Newest Right
The Utah Court of Appeals ruled in February that Barbara Bagley has a legal right to sue herself for her own negligent driving that caused the death of her husband. Typically, in U.S. courts, a party cannot profit from its own negligence, but Bagley is the official “representative” administering her husband’s estate and has a duty to claim debts owed to the husband. Those debts would include “wrongful death” damages from a careless driver (actually, the careless driver’s insurance company), even if the careless driver was herself. Of course, if her lawsuit is successful, the monetary award would become part of the husband’s estate, a portion of which will likely go to her.
Historical Weird
■ Can’t Possibly Be True: For a brief period in 1951 and 1952, an educational kit, the Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab, was for sale in the United States even though it came with testable samples of four types of uranium ore and three different radiation sources (alpha, beta, gamma). A surviving copy of the kit has been on display recently at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but the radioactive materials had to be removed before the kit could be shipped to Belfast. (The kit had failed to sell well; kids apparently preferred the company’s erector sets.)
■ In February, the Kansas Humanities Council, providing background to a current traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibit, posted a description of a 1925 baseball game in Wichita in which the professional, all-black Wichita Monrovians took on members of the local Ku Klux Klan. (Historians guessed that the KKK risked the embarrassment of defeat only because it needed the exposure to overcome declining enrollments.) The Monrovians (champions of the Colored Western League the year before) won, 10-8, and the Klan shut down in Kansas two years later.
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War Is Hell
■ Least Competent Terrorists: London’s Daily Telegraph reported in January that the “Darkshadow” jihadists from Tunisia and Ivory Coast, who had proclaimed their website hacking would disrupt international travel, wound up taking down a site consisting merely of bus timetables in Bristol, England.
■ Perspective: ISIS’ very public recent executions of a Jordanian pilot and two Japanese citizens were met with starkly different reactions. In Jordan, King Abdullah II led his nation in a call for bloody revenge. In Japan (according to a February Associated Press dispatch from Tokyo), feelings were mixed because of “meiwaku”—Japan’s cultural feeling that the dead victims (and their families) were “causing trouble” by placing themselves in harm’s way. Said one man cited by the AP, “In the old days, their parents would have had to commit hara-kiri (ritual suicide) to apologize.” In fact, both victims’ families did repeatedly apologize for inconveniencing the government, which had warned citizens to stay away from the war zone.
The Continuing Crisis
■ CSI Netherlands: Police in the Dutch town of Haarlem, near Amsterdam, raided an urban marijuana farm after a recent snowfall. In photographs of the neighborhood, all yards and roofs of houses are blanketed in white—except for a certain portion of the roof of one home, on which the snow had completely melted. Police, deducing that the attic was likely an illegal marijuana greenhouse, made arrests.
■ News You Can Use: If you’re in pain, shouting “Owww!” has measurable therapeutic value. Writing recently in the Journal of Pain, researchers from the National University of Singapore hypothesize that the muscle movements in vocalizing somehow divert or confuse pain signals, which otherwise would go unimpeded to the brain. Of subjects who plunged their hands into extremely cold water, those who were allowed to vocalize kept their hands immersed for up to three minutes longer than those who were silent. (The “oww” sound is similar in many languages and is apparently instinctive from birth.)
Promoting Their Brands
John Balmer, 50, was arrested at a Kmart in Hudson, Florida, in January as he attempted to pass a bag (allegedly containing marijuana and methamphetamine) to another person in line. Balmer was wearing a T-shirt that read “Who needs drugs?” above lettering that read, “No, seriously, I have drugs.”
© 2014 CHUCK SHEPHERD
