Lead Story
Police in Santa Rosa, California, went door-to-door in January to warn residents that a six-foot-long python had escaped from a bathtub down a drain and that they should keep their bathroom doors closed and their toilet lids down.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A pro-nuclear-power video sponsored by a private company seeking to build nuclear reactors in Japan features the cartoon character “Mr. Pluto,” who downplays the risks of plutonium to primarily school-age audiences. Says Mr. Pluto, “If everyone treats me with a peaceful and warm heart, I’ll never be scary or dangerous.” A narrator adds that if a person drank plutonium most of it would pass through his body without causing harm.
Beijing’s Heilongjiang Legal News reported in January that the wife of Zhang Jingui, following the advice of a fortune-teller on how to improve marital relations, cut off his penis with a pair of scissors. The fortune-teller had concluded that the problem was Zhang’s faulty organ and that the wife’s only hope was to remove it so that a new one could grow.
In December fashion designer Oribe Canales returned to work at Elizabeth Arden’s studio in New York City, following a week’s stay at a Minnesota drug rehabilitation clinic. He went to the clinic after a fashion show at which he suddenly decided to smear blue paint on models just as they were to walk out on the runway. After returning to work, an unrepentant Canales said, “It was genius. My interpretation was Hiroshima–and that radiation can be beautiful.”
