"Coming Up Next! The Resurrection! Live!": "If the Messiah descends from the Mount of Olives as foretold in the Bible," wrote the Los Angeles Times in an October dispatch from Jerusalem, the two largest Christian television networks in the U.S. promise to cover the arrival live from a hilltop in the city. Daystar Television has already been beaming a 24/7 webcam view, and Trinity Broadcasting Network bought the building next door to Daystar's in September and has already begun staging live and pre-recorded programs using the broad expanse of the Holy Land city as background.
Once again, in September, the upscale Standard Hotel, in New York City's lower Manhattan, made headlines for the views it provides to amazed pedestrians. In 2009, it was the hotel's floor-to-ceiling windows showcasing amorous couples at play (unless the guests knew to draw the curtains), especially delighting out-of-towners seeking inexpensive entertainment. Now, a September 2012 report in the New York Daily News revealed that the restrooms at the hotel's Boom-Boom Room restaurant posed a bigger problem: no curtains at all. One restroom user, from Australia, said, "Sitting on the royal throne, you don't expect a public viewing." On the other hand, the Daily News noted one gentleman relieving himself and waving merrily at the gawking crowd below.
In September, the National Geographic cable TV show "Taboo" featured three young Tokyo partiers as examples of the "bagel head" craze in which fun-lovers inject saline just under the skin of the forehead to create a swelling and then pressure the center to achieve a donut look that lasts up to 24 hours before the saline is absorbed into the body. Some adventurers have injected other areas of the body - even the scrotum.
In Ventura, Calif., in September, once again, a scammer tried to bilk victims out of money by assuring them that he could double their cash (in this case, $14,000) merely by spraying it with a secret chemical. (Of course, the victims had to wait several hours for their newly doubled cash to dry and eventually discovered that the scammer had substituted blank paper and by that time was long gone.) But the weirdest aspect of the scam is that people who are so unsophisticated as to fall for it somehow managed to amass, in this tight economy, $14,000 cash to begin with.
In September, Britain's Leeds Crown Court meted out "punishment" to a 25-year-old man convicted of sneaking into the changing room of China's female swimmers during the Olympics: He was banned - for five years - from entering any female toilet or changing room.
"It has been four years since News of the Weird mentioned the growing controversy over one response to Peru's stray-cat problem, especially in the suburbs of Lima, and still, the outrage continues. Each September, the city of La Quebrada holds its Gastronomic Festival of the Cat, in which the country's chefs try to out-do each other with creative gourmet feline (e.g., cat stew, grilled cat with huacatay herbs), which some Peruvians, of course, believe to be aphrodisiacs. Said one Peruvian, such cultural events "are our roots and can't be forgotten."
