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June 11, 2000

WELCOME, ROTARIANS! Thieves and pickpockets in Buenos Aires were overjoyed that Rotary International chose their fair city to host a goodwill effort, bringing some 15,000 members there to be victimized by the local criminal element. The crooks set upon these hapless out-of-towners who wandered the streets wearing Rotary paraphernalia, and robbed them blind.
"They go out with this sign around their neck, they're pigeons," said one diplomat.

I PROMISE TO PAY IT BACK: Though he was locked up for conducting a student loan scam, Conrad Cortez clearly didn't learn his lesson. He continued to conduct his illegal enterprise, applying from jail for still more fraudulent loans, under the pretense that he was a foreign medical student. 
His scheme netted him a whopping $900,000, but he was caught and sent back to prison for 15 months.

MESS WITH MY LITTLE GIRL, WILL YOU? Angered that his daughter was forced to leave the Itokela Girls Secondary School in East Kenya, a businessman used witchcraft to unleash ghosts to harass and torment the other girls at the school. The terrorized schoolgirls reported that the bad spirits scared them and knocked them down repeatedly. 
When the cops arrested the businessman, he admitted responsibility, and agreed to pay a noted exorcist named Ntingili to get rid of the troublesome ghosts.

JUST UNTIL HE MAKES UP HIS MIND: A man who works for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is in the process of changing his gender to female but isn't all the way there yet, ad so doesn't feel comfortable using either the men's or the women's toilet facilities. 
So, to accommodate him, the very understanding MBTA built him his own bathroom. Cost: $8,000 in taxpayer money. Eyebrows were raised.

WHAT KIND OF BEAVER ARE YOU? A 30-pound beaver went absolutely insane and launched a ferocious attack on a farm woman in Manitoba and her two Newfoundland dogs which weighed 200 pounds each. The woman, Sam Pshyshlak, said that, despite the disparity in size, the crazed beaver pinned her two huge dogs up against a fence and savagely clawed them, leaving a pool of blood and fur before fleeing into the woods. 
"I've lost all respect for beavers," she said. "I never would have imagined this from a beaver."

Mike Pingree writes another Looking Glass column in the Boston Sunday Herald. You can read it by clicking here:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists.html

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