Great Moments in Gravity

If we learned anything from all those Postscripts, itג€™s that Nature has a way of bringing us down to earth.

    Back -- not by popular demand, but because I still have a lot more material -- to the best of Postscripts.
    The worst golfer of all time has to be Metthieu Boya, of the African state of Benin. Practicing his drive near an airstrip, his shot careened into the windshield of an air force jet about to take off. The pilot lost control and smashed into a line of four fighter jets, destroying the lot. The government ordered poor Boya to pay $70 million for a new air force, but when it was pointed out that he earns only $700 a year, it settled for a $75 fine. 
    English golfer Tracey Lovey married golf pro John Dovey, becoming Tracey Lovey-Dovey.
    An off-duty policeman in Oklahoma City jumped out of the stands during a basketball game and arrested a referee who, he claimed, was not calling enough fouls against the visiting team.
    For more sports, please see the paper's back page.
    Nature has a way of telling scientists to shut up. Wim Kodman was trying to calm a fellow airplane passenger frightened by wind turbulence. "I told him I'm a scientist, we're objective. I told him a crash was improbable. I was trying to remember the exact probability when we smashed into the ground."
    In the same vein, physicist Richard Feynman told a scientific conference that "The gravitational force is weak. In fact, it's damn weak. At that moment, a loudspeaker broke loose from the ceiling and crashed to the floor. Feynman responded right on cue. "Weak," he said, "but not negligible."
    Mistakes will happen. A British bank accidentally put one fellow's deposit into the account of a nearly broke man -- and if you've always wished this would happen to you, think again. The windfall recipient saw his account mysteriously increase from L 56 to
L 1,027,888.43. He never got his hands on the money. The bank noticed the error, corrected it -- and being a bank, deftly charged the poor fellow five pence for the blunder.  
    Anyone who has not received an honorary degree would agree it's a stupid thing, but we'll make an exception for this one: Lydia and Anastacio Alvarez, a migrant worker and cotton farmer with little formal education, were presented with well-deserved honorary degrees by the local high school in Loraine, Texas. The surprise ceremony came just after the 18th of their 18 children received his diploma from Loraine High. Believing that hard work and education are the most important virtues, the Alvarezes' children, every one of them, went on to college. 
    Anastacio is the sort of fellow who should win the Father of the Year Award, but it seems they always give it to the wrong guy. The winner of the 1982 award celebrated the 10th anniversary of his citation -- in jail. He was put there for failing to pay child support.
    A man on trial in Los Angeles demanded a jury of nymphomaniacs, atheists and agnostics to compose a "jury of his peers."
    So maybe Man of God Pat Robertson was on the right track when he said the Equal Rights Amendment "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." Encourage, maybe, but does the ERA  require it?
    Sex in Canada: a biologist reported that female snails were turning into males as a result of pollution. Come on, it wasn't pollution, it was the Equal Rights Amendment.
    In California, a volunteer at the Suicide Prevention Center in Sacramento admitted to police that he slit the wrists of a depressed caller who got on his nerves. Frank Snyder said the victim "sucked everything out of me. He antagonized me so that I would kill him. He wanted to die but didn't have the courage to do it." So what's the big deal? By murdering him, Snyder would have succeeded in preventing the suicide.
    Elsewhere in the morbidity department, a man in Roubaix, France, sat down on the sofa to watch TV, and died. His skeleton, and little else, was found only 10 months later, still on the sofa facing the TV, which was still on, but with a snowy screen.
    And a homeless man in Germany froze to death on an ice-cold night -- because he drank antifreeze, which doctors said lowered his body temperature. He should have put on a muffler.

THE GENERATION Gap has gone full cycle: teenagers in a Ridgefield, Conn., high school petitioned that a wall mural of Jimi Hendrix be whitewashed over because of the rock guitarist's drug lifestyle -- but the school principal came out in support of Hendrix, refusing to reduce his existence to "symbol of drug abuse."
    It's hard to tell what rock musician Bill Wyman is a symbol of. He has the mother of all mother-in-law problems: When he was 56, he married model Mandy Smith. After they got divorced, Mandy's mother married Wyman's son. His former mother-in-law thus became his daughter-in-law. And nobody's blaming pollution.
    Men are slightly more likely than women to think about sex while bicycling, and women are more likely to think about bicycling during sex. If you're not, there's something wrong with you.
    Christopher Harriman was more likely to think of sex and Bill Wyman. Harriman was engaged to a Miss Universe, Thailand's startlingly-named Porntip Nakhirankanok. But pulsating Porntip's ferocious mother hated him. The last we heard, she was trying to decide between the man she loved, and the mother who was liable to strangle them both.
    For some couples, the problems start only after the wedding.
    Korean honeymooners toured the sights of Stockholm, and then bought a train ticket for romantic Venice. The train sped off in the opposite direction, 500 kilometers to the north, to the Swedish town of Vannas. Instead of canals and the Piazza San Marco, the newlyweds saw a lot of timber in a bleak snowy landscape. Accepting that its clerk in Stockholm had misheard the Koreans' imperfect English, the railway company gave them a free trip to Venice. The young Koreans were graciously forgiving, saying that they enjoyed every minute of the trip to Vannas. They had never seen so much snow.
    On the other hand, there was Mike and Cheryl Mason, who left England for a holiday in Kenya. Mike didn't have a very nice holiday. Cheryl met a Kenyan warrior, and they decided to get married. Mike meekly went home alone. He explained: "What do you say to a man who has killed a lion with his bare hands and has been sleeping with your wife?"
    Four families in Burlington County, New Jersey, sued the Catholic Church because it endangered their afterlives. They claim authorities did not remove a priest who was sexually abusive, which destroyed the families' religious faith, thus severely reducing their chances of being admitted to heaven.
    I presume I'll see those four families in hell, because of all the sacrilegious Postscripts I ran.
    If I spend an eternity in purgatory for running this next story, it'll be worth it. (This came to us only a few weeks ago, too late for Postscripts.)  
    The Associated Press reported that an Arkansas woman was killed after leaping through her moving car's sun roof during an incident best described as "a mistaken rapture."
    Thirteen other people were injured after a 20-car pile-up resulted from people trying to avoid hitting Georgann Williams, 28, who believed she saw Jesus. Which she did, sort of.
    The rapture occurred when she saw 12 people floating, and then passed a man on the side of the road who she claimed was Jesus.
    The weird thing is, she wasn't imagining it.
    Her husband Everett said: "She started screaming 'He's back! He's back!' and climbed right out of the sunroof and jumped off the car. I was slowing down but she wouldn't wait till I stopped. She was convinced that Jesus was gonna lift her up into the sky."
    "This is the strangest thing I've seen since I've been on the force,"
said Paul Madison, first officer on the scene.
    Madison questioned the man who "looked like Jesus" and discovered that he was Ernie Jenkins, 32, of Fort Smith, who was dressed up as Jesus. Jenkins was on his way to a costume party when the tarpaulin of his pickup truck came loose and released 12 blow-up sex dolls filled with helium, which floated up into the air.
    Jenkins, who has often been told that he looks like Jesus, pulled over and lifted his arms toward the sex dolls in frustration, and said, "Come back here," just as the Williams car passed him. Everett said that Georgann, who "loved Jesus more than anything else," was sure that it was Jesus lifting people to heaven.