The Crazy Beauties
"A group of masked women caused controversy in China by dancing in the street in their underwear in a bid to find husbands," Ananova.com reports. "The eight young women said they were coming under intense pressure from their families to settle down before 'it was too late.'" The women, calling themselves the Crazy Beauties, braved the weather to dance outside a subway station in Guangzhou for passersby. They handed out sheets of paper with their personal details and the kind of men they hoped to marry, Guangzhou Daily reported. One participant explained: "We think we are beauties, but we can't find our Mr. Rights. Our age is close to 30, so we have to do something."
I'll pick the psychopath
"Before he was a convicted serial killer, Rodney Alcala was a winning bachelor on The Dating Game," Gabriel Falcon reports for CNN.com. "… Found guilty in February of murdering four women and a child, Alcala, 66, is acting as his own attorney in the penalty phase of the trial. He is hoping to persuade the jury in Santa Ana, Calif., to spare his life. The crimes Alcala committed date to the late 1970s. Nobody at the time knew the man with the wavy long hair and toothy grin was an apparent psychopath - an unstable, antisocial personality." He had already been convicted of the rape of an eight-year-old girl. Pat Brown, a noted crime profiler, analyzed his Dating Game performance for CNN. She believes that Alcala's real identity revealed itself backstage with the other bachelors: "This guy probably literally hated them." Although Alcala was chosen by Cheryl Bradshaw on the show, she refused to go out with him afterward. Being rejected can have a profound impact on serial killers, Ms. Brown suggested: "They don't understand the rejection."
Is the doctor in?
"Patients of a northern Kentucky psychiatrist jailed on a charge he stabbed a woman with a sword have tried to keep appointments with him in jail," Associated Press reports. "Kenton County jail Chief Deputy Scott Colvin said deputies have had to turn away several patients of Douglas Rank, charged last month with first-degree assault in an attack on a 32-year-old woman. Colvin told the Kentucky Enquirer that some patients have asked if they could drop off Rank's prescription pad at the jail so he could write their prescriptions."
We need an enemy
"New research supports the notion that we fixate on enemies, and inflate their power, as a defence mechanism against generalized anxiety," Tom Jacobs writes for Miller-McCune magazine. "We have seen the enemy, and he is powerful. That's a recurring motif of contemporary political discourse, as generalized fear mutates for many into a fixation on a ferocious foe. … According to one school of thought, this tendency to exaggerate the strength of our adversaries serves a specific psychological function. It is less scary to place all our fears on a single, strong enemy than to accept the fact our well-being is largely based on factors beyond our control. An enemy, after all, can be defined, analyzed and perhaps even defeated." The paper, An Existential Function of Enemyship, just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reports on four studies by a University of Kansas research team that confirm the notion. "These studies suggest it's oddly comforting to have someone, or something, you can point to as the source of your sorrows. This helps explain why Americans inevitably find an outside enemy to focus on, be it the Soviets, the Muslims or the Chinese."
She was loaded
A Kentucky woman in jail for public intoxication has been accused of assaulting a jailer by squirting breast milk at her, Associated Press reports. WYMT-TV reported that a 31-year-old woman was arrested on a misdemeanour charge of public intoxication. But as she was changing into an inmate uniform, she squirted breast milk into the face of a female deputy who was with her. The woman now faces a felony charge of third-degree assault on a police officer.
Robin Hood's sideline?
"By stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, Robin Hood gained legendary status as a selfless redistributor of wealth," Roya Nikkhah writes for The Daily Telegraph. "But a new book claims that the outlaw of Sherwood Forest was in fact something of a loan shark, who operated a sophisticated lending scheme for those short of cash. Robin Hood: The Unknown Templar points to several passages in an old English ballad that depict him lending ₤400 to an impoverished knight. The claim threatens to tarnish the image of a heroic folklore figure. …" The book's author, John Paul Davis, cites scenes from A Gest of Robyn Hode, one of the earliest references to the outlaw. Prof. Helen Phillips, an expert on Robin Hood from Cardiff University, said there was more emphasis in the ballad on his generosity to a stranger than on the act of lending. "To focus on the image of Robin Hood as a money lender in the Gest is a very insensitive reading of the way the text is written."
Thought du jour
"Never swear, for that is a crime without excuse as there is no pleasure in it."
- The Atlantic Monthly Almanac, 1926