Crime of the Century (Crap Kerfuffle Divison)

NAPERVILLE, ILL., Sept. 19 - A woman who stepped in dog droppings outside her apartment Wednesday allegedly exacted swift and sure revenge upon a neighbor who owns the dropping-dropping dog. 
   Evidently, Susan M. Miller (left), who lives at the Brittany Springs apartment complex, on the 800 block of Beaumont Drive in the Chicago suburb of Naperville (pop: 144,560), has had it up to the top of her shoe with pooch-poo left lying around.
   The Naperville Sun ("Member of Sun-Times Media") reported Sept. 17 that Ms. Miller allegedly wiped cur ordure (dog shit) on the neighbor's porch, hurled it at her patio door, and filled bags with it and left them on the patio, to which she also relocated an apartment-complex sign urging residents to pick up their pets' waste. 
   These are creative, if rage-fueled, responses to the conundrum of festering dog logs. Granted, dog guardians - Ms. Miller is one - have the unenviable task of picking up their animals' ca-ca, often using bags that leave naught between hand and excreta except thin plastic. So some owners naturally balk, on occasion, at doing their duty when their dogs do their dooty.
  Still, what's more annoying than stepping in mutt faeces? Answer: neighbors who leave it around to be stepped in. 

   Alas, the law is the law. A Naperville police report cited by the Sun notes that Ms. Miller, who is forty-three, was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. She is free on bail. The unnamed neighbor apparently got off scot-free, but not to worry: God'll git 'er someday.
   A side note. Sun reporter Bill Bird couldn't help pecking out this lede: "Dog is man's best friend. Dog feces, not so much." 
   This sort of writing is causing readers to leave newspapers in droves, which accounts for the decline and fall of the Fourth Estate in America. 

   

Crime of the Century (Wagging the Dog Division)

ABERDEEN, Scotland, March 17 -- A twenty-eight-year old man has been fined nine hundred dollars for attempting to "assault" a female Scottish police officer with a dangerous weapon: his penis.
   Various British news outlets - the Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror and BBC News, but not the Times, because that august broadsheet dasn't touch news of the common willie - reported today that the man, named Marium Varinauskas (photo, below), was arguing with his girlfriend when police were called to his Aberdeen apartment.
   When officers showed up, a Huffington Post roundup of the British press stories noted, he was "drunk and in his underpants." Colloquially, this means he was entirely shitfaced and nearly bare-assed nekkid.
   The HuffPo did not say, however -  nor, apparently, did the British press - what kind of "underpants" Mr. Varinauskas was wearing, so readers learned news neither of style, color, brand nor type: thong, bikini, briefs, boxer briefs, boxers, or other. This cannot be seen as anything other than an appalling oversight.
   An official told the court that Mr. V. (honestly, how many times does one need to type out "Varinauskas" in his ever-shortening lifetime?) stood over the police officer "exposing his penis and thrusting it in her face, forcing her to take evasive action to avoid getting struck." 
   It is unclear what "stood over" actually means. Mr. V. was, when deputies arrived, sitting on a couch. Presumably, as they were standing, they loomed  over him. When he stood, he'd have been eye-to-eye with them. 
   For him to have "stood over" the female officer, then, suggests that she was somehow below him, perhaps in a kneeling position, which would further explain why the potted Mr. V., who later confessed to having been in an alcoholic blackout, might have mistakenly thought it entirely correct and context appropriate  to "thrust" his member "in her face." 
   Alas, we will never know. 
   With classic Scottish understatement, a police department spokesman said, "This was a distasteful experience for the officer." 
    

News That Makes Life Worth Living (Scentless Apprentice Division)

DETROIT, Michigan, March 17 - A Detroit city employee named Susan McBride successfully sued the city for $100,000 in damages stemming from what she called her inability to breathe and do her job because a co-worker wore strong perfume.
   One term of the settlement, the Detroit News reported Sunday, is that the city will post warnings in city buildings urging city employees to refrain from "wearing scented products, including ... colognes, aftershave lotions, perfumes, deodarants, body/face lotions ... (and) the use of scented candles, perfume samples from magazines, spray or solid air fresheners...." 
   Ms. McBride's lawyer, a woman named Ann Curry Thompson, told the News the settlement is "unique. I think it should be used as a model for other people who are having similar problems."

