Chicken Ticketed for Crossing the Road

Linc and Helena Moore may have finally learned the answer to that age-old question: Why did the chicken cross the road? Because the chicken doesn't know jaywalking is illegal.
Kern County Sheriff's Deputy J. Nicholson does know, however. The deputy issued a ticket March 26 because one of the couple's chickens allegedly impeded traffic in Johannesburg, a rural mining community near Ridgecrest, some 220 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
The Moores were in Superior Court on Friday to plead not guilty. A trial was scheduled for May 16.
Nicholson has declined to discuss the matter, but sheriff's Sgt. Francis Moore said chickens on the roadway have been a problem in the community of 50 residents. Officials didn't believe it could be resolved by simply issuing the couple a warning.
"Sometimes you have to let people talk to the judge," Moore said.
The chicken's owners say they believe they were cited because they were among several people who complained that sheriff's deputies haven't done enough to control off-road vehicle riders who create dust and noise in their neighborhood.
Sheriff's officials say that isn't so, adding they are doing what they can to keep off-roaders away from homes.
"The chicken thing has nothing to do with the motorcycle thing," Moore said.


Two Streakers Disrupt Mass. College Class

Professor Eva Grudin was about to lead her students into a discussion of whether an abstract painting was meant to invoke a certain part of the male anatomy when her class was interrupted by the real thing.
With no warning, two naked students barged into her Williams College lecture hall, struck a quick pose for the 150 students there, and ran out.
Nothing abstract here. Grudin and her students had just been streaked.
But this was no one-time prank by some drunken college students. It was yet another performance by two members of the Springstreakers, the latest unofficial student activity club at this elite liberal arts college.
"It's hard to get your bearings back and continue with your lecture after that," said Grudin, who let out a shriek that was followed by her students' laughter, then applause when the streakers stole everyone's attention from a slide projection of Robert Motherwell's vaguely phallic depiction of a bull.
With two weeks before the end of final exams, Grudin and many of the students on the prim 2,000-student campus in the Berkshires say the Springstreakers are offering just the kind of stress relief that so many need right now.
"It's amazing that they do this," said Mon Thach, a freshman who was streaked in Grudin's art history class late last week. "It was so funny, and everyone needs a good laugh like that at the end of the semester."
 

City hopes to cut crime with scooter ban

If you can't beat them, ban their getaway vehicles.
So goes the logic of the latest attempt to curb crime in the southern Italian city of Naples -- a scooter ban to aid police chasing common crooks who famously rob pedestrians and speed away through the historic center's narrow alleyways.
"Our goal is to give tourists and citizens more security," said Nicola Oddati, Naples' counselor on traffic.
From Tuesday, non-residents of the picturesque but often unruly area will be required to either leave their scooters behind, or walk them through the historic center, motors off. Sanctions include a fine of about 35 euros ($45) and possible confiscation of the vehicle.
In the past, authorities have outlawed selling certain types of knives to curb violent theft in the city, the center of an area whose unemployment rate is among the highest in Europe.
 

 Woman sickens eight with poisoned pizza

A Brazilian woman sent a poisoned pizza to a teenager she had a crush on, which landed the teenager, his six schoolmates and their teacher in the hospital in grave condition on Friday, police said.
Two of the victims were in a coma after sharing the pizza and others showed severe poisoning symptoms, such as bleeding from the throat, police said.
"We know it was a poison, but are still trying to find out what exact substance it was," said investigator Roberto Fonseca de Oliveira of Petrolina in Pernambuco state.
The victims were taken from Petrolina to Pernambuco's capital, Recife, 310 miles away, for urgent treatment.
De Oliveira said police had a letter addressed to one of the victims -- a 16-year-old identified only as Paulo. In a description provided to police, the man who had delivered the pizza said the suspect was a plump, short woman about 18 to 20 years old.
"She was either an ex-girlfriend or just had a strong interest in the guy," de Oliveira said.
 


Women-only train cars irritate some men

A stepped-up campaign by Tokyo train operators to protect women from gropers by increasing the number of women-only carriages is angering some male commuters.
Several of the Japanese capital's railway companies introduced the single-sex carriages Monday as part of a city effort to tackle the problem of men who take advantage of overcrowding to grope female passengers.
In a Tokyo survey last year, almost two thirds of women aged between 20 and 40 said they had been groped on a train.
"We can't do all that much about the crowding and this kind of crime is hard to prevent, even in cooperation with the police," said a spokesman for Odakyu Electric Railway.
"Passengers have also been asking for women-only carriages."
Some men support the restrictions, which apply mostly during rush hour, but others have complained that reserving one carriage for women worsens overcrowding in the rest of the train.
"Women-only carriages are a form of discrimination against men," one opponent told the Asahi Shimbun daily.

