The Funny Section

According to the Austin American-Statesman, the lawyers for Michael Richard, a former Texas death row inmate, have reason to be upset.  On a September day, merely moments after the court accepted the lethal-injection case, Michael Richard’s lawyers rushed to file a stay with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal and promised delivery by 5:20 p.m.  The court clerk replied, “We close at 5″.  The petition for a stay didn’t end up making it, and Richard was executed at 8:23.

According to Reuters News Service, the only survivor of a certain species of tortoises at the Galapagos Islands is named “Lonesome George”.  Biologists who have been studying the tortoise say that although George may live another 100 years, it’s unlikely he will ever mate.  The biologists have gone to great lengths to help George along, but say he remains uninterested.  Attempts to reenergize George have included having randy young male and female tortoises demonstrate mating for him followed by many attempts to pair him up with a female tortoise.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Eyal Gur, a famous Israeli plastic surgeon said that within the next year he expects his revolutionary breast-lift procedure, a.k.a. an internal bra, to be approved.  The procedure only takes forty minutes long and fits a thin titanium bra-like frame with silicone cups to hold the breasts up just under the woman’s skin.  The doctor claims that the procedure will be both less invasive and less expensive than modern breast lifts.

Originally, cookbooks didn’t give precise measurements for recipes - they just told readers to use a “pinch” of this, a “heaping spoonful” of that, and a “handful” of something else.  Fannie Merrit Farmer, a domestic servant in the late 1850’s, had no trouble following such recipes herself - but she found it almost impossible to give instructions to the young girl who helped her in the home where she worked.  So she began rewriting the family’s recipes using more precise measurements.

Forty years later, she had become the assistant principal of the prestigious Boston Cooking School.  In 1896 she decided to publish her first book of “scientific” recipes, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.  Her publisher was so worried it wouldn’t sell that he forced Farmer to pay for printing costs herself.  She did.  It sold four million copies and permanently changed the way cookbooks are written.

From the San Francisco Chronicle,

“Someone fired a .45 caliber bullet into Ava Donner’s kitchen.  Luckily, she was holding a spoon.  Donner was stirring a pot of macaroni and cheese when a bullet hit the stem on the stainless steel spoon, ricocheted off the refrigerator and landed on the kitchen counter . . . ‘If it had been an inch either way, it would have been in her chest,’ said Donner’s husband.  Police suspect the shot was fired by youths target shooting in a nearby vacant lot.”

In 1995, a 30-ton boulder fell 500 feet off a cliff, crashed through a mobile home roof and killed Jackie Johnson, 19, of Adams Beach, Kentucky, while he was watching TV on the couch.  The man’s grandmother, who had been watching TV beside him, had just gotten up to let her dog in.  His grandfather, who was also sitting on the couch, was thrown up in the air and got a broken shoulder.

The Sighting: A 35-foot-high image of the Virgin Mary on the side of a building in Clearwater, Florida

Revelation: In 1996 workers chopped down a palm tree in front of the Seminole Finance Company building.  Not long afterward, a customer noticed a discoloration in the building’s tinted windows that resembled Madonna.  The discovery was reported on the afternoon news.  By the end of the week, and estimated 100,000 people visited the site . . . including a Baptist minister who was ejected after he “condemned the crowed for worshipping an image on glass.”

Impact: The city set up a “Miracle Management Task Force” to install portable toilets at the site, arrange police patrols, and erect a pedestrian walkway over the adjacent road (Route 19) to stop the faithful from dodging in and out of traffic.  “That’s the busiest highway in Florida,” one policeman told reporters.  “You want to know the real miracle?  Half a million people have crossed that intersection and nobody’s been injured or killed.”

People started drinking coffee and tea in the morning not because they were pleasant, but because they were hot, dark, and mysterious.  Until the 17th century, it was common for Europeans to start their day with alcohol.  Queen Elizabeth, for exampale, had a pot of beer and a pound of beefsteak for breakfast every day.  Scottish breakfasts routinely included a dram of whiskey.  Coffee, tea, and sugar had the same illicit appeal as alcohol when they reached Euorope in the 1600s - so they became suitable substitues for booze.

Benjamin Franklin was a big believer in fresh air, even in the middle of winter.  He slept with the windows open year-round and as he wrote, “I rise almost every morning and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season.”  In April 1790 Franklin, 84, developed an abscess in his lungs, which his doctor blamed on too many hours spent sitting at the open window.  The abscess burst on the 17th, sending him into a coma.  He died a few hours later.