Al Gore punted on third down.

• Jose Rubert of Plymouth, Connecticut, was in love with a married woman, Nicole Pelletier, so he beat her husband to death in 1989, but failed to reap the benefits of his crime: he's serving 30 years. In 1995 he apparently stopped getting valentines in the mail from his lover, so he wrote a letter to officials telling them that the wife made him do it. A jury agreed, sentencing her to 60 years as an accessory. Apparently Jose doesn't realize there are no coed prisons.

• The Beth Israel Medical Center in Brooklyn was closed down when a 21-year-old Nigerian man showed up and emergency room authorities thought he had smallpox. The New York City Office of Emergency Management swung into action, with hotlines operating to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta. The man had fever and a rash on his face and other parts of his body. Two officials from the city Health Department showed up to do a clinical evaluation of the man--and said that not only was it not smallpox, but they didn't even need to run lab tests. They discharged the patient and told him to seek follow-up care with a dermatologist, leading to our observation: that is one hellacious case of acne.

* Renee Koutsouradis was pulled off a Delta flight at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport when a security agent found something vibrating in one of her checked bags. She was taken to the bag on the tarmac and asked to remove the item and hold it up. When she did, three male Delta employees "began laughing hysterically," according to her lawsuit. It was a sex toy. Must have been one of the larger models.

* Karen Brand, Vice President of the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce, was upset over being dumped by the retired Alaska Commissioner of Public Safety, Glenn Godfrey, so she waited for Godfrey at his home in Eagle River. When he drove up after midnight with his wife Patricia, she shot her ex-lover dead, wounded his wife, then killed herself. Those Anchorage tourism brochures will be a little late.

