A teenage girl in Wyandotte, Mich., used tools from a website called FakeABaby.com to pretend for months to be pregnant. She made use of such products as abdomen extenders and ultrasound photos of her “triplets.” She received gifts; had a baby shower; joined expectant mother groups; and frightened her 16-year-old boyfriend so much that he began looking for full-time work to feed the babies that were soon to be born. The ruse fell apart in the 10th month of the fake pregnancy. There was community outrage. But according to the sheriff, none of the victims of the ruse have come forward to press fraud charges.
From Cuba, With Love
One of the remaining 116 Guantanamo Bay prisoners, who is suspected of having been close to Osama bin Laden, has a dating profile on Match.com captioned “detained but ready to mingle.” Muhammad Rahim al-Afghani has relentlessly proclaimed his innocence. His attorney released a series of charming letters from his client that were intended to humanize him. Al-Afghani commented on Lebron James, Caitlyn Jenner, the Ashley Madison website and, for some reason, South Dakota. However, with the publicity that resulted, Match.com suspended the account.
Leading Economic Indicators
— Adam Partridge Auctioneers in Liverpool announced that $10,000 would be the starting bid on a two-pound mass of whale vomit that had been hardened into a chunk by aging in ocean waters. BBC News reported that a six-pound hunk once sold for $150,000. When it ages into ambergris, the putrid waste product turns waxy and sweet-smelling and is valuable to high-end perfume houses.
— An international property rental service recently found a seven-bedroom castle on 200 acres in Ringuette, France, being rented for $2,925 a month. San Francisco’s KNTV immediately contrasted this castle with the listing of a 401-square-foot apartment in the city’s Lower Haight district being offered at $3,000 a month. Another French castle (six bedrooms, a pool, three-acre garden, several lawns) was renting for $4,940 — about what a three-bedroom on Collins Street in San Francisco goes for.
— Marie Holmes disclosed in March that the $88 million Powerball lump sum she had won would allow her to finish college and help her four kids, one of whom has cerebral palsy. But soon, her boyfriend, Lamar “Hot Sauce” McDow, was charged with drug trafficking and given a $3 million bail, which Holmes took care of. Then, in August, in Brunswick County, N.C, “Hot Sauce” was arrested again for selling heroin. Reporters surmised that Holmes must have been the one who posted that $6 million bail. Holmes addressed her critics on Facebook: “What Y’all need to be worried about is Y’all money.”
Failure To Keep A Low Profile
— Maurice Stewart, 22, had been on the lam since November, 2014, for armed robbery in Cleveland, Ohio. He was arrested in August of this year when police spotted a man matching his tattoo of a semiautomatic rifle just below his right eye.
— Nearly every courthouse forces visitors to walk through a metal detector after emptying their pockets. Isaac Phillips, 24, faced several charges after a courthouse visit in August in Cincinnati. Among the items he removed from his pocket were a drug scale and a razor blade. After a short chase and a Tasering, he was arrested.
Latest Right
Officials in Carroll County, Mary., released a woman in August after she had been detained for 67 days for declining to give her name to a traffic patrolman who had stopped her for a broken taillight. In her understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, to “not be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against (herself)” meant keeping her identity hidden from police. Eventually, sheriff’s deputies captured her fingerprints. Since they matched no outstanding warrants, she was released.
Can’t Possibly Be True
An ovipositor is the organ that inserts or receives an egg, especially from parasites. It was featured prominently in the film Alien. A spokesman from a startup firm called Primal Hardware assumes there is a market for ovipositors. The company is now selling two hollowed-tube models at $120 and $130, along with advice on ways to create gelatin “eggs” for insertion. Primal Hardware acknowledged the product “can be … off-putting” to anyone who might not “fantasize about being the willing or unwilling host of alien beings inside them.”
Recurring Themes
In the Tucson, Ariz., federal court more than three-fourths of the civil cases filed in 2014 were filed by one man — a prisoner named Dale Maisano, who was expressing disappointment with his health care. Maisano, who is serving a 15-year term for aggravated assault, said in July, 2015, he was getting little help for his valley fever, gallstones, sun sensitivity, leaky bladder and the nerve problems in his feet.
Least Competent Criminals
Pamela Downs, 45, was arrested in Kingsport, Tenn., in July and charged with using a counterfeit $5 bill at a gas station. The bill was merely two photocopied sides of a single bill that were poorly glued together. As she was being cuffed, Downs explained, “All these other bitches get to print money, so I can too.” She later told officers that she had read “online” that “President Obama” had “made a new law” allowing people to print money if they were on a fixed income.
