:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 10.25.2004 ::

:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird

Update
In 2002, News of the Weird mentioned a Wall Street Journal dispatch from Cuba, suggesting that Fidel Castro's 1987 vision of "apartment cows" was still a ways off. (Castro had pushed farmers to breed small cows, not much larger than dogs, that families could keep in small homes and that would supply their minimum daily quantities of milk.) Two months after that story ran, a farmer in Rockwell, Iowa, said he had bred such miniature cows but that they were not good milk producers. Cut to September 2004: An Associated Press dispatch from San Juan Y Martinez, Cuba, touted rancher Raul Hernandez, who has now apparently successfully created a small herd of 28-inch-high cows that can deliver about five quarts of high-quality milk. [Billings Gazette-AP, 9-12-04]

Almost All True
Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story? (a) A Hawaiian company opened a big market in Japan for ultra-premium bottled water pumped from the ocean floor off the Big Island coast (and desalinated). (b) A man fleeing police in Maine was caught when he jumped into a car and started the engine before he noticed that the owner, working on it, had left it on jacks. (c) Police in Houston, called out on a loud-music complaint, stumbled upon a fetish party, finding 12 nude men, all virtually immobilized in clear plastic cling wrap. (d) Some farmers in Nebraska supplement declining income with adoption programs in which animal-rights advocates pay them not to slaughter their cattle. [Associated Press, 10-4-04] [Billings Gazette-AP, 10-8-04] [Omaha World-Herald, 10-3-04]

[Answer to Almost All True: (a), (b) and (d) are true.]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 12:38:00 AM [+] ::
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