Thursday night has become, largely be default, my mindless surfing time, thanks to my last class of the week falling on... Thursday evening. So I drink too much caffeine and catch up on all the bullshit I've not been reading for the past six days (as opposed to all the bullshit I find time to read every day) in preparation for another weekend full of homework and long mountain bike rides. This evening I've been surfing all over, but since I just went through the past month's News of the Weird updates and found several worth quoting... here they are.
This one is just baffling. I read it three times and I still couldn't quite tell you what happened there.
Junior New York City hedge fund trader Andrew Tong charged in October that his boss forced him to take female hormones to dampen his aggressiveness, which the supervisor said was leading him to make bad trades, according to a CNBC report. In his lawsuit against Mr. Ping Jiang (a big-time trader who reportedly earns $100 million a year) and employer SAC Capital (one of the biggest hedge fund names on Wall Street), Tong claimed further that he was harassed and even sexually attacked, and had started wearing dresses. [CNBC, 10-17-07; New York Post, 10-11-07]
Two heads are
better than one?
Mandy Bailey, who lives in a suburb of Phoenix, is the mother of conjoined 1-year-old girls and wanted to take them to a family reunion in Maryland. She called Delta Air Lines to make sure the girls could ride for free on her ticket. No, said Delta, because even though a child under 2 can ride for free, each infant would need an oxygen mask in case of emergency, and thus, a separate ticket was needed. Bailey kept complaining (giving the story international reach) until a Delta higher-up compromised for the flight: Bailey's sister-in-law, who had been assigned to another row on the flight, was put next to Bailey so she could share her oxygen with the second twin. [Arizona Republic, 10-3-07; WSMB-TV (Tucson)-AP, 10-4-07]
The phenomena of rich old white guys who grow more belligerent and lacking in common sense with every dollar they accumulate never fails to bemuse and confuse me. Quite a few humans (mostly do-it-yourself type men) are utterly unable to place any reasonable value on their own time, or absorb the concept of "
sunk costs."
This guy might be their king.
"Over my dead body was I going to give the state another dollar for the tolls," said Thomas Jensen, 68, to the judge in Rochester, N.H., in September as he accepted the three-day jail sentence instead of a $150 fine. He had been convicted of cheating the state for insisting on using two discontinued 25-cent tokens to pay a 50-cent toll after he had failed to use the tokens up before their expiration. The toll road is a connector between the 50-cent-saving Jensen's main residence in Braintree, Mass., and his summer home in New Hampshire. [TheBostonChannel.com-AP, 9-15-07]
Labels: humor, weird news