Your English Teacher Was Right
In September, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery concluded that records of an investigation need not be released to the Memphis City Council because the subpoena did not have a comma in the right place. The law requires the records’ release “only in compliance with a subpoena or an order of a court.” Slatery said if there had been a comma after the word “subpoena,” a council subpoena would have gotten the records. And in July, Andrea Cammelleri prevailed on her parking ticket challenge because a comma was missing. A West Jefferson, Ohio, ordinance banned parking of any “motor vehicle camper, trailer.” A state appeals judge ruled that, with a comma after “vehicle,” Cammelleri’s truck would have been banned, but without it, only campers and trailers were.
Great Moments In Gerrymandering
In April, the City Council of Columbia, Mo., rigged a specially drawn “Community Improvement District” to pass a sales tax increase. Under the law, if the District had no “residents” who could vote, the “election” would be decided by the tax-friendly business owners. However, the council somehow missed that college student Jen Henderson, 23, lived in the district and had registered to vote. In late August, the Council “postponed” the election. At press time, they were in a quandary, as Henderson said she’s against higher taxes.
The Continuing Crisis
— “Let me get this straight,” wrote a blogger who’d visited the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Those who oversee” the park have it “populated with snakes that can bite and inflict serious wounds.” The remark was in response to a visitor’s having been bitten by one of at least 27 rattlesnakes that was loose on the grounds. On the other hand, the park has posted many snake warning signs. Also, the blogger who was bitten had removed her shoes to walk in the lush grass.
Cultural Diversity
— While deep south state courts are notorious for death sentences, the epicenter of capital punishment in recent years has shifted to Southern California, according to a September Slate.com analysis. While neither Texas, Georgia, North Carolina nor Virginia has issued a death sentence this year, Riverside County, Calif., has issued seven. Since 2010, Riverside and Los Angeles County have led the nation in death-row assignments. Ironically, of course, California rarely actually executes anyone; its death row has 748 residents, and no one has walked the last mile since 2006.
— In Egypt, Mariam Malak, one of the top-performing high school students in the country, not only failed all six of her final exams but received a score of zero in each exam she failed. Her family and a legion of supporters on social media have demanded that the prime minister investigate the possibility that Mariam was failed intentionally because she is of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.
Bright Ideas
The Cambridge, Mass., company AOBiome believes we have dangerously stripped “good bacteria” from our skins via “excessive cleaning,” and has introduced for sale “Mother Dirt” spray to add to the skin. Chemical engineer and co-founder Dave Whitlock said he has “not taken a shower in over 12 years,” but instead uses his odorless bacteria-restoring mist twice a day to cover himself with helpful “dirt” that activates the “good” bacteria. The company will soon begin clinical trials to demonstrate whether Mother Dirt (which also comes in shampoo form) can improve certain skin conditions.
Perspective
— Military veteran Gary Dixon, 65, has several medical problems, the worst of which is stage-four lung cancer, which he says he got from Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. He takes 15 meds a day. These were previously supplied by the Veterans hospital in Topeka, Kan. For post-traumatic stress and anxiety, he also smokes marijuana when he can get it. (Kansas has not legalized medical marijuana.) A recent policy change by the V.A. bars pain meds for marijuana users. This has left Dixon fending for himself for the meds, which cost $400 a month. Due to his medical condition, he cannot give up the marijuana because he so badly needs it.
— Ten years after Hurricane Katrina left tens of thousands homeless in New Orleans and neighboring Gulf states, many of the 120,000 hastily constructed box-type trailers ordered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency — and later condemned for concentrations of carcinogenic formaldehyde — are still being used in the U.S., although most of the people living in them have no clue about the risk. The most recent inhabitants were oilfield workers in North Dakota boomtowns. But shady entrepreneurs had also bought trailers at FEMA auctions and sold them for tornado and flood victims — after removing FEMA’s “Not For Human Habitation” stickers.
People With Issues
According to a divorce petition filed by Carole Mundy, her estranged husband Jeffrey Stein (a “top administrator” for New York’s Nassau County District Attorney) drove her to post-traumatic stress disorder with his “lifestyle.” The petition alleged Stein sometimes wore a chastity belt to work; wore diapers and “a horse tail”; “galloped” around the home; used a litter box; had his wife “walk” him on a leash; dressed like a “sissy maid” named “Jessica”; and wanted to be fed and diapered like a baby. Said Mundy’s lawyer, it was “a bedroom nightmare.”
The New Waterboarding
In April, 2009, the district attorney in Vilas County, Wisc., announced he was seeking volunteers for a forensic test to help his case against Douglas Plude, 42, who was scheduled to stand trial for the death of his wife. The volunteers were to be female, about 5 feet, 8 inches tall, weigh 140 pounds, and be willing to stick their heads into a toilet bowl and flush. Plude was charged with drowning his wife in a commode. His version was that his wife committed suicide by flushing herself. Plude ultimately pleaded guilty to reckless homicide.
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