American Madness

This is kind of a sad one (2).

The remains of Hedviga Golik were found last month in her apartment in Croatia. According to reports she had made herself a cup of tea, sat down in her armchair to watch some tv, and must have passed away.

Having been born in 1924, there is nothign too surprising about all of this. In fact it isn’t much of a story until you start to get into the details. Golik was reported missing and was last seen by a neighbor… back in 1966. Although officially reported missing, apparently either no one ever did anything to try and locate her, or in their search for her the police did not enter her apartment.

Fast forward 42 years to May 2008 and the police and some bailiffs are busting down her door to try and help figure out who owns the apartment only to find Golik in her armchair dead now for as long as she had lived.

Besides a few cobwebs, her apartment appeared just as it had been in 1966, a virtual time capsule, with her cup of tea still on the table in front of her.

According to the authorities: “So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in.”

Okay, I thought I was done with this, until I did a search for a picture and found the CNN article, which isn’t exactly the same story.

(more…)

American Madness readers: meet William Johnson.

William, it is my pleasure to introduce you to American Madness.

I apologize up front for the awkward introduction, but this is the only way we could arrange for this meeting. William is currently incarcerated in Brazoria County, Texas on a burglary charge.

Turns out, he asked one of the local trailer park residents to help him move a big screen TV out of another trailer home that wasn’t William’s. Outside of stealing someone’s snuff, thievin’ a TV from a trailer park is about the highest crime you can commit in that part of Texas.

And he might have gotten away with the theft if he hadn’t been pulled over during a couple suspicious U-Turns in the middle of the Interstate. And even that might not have got him nabbed if the officers didn’t think it entirely too weird that his co-pilots were a six-foot long alligator and a water moccasin (a type of poisonous snake).

Ok, I’ll pause and let you read that last little bit over again.

Yep, William here is a man with a fondness for reptiles. The Houston Chronicle reports Johnson told the pokey that he found the snake and the alligator on the sides of roads and picked them up because he has an interest in cold-blooded, scaled creatures. (more…)

Should we bring back the asylums of yesteryear?

Is the promise of modern medication exceeding its actual effectiveness?

These are questions that come to mind having read yesterday’s Freakonomics Quorum post by Stephen Dubner.

The column, How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made? is definitely worth reading in its entirety.

There is one section I would like to discuss and that has to do with a woman whose son was bipolar and who committed suicide when he stopped taking his medications. The writer says:

“Four years ago I lost a beloved son to suicide due to bipolar disorder. As devastating as this is, I do believe that the treatment he received increased his quality of life and chances for survival. His doctors and therapists were compassionate and concerned, working very hard to assess and adjust his treatments, and I came to respect the complexity of his condition and what they were trying to do on his behalf.

Is it possible he was in some ways a guinea pig in terms of the various medications he took? Perhaps, but I believe they were our only hope of giving him a chance in light of the seriousness of his condition and his previous suicide attempt. When he did complete suicide, we discovered that he had stopped taking his medications, so I don’t blame the medications, but the lack of them.”

Now as horrible as it may seem, I feel compelled to take issue with this lady. The problem which caused her son’s suicide was the fact that he stopped taking his medication. We have recently had a spate of mass murders in America committed by psychiatrically disturbed individuals who were mainstreamed in society because they were on medication. The problem that resulted in the killings has often been that the patient stopped taking the medication. (more…)

BBQ Chicken, a South Korean-based chicken franchise (with a few locations in the US*) has developed, what they are hoping is the next great revolution in fast food containers.

The recently introduced Col-Pop is a drink cup and top combo designed not only to hold your beverage of choice, but also to hold your serving of Popcorn chicken. 1 cup for your on-the-go take out action. Making drinking and snacking easier.

Eliminated is the cumbersome extra food container, allowing you to enjoy your 32 ounce soft-drink and still keep a hand free to chow down on your popcorn chicken. The folks over at Serious Eats did a review of the cup and also measured it up to its claims.

The determined that while it does separate the two items some condensation forms on the top of the lid while you eat. Also, the lid cuts the 32 ounce drink down to about 18 ounces. Some may view it as scary that their are highly paid researchers and marketers at fast food corporations pouring good money into developing products like this. I just call it progress.

*read New York, Jersey and North Carolina (for interested New Yorkers there is one on St. Mark’s Place)

We have all heard that our country has a weight problem. Various initiatives have been put in place and tooled with to help with this problem. New York banned serving foods with Trans-Fats, Chain Restaurants will soon be required to list the caloric value of their food on their menu. One state has taken things a step forward.

