Let's begin with a brief nod to election chaos. With no names on
Oregon's 8th House district ballot for the Republican primary
election, it was left to write-in candidates. The most popular of the
103 names were Lisa Fragala and Doyle Canning. Seven votes were cast
for each, so lots were cast, as state law requires. While Canning won
the coin toss, Oregon's 'sore loser' law prevented her from accepting
the nomination, since she'd already lost the Democratic primary.
Hence, Fragala, who'd won the Democratic primary, is likely to be
the only one on the ballot in November. Canning, meanwhile, said that
Republicans should make sure to pick a candidate next time around.
Any candidate put forth 'would have gotten more than seven votes'.
Motivational posters might extol the virtues of perseverance, but success sometimes requires a bit more than that. Earlier this month, a US citizen returning from Amsterdam was caught at the Seattle airport with 5+ kilos of ketamine, a kilo of codeine, and some GHB, packed into rubbing-alcohol bottles and similar containers. Less than a week later, the 43-year-old man had posted bail and was ready to try the same technique again. Again, US Customs officials in Seattle stopped him, and neither he nor his ketamine-filled checked luggage made it to London.
Our ![[IMG: Trouser snakes]](images/customsnakes.jpg)
next story too falls under the 'brazen Customs hijinks' banner.
While it has become customary for people to attempt to smuggle
wildlife from Hong Kong into mainland China, someone decided to do so
on unusually large scale. Officials apprehended a man who arrived in
Shenzhen with heavily stuffed trousers closed at the bottom with tape.
Within those trousers were six canvas drawstring bags. Within each bag
were 'living snakes in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and colors', 104 of
them in all and many of them representing non-native species. The
agency stated that he will be 'held liable in accordance with the law'.
Sometimes even a single trouser snake is newsworthy, though. An American Airlines passenger's bladder issues allegedly left him unable to remove all of the 'Jack and Cokes' from his body in the lavatory during his afternoon flight between Chicago and New Hampshire. This is Neil McCarthy's explanation for whipping out his male member in the aisle, stroking it a few times, and then urinating in the aisle. The plane was diverted to New York, where McCarthy, 25, was arrested for indecent exposure.
Our next story is about a different kind of drinking problem. A
Lebanon, Missouri, man noticed that his Mountain Dew tasted odd, but
he drank the full two litres anyway and shrugged off the illness that
followed. A few weeks later, he was able to correlate the odd taste,
diarrhoea, and vomiting with the Mountain Dew in his garage, so he
trained a video camera on the fridge there. Now his wife, Michelle Y.
Peters, faces charges of first-degree domestic assault and armed
criminal action for repeatedly augmenting his soda with insecticide
and 'a chemical in the basement', Roundup weed-killer.
Peters told the authorities that she had grown upset because she'd
'thrown him a 50th birthday party and he was not appreciative', adding
that she 'should have just divorced' the selfish man.
Finally, sport isn't all about directing frustration at VAR decisions. If we look to the example of Chicago Cubs pitcher Colten Brewer, it's also about venting anger at the furniture. When doing so recently in response to being substituted out of a game after his pitch hit the batter, he found that the dugout wall at Wrigley Field is stronger than he is. With a fractured left hand, the 13-year-old Brewer now has two months to reflect on this fact before playing again.