AP - ATLANTA - A globe-trotting Atlanta lawyer with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was allowed back into the U.S. by a border inspector who disregarded a computer warning to stop him and don protective gear, officials said Thursday. The inspector has been removed from border duty.

The unidentified inspector explained that he was no doctor but that the infected man seemed perfectly healthy and that he thought the warning was merely “discretionary,” officials briefed on the case told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is still under investigation.

jay: this is probably the same border patroller who stopped me on my way back from canada and grilled me for 10 minutes about being a member of MS-13. or maybe it was the guy who dragged me back into secondary inspection, told me to get out of the car, tossed all the shit out of my trunk, snapped on some rubber gloves and nearly scared the poop out of me on my way back from mexico. so useless. all of them.

cates: can we get this dude transferred to LAX immigration? i need an underqualified buffoon there to let me into the US permanently.

BBC — A German woman in Dusseldorf blocked the entrance to an underground station when she mistook it for a subterranean car park, police said on Wednesday.

The 52-year-old drove her Volkswagen Beetle across the pavement and into the entrance, where it came to a halt five steps down.

Police estimated the damage to the station at around 1,500 euros (£1,000).

The VW Beetle-Cabrio remained balanced on the fifth step and the woman was able to get out unaided and unharmed.

The accident happened in the Nordstrasse underground station, in the centre of Dusseldorf.

A truck later towed the car out of the stairwell.

cates: i hate beetles. i think somebody should be in charge of driving them all underground so that i don’t have to see them any more.

dan: yes, but how will the little dashboard flowers survive without sunlight?

BBC — About 3,000 people converged on Coopers Hill in Gloucestershire for the annual spring bank holiday cheese-rolling event.

Dozens of competitors chased the 7-8lb Double Gloucester down the steep slope, which is 200m long and has a 1:1 gradient in places.

Jason Crowther, from west Wales, won the first race to complete a hat-trick of victories over the last three years.

The 25-year-old said: “There’s no training you can do for this.”

He added: “It was a bit slippery and I heard something crack, which I think was my knee.

“But there aren’t any tactics involved, as you can probably see.”

Aaron Walden, 20, from Gloucester, also won for the third time - beating a man dressed in a nappy to the bottom of the hill.

cates: i don’t understand why the english have a reputation for being eccentric. i think it’s totally unjustified.

jay: omg, what is the story with your island of eccentrics? how do your personal injury lawyers let events like this continue?

UPI — EAGLE CREEK, Ore., May 28 Police were looking for an Oregon man who allegedly locked three pigs in his home hoping they would trash it after the house went into foreclosure.

Detective Jim Strovink of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office said Shane Lovett of Eagle Creek had been distraught about the foreclosure and joked to neighbors he had locked the pigs in his home more than a week ago without any food or water, KGW-TV in Portland, Ore., reported Monday.

Deputies responded to a neighbor’s complaint about the pigs and found the inside and outside of the house had been trashed. Thomas Getten, an animal rescue expert, said the pigs were dehydrated but otherwise healthy after he coaxed them outside.

jay: that’s some good olde-fashioned country ingenuity. i think the urban version is letting tweakers squat in your foreclosed condo until the boys in blue show up.

By KATE BRUMBACK, Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Hogzilla is being made into a horror movie. But the sequel may be even bigger: Meet Monster Pig. An 11-year-old boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet 4, from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. Think hams as big as car tires.

Jamison, who killed his first deer at age 5, was hunting with father Mike Stone and two guides in east Alabama on May 3 when he bagged Monster Pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

“It feels really good,” Jamison said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s a good accomplishment. I probably won’t ever kill anything else that big.”

via jon schreiber

jay: don’t sell yourself short, kid. if you can dream it, you can kill it — pigs the size of volkswagens, giant mutant chickens, cerberus. and i know i’m going to seem like some sort of yankee liberal elitist buzzkill here, but wasn’t may 3rd a tuesday? why wasn’t your gun-toting cracker ass in school?

rob: just wait until that hog’s daddy finds that little bastard….

A mandala is shown Tuesday, May 22, 2007, at Union Station in Kansas City, Mo., after it was destroyed by a toddler. Eight Tibetan monks had spent two days cross-legged on the floor creating the intricate design from colored sand as an expression of their religious faith. The toddler was accompanying a woman who was visiting the post office inside of Union Station.

jay: what’s the sound of eight monks crying?

dan: i heard one of the monks kicked the kid’s ass.

rob: i once had an art teacher who said “there are no wrong choices in art.” i always kind of doubted that statement, but especially so when the rightness/wrongness has to do with your feet on someone else’s painting. that aside, there’s something unbelievably awesome about the video of the little guy skating around on the mandala.

