Have you heard or read a news story lately that just baffles you compeletely? Here's my latest.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Answers

Yeah, I saw that one. If you're gonna steal something from Derek Jeter and risk getting fired by the New York Freaking Yankees, at least make it something interesting. Like the towel he used to clean up the mess after nailing crazyass Mariah Carey. Or perhaps the sheet.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

This didn't exactly baffle me... http://www.teenhollywood.com/d.asp?r=6302&cat=1027

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

The story that's really baffling me is the Tri-State Crematory thing. I just don't get it. The crematory worked, they found out, and Ray-Brent Marsh hasn't offered any explanation of why - for at least five years - he didn't actually cremate anyone.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

It worked?! Amazing. That is the craziest story ever. People in North GA are totally scandalized.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

it gets no worse than this, from my hometown:

http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/030702dnmethitandrun.b7a8 5.html

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

sorry, that last address isn't valid. try this

http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/08/hit.and.rundeath.ap/

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

The story about the woman who hit the man and let him die in her garage upsets me much more than the crematory man (almost spelled that 'creamatory', which sound like a good place to get a scoop of Blue Bell). Those people in his yard were already dead, but the man who died stuck in that garage pled for his life with a crazy woman. That is so Stephen King that it give me terror chills.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

It's so awful.

I love how the lawyers were like "Well, she came out and apologized to him a few times, you know, while he was dying and couldn't get off her windshield."

I hope she goes to jail forever.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Y'all have no idea how embarassed all of Fort Worth is over that. I feel awful for making fun of Georgia, now, with the crematory.

Did y'all here that the crematorium guy had pictures of the bodies on his computer?????

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Try running a google search for 'c0rpse p0rn' (obviously, without the zeros - I just didn't want this forum coming up in someone else's search for the same) and see what comes up. I had heard that guy was using the bodies for this. It wouldn't surprise me.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Oh, dear Lord. Surely not. I haven't heard about that, at all, and I live in Atlanta. I hope it's just a terrible rumor.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

That hit and run thing is unREAL. I can't believe she drove all the way back to her house with a man on her windshield. It's so cartoonish.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

"That hit and run thing is unREAL. I can't believe she drove all the way back to her house with a man on her windshield. It's so cartoonish."

Yeah, it's like one of the segments from the fine motion picture Creepshow 2. Except in that (better) version, the person who was hit got to kill the lady that hit him.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

The crematorium guy... sick bastard

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

I have a question for you guys: If you owned a creamatorium and someone dropped off a body a paid with a bad check, would you burn the body or just throw it out back?

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Well, I'd just build a big bonfire in the back yard and th'ow it in there, same's you'd do a cast-iron skillet.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

I believe I'd keep the body in cold storage and submit the check for collections. And if that didn't work? I'd turn it over to the state for anonymous "pauper" burial. What I would NOT do is stack it up in my fucking backyard along with hundreds of other corpses.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Or, I guess I'd call the people who wrote the check and say, "Come get your body." And if they didn't, I'd take it and throw it in their back yard.

Lord, I'm just kidding. I'd call the cops, or something. And then I'd cremate the body - because, damn, how hard is it to slide it in there and light the thing? That's what one does at a crematorium. Trash at the dump gets more consideration than those people gave those bodies.

Having had a relative that was cremated, I can say that if I found out they'd just slung him out back, I'd be mighty pissed off.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Is that the case? That all those bodies were becaues people didn't remit payment?? Good lord. It gets worse.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Al, I bet your check cleared. I sure hope we don't find the venerable one in your back yard.

And I don't know if it happened that way, it's just a theory. Why damn the man with all this speculation before ALL of the evidence is gathered? Who knows how many bad checks were passed or if he indeed called the authorities a few times too many and was ignored?

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

Maybe the people in that area are notorious at bad checks, but I find it hard to believe there were HUNDREDS of bad checks written to that place, a few? probably. But enough to account for all of those bodies? Hell no.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2002

My understanding is that the families didn't deal directly with the crematory. Funeral homes in THREE DIFFERENT STATES sent bodies there. So the bad check theory is out.

I just hope the corpse porn theory is out, as well.

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

I belong to this grief support group (a real swinging way to spend your Tuesday nights, let me tell you), and some of the people in it were traumatized when the news of this thing came out. They all called they're funeral homes to make sure they didn't use that place.

D.L., you know what would happen if the large man was found in our backyard? JoLo would call me up and say "Dammit, your Daddy has done it again!"

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

You know I meant "their funeral homes."

Why can't I write?

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

I don't think there's anything to the bad check thing. I think that the pictures that they found on is computer were ones that he had downloaded from the internet (which raises the question of what would possess someone to do a Google search on "corpse" + "rotting" + "my backyard" - or whatever).

