xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Last year, New York Gov. George Pataki, criticizing the legislature’s spending priorities, deplored wasting money on trivial state projects like “cheese museums and pro wrestling halls of fame.” In 2006, however, another $5,000 of state funds went to the Cuba (N.Y.) Cheese Museum, from a fund nominally controlled by Pataki. The Cuba Cheese Museum is not to be confused with the New York State Museum of Cheese in Rome, N.Y.
In April, sculptor Daniel Edwards, creating a “Monument to Pro-Life,” ran a 10-day show at a gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y., consisting of his life-sized rendition of the singer Britney Spears, nude, on her knees and elbows on a bearskin rug, at the moment of birth of her first child, Sean Preston. Edwards did not speak with Spears ahead of time but said he was drawn to her high profile and that he “couldn’t come up with anybody” better to make his anti-abortion statement.
Artist Ira Sherman’s high-tech “Impenetrable Devices,” exhibited earlier this year at the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, are sleek, wearable gadgets whose common purpose is to thwart rape. Sherman said his “genital armor” and “castration mechanisms” were borne from listening to rape victims recommend instruments to provide bodily security. “The Injector” shoots an identifying dye, and sedatives, at the rapist; “The Bear Trap Corset” and the “Intimate Electric Fence” are self-explanatory; and the complex Cremasteric Reflex Corset employs steel spikes delivered by a pressure-sensitive air valve. Said Sherman, “All my (devices are) plausible.”
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