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Good-fortune graves

Lee Myung-bak was elected president of South Korea in December, with experts in “poonsgoo” (similar to the Chinese feng shui) attributing the victory in part to the favorable location of his ancestors’ graves, which is an important predictor of good fortune. Candidates not so lucky spent part of the campaign moving their ancestors’ remains to […]

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Cultural Diversity

While European and American TV and film producers take care to have dialogue dubbed into foreign languages using voices that are appropriate for each actor, the dubbing in Poland continues to be done by “lektors” males with smoking-seasoned voices who speak the dialogue of all the characters in a story in the same pitch. The […]

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Latest Religious Messages

More than 5,000 Christians have joined the Hollywood Prayer Network to pray anonymously for the spiritual transformation of certain troubled celebrities, according to a November Chicago Sun-Times report. Also, an “Incognito Prayer Network,” whose members wear “90028” bracelets with Hollywood’s ZIP code, will assign celebrities to members who are touched by a particular star. Even […]

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Least Competent Criminals

Unclear on the Concept: The 44-year-old man who allegedly skipped out on a court appearance in April in Vernon, British Columbia, in connection with marijuana-growing was arrested in December in Mission, British Columbia, when he applied for a job at the county jail. Also in December, police in Oakland, Calif., charged Jason Brooks, 24, who […]

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Update

In 1964, a chaste, 23-year-old woman was injured in a municipal streetcar collision in San Francisco, and in one of the most notorious turns in medical history, became a nymphomaniac because of injury to the part of her brain that controls impulsive behavior. (According to her lawyer, she once had sex with partners 50 times […]

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Fine Points of the Law

Ryan Holle, 25, is serving a life sentence (with no possibility of parole) in Florida even though his only connection to a 2003 murder was that he loaned his car to one of the killers. According to a December New York Times report, Florida, even when dispensing its second-worst punishment of all, does not restrict […]

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News That Sounds Like a Joke

Salt Lake City police reported that an out-of-town man was treated at a local hospital on Dec. 1 after being beaten up by gang members. The man had earlier mentioned to the gangbangers that “Utah gangs” are not as tough as those from his hometown. In October in West Palm Beach, Fla., Jacqueline Holmes filed […]

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People Different From Us

Small-Town News: Nicholas Palmer, 22, briefly took to the woods near Swanville, Maine, in October after an altercation with his sister. He had tried to snip the cord of the clipper she was using to shave the family cat to rid it of fleas and ticks. Robin Handel, 44, was arrested in Rowlett, Texas, in […]

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The Entrepreneurial Spirit!

A warehouse on Chicago’s West Side is “the world capital of fake (latex) vomit, where it’s still made the old-fashioned way, ladle by ladle, formed and coagulated,” reported the Chicago Tribune in December. Though it is not as popular as 50 years ago (7,000 units sold yearly, compared to 60,000 then), Fun Inc. President Graham […]

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