Intelligent Design: If the male nursery web spider were a human, he would be sternly denounced as a vulgar cad. Researcher Maria Jose Albo of Denmark's Aarhus University told Live Science in November that the spiders typically obtain sex by making valuable "gifts" to females (usually, high-nutrition insects wrapped in silk), but if lacking resources, a male cleverly packages a fake gift (usually a piece of flower) also in silk but confoundingly wound so as to distract her as she unwraps it - and then mounts her before she discovers the hoax. Albo also found that the male is not above playing dead to coax the female into relaxing her guard as she approaches the "carcass" - only to be jumped from behind for sex.
The Continuing Crisis
- Son Theodore Zimmick and two other relatives filed a lawsuit in November against the St. Stanislaus cemetery in Pittsburgh for the unprofessional burial of Theodore's mother, Agnes, in 2009. Agnes had purchased an 11-by-8-foot plot in 1945, but when she finally passed away, the graveyard had become so crowded that, according to the lawsuit, workers were forced to dig such a small hole that they had to jump up and down on the casket and whack it with poles to fit it into the space.
- Managers of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., decided recently to relocate the statue of Abraham Lincoln that since 1895 had occupied a seldom-visited site and whose advocates over the years had insisted be given more prominence. It turned out that the most viable option was to swap locations with a conspicuous 1906 statue of Dr. Alexander Skene. Lincoln is certainly universally revered, but Dr. Skene has advocates, too, and some (according to a December Wall Street Journal report) are resisting the relocation because Dr. Skene (unlike Lincoln) was a Brooklynite, and Dr. Skene (unlike Lincoln) had a body part named after him ("Skene's glands," thought to be "vital" in understanding the "G spot").
- A December New England Journal of Medicine report described a woman's "losing" her breast implant during a Pilates movement called the Valsalva (which involves breath-holding while "bearing down"). The woman said she felt no pain or shortness of breath but suddenly noticed that her implant was gone. Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore discovered that, because of the woman's recent heart surgery, the muscles between the ribs had loosened, and the implant had merely passed through a rib opening. (They returned it to its proper place.)
Convoluted Plans
- A balaclava-wearing man "kidnapped" Julian Buchwald and his girlfriend in 2008 in Australia's Alpine National Park as they were picnicking. The man separated the couple, tore their clothes off and buried them, but Buchwald escaped and rescued the girlfriend, and they wandered around naked for days before being rescued. The balaclava-clad man, it turns out, was Buchwald, whose plan was to convince the woman by his heroism that she should marry him (and more immediately, to have sex even though they had both pledged to remain virgins until marriage). Buchwald was convicted in Victoria County Court and sentenced in December to more than seven years in prison.
- Laurie Martinez, 36, was charged in December with filing a false police report in Sacramento, Calif., alleging that she was raped, beaten bloody and robbed in her home. It turns out that she had become frustrated trying to get her husband to move them to a better neighborhood and that faking a rape was supposed to finally persuade him. Instead, he filed for divorce. Martinez is employed by the state as a psychologist.
- After 12 almost intolerable months, Ms. Seemona Sumasar finally received justice in November from a New York City jury, which convicted Jerry Ramrattan of orchestrating a complex and ingenious scheme to convince police that Sumasar was a serial armed robber. Ramrattan, a private detective and "CSI" fan, had used his knowledge of police evidence-gathering to pin various open cases on Sumasar as revenge for her having dumped him (and to negate her claim that Ramrattan had raped her in retaliation). Ramrattan was so creative in linking evidence to Sumasar that her bail had been set at $1 million, causing her to spend seven months in jail. (Said one juror, "If I had seen this on TV, my reaction would be, 'How could this really happen?'")
People With Issues
Prominent Birmingham, Ala., politician Bill Johnson describes his wife as "the most beautiful woman in the world," but he revealed in December that, while on temporary duty recently as an earthquake relief specialist in New Zealand, he had clandestinely donated sperm to nine women (and that three were already pregnant). Becoming a biological father is "a need that I have," he told a New Zealand Herald reporter, and his wife had been unable to accommodate him. Asked if his wife knew of the nine women, Johnson said, "She does now."