BBC — The creator of a website which allows people to pay tribute to dead family members and friends has apologised after online adverts upset users.

The Leeds-based website www.gonetoosoon.co.uk was bombarded with complaints after adverts started appearing on Wednesday.

They included an advert for a motorcycle on a tribute page for a man who died in a motorbike crash.

Creator Terry George said he would remove the adverts.

Nightclub owner Mr George, from Halifax, said he introduced advertising in an effort to keep the website free for users.

He introduced Google ads on to the site, not realising that Google finds adverts related to words used on a particular page.

The site also included adverts for self-defence classes on a tribute page for murdered Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and adverts for airline Ryanair on sites for dead boys and men called Ryan.”

cates: i’m almost tempted to set up some fake memorials to explore all the comic possibilities here.

The Guardian — Stasi scent-tracking methods are being used to keep a check on selected protesters planning to demonstrate at next month’s G8 summit.

Scent traces collected directly from everything from people’s palm sweat to their vests and cigarette lighters have been made available to investigators so that sniffer dogs can detect potentially violent protesters, federal prosecutors confirmed yesterday following reports in the German media.

“This has happened to several suspects,” said Andreas Christeleit, a spokesman for the prosecutors. It is believed that most samples were collected during recent early-morning raids across Germany.

cates: but don’t the dogs get confused when everybody smells of cider, patchouli oil and marijuana?

A 68-year-old atomic energy protester from Hamburg, identified by police as a possible danger to the G8 summit, reported how investigators knocked on his door at 8am and demanded scent samples from him.

The man said he was made to hold metal pipes in his hands - as palms give off an immediate scent - which were then sealed and marked with his name before being taken away.

cates: as the saying goes: “the old ones are the violent ones”.

jay: it’s true. years of patchouli abuse takes its toll on the body’s “restraint” mechanism. ultra-violence ensues.

LONDON (AFP) - A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organisation said Monday.

Carlos and Fernando had been desperate to start a family, even chasing other flamingos from their nests to take over their eggs at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) in Slimbridge near Bristol.

But their egg-sitting prowess made them the top choice for taking an unhatched egg under their wings when one of the Greater Flamingo nests was abandoned.

The couple, together for six years, can feed chicks by producing milk in their throats.

jay: i didn’t even need to pun the headline, the afp did it for me. nicely done, afp. also, throat milk? gay flamingos have breasts in their throats? weird. wait, i thought only mammals lactated. so female mammals and gay english flamingos? help.

cates: maybe it’s some variant of man-milk.

BBC — An obese American tourist who fell ill on a cruise ship had to be carried off by helicopter because of his size.

The man, who weighs 32 stone (203kg), was onboard a luxury five star cruise ship anchored in the Firth of Forth when he suffered gastric problems.

Forth Coastguard realised he was so heavy that its usual rescue procedures would have been impossible.

It called in an RAF Sea King helicopter to winch the man off the boat before carrying him to hospital.

[…]

A spokesman for Forth Coastguard said the man had visited the ship’s doctor, who recommended that he was evacuated after his condition worsened.

cates: evacuated. snigger.

jay: apparently aussies (and maybe the brits?) call americans “seppos”. when i asked why, i got one answer in two parts. 1. rhyming slang. seppo, short for septic tank, rhymes with yank. 2. as for why septic tank: we’re round and full of shit. evacuated, indeed.

Christina Almeida, Associated Press Writer
Los Angeles — A man trying to kill his girlfriend by leaving her in a car on railroad tracks was himself killed Monday when a commuter train launched the vehicle into him as he tried to flee, police said. The girlfriend survived.

The man drove the car in front of a group of other vehicles stopped at a railroad crossing in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Sunland, Officer Mike Lopez said.

The driver, who was seen arguing with his girlfriend, parked the car on the tracks and jumped out, leaving her behind, Lopez said.

A northbound Metrolink train hit the rear of the car, hurling it into the man. The girlfriend was taken to the hospital, where she was in stable condition, Lopez said.