   Ms. McBride is a heroic example of the rugged individualism upon which America was founded. If others, in their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, are bothersome, then one simply need stop them, using the long arm of the law if necessary. 

   To get others - in this case hundreds, perhaps thousands - to conform to her idiosyncratic personal needs was the sole aim and end of Ms. McBride's suit. Well, that and the hundred K. 
   The terror of one's own mortality is a painful psychological fact for all humans, and each confronts or ignores it differently. Some bungee jump. Others gamble. Still others help humanity.
   And then there are the Ms. McBrides of the land. They are not naturally given to societal ties. They operate apart from their fellows, existing in a special world of their own mental devising. Their myriad forms of narcissism are so advanced that they believe they are exempt from facing the ordinary existential fear of the Great Void (I can't breathe! I can't breathe!). So they force innocent others about them to rearrange their lives - to do, indeed, their heavy psycho-spiritual lifting for them. In their deluded minds, it is but common sense that the world should fit itself to them rather than vice versa. 
   And yet these same people, who by nature prove incapable of social integration, live with the constant fear and frustration that arise from feeling disconnected, heart and soul, from their fellows.
   Ms. McBride wasn't choking on perfume. She was choking on rage. And because she was too immature to face it - to become, indeed, a part of the human race - she took it out on everyone else. 
   Well, she's the big winner now. 
   And yet, what a loser. 

Queer Notes From all Over (Catholic Entrenchment Division)

   First of All is an ecumenical blog. That is, we have no one axe to grind; we are a many-tricked pony. (Insert "trick" joke here.) (Insert "insert" joke here.)
   That said, we are not disinterested in news of all things lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and etcetera, of which there is a dizzying blizzard these days. Herewith, then, we inaugurate a new feature: "Queer Notes From all Over." 
   Be patient; our inaugural post is a long one. (That's what she he said.)


BOULDER, Colo., March 11 - The administrators of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, in Boulder, plainly are doing their best to practice the love, acceptance and good-heartedness that defined the teachings of the school's namesake.
   A week ago, according to KUSA-TV, in Denver, they refused to let two children re-enroll in the school next year after discovering that the children's parents are lesbians. 
   The Denver Archdiocese sent a statement to the television station that read, "Homosexuals living together as a couple are in disaccord with Catholic teaching." 
   Note the use of "homosexual." This word is used by "heterosexuals" - especially conservative religious ones - as a way of distancing from and dehumanizing the human beings they are discussing. "Homosexual" is a clinical term for those who are sexually attracted to members of their gender. Some "homosexuals" act on that desire. Others don't. "Gay" and "lesbian" people, on the other hand, though by definition homosexual, integrate sexuality into lives lived in full societal openness. 
    Parents of other students have shown an open-heartedness - the true test of spirituality - that apparently eludes Catholic officials. Some have considered pulling their children from the school. 
   "We're all very hurt by this decision," one told KUSA. 
   The station also reports that school staff members have said they are "disgusted by the decision." 


                         Church Has Become More Aggressive


   Yesterday, KUSA quoted Luis Leon, a professor at the University of Denver's Religious Studies Department as saying that, in the wake of the pedophile priest scandals, the Church has become more aggressive about all things homosexual. 
   The no-doubt-well-meaning Professor Leon here makes an unfortunate connection - one widely repeated, including by the conservative religionists - between same-gender pedophiles and gay men and lesbians. 
   Pedophiles are those who have sexual interest in, and sometimes relations with, children. Some pedophiles are oriented to children of their gender, others to those of the opposite gender. 
   But a pedophile's sexual orientation is, first and foremost, to children; the gender of those he or she is interested in is secondary. 
   So to link male-priest-male-child pedophilia with homosexuality is misguided. If, for example, a pedophile male priest had a sexual relation with a female child, would the Church take a more aggressive stance towards heterosexuality?
  
                          "Form Students"


   Archbishop Charles Chaput released a statement, the full text of which is on the KUSA Web site, pointing out, among other things, that the "main purpose of Catholic schools is religious; in other words, to form students in Catholic faith, Catholic morality and Catholic social values." 
   One supposes that Chaput is hard-pressed to explain the sexual kerfuffles ("scandal" is such an overused, and therefore cliched, word) stinking up the Vatican just now.


