64 San Diego Reader April 6, 2017
news of the WeiRD
LEAD STORY — A highlight of the recent upmarket surge in Brooklyn, N.Y., as a residential and retail favor- ite, was the asking price for an ordinary parking space in the garage at 845 Union Street in the Park Slope neighborhood: $300,000 (also car- rying a $240-a-month condominium fee and $50 monthly taxes). T at’s similar to the price of actual one-bedroom apartments in less ritzy Brooklyn neighborhoods like Gravesend (a few miles away).
Compelling Explanations — Saginaw, Michigan, defense lawyer Ed Czu- prynski had beaten a felony DUI arrest in De- cember but was sentenced to probation on a lesser charge in the incident, and among his re- strictions was a prohibition on drinking alcohol — which Czuprynski acknowledged in March that he has since violated at least twice. How- ever, at that hearing (which could have meant jail time for the violations), Czuprynski used the opportunity to beg the judge to remove the restriction altogether, arguing that he can’t be “eff ective” as a lawyer unless he is able to have a drink now and then. (At press time, the judge was still undecided.)
Fine Points of the Law — Residents in southern Humboldt County, California, will vote in May on a proposed property tax increase to fund a community hospital in Garberville to serve a web of small towns in the scenic, sparsely populated region, and thanks to a county judge’s March ruling, the issue will be explained more colorfully.
Opponent Scotty McClure was initially re- buff ed by the registrar when he tried to dis- tribute, as taxpayer-funded “special elections material,” contempt for “Measure W” by in- cluding the phrase “(insert fart smell here)” in the description. T e registrar decried the damage to election “integrity” by such “vul- garity,” but judge Timothy Cissna said state law gives him jurisdiction only over “false” or “misleading” electioneering language.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time — “Life’s full of peaks and valleys, man,” Cali- fornian Georgiy Karpekin told a reporter, but Jan. 18 seemed all valley. Karpekin had both a pickup truck and a car, and as he was leav- ing Sacramento City College that day during violent storms, a falling tree crushed the truck. When he got home, he learned that the same storm had taken down another tree — on top of his car. (Karpekin, insured and uninjured, called himself “the luckiest guy.”)
Readers’ Choice — Miami defense lawyer Stephen Gutierrez caused quite a spectacle on March 8 when, rep- resenting a man accused of arson, he rose to address jurors, and his pants appeared to catch fi re. He insisted aſt erward that a malfunction- ing e-cigarette caused smoke to billow from his pocket, but observers had a fi eld day with meta- phors and “stunt” theories. — Despite an exaggerated, widely read head- line in London’s Daily Mail, the recent death of a 50-year-old man in Japan was indeed pornog- raphy-related. T e man was a hoarder of porn
magazines, living alone with a large collec- tion, and when he suff ered a fatal heart attack sometime early this year, he collapsed atop the piles, where his body was found in February. (T e Daily Mail headline had him “crushed” to death under a six-ton stack, but the Mail con- ceded below the headline that he might have just fallen.)
Can’t Possibly Be True — News of the Weird has written several times (as technology progressed) about Matt Mc- Mullen’s “RealDoll” franchise — the San Mar- cos, California, engineer’s richly detailed fl ex- ible silicone mannequins that currently sell for $5,500 and up (more with premium custom features). Even before the recent success of the very humanish, artifi cially intelligent (AI) an- droid “hosts” on TV’s “Westworld,” McMullen revealed that his fi rst AI doll, “Harmony,” will soon be available with a choice of 12 “person- alities,” including “intellectualism” and “wit,” to mimic an emotional bond to add to the sexual. A recent University of London conference pre- viewed a near future when fake women rou- tinely provide uncomplicated relationships for lonely (or disturbed) men. (Recently, in Bar- celona, Spain, a brothel opened off ering four “realdolls” “disinfected aſt er each customer” — though still recommending condoms.) — Scientists at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center announced that they have digitally stored (and retrieved) a movie, an entire computer operating system and a $50 giſt card on a single drop of DNA. In theory, wrote the researchers in the journal
by Chuck Shepherd © 2017
Science, they might store, on one gram of DNA, 215 “petabytes” (i.e., 215 million gigabytes — enough to run, say, 10 million HD movies) and could reduce all the data housed in the Library of Congress to a small cube of crystals. —An office in the New York City government, suspicious of a $5,000 payment to two men in the 2008 City Council election of Staten Island’s Debi Rose, opened an investigation, which at $300 an hour for the “special prosecutor,” has now cost the city $520,000, with his fi nal bill still to come. De- spite scant “evidence” and multiple opportunities to back off, the prosecutor relentlessly conducted months-long grand jury proceedings, fought sev- eral court appeals, had one 23-count indictment almost immediately crushed by judges, and en- ticed state and federal investigators to (fruitlessly) take on the Staten Island case. In March, the city’s Office of Court Administration finally shrugged and closed the case.
Bright Ideas — A councilman in Overtornea, Sweden, in- troduced a bill (a “motion”) that workers be given paid “sex breaks” during the business day in order to improve well-being and, thus, job performance. Te primary beneficiaries would be married, fertile couples, but all work- ers would receive the benefit. And employers, said Councillor Per-Erik Muskos, would have to “trust” their employees because some surely would “cheat” (by not having sex!).
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, San Di- ego Reader, P.O. Box 85803, San Diego, CA 92186 or to
WeirdNewsTips@Yahoo.com
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