A couple in rural Cambodia has terminated their 18-year marriage with a divorce settlement that entailed sawing in two the wooden house they once shared, villagers said Friday.
I wonder who got the bathroom.
October 10, 2008
October 2, 2008
Biden Palin debate verdict
Palin’s responses were highly evasive and irrelevant. Video examples will be forthcoming as they get posted on YouTube.
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September 28, 2008
It’s a dog’s world
When billionaire Leona Helmsley died, she left $12 million to her dog, Trouble. She left $10 million each to two of her grandchildren and nothing to two other grandchildren. According to this fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine
Helmsley made only a handful of relatively small individual bequests in the will, and left the bulk of her remaining estate to the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. Based on the figures in court files, that trust may turn out to be worth nearly eight billion dollars, which would make it one of the top ten or so foundations in the United States. (Leona’s estate was so large because Harry left his fortune to her.) According to a “mission statement,” which Helmsley signed on March 1, 2004, the trust was to make expenditures for “purposes related to the provision of care for dogs.”
An $8 billion trust to care for dogs? Are we living in the Bizarro world? That is more than the GDP of Mauritania, Swaziland, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Somalia, Eritrea, Gambia and Liberia. For dogs???
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August 21, 2008
World champion of bicycle theft
Police recovered almost 3,000 stolen bicycles from Igor Kenk, an ex-K.G.B agent in Toronto. From the article:
Mr. Kenk was something of an informal social worker, Mr. Jansen explained, giving work to street people and outpatients from a nearby mental health institution. Of course, the police say some of that work involved stealing bicycles.
When the police subsequently raided the Bicycle Clinic, the Fire Department at first blocked them from entering for safety reasons. The building was so crammed with bicycles and bike parts that a Fire Department rescue squad had to remove the upper-floor windows and lower the bicycles by rope.
That was just the beginning. An additional 200 bikes were seized in Mr. Kenk’s home. Ten landlords around the city reported that their garages had been rented by Mr. Kenk and were bulging with bicycles. As the police gathered the mounds of bikes, they also found cocaine, crack cocaine, about 15 pounds of marijuana and a stolen bronze sculpture of a centaur and a snake in battle.
Mr. Kenk shared a rented house in Yorkville, a fashionable and expensive neighborhood, with his partner, Jeanie Chung. An accomplished pianist, Ms. Chung, who also faces charges for drugs and possession of stolen goods.
theories about his hoarding have proliferated. Because Mr. Kenk held a scrap metal dealer’s license, Inspector Evans speculates that he was playing the commodities markets, waiting for another spike in metals prices before melting down the bicycles.
In the past, Mr. Kenk has said that he was accumulating bicycles in preparation for a severe oil shortage. But in a somewhat disjointed interview in July for a radio documentary, portions of which were published by The Globe and Mail, a Toronto daily newspaper, Mr. Kenk portrayed himself as a crusader against theft and a protector of cast-off bicycles.
Mr. Kenk holds a passport from Slovenia and has claimed he was a police officer and a former K.G.B. agent. After one court session, he told reporters, “I’m a dead man.”
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