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Show A6 Castle Valley Review, April 2009 nate on account of health status or addiction without offering to accommodate the worker's condition. The Miracle Drug Alcohol Was Involved: (1) A 19-year-old University of Colorado student required emergency assistance in March after spending all evening badgering fellow partygoers to hit him in the face. Finally, at 2 a.m., someone complied, resulting in a broken nose and massive bleeding. (2) A National City Bank in downtown Pittsburgh was broken into on March 7, inadvertently, when an intoxicated man accidentally tripped and crashed through the front window (narrowly avoiding decapitation). (3) According to sheriff's reports, a man reported to Huntsville (Ala.) Hospital on Feb. 18 after having passed out drunk with an ex-girlfriend and waking up with a sewing needle in his urethra. Recurring Themes That Sacred Institution (as practiced in villages in India): (1) To prevent mysterious illnesses in the village, two 7-year-old girls were married, separately, to frogs (Pallipudupet, Tamil Nadu state; January). (2) To bring prosperity to the village, an elder married off two trees to each other (Subhasnagar, West Bengal state; February). (3) To overcome the effect of a baby's odd-looking tooth, which is said to portend death by a tiger unless remedied, the 18-month-old boy was married off to a female dog (Jaipur District, Orissa state; February). Least Competent Criminals: (1) Alleged bank robber Feliks Goldshtein was arrested after a brief chase by police, who were summoned to National City Bank in Stow, Ohio, in January. Employees may have been tipped off because Goldshtein, wearing a ski mask, had waited patiently in a teller's line and only displayed a gun when he finally reached the counter. (2) Romeo Montillano, 40, who was being sought in the December robbery of a Kmart in Chula Vista, Calif., pleasantly surprised the cops when they learned that a "Romeo Montillano" had registered for the upcoming police officers' exam on Feb. 25. Indeed, he showed up, and he was arrested. Casey’s Pockets Undignified Deaths (1) A motorist survived a crash on Feb. 4 near Los Banos, Calif., though his car fell down a 200-foot cliff. After he climbed back to the highway and sought help, he was accidentally hit and killed by another driver. (2) A 60-year-old man, celebrating his retirement from a transportation company in Ritto, Japan, in December, was killed when three co-workers tossed him playfully into the air and then apparently miscommunicated as to who would catch him. The Continuing Crisis -- We Welcome Our New Monkey Overlords: Researchers recently revealed that they had observed monkeys (1) planning future combat and (2) perhaps teaching their young to floss. A researcher from Sweden's Lund University, writing in the journal Current Biology, described a daily ritual of a 30-year-old chimpanzee that loathes his human visitors at a zoo north of Stockholm and thus begins every morning by roaming his enclosure to collect stones and place them strategically in handy piles for subsequently hurling at irksome visitors. And a researcher at Kyoto University's Primate Research Center told Agence France-Presse in March that he had observed mother long-tailed macaques in Thailand flossing their teeth (with strands of human hair) more frequently if their young are present and hypothesized that they were teaching dental hygiene. -- Questionable Pricing: (1) Yale University student Jesse Maiman, 21, filed a lawsuit against US Airways in March because someone stole the Xbox console from his luggage, for which he wants $1 million. (2) In January, after the New York City subway system barred the oversized "assistance dog" of Estelle Stamm, 65, she filed a lawsuit for $10 million. (3) In Lonnell Worthy's lawsuit against Bank of America, filed in November in California, Worthy values his now-ruined iPod playlist at $1 trillion. -- After Elizabeth Russell, 45, and her 13-yearold daughter were arrested in February in Hartford, Conn., and charged with shoplifting from a Kohl's department store, her husband, Daryll, 47, and son, Jonathan, 19, arrived at the police station to bail them out. However, a quick check revealed that both Daryll and Jonathan had warrants against them for violating probation, and were arrested. Said a police lieuten- Oops! -- In December, Idaho State University sent certified-mail letters to its adjunct faculty to disclose (as required by law) that some of them would soon be laid off. However, only the first-class mail fee was billed to the university, leaving each professor to pay on receipt the certified-mail surcharge in order to find out what the university would send them that was so important. (The Idaho State Journal reported that it was the Postal Service's