (earning a second DUI), and then an all-terrain vehicle to the scene (and a third DUI).
© 2014 CHUCK SHEPHERD
