:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 1.23.2005 ::

:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird (.885)

LEAD STORY
Editor Frank Kelly Rich's bimonthly tribute to overdrinking -- the magazine Modern Drunkard -- is a 50,000-circulation glossy "about drinking and only about drinking, and not just drinking, but heavy drinking," he told the Los Angeles Times in January. Recent features included biographies of great drunks, a dictionary of bar slang, and a testimonial on how drinking cured one man's fear of flying. "The most accomplished people," Rich said, "have been drinkers," and he implied that people in the Middle East ought to drink more. Calling serious drinkers an "oppressed minority," Rich said he himself has about eight drinks a day, sometimes up to 30 (when he frequently blacks out). Said Rich's wife, of her husband's career, "When you find your calling, you have to go with it." [Los Angeles Times, 1-1-05]

Time Is of the Essence
Austrian artist Muhammad Mueller started a project in November, as political commentary, in which two people at a time dig a tunnel from the city of Graz to Gradec, Slovenia, 42 miles away, using only shovels; he estimated the venture would take 5,600 years. And in July, a federal appeals court rejected the Environmental Protection Agency's leak-safety standards for the long-awaited nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain; EPA had found the proposed site safe until the year 12,000 A.D., but the court said that wasn't long enough (and noted that one National Academy of Sciences report recommended protection until the year 302,000 A.D.) [ABC News-AP, 11-8-04] [New York Times, 7-10-04]

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

posted by me

:: 9:13:00 PM [+] ::
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