New York soup kitchen features master chef
New York City has more than 400 soup kitchens but nothing else like the Broadway Presbyterian Church’s, where master chef Michael Ennes presides three days a week, turning leftover restaurant ingredients into gourmet meals. In fact, one pre-Christmas meal included octopus, as well as day-old bread from Le Bernardin restaurant. Ennes told London’s Independent that he is motivated by the chance to help troubled people get “real nutrition,” but he also likes serving “famous” homeless people, such as diners who claim to be, among others, George Bush, George Washington and Jesus Christ.
Can?t Possibly Be True
Buddy, a 6-year-old German shepherd mix, wandered into the emergency room at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower, Calif., in October after having just been hit by a car, and he resisted efforts to remove him, apparently waiting until someone attended to his injured hind leg (which turned out to be broken), according to local animal control officials interviewed by the Whittier Daily News. Owner Fabian Ortega was called (by virtue of Buddy’s implanted microchip), and a vet fixed him up.
? In October, in front of other people, town manager Bonilyn Wilbanks-Free of the upscale village of Golden Beach, Fla., referred casually to her black female assistant as “Mammy” (which is not her name) and then, when the assistant took offense, tried to soften the gaffe by telling her how much she “loved Aunt Jemima.” A subsequent investigation suggested that someone besides Wilbanks-Free might have made the latter comment, but Wilbanks-Free nonetheless resigned in December.
Unclear on the Concept
Condoms are proving such an attractive target for shoplifters, according to Phoenix’s Arizona Republic, that some stores are putting them in locked display cases that require a customer to call a clerk for help. However, as an official of the Arizona Public Health Association pointed out, condoms are a purchase consumers choose to make in low profile. A spokesperson for a condom maker mentioned a recent incident in a CVS pharmacy in which a clerk, assisting a customer, shouted several times, “Who’s got the key to the condoms?”
Questionable Judgments
(1) In October, a judge of Scotland’s Greencock Sheriff Court released Hui Yu, a college student from Beijing, from a traffic charge by disregarding two police officers’ identification of Hui. Said the judge, “All Chinese people can look the same to a native Scot. It’s only when you have time to look that you begin to see the differences.”
(2) Former highly regarded Texas drug agent Barry Cooper (800 arrests) announced in December he would begin selling his video, “Never Get Busted Again,” instructing drug users on how to conceal their stashes. (Cooper called the “war on drugs” counterproductive.)
(3) In December, former New York City parking court judge Haskell Nussbaum published “Beat That Parking Ticket,” in which he advises that harried judges look for the slightest defect in a ticket, in that it’s the easiest way to move quickly through a docket. “Every ticket is worth fighting,” he told the New York Post in October.
People Different From Us
According to prosecutors, Irenia “Lamb” Cotner, 34, managed to enlist four adults in rural Claremont, Ill., to help her murder a pregnant 16-year-old girl, by convincing them they all had hexes on them that could only be lifted by killing the girl before a candle with her name on it melted down. (They failed, but a man died fighting off the attackers.) One defendant said the hex was real because she got migraines every time Cotner came by. Another defendant said he learned about hexes and spells so that people would like him and said Cotner planned the murder for a remote location so that the gates of hell could open for the mother’s and fetus’s souls. In December, Cotner was sentenced to 57 years in prison, and two others go on trial soon.
Least Competent Criminals
An unidentified man fled after an unsuccessful attempt at robbing a Git-N-Go convenience store in Des Moines, Iowa, in December, which was foiled when the clerk noticed that the “gunman’s” thumb was visible from his pocket, where he was holding his hand to pretend he had a gun. The clerk said he actually had to argue with the man, who continued to insist that it was a gun in his pocket. Said clerk Terry Cook later, “I know what a gun looks like.”
More Christmas Mania
After a domestic tiff, Steven Rautio took the Christmas tree that he and his girlfriend had just decorated, cut it into pieces with a chainsaw, and burned it in a wood stove, but the stove overheated and burned his house to the ground (National Mine, Mich.).
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