And now . . . this - Sept. 16/05

Now, come on!

Ice creams are being withdrawn from Burger King - because a design on the lid looks like the word Allah.

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Here's the sacrilegious dessert treat:

To borrow a turn of phrase from the great Douglas Adams: "Unfortunately, in the Arabic tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible jihad for centuries."

But seriously. How backwards do you have to be to think that a picture of some whipped ice cream turned on its side is a blasphemy against your god? (Just don't get me started on the "666" fearmongers.) Worse, how spineless do you have to be to cave in to this crap?

Unclear on the concept

A Japanese woman called in the police after a hitman she paid to kill her lover's wife failed to carry out the job.

The 32-year-old Tokyo woman was arrested on Wednesday for incitement to murder, the Daily Yomiuri newspaper said on Friday.

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This kind of idiocy happens more than you think. As a high-school law student, we made a field trip to the municipal court in Sudbury one day in 1987, where the first case we heard was a charge of fraud against a drug dealer who took a sucker's money then didn't give him the drugs he wanted. The judge rightly threw the charge out, but apparently criminals aren't getting any wiser to the fact that the police won't help them commit their crimes.

ZOT!

An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woollen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together. . . .

"We tested his clothes with a static electricity field metre and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited," Barton said.

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This is probably how Spider-man's enemy Electro got his start.