“She gets hit by a train and lives. He gets hit by his own car and he dies,” Lopez said.

jay: i dunno about this plan, b. people have been killing their spouses since the birth of time using only their bare hands and sometimes a small weapon. i don’t know why you had to go and make it so complicated — cars, trains, commuters. as an aside, the conversations at your funeral are probably going to be really awkward.

cates: is that what they call “carma”? i’m sorry. punch me.

jay: terrible, patrick. just awful. and i’ll be punching myself for missing that pun.

AP — HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — Michael Lusher apparently is a sound sleeper. A small-caliber bullet struck the 37-year-old Altizer man in the head as he slept Sunday morning, but he didn’t realize it until he awoke nearly four hours later and noticed blood coming from his head, said Cpl. R.H. McQuaid of the Cabell County Sheriff’s Department.

The bullet that struck him was one of five that someone sprayed across his mobile home and truck at about 4:20 a.m. Sunday, McQuaid said. The one the struck Lusher apparently lost velocity as it traveled through two walls.

“We’re just glad he didn’t suffer any life-threatening injuries with a head wound,” he said.

Lusher came home from a night on the town about an hour before he was shot while lying in bed, McQuaid said.

He remained hospitalized at St. Mary’s Medical Center on Monday. His condition was not immediately available.

jay: wow. he must have felt something. did he think he got tagged by an extraordinarily aggressive mosquito? other? drunk?

rob: i believe in west virginia parlance, the man is simply “harder than woodpecker lips.”

The London Paper — British Airways has banned staff from using microwaves for non-airline food after an exploding curry cost the company £20,000 in damages.

An air hostess caused chaos on a flight from Heathrow to Miami after her ready meal blew up at 35,000ft.

Staff had to use a fire extinguisher to control the flaming high-power microwave, but British Airways insists that the incident did not endanger passenger safety.

However, the explosion caused extensive damage to the Boeing 747 which needed days of repairs.

British Airways has since banned cabin crews from using the ovens to prepare their own food and sent a warning email to its staff.

In a memo headed “microwave incident”, it instructed staff that food must be packaged carefully when using its club-class ovens because they are twice as powerful as regular domestic microwaves.

cates: there go my plans for a weaponless terrorist outrage. i had a backpack full of curries-for-one in my closet ready for some action.

jay: game on, player. they only banned cabin crews from using the microwaves. there was nothing in the memo about civilian non-weaponed terrorists.

Seattle PI — A Tacoma man who admitted stealing a kidney from “Bodies … The Exhibition” — a display of preserved human bodies on display in Seattle — was sentenced Friday to 240 hours of community service.

Tyler Conrad, 26, pleaded guilty last month to stealing the plasticized organ in February. He told detectives he did it as a prank. The kidney was returned to the exhibit.

jay: my guess is that the irony of the prank was lost on the curatorial staff. for those of you not in the know, word on the street has it that the bodies in ‘Bodies … The Exhibition’ came from executed chinese political prisoners, none of them have documentation stating that they were signing on for this. lame. also, chinese kidney thief!

cates: they’ve got the story wrong. the dude heard there was a lucrative black market trade in organs but nobody told him to go for the fresh ones. he circulated the prank excuse to make himself look less stupid.

dan: wait, you can’t do that?

dan: p.s. welcome cates!

cates: it’s a nice place you’ve found here. is it table service or should i go up to the bar?

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — A 400-pound gorilla escaped from his enclosure and ran amok in a Rotterdam zoo Friday, biting one woman, dragging her around, and causing panic among dozens of visitors before he was finally subdued, officials and a witness said.

The Diergaarde Blijdorp zoo was evacuated and the 11-year-old gorilla, named Bokito, was eventually contained in a restaurant within the park, police spokeswoman Yvette de Rave said.

Four people were injured, including the woman who was bitten, zoo director Ton Dorrestijn said.

Bokito was shot with a sedative dart and recaptured, said zoo spokeswoman Lilian Jonkers, but she couldn’t say what his condition was. It was not immediately clear how he managed to climb the high stone walls surrounding his enclosure.

“He got over the moat, which in itself is remarkable, because gorillas can’t swim,” Dorrestijn said.

jay: turns out that maybe they can swim, my dutch friend. something tells me you won’t be underestimating our primate relatives again. also, alternate title for this post: lowland gorilla attacks low country zoo visitors! the AP really could have done a lot with this headline but all they could come up with was ‘Gorilla wreaks havoc in zoo escape.’ yawn.

dan: yes, jay, but you my friend are channeling the ny post edit staff. kudos on the killer heds!