Goat Sacrifice to Lacrosse Player Sacrifice
Finally, a solution to terrorist hijacking: Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
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Will the violence never stop? A 22-year-old man has been arrested for assaulting his father with a bag of Cheetos. It gets worse: The father's t-shirt was also covered in Cheetos dust.
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A drunken schoolgirl kicked a New Zealand man in the testicles for pronouncing her name wrong, a court was told today. The man was 40, the girl 17. Based on the story, it sounds like she really man-handled him. Give that guy the pansy award. (When I first read the headline, incidentally, I thought, either (i) the girl's name is one of those creative inner-city types or (ii) her last name is "Fuchs.")
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Two funny Lenos from earlier this week:
Hey what do you think of this? The British government had finally given approval for scientists to create human animal embryos by mixing human and animal DNA. Or as they call that in the South, Saturday night. . . . This weekend marked the 86th anniversary of the invention of the bowling shirt. Cause prior to this, people in Cleveland had nothing to wear to weddings.
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Probably more effective than a gun, though the collateral damage might be a bit excessive: A man told police that he set his parents' home on fire Wednesday afternoon to chase away burglars he claimed were creeping around the attic.
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Book about the Duke non-rape case. Sounds like compelling reading. Excerpt from review:
There was plenty of wrongdoing, of course, but it had very little to do with Duke's lacrosse players. It was perpetrated instead by a rogue district attorney determined to win re-election in a racially divided, town-gown city; ideologically driven reporters and their pseudo-expert sources; censorious faculty members driven by the imperatives of political correctness; a craven university president; and black community leaders seemingly ready to believe any charge of black victimization.
Until Proven Innocent is a stunning book. It recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions--legal, educational and journalistic--that do so much to shape contemporary American culture. Messrs. Taylor and Johnson make it clear that the Duke affair--the rabid prosecution, the skewed commentary, the distorted media storyline--was not some odd, outlier incident but the product of an elite culture's most treasured assumptions about American life, not least about America's supposed racial divide.