"I cannot agree to their introduction."

The number of reported incidents of groping and sexual assault leaped to 2,201 in 2004, the worst figure on record and three times the number in 1996.

"On the one hand it could be the number of men engaging in such acts is increasing, but it could also be that women who once felt they had to suffer in silence now have to courage to speak out and complain," said a Tokyo city government official.

Some women had other reasons for preferring to travel separately from men.

"I didn't like the smell of alcohol and cigarettes on the men," one satisfied female passenger told the Asahi Shimbun.
Sex researchers shed light on unpopular sex acts

From bondage to "breath play" and zoophilia, it's not easy keeping up with society's fast-developing sexual trends.

That's why some of North America's top sexologists hunkered down with academics and therapists at a Fisherman's Wharf hotel this weekend: to swap findings about everything from teens with underwear fetishes to transgender couples.
"These couples have problems that I didn't know how to deal with," said Olga Perez Stable Cox, president of the Western U.S. region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. "You have to understand the culture, otherwise you're an outsider, and you don't get it."
The theme for the society's four-day conference is "Unstudied, Understudied And Underserved Sexual Communities." Presentations range from discussions from autoerotic asphyxiation, or "breath play," to zoophiles, or animal lovers, to more mainstream topics like sex motives of dating partners.
"Let me tell you, it was not easy finding these pictures," Hunter College professor Jose E. Nanin told his audience in a seminar about "specialized" sexual behavior among gay men.
Nanin's photos are more than an explicit how-to of exhibitionism and sadomasochism, he says; they are examples of safe alternatives to sexual intercourse that need to be de-stigmatized in order to fight diseases like HIV/ AIDS.
Researchers say their greater goal is to help the medical community, the public and legislators figure out what behavior is merely out of the norm versus downright dangerous.

"As sex researchers, one of our concerns is distinguishing what can be harmful and what is not -- so that instead of being based on myth, public policy can be informed," said Charlene Muehlenhard, professor of psychology and women's studies at The University of Kansas.

When authorities caught a Midwestern U.S. teenage boy stealing girls' underwear, they immediately demonized his underwear fetish, Pennsylvania State University researcher Patricia Barthalow Kosch said. Many clinicians attribute the boy's crime more to broken family relations. The crime was theft, not his sexual fantasies, conference attendees said.

Teen sexuality draws sensational headlines, but suffers from a lack of academic study, researchers said.

Kim Openshaw, a psychology professor at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, who studies teenage sex offenders, said the limited amount of research so far has found that girls make up only 5 to 10 percent of all underage sex offenders.

The numbers are underreported, Openshaw says, because many people are reluctant to acknowledge the problem.

Victims of girl sex offenders tend to be in the immediate family circle. Most perpetrators are victims of family abuse. By contrast, boy sex offenders tend to be more macho, violent and attack outside of their immediate family.

Pizza delivery ends prison siege

An Australian prison siege ended Monday after a group of inmates agreed to release a guard they had held for two days in return for a delivery of pizzas, prison officials said.
A group of up to 20 inmates seized control of the reception area of the maximum security Risdon Prison in Hobart, capital of the southern island state of Tasmania, Saturday, demanding better treatment and improvements to the jail.
The siege was resolved in far less dramatic circumstances.
"Our staff member was negotiated out with the delivery of 15 pizzas," Graeme Barber, Tasmania's director of prisons, told reporters.
The prisoners had earlier made a list of 24 demands. But none was so pressing as the need for a take-out meal and the guard was released unharmed not long after midnight.
About 20 prisoners, some being held as hostages, were involved in the siege. The last of the hostages was released by their pizza-filled captors early Monday.
Risdon Prison holds Martin Bryant, who was convicted of Australia's worst massacre of modern times when he shot dead 35 people in 1996 in the Tasmanian tourist town and former penal colony of Port Arthur.

Tailpiece

At the bar

A man walks into a bar and orders one shot. Then he looks into his shirt pocket and orders another shot. After he finishes, he looks into his shirt pocket again and orders another shot. The bartender is curious and askes him "every time you order a shot, you look in your shirt pocket. Why?" The man replies, "I have a picture of my wife in my pocket and when she starts to look good, I go home."