Sideswipe

Naff Christian t-shirts #1: Making a monkey out of religion. (Source: christianshirts.net)

In Iraq a French television team has uncovered a new series of atrocities carried out by American intelligence operatives against terrorist suspects held at Abu Ghraib prison. Reliable sources report a senior officer forced an inmate to bend over the back of a chair while the officer delivered six hard blows with a cane to the inmate's backside. After the second blow, the cane split and subsequent blows inflicted severe cuts which resulted in considerable bleeding. No medical assistance was offered. The officer laughed all through the incident. On another occasion the same officer bound an inmate's hands and stuffed a tennis ball into his mouth, all the while leering with grotesque facial contortions only inches from the face of the terrified inmate who was aged 14. The authorities considered no inquiry was necessary. Some commentators in New Zealand have demanded the death penalty for the officer concerned.

(Source: posted by Adolf Fiinkensein on sirhumphreys.blogspot.com)

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Esther Christensen (16), Alison van der Straaten (16) and Kima Tuialii (15) write: "We are students in the Real Gorgeous team which promotes body satisfaction at Mt Roskill Grammar School and we believe that Lee Macdonald's email was full of fat phobic ideas that are adding to the mainly female problem of body dissatisfaction. The writer claims that fat people that believe they are beautiful are deluded, no matter how lovely their personalities are. This is both untrue and shallow. Beauty is defined as: 'The quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or colour, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality'. This definition states nothing about size, shape or weight. The definition used by Lee Macdonald is typical of those living in Barbies world. The writer stated that bulimics were not sexy. But people become bulimic because of the very attitude expressed; enforcing the insecurities that everybody already feels, and arguably the very ones that cause people to strive for the unattainable body images."

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An arbitration panel in April issued a two-year suspension to champion cyclist Tyler Hamilton for having transfused another person's blood for a race in Spain last year. At the panel's hearing Hamilton and his lawyers had denied the charge and raised the possibility that maybe Hamilton had a "vanishing twin" who had shared the womb with him during his first trimester, which would account for why he wound up with some blood that doesn't match his "other" blood. (Source: News of the Weird)

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Another bizarre employment court case from 2004 from the National Law Journal. The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal upheld an agency ruling that Dorothy Kateri Moore, a Native Canadian from the Mi'kmaq tribe, was not discriminated against when her boss called her Kemosabe, the oft-used word from the 1950s show The Lone Ranger. After spending an entire day watching reruns, the agency ruled that Kemosabe is not derogatory. Hi-Yo, Silver!