Category: Truth that’s Stranger than Fiction

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Death Got You Down?

At last an alternative! www.finalcurtain.com. These were the words Joey Skaggs used to advertise his Final Curtain cemetery theme-park mall.

by Nick Gaetano, www.nickgaetano.comAt the Final Curtain Web site, created by Skaggs and friends in 2000, clients were encouraged to develop site-specific works of passage — their own tombstones, mausoleums, caskets, or urns — as homage to their lives and their spirit. Dozens of media outlets covered the Final Curtain as though it was real. For a fun read, check out this salon.com article by Jeff Stark.

Now comes this latest chapter in the death arena:

24-hour death-and-dying TV channel to debut in fall
July 15, 2007
London Sunday Telegraph

Berlin “” A round-the-clock television channel devoted exclusively to aging, death and dying will be started in Germany this fall.

Eos TV, which takes its name from the Greek goddess of the dawn, will feature documentaries about graveyards, televised obituaries, tips on finding a decent retirement home and even how to install in-house stair lifts.

The $14.2 million project was conceived by Wolf Tilmann Schneider, 51, a former television producer who has joined forces with Germany’s funeral association to start the 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, death-and-dying channel on cable television and the Internet. Continue reading “Death Got You Down?”

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Man Calls 911 to Save Him From Police

What not to do:

57540200.jpgMan Calls 911 to Save Him From Police
July 16, 2007

Largo, Fla. (AP) — A 38-year-old man was arrested after he called 911 and told a dispatcher he was surrounded by police officers and needed help, authorities said.

Police officers met Dana Farrell Shelton after being called to investigate a disturbance at a bar on Sunday but had found no problems and told him to move along.

Shelton, who officers said appeared intoxicated, then called 911 to report he was “surrounded by Largo police,” according to an arrest affidavit. Continue reading “Man Calls 911 to Save Him From Police”

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Look before you flush!

money-toilet-1.jpgMoney Found in Toilets Across Japan
AP
July 13, 2007

Tokyo — Envelopes containing 10,000 yen ($82) bills and well-wishing notes have been discovered in municipal toilets across Japan, media reports said, baffling civil servants and triggering a nationwide hunt.

Local media have estimated that over two million yen ($16,400) worth of bills were found at men’s rooms in city halls in at least 15 prefectures (states) in recent weeks. Read the whole story here.

photo from: nbabi weekly

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Extreme Measures

http://theslowcook.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.htmlChina Executes Former Food Chief
Time.com
July 10, 2007

(Beijing, AP) “” China executed the former head of its State Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Zheng Xiaoyu was sentenced to death in May for taking bribes to approve an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths and other substandard medicines.

The sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined. It was an indication of the leadership’s determination to confront the country’s dire product safety record. Read the whole story here.

Image from The Slow Cook, which also has an interesting article on this subject. Just look for the dead fish.

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Steve Kurtz, artist or terrorist?

By Sheldon Rampton, PR Watch, June 25, 2007 about artist-activist Steve Kurtz:

108200.jpgI happened to meet Steve Kurtz in December 2002 at a “World Information Organization” conference in Amsterdam, where we were both speakers. Kurtz spoke on the topic of The Spectre of Intellectual Property Rights and described his work as a performance art provocateur. To challenge corporate control of biotechnology, for example, his Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) produced an exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. called Molecular Invasion. It consisted of a “live public experiment” that attempted to “reverse engineer genetically modified cash crops” by developing a chemical that can be applied to the Monsanto company’s genetically-engineered Roundup Ready crops to make them vulnerable again to “the crippling effects of RoundUp herbicide.” Another CAE project, Free Range Grain, consisted of a mobile lab that invited the public to test foods for genetic modification. Another, more whimsical project that Kurtz showcased at the conference in Amsterdam was called Cult of the New Eve (CONE). It consisted of a mock religion that practiced “molecular cannibalism” by inviting people to eat bread and drink beer containing human DNA.

At the end of the conference, I had dinner with Steve Kurtz and some of the other participants. He told some funny stories, and I told a few myself. Neither of us knew at the time that his life was soon to take a strange turn that would lead to the FBI accusing him of terrorism. Continue reading “Steve Kurtz, artist or terrorist?”

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