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Big spender, even now: Michael Jackson’s grave site costs his estate $5,000 per month.
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OY VEY!
In her routines, comedian Sunda Croonquist often talks about her mixed heritage: Her mother’s African American, her father’s Swedish, she was raised Catholic, and she married into a Jewish family. “I’m a black woman with a Jewish mother-in-law,” goes one of her jokes. “The only thing we have in common is that we don’t want to get our hair wet!” Not laughing: Croonquist’s Jewish mother-in-law, Ruth Zafrin. In 2009 she sued the comedian for “spreading false, defamatory, and racist lies.” Croonquist agreed to stop telling mother-in-law jokes and to take any information pertaining to her family off her Web site, but she refused to pay monetary damages. The case is still pending.
WHICH PART OF THE NAME DIDN’T HE GET?
In 2005 Anthony Beninati was attending the Burning Man festival in Nevada, a weeklong event that features a lot of stuff getting burned (see page 422). One night, Beninati walked too close to a bonfire, fell down, and burned his hand. He sued Burning Man organizers for not warning him that he might get burned (even though he’d attended the festival twice before). In his deposition, Beninati admitted that he knew “fire is dangerous and causes burns.” Case dismissed.
THAT’S COLD-BLOODED
In 2000 a lawyer named Linda Ross sued a California phone company, GTE, for $100,000 because they mistakenly put her Yellow Pages listing under the category “Reptiles.” (Ross’s phone number had once belonged to a business called the Reptile Show, but GTE failed to update its records when she acquired the number.) Ross claimed that the listing caused her public humiliation: She received dozens of prank calls; people hissed at her when she walked by them; Jay Leno even made fun of her on The Tonight Show. There were no follow-up news reports about the lawsuit, so we’re guessing it was ssssssettled out of court.
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According to British researchers, terrorists and extremists almost never buy life insurance.
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WHAT COMES
AFTER WEIRD?
Is there a word for something that’s so weird that the word “weird” can’t begin to describe it? If so, please use it for these stories.
THERE’S A SUIT IN MY BUCKET
In October 2009, Alicja Tomankiewicz of Mikowice, Poland, sued her neighbor Waldemar Wilk…for kicking and damaging a $4.50 plastic bucket that she kept in her front yard. The case went to court, where Wilk pleaded not guilty. He even brought a video to the courtroom showing footage of Tomankiewicz using the bucket and argued that it proved that since the bucket wasn’t damaged, he couldn’t have kicked it. The judge said Wilk couldn’t prove that the video had been taken after he had allegedly kicked the bucket, and the footage was therefore inadmissible as evidence. Then the judge ordered that an expert be brought in to determine whether kicking a bucket could actually damage it. It could, the expert testified, and Wilk was found guilty. He appealed the case, and after 18 months of litigation, the lawsuit was dropped.
TAKE IT ALL OFF
A police officer in Tiffin, Ohio, pulled over Jaime Aguirre, 42, in November 2009 for a traffic violation, and smelled marijuana coming from his car. A subsequent search of the vehicle instead turned up hundreds of X-rays of women’s torsos. Aguirre was a technician at a medical imaging center, and he’d allegedly taken the images, illegally, from his office. Why? He was using them for sexual-gratification purposes, police said. Aguirre was arrested on several charges and held in lieu of $250,000 bail. “This,” said Police Chief David Blough, “is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.”
MYSTERY BY THE FOOT
On August 20, 2007, a 12-year-old girl found a running shoe on Jedediah Island, off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. She looked inside the shoe and saw a sock. She looked inside the sock—and found a human foot. Medical examiners later identified it as belonging to a man and said that it didn’t appear to have been severed, but seemed to have detached due to decomposition underwater, possibly from the body of a drowning victim. Six days later, a couple on nearby Gabriola Island found another running shoe…with a sock inside it…with a human foot in it. It, too, was from a male. In February 2008, a third foot—again, complete with shoe and sock—was found on nearby Valdes Island. This one was also a man’s. In May a fourth foot was found on Kirkland Island, this time belonging to a woman. A fifth foot found the following month on Westham Island was confirmed to be from the same person as the foot found in February. August brought another foot in a sock and running shoe, and so did November—this one a match to the foot found in May. In July 2009, police announced that they had determined the identity of the person associated with the first foot, a man who had suffered from depression and may have committed suicide. In October 2009, an eighth human foot was found in British Columbia. The case has been called one of the most bizarre in Canadian history, and no explanation for the mystery feet has been found.
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A recent poll shows that 67% of Americans believe Democrats are better lovers than Republicans.
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MOOVING VIOLATION
Police in Tonowanda, New York, were called to a water-treatment facility late one night in October 2009. The caller said that a man in a cow suit had stopped by the plant, buzzed the intercom, asked for directions, and then run away. Police came out to investigate and found Jeffrey S. Barber of Hamburg, New York, near the plant. He was still wearing the cow suit, which was soaking wet, and he appeared to be intoxicated. When asked what had happened, Barber told officers he was driving home from a Halloween party, and his GPS device had told him to take a right turn. He turned down a street called Aqua Lane—and drove off the dock at the end of the street, straight into the Niagara River. He smashed out a window, “like I saw how to do on TV,” he said, and swam to safety. Then he walked to the water-treatment plant to ask for directions—still wearing his cow suit—thinking it was the University of Buffalo. Barber was found to have a blood-alcohol content of 0.20, far over the limit for driving, and was arrested. Police recovered his car from the river the next day, with three beer bottles, four whiskey bottles…and one fake cow head inside.