But STILL - the thing worked! And what I really don't get is why his family - who HAD to have been aware that there were hundreds of corpses all over their land - didn't say anything. Ray-Brent Marsh got married just a year or so ago, which means that the girl who married him had to have married him knowing that she was going to live in a house that was surrounded by dead people. They had a baby in a house that was surrounded by dead people!

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

On a related note, not too many years ago a pilot in the SF Bay Area was arrested for not scattering peoples' ashes at sea. He was paid to go up in his plane and then scatter ashes over the ocean. Instead of doing that he took the money and put the boxes of ashes in his garage and one of those rental storage units. The police eventually found hundreds of containers of ashes stored away. I'm not sure what happened to the ashes. I think some were reclaimed by family but a lot weren't.

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

Not to fear on the "Crematorium Circuit". Birmingham is big enough and current enough to possess its own crematorium and I haven't bounced a check in 40 years. However, there IS something in the news that has me amazed and aghast. The INS snafu with the terrorist's visa's being renewed. Now, listen up young people! We have some folks in top positions in this government who are not thinking. Someone at INS should have gone into the computer system after the events of 9-11 and checked to see if those guys were actually listed. Surely, they were looking at the INS files while attempting to identify the guys who did this? Why, even after the Monica Lewinski scandal, someone in my office who needed to be actually working discovered that we had her Explorer financed! I retired before she terminated but I assume she is still riding today as long as the money keeps coming in! The INS snafu is truly disturbing. I thought we were smater than that.

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

You know, in re: the pilot Kay mentioned...

Not that I'm advocating these cases of "fraud with human remains," but why in the name of all that is logical wouldn't that guy have just put the ashes in the Dumpster? If you aren't going to do what people paid you to do, why would you pay good money to rent a storage unit? Wouldn't disposing of the ashes in the ocean actually have been cheaper than storage?

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

If you aren't going to do what people paid you to do, why would you pay good money to rent a storage unit? Wouldn't disposing of the ashes in the ocean actually have been cheaper than storage?

Now, see, this is my exact question about the cremation guy. Why the hell didn't he just set them on fire? Because, really, why drag them off into the woods and stack them and go to all that trouble? Especially if, as T says, the thing worked?

It just makes no sense at all, which leads me to believe that something "off-the-wall" (as Mother would say) was happening in North GA. There has to be a reason.

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

With all due respect, isn't North Georgia just "off-the-wall" in general?

I mean, it is Deliverance country.

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

"Now, see, this is my exact question about the cremation guy. Why the hell didn't he just set them on fire?"

In the category of Knowledge I Probably Shouldn't Have:

Human remains will not burn to ash in the sort of fire one could set in one's backyard. Soft tissues will, but bones can't. Even a big hot bonfire won't work. The crematorium thingies get to temperatures 1000's of degrees higher, from what I understand. So he would still have had to bury the remains in the yard.

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

I think the question is: isn't it harder work to drag bodies into the woods and stack them up and live with the stench than it would be to just do his job and put them in the crematory??? I want to say it's just pure laziness (and a huge dose of disrespect) but to me it seems like MORE work to not do your job in this case.

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

Here's what I don't get: they found bodies that had been disinterred, i.e. buried peacefully (presumably) and then dug up years later. Which pretty much blows a hole in the not-burning- bodies-to-save-money theory.

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

All this logic talk about something that is so purely pathologic.

I have this friend (we all refer to him as "The Omega Man" as he acts like he's the last man on earth) who basically lives in his truck, works job to job freelance, smokes a lot of weed and has given up on any sort of productive, meaningful life. His ambition has slowly dwindled over the years to the point where he doesn't really care about the consequences of his actions (or inactions), personally or professionally. BUT, he's still charming enough to maintain a minimal income. There is no logical explanation for this type of behavior...

What The Omega Man owned a crematorium?

-- Anonymous, March 13, 2002

The one that still makes me scratch my head is the curtains that AG Ashcroft bought (with taxpayer money no less) to cover the breast of a statue because he didn't want to photographed in front of it. Huh? If it bothers him that much can't he find another spot for photo ops? And he's afraid of calico cats. Just calicos. Hooboy...

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2002

Here's a link to the story about Ashcroft, and it has links to the calico cat reference:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/gate/archive/2002/03/08/notes030802.DTL

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2002

This article brought a big "Good Grief!" from me.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2002

This one cracked me up:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/11/MN94701.DTL

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2002

Okay, I've obviously forgotten the HTML for making links. Little help?

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2002

For the cut-and-paste challenged, Here is Kay's link.

(For kay, the syntax is: <a href="http://hostname.com/reference">Link text here</a>)

-- Anonymous, April 15, 2002

Afghanistan News

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-- Anonymous, July 14, 2002