error.) -- Jailers Not Paying Attention: (1) Christian Colon, 21, had a plea deal worked out to testify against alleged murderer Joel Rivera in exchange for a lighter sentence, but suddenly decided in February that he would not take the stand. The change of heart came right after Colon was accidentally housed in the same Milwaukee County Jail holding cell with Rivera. (With no plea deal, Colon got 46 years.) (2) At least Colon is still alive. A 23-year-old inmate at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary was found beaten to death in March after being mistakenly assigned to the same cell as his ex-partner-in-crime, against whom he had testified in a 2002 murder trial. Bright Ideas -- At least four culinarily daring food emporiums in the U.S. serve deep-fried pizza, including the takeout Pizza Snobz in Wilson, Pa., though owner David Barker admits the specialty is more common in Scotland. The key point, he said, is to begin only with frozen pizza; otherwise, the cheese soon slides off into the fryer. -- When a supporter of the animal-rights organization PETA contributed, for a fund-raising auction, a towel that had recently been used by actor George Clooney, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk had what she thought was a better idea: extracting Clooney's perspiration from it and using the sweat to flavor a tofu dish. "I can see people having parties to try CloFu," she said. (Clooney rejected the idea, according to a March Washington Post report.) (Copyright 2009 Chuck Shepherd. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.) Influence of Friendships Shapes Your Life Casey D. Wood It’s astonishing how friendships can change a person. I have learned firsthand the tremendous effect friendships can have on a person’s life, especially during school years. Friends have a life shaping effect on you that nobody else, including your parents, has. As a child, your parents teach you to do what’s right, to be a good person, to treat people right, to work hard, and to try and make some sort of contribution to the world and society. These teachings certainly shape us as people and are a basis for who we are, but depending on the friends we make, these teachings may never really go into effect. If we make friends with people whose parents have taught them the same things, chances are we will be the kind of people our parents want us to be. Interestingly enough, if we make friends with people that have different values than us, two things can happen. We can be influenced to take on their values, or they can be influenced to take on ours—not necessarily in every The Duplex ant, "I don't ever recall having four related people in lockup at the same time." way, but in many. The stronger personality will generally win out. Sometimes you see people acting in ways that seem completely contrary to how you think their parents would have taught them to act, and then you see who their friends are and their actions make more sense. The stronger personality has won out and in an effort to be accepted, despite the things this person has been taught, they have in many ways taken on the values of their friends. Likewise you may see a person who is outstanding in every way and be unsure how they can be so determined when their parents seem to care so little. Once again, that person’s friends have influenced them. As humans our basic needs are food and drink, shelter, and to be loved. That final need is what pushes us to be like our friends. We have an instinctive need to be loved and accepted, so when we get into school and start interacting with other students, we are naturally drawn to those like us. In some circumstances we are unable to find those kinds of friends, so to avoid rejection we adapt and in ways conform. In every area, from religion, to politics, to education, to overall values, friends shape us and truly put our parents’ teachings to the test. In high school and onward into our adult lives, our personalities do not seem to be as easily influenced by those of our friends. We have strong enough personalities, values, and opinions that we are, in many ways, already shaped. Despite this, our friends still have a huge impart on who we are and what we do. The overall message given to us by this habit we have to be influenced by our friends, and adopt some of their beliefs, is that no matter how young or how old we are, we need to make sure that the people we choose to associate with are the kind of people we want to be, because despite our convictions about who we want to be, the instinctive need for acceptance often can, and will, push us more towards being the kind of people our friends are and want us to be. If we make poor choices when choosing friends, we may see that our convictions, and the teachings of our parents, don’t really add up to much. |