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BillionaireXchange is an eBay for rich people. Bidders must have a net worth of at least $2 million.
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DISTURBING PSAs
Do we need TV to tell us how to behave? Well, it worked with “Only YOU can prevent forest fires,” “Every litter bit hurts,” and dozens of other public-service TV ad campaigns. But how far should an ad go to make a point, even with the best intentions? Perhaps these folks went a bit too far.
SAFETY FIRST! In 2007 the Canadian Workplace Safety and Insurance Board produced a series of public-service announcements to warn of workplace hazards. Here’s a sample of what TV viewers saw.
• A young female chef says to the camera, “I’m on the fast track to becoming head chef, and I’m supposed to be getting married next week. But I won’t, because I’m about to have a terrible accident.” Suddenly, she slips, falls, spills a huge cauldron of hot oil all over herself, and screams in gurgling agony as her face literally melts.
• Warehouse manager: “Get that skid.” Forklift driver: “Okay.” Bad move. The forklift drives up to a shelving unit and the shelves collapse, burying the driver in a crushing mountain of steel pipes. With pipes protruding from his bleeding torso, the driver delivers a monologue about the importance of managerial oversight.
DON’T SMOKE! This Australian announcement starts with a close-up of a cancer-ridden mouth. The camera pulls back to reveal a woman who says, “Smoking causes mouth cancer. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t need radiotherapy and chemotherapy.” She then refers to the quit-smoking number that’s printed on every pack of cigarettes before the camera zooms back in to linger on her chipped, yellow, rotten teeth, her mouth sores, and her oozing, bloody gums.
TEXTING AND DRIVING DON’T MIX! This PSA from Engla
nd begins with three teenage girls in a car, talking and laughing. The driver starts texting…she crosses the center line and smashes into another car, and then another car smashes into them, shattering windows and sending girls flying. The camera pans over the blood-covered bodies; the driver screams in terror. As onlookers and rescue workers try to help, a little girl in one of the other wrecked cars is crying, “Mummy, Daddy, wake up! Mummy, Daddy, wake up!” (Mummy and Daddy don’t wake up.)
* * *
Canadian Gilbert Nelles says a beam from a UFO made him into a reincarnation of Elvis Presley.
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SITTIN’ IN A TREE, PART II
When we left Julia “Butterfly” Hill (page 132), she was just beginning her two-year stint on a platform near the top of a 1,000-year-old redwood tree called “Luna” to save it from being felled by loggers.
NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW…
Winter had already begun to settle in on the forest when Julia Hill climbed Luna on December 10, 1997. Her cold-weather gear consisted of a T-shirt, a thermal shirt, one pair of thermal pants, a wool sweater, a pair of wool pants, and a lightweight sleeping bag. Hats were a challenge; they kept getting blown away by the constant wind. Gusts of 70 mph tossed the platform around like a boat on a rough sea, shredded its tarp roof, and howled so loudly that she couldn’t think. It rained continuously, and storms would last for days. Lightning struck so close that the platform shook, the sky lit up like a neon sign, and Hill’s hair stood on end. She endured only one snowstorm that winter, but the chronic cold, combined with being constantly wet, gave her frostbite. At one point she broke a toe, but her feet were so numb she never knew it until she saw the toe turn from white to blue to black. The pain was excruciating. She took duct tape, cardboard, and toilet paper from her “medical” kit and wrapped it around her toe to form a makeshift cast, but from that time forward, her feet were in constant pain.
THE GROUND WAR
While Hill was struggling to survive the rain and cold, loggers from Pacific Lumber—whose livelihoods depended on cutting down trees—kept up a constant campaign of harassment. They hacked off the baby sucker trees growing out of Luna’s trunk, each blow of the ax shaking Julia’s perch. They felled nearby trees so that they crashed through Luna’s outer branches, nearly shattering Hill’s 4′ x 7′ platform. To keep her from sleeping, the loggers trained floodlights on her and blew bugles and air horns all night long. They hired a helicopter the size of a passenger plane to buzz the platform, creating 300-mph updrafts that nearly sucked her and a visiting reporter out of the tree. They tried to starve her out by preventing her support team from bringing food and supplies. And they hired “Climber Dan,” a former logger who specialized in taking activists out of trees by force. Climber Dan ended up cutting a traverse line connecting Luna to a nearby tree while “Almond,” who was helping Julia tree-sit for the first few months, was on it. Almond would have plummeted 100 feet to the ground if a branch hadn’t broken his fall.
* * *
Some Internet “safe browsing” filters block access to chicken-breast recipes.