• Colin Edwards of Brooklyn, yelling at his wife Stacy and accusing her of cheating on him, grabbed a kitchen knife and killed her with several stab wounds to the chest, making her confession unlikely.
• Linda Akin of Cedar Creek, Texas, got into an argument with her mother and sat on her, killing her with her 350-pound frame, police say. If you butt in, you get butt on.
• David Schicchi of Brooklyn said "I love you so much that it hurts inside"--to the girlfriend he killed three years ago. After being convicted of stabbing Jennifer Davids seven times in the head, back and neck with a knife and scissors, breaking off the wooden handle and leaving the scissors stuck in her neck, Schicchi read a long rambling statement to the court in which he appeared to be speaking to his victim. He talked about regrets over spending too much time waxing his car instead of taking his girlfriend out, then recited the lyrics to the 1987 pop song "Can't We Try," which go "Can't we try just a little bit harder? Can't we try just a little bit more?" No, David, we can't.
• Viola Virginia Journey of Woodland, California, got tired of taking care of her frail 79-year-old husband, so she shot him to death. No one believed the 70-year-old's claim that it was an accident, so now she's doing two sentences of 25-to-life plus an additional ten years for "elder abuse." But at least she has some peace and quiet..
• Vanessa Foote of Brooklyn conspired with her lover, Jeffrey Richardson, to kill her first husband, Wall Street accountant Kevin Foote. After Richardson shot him, she used the life insurance money to pay for her wedding reception with Richardson. The honeymoon period turned rocky, though, when Vanessa Foote Richardson decided to testify against the second husband at his murder trial. Just because she said "Kill him" doesn't mean she didn't love him.
• Scott Brian Hall of Mastic, New York, got into a heated argument about their four-year-old daughter with ex-girlfriend Candace Williams while she sat in a parked car with her friend Brian Daily in a Riverhead, New York, driveway with the daughter strapped in a car seat. The argument ended when Hall pulled a gun, shot both Williams and Daily, then fled. Williams tried to drive to the hospital but passed out and struck a light pole before crashing into a chain-link fence. That "Why did Daddy do that?" conversation is gonna be tough.
• Javier Rivera of New York City handcuffed his girlfriend's ankles and duct-taped her wrists together, then passed out in a drunken stupor. The girlfriend, a former Miami model, was able to rouse him three hours later, and he unlocked one of the cuffs, freeing one leg--then passed out again. Five hours later the woman called police, who showed up at 11 a.m., removed the cuffs, woke up Rivera and arrested him. Cops say he had no idea why he was being locked up--but the woman claims she was held against her will. That will teach you to keep a woman waiting.
• Christian Lindblad of Big Bear Lake, California, fired three bullets into his girlfriend's hand, leg and stomach, according to police, and then decided not to call 911. Instead he called his parents, who helped him set up the girlfriend on a mattress in the garage, where he cared for her with gauze, soapy water and antiseptics for six days. The parents blabbed to a friend, who had the audacity to call paramedics, who airlifted Christina Stebbins to Loma Linda University Medical Center in critical condition. Lindblad is 36, but he knows Mommy and Daddy will always be Mommy and Daddy.
• Andre Neverson, a Jamaican living illegally in Brooklyn, got into an argument with his sister Patricia over who owns the house she bought in 1999, shot her in the chest and head, drove to Aubrey Cohen College in Queens, where his estranged girlfriend Donna Davis was studying, and vanished with her in a Dodge Caravan. Three days later the girlfriend's body was found in a vacant lot in Brooklyn, shot once in the head. Neverson had been deported to Jamaica in 2000 after serving five years for a 1992 shooting, but he slipped back into the country six months before the latest crime--because it's cruel to break up a family like that.
• John Negron of Brooklyn allegedly set his live-in girlfriend on fire in 1993 and served eight years for the crime before his conviction was overturned and he received a new trial. At the second trial, the girlfriend testified that Negron covered her with turpentine and lit her up, causing burns over half of her body. The jury voted for acquittal, and so Negron is now free to see if there are still sparks in the relationship.
• One week after the September 11th attacks, Brent David Seever of Detroit found his ex-girlfriend with a new love interest, Yemeni native Ali Almansoop, and chased the man out of her home and shot him dead. Getting creative with his defense, Seever claimed he was enraged over Arab terrorism. The judge and jury rewarded his patriotism with lifetime service in a state- supported institution.
• Morris Lindenbaum of Glen Head, New York, infected his wife with HIV one year after their marriage without telling her he had the disease. It slipped his mind.
• Cherisse Robinson of Brooklyn stabbed her ex-boyfriend's pregnant girlfriend in the chest, arms and stomach with a 12-inch knife. She pled guilty, but was freed on bail pending sentencing. She used the extra time to find her ex-boyfriend and father of her two children at a nightclub, where she proceeded to stab him in the chest and puncture his lung. For the time being, conjugal visits are out.
• Glenn Robinson of the Milwaukee Bucks was arrested for assault, domestic battery and illegal possession of a firearm after he allegedly "pushed and shoved" his ex-fiancee, which, seeing as how he's 6-foot-7, 230 pounds, would probably be a flagrant foul.
• Ron Artest of the Indiana Pacers was charged with criminal contempt and aggravated harassment for allegedly making threatening calls to his girlfriend in Long Island City, New York, where she is raising their son. The girlfriend claims he called to say, "I'm going to have to hurt you," which we all know is just common NBA trash-talk that roughly translates "Baby, baby, oh baby, you're my baby."
• Yolanda Billingslea of Brooklyn got into an argument with her friend Ieshia Byrd and started stabbing her with a small folding knife, when Billingslea's 7-year-old daughter Tashiema came downstairs to see what was wrong. The angry mother then turned the knife on the little girl, with Byrd getting stabbed more as she tried to stop her. Billingslea ended up stabbing the girl 30 times, killing her, then chasing Byrd into the street and stabbing her repeatedly. When Byrd wrested the small knife out of her hand, Billingslea ran back into the apartment, retrieved a large kitchen knife, ran back to the fallen Byrd, and ended up stabbing her 15 times in the face, back, chest and arms. That will teach people to keep interrupting her.
• Neeranjan Kumar of Queens was upset at his girlfriend for working as a bartender, so he strangled her with a telephone cord and then hung himself in the garage, pretty much settling all alcohol issues.
• Ruby Clayton of the Bronx left a backyard barbecue at her boyfriend Albert Henry's house to "shower and freshen up" at her own apartment a few blocks away. When she returned, Henry was in bed with another woman--a tryst interrupted when Clayton plunged a large kitchen knife into his chest, killing him while the burgers were still warm.
• Josephine Gray of Baltimore lost her first husband in 1974 when he was found shot dead in his car in Poolesville, Maryland. Her second husband was found shot dead in his apartment in Germantown, Maryland, in 1990. And her boyfriend Clarence Goode never made it to the altar; he was found stuffed in the trunk of his car in West Baltimore in 1996. Prosecutors have put her on trial for murder, saying she killed or assisted in the killing of all three men in order to collect on life insurance totaling $163,000. She was never tried before, say prosecutors, because witnesses fear her voodoo powers. She was obviously levitating those bullets.
• Chris Harmon of Louisville fed vodka to his 7-year-old stepson through a medical feeding tube, causing the boy to be admitted to Kosair Children's Hospital with a 0.59 percent blood alcohol level. The boy suffers from Vacteral Syndrome, a birth defect that affects the vertebrae, anal area, limbs, esophagus, heart