                         "'Two Cuban Lads'" 


   In a March 4 story, the British newspaper the Guardian reported that telephone wiretaps in the paper's possession reveal that a man named Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness (that is, one of the very special ceremonial ushers of the papal household), allegedly spent a good deal of his time having a friend in the choir procure male prostitutes for him, the dirty thing. 
   The chorister, a man named Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, is twenty-nine and hails from Nigeria. He said in a recent magazine interview that he met Balducci ten years ago - that would be at the tender age of nineteen - and added, "He asked me if I could procure other men for him." This locution, "other men," suggests that Ehiem may be referring to men other than himself, which further suggests that he and Balducci may have, to put it colloquially, hooked up. 
   Ehiem added, "He [Balducci] told me he was married [closet case] and that I had to do it [find sex-for-pay partners] in great [great] secrecy [blackmail]." 
   The two evidently made a proficient team. The Guardian notes that the wiretap transcripts show that "over a period of around five months, Ehiem procured for Balducci at least 10 contacts with, among others, 'two black Cuban lads,' a former male model from Naples, and a rugby player from Rome." 
   Ehiem also is alleged to have attempted to set Balducci up with a seminarian - that is, a student studying to become a priest - which seems efficient: why not keep it in-house?
   It is plain from these hookups, then, that Balducci has catholic, if not Catholic, tastes. 


                          Another Kerfuffle  


   Another kerfuffle is rattling the Vatican cages, and this one could scar the Papacy. 
   Pope Benedict XVI, who was known, before becoming God's hatchet man, as Joseph Ratzinger, was Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982. German officials are now investigating claims of physical and sexual abuse within the Church in Germany in those years; to what extent Ratzinger knew about the abuses; and, if he did know, whether by remaining silent about them he covered them up, according to a March 11 Associated Press story. 
   In a separate investigation, the Regensberg Diocese told the AP it will look into claims of physical and sexual abuse in a choir led by the Pope's brother, Rev. Georg Ratzinger. So far, the claims appear to predate Ratzinger's tenure as choirmaster.
   Georg Ratzinger said Tuesday that, after taking over the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir in the mid-1960s, he systematically slapped boys by way of punishment. The AP notes that such punishment, though typical then, was later banned. 


                         Shaping the Good Catholics of the Future


   Yet these claims offer a window into how the Catholic church, a mere fifty years ago, set out to, as Denver Archbishop Chaput so poetically put it, "form students in the Catholic faith, Catholic morality and Catholic social values."
   The AP story notes that the Regensburg Diocese has, so far, reported two sex abuse cases at the choir, one in 1958, the other in 1959. More than one hundred and seventy students in Germany have claimed sexual abuse at the hands of officials at various Catholic high schools. 
   One man who sang in the choir from 1958 to 1967 said that, at the choir's boarding school, "Severe beatings were normal." He added, however, that Georg Ratzinger "did not belong to the group of more sadistic abusers" - did Ratzinger, then, belong to the less sadistic group? - and that "I do accuse him of covering up the abuses." 
   The Etterzhausen elementary school, in Pielenhofen (pop. 1.3 million), was considered a feeder school for the choir. A man who matriculated there in the early nineteen-eighties told the AP he was slapped, witnessed other boys getting beaten, and saw the school's director hit an eight-year-old boy with a chair. 
    That same man joined the choir in 1982. He has made plain that he personally did not witness or hear about abuse at the choir boarding school. But he did, at the time, tell Georg Ratzinger, then the choir director, about the violence. Ratzinger did nothing. 
   "He chose not to listen," the man told the AP. 
   Incidentally, the Catholic Church is held in low opinion in Germany these days, and not surprisingly. Last year, the Pope lifted the excommunication of a British bishop.
   The reason for the excommunication? 
   The bishop had denied the existence of the Holocaust. 


                            Archdiocese Should Support


   With these facts known, it becomes understandable that the Denver Archdiocese should support the Boulder Catholic school that, in effect, expelled two offspring of lesbian parents. 
   After all, lesbian parents do not physically and sexually brutalize their  children, and therefore cannot be said to conform to "Catholic faith, Catholic morality and Catholic social values." 
                         --30--