* * *
RECORD BREAKER
Hill never intended to stay up in Luna for more than a few weeks. “But two weeks turned into three,” she wrote later, “and after three, I thought, ‘I’m so close to a month I might as well stay.’” During those first few weeks, she shared her perch with other tree-sitters, but one by one the others came down, unable to stand the cramped, uncomfortable platform any longer. Hill, however, found herself becoming more and more attached to life in the treetops. She actually began to think of Luna and herself as one entity.
Nevertheless, at 71 days she’d had her fill and was ready to quit. The cold weather and the shaking she’d endured during storms had taken their toll, and she was near her breaking point. Then a visiting journalist named Erik Slomanson put a provocative idea in her head. “You know, if you want to do this right,” he said, “you’ve got to stay to the 100-day mark because the world record is 90 days, and Americans love record-breaking.”
The challenge of breaking the record gave her the impetus to go on. Plus, the efforts of the loggers to intimidate her out of the tree completely backfired. “I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to stay in Luna; I just did it,” she said. “Ironically, their opposition just encouraged me to continue on.” Added to that was her fear that the moment she came down, Pacific Lumber would immediately cut down her tree. That had been the company’s pattern with other tree-sitters. “There’s no way I’m letting this incredible tree fall,” Julia told her support team. “I’m not going to do it. As long as I have the ability to keep this tree standing, I’m staying up here.”
LIFE IN A TREE
Weathering storms was one thing; dealing with harassment was another. But what about the mundane tasks of everyday life? For instance, how did she…
* * *
After realizing that its initials had become crude Internet slang the Wisconsin Tourism Federation (WTF) changed its name.
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• Get supplies? The ground crew gave Hill a pager and established codes to let her know they were coming, when they were nearby, and when to drop a duffel bag attached to a rope. Once the crew stuffed the bag with supplies, she would haul it back up. When the company security guards surrounded the tree to keep the crew from getting to Hill, her crew found ways to outwit them. Once 19 activists danced around the tree, yelling, “23! 23!”—the code for her to drop her duffel bag. All of them held supply sacks, but only some of bags actually had supplies. While the guards repeatedly tackled activists with decoy sacks, one of the activists managed to clip the real bag onto the rope.
• Get water? She rigged the tarps sheltering her platform to collect rainwater, which she used for washing, cleaning, and personal hygiene.
• Cook? Hill used a single-burner camp stove fueled by propane. She made couscous, oatmeal, farina, and instant soup, and combined them with dried fruit, nuts, fresh vegetables, and spices.
• Bathe? She took sponge baths. She heated water on her camp stove, stripped from the waist down, scrubbed for two minutes, dried off quickly, and put her clothes back on. Then she repeated the process from the waist up. Temperature, water, and fuel rations didn’t allow for rinsing. She rarely washed her hair; it used too much water, and she was afraid a wet head would make her sick.
• Go to the bathroom (the #1 question on all Bathroom Readers’ minds)? At first she used a funnel with a hose over the side of the platform to urinate. When the wind kept ripping the hose away, she changed to a funnel and a jar, which she emptied over the side. By the time the urine fell 180 feet to the ground, the wind had turned it to a fine mist and spread it over a wide area. (Because Luna was in a rain forest, the acidity of the urine did not burn leaves or plants, which it would have done in a dry forest.) For solid waste, Hill used a bucket lined with a heavy-duty trash bag. The bag was stashed in a hole in Luna’s trunk that had been formed by lightning years before, and was packed out with the other garbage.
• Sleep? Hill slept under a tarp in a three-season sleeping bag the first year. The second year, she was given a winter sleeping bag and a bivouac, a tent-like shelter that wrapped around the bag.
• See at night? Candles were her primary source of light after dark. She also had a headlamp, but that required precious batteries, so she rarely used it.
• Communicate with the outside world? At first, Hill only talked by yelling down to her crew when they came with supplies every few days. Later she was given a radio phone powered by solar panels connected to two motorcycle batteries, an emergency cell phone, a hand-cranked radio, a tape recorder, a digital camera, a video camera, walkie-talkies, and a pager.
• Keep from going crazy? Hill had roommates at first, other activists who stayed for days or weeks at a time. After they dropped out, she had visitors—journalists, fellow activists, and, on a few occasions, celebrities, including Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, actor Woody Harrelson, and sing
er Bonnie Raitt. But most of the time, she was alone. She immersed herself in books, educating herself about forestry and environmental issues. She listened to radio shows and talked to experts about slope erosion, watershed analysis, and timber-harvest plans. She spent hours reading about a variety of topics, from sustainable logging and northern California history to Charles Hurwitz’s financial dealings. In the end, Hill’s treetop studies earned her an honorary doctorate in humanities from the New College of California.
THE END IS NEAR
After she broke the 100-day tree-sitting mark, Julia “Butterfly” Hill suddenly became a public figure on a national level, bringing tremendous visibility and sympathy to her cause. Money began to pour into the environmental groups filing suits against the Pacific Lumber. Not only was the company hemorrhaging money trying to defend itself in court, it was losing the public-relations battle as well: Political figures from Senator Dianne Feinstein all the way to President Clinton joined the chorus criticizing Pacific Lumber.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Page 31
