Is It Really a ‘Problem’ If 99% Wish They Had It?
Among those struggling with psychological issues in modern America are the rich “one-percenters” (especially the mega-rich “one percent of one-percenters”), according to counselors specializing in assuaging guilt and moderating class hatred. London’s The Guardian, reporting from New York, found three such counselors, including two who barely stopped short of comparing the plight of the rich-rich with the struggles of “people of color” or out-of-closet gays. Sample worries: isolation (so few rich-rich), stress caused by political hubbub over “inequality” and insecurity (is my “friend” really just a friend of my money?).
Can’t Possibly Be True
Stories surface regularly about a hospital patient declared dead who then revives briefly before once again dying. However, Tammy Cleveland’s recent lawsuit against doctors and DeGraff Memorial Hospital near Buffalo, N.Y., reveals an incident more startling. She alleges that her late husband Michael displayed multiple signs of life (breathing, eyes open, legs kicking, attempted hugs, struggles against the tube in his throat) for nearly two hours, but with two doctors all the while assuring her that he was gone. (The coroner came and went twice, concluding that calling him had been premature.) The lawsuit alleges that only upon the fourth examination did the doctor exclaim, “My God, he has a pulse!” Michael Cleveland died shortly after that—of a punctured lung from CPR following his initial heart attack—an injury for which he could have been treated.
The Continuing Crisis
In 20th-century Chicago, according to legend, one did not have to be among the living to vote on Election Day, and a 2013 policy of the city’s community colleges has seemingly extended rights of the dead—to receive unearned degrees. City Colleges of Chicago, aiming to increase graduation numbers, has awarded a slew of posthumous degrees to former students who died with at least three-fourths of the necessary credits to graduate. (The policy also now automatically awards degrees by “reverse transfer” of credits to students who went on to four-year colleges, where they added enough credits, hypothetically, to meet City Colleges’ standards.)
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People Different From Us
It would be exhaustive to chronicle the many ways that the woman born Carolyn Marjorie Ann Clay, 82, of Chattooga County, Ga., is different from us. For starters, she was once arrested for stripping nude to protest a quixotic issue before the city council in Rome, Georgia; for another, her driver’s license identifies her as Ms. Serpentfoot Serpentfoot. In October, she filed to change that name—to one with 69 words, 68 hyphens, an ellipsis and the infinity sign. One judge has already turned her down on the ground that she cannot recite the name (though she promised to shorten it on legal papers to “Nofoot Allfoot Serpentfoot”).
Bright Ideas
In September, officials in Uzbekistan’s village of Shaharteppa, alarmed that Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev would drive through and notice barren fields (since the cotton crop had already been harvested), ordered about 500 people into the fields to attach cotton capsules onto the front-row stalks to impress Mirziyoyev with the village’s prosperity.
Least Competent Criminals
Jorge Vasconcelos, 25, was traffic-stopped in El Reno, Okla., in October because he was reportedly weaving on the road, but deputies detected no impairment except possibly for a lack of sleep. Then, “out of nowhere,” according to a KFOR-TV report, Vasconcelos, instead of quietly driving off, insisted that he was doing nothing wrong and that deputies could check his truck if they thought otherwise. They did—and found an elaborately rigged metal box in the engine, containing 17 pounds of heroin, worth over $3 million. He was charged with aggravated trafficking of heroin and possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
Weird Norway
(1) In July, artist Hilde Krohn Huse, shooting a video alone in a forest near Aukra, accidentally got hung upside down naked in a tree for nearly four hours. (2) In October, hunters who had shot two elk near Narvik were informed that they had inadvertently wandered into an area of the Polar Park zoo (and that, thanks to them, the zoo’s elk population was now down to three).
© 2015 CHUCK SHEPHERD