Mississippi, known for its forward thinking views on human rights, has presented House Bill (#282) which, if passed, will ban restaurants from serving “obese” people. How will servers at restaurants be able to tell if some one falls into Mississippi’s standards for classifying some one as obese? Glad you asked: “The State Department of Health shall prepare written materials that describe and explain the criteria for determining whether a person is obese, and shall provide those materials to all food establishments to which this section applies.” (more…)

Snatch is a great movie. There is a line in it about pig farms, something along the lines of “never trust a man who owns a pig farm…” Actually I think that is exactly what the line is.

Well, apparently Guy Ritchie knew what he was talking about when he wrote this. A Canadian pig farmer was convicted last week of killing 6 different people. This was his first trial, he was found guilty of second degree murder for all six folks and will have another trial for the murder of an addition 20 people he supposedly offed. And that’s not all. Although he is only on trial for 26 different murders, he claims to have killed 49 people and was hoping to make it to 50.

Most of his victims were prostitutes, junkies and other people of ill-repute. After killing them he would chop up their bodies and, you guessed it, feed them to his pigs. Investigators found severed skulls and feet on his property. But he thought he was still going to get off since the fact that the skulls and feet were on his property didn’t mean he had killed them. Oh the other hand he probably overlooked his confession to an under cover cop and the fact that his wife claims to have seen him chopping up some bodies.

The odd thing about this case (okay, one of the many odd things about it) is that the jury did not find him guilty of first degree murder, meaning they felt he had not planned to kill the victims ahead of time. It was just 26 spur of the moment decisions to kill these women. Man, even his picture is creepy.

When your previous job used to be running around all day in a pair of spandex, getting sweaty with other men and then jumping on top of them, maybe you aren’t the right person to be coming out with a strong stance against gay rights.

Former Dallas Cowboys linebacker turn reverend, Ken Hutcherson of the Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, WA is claiming to be a modern day David against Goliath mega-corporations. Hutcherson is preaching that companies like Microsoft, who he says is attempting to become a political player in Washington state and push its policies on the entire state, can have their policies of toleration changed by the power of the shareholder.

Hutcherson is telling members of his 3,500 congregation to buy up shares of the company and reaching out to other religions, like Orthodox Jews, to do the same. The theory being that once they have amassed a controlling share of the company the can ‘correct’ the diversity policies currently in place , one of which includes an internal “affinity employee group” called the Gay and Lesbian Employees At Microsoft (GLEAM).

(more…)

We have another two-fer today: Stupid Criminals.

First up, we have a man in Suffolk County, NY who tried to rob a convenience store with a gun. Unfortunately it was either a toy gun or he was totally unwilling to use it (which technically wouldn’t be unfortunate, though if you are going to rob a store at gun point you might want to be prepared to follow through). The guy approached the counter waving his gun and demanded the money in the register. Hafize Sahin, who is, by the way, about 4′5″ and 90 pounds, said:

“I thought the gun is not real. I wasn’t going to open the drawer. I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to give him money.’ I couldn’t give him the money because I thought it was the first time he was doing it.” She added, “I was yelling at him and telling him ‘Get out of here!’ I didn’t want to hit him, I just wanted him to get out.”

(more…)

I get such glee about reading about idiocy, usually while thinking “You must be f#cking kidding me!!”

And today we have a two-fer:

First up we’ve got a school district in Atlantic City, NJ that has suspended a seven year-old due to “the school’s zero-tolerance policy for guns.”

Now, guns in school are generally considered a bad thing, and I won’t argue with that. Even toy guns can send the wrong message, so I get the idea behind a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to guns.

And I mean, a seven-year-old, right? That’s just scary. Except, the seven year-old didn’t have a gun, or a toy gun, or pretend to have a gun, or even an have an imaginary gun. He drew a picture of a gun.

(more…)

Continuing in our tribute to Columbus we have another story:

While so many companies these days are working on making their products more affordable for people and others are working to help poor nations get access to the basics like food, drinkable water and shelter, other companies are working in the opposite direction.

With so many companies concerned about the poor these days, you almost start to feel bad for people with so much money they don’t know what to do with it. Fortunately for them Neiman-Marcus is working to keep its name as a luxury department store intact.

On their website you can now check out the specs on the NM Gem Triton 1000 Submarine. That’s right, for the bargain price of $1.44 million you can have your own submarine to tour around… Well, um, I guess since this seems so out of my helm of understanding I really don’t know where you would use this… In your jumbo sized swimming pool? Your personal super-sized koi pond? Touring around the sea reefs near your private island?

Anyway, for specs on the NM Gem Triton 1000 you can call Neiman-Marcus. I think it looks like it is straight from the design team that did The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou if you ask me. Though if you want to get me a Christmas gift and you’ve been stumped… Well, opt for the bottle of Partida I want to try, I am all out of super-sized koi ponds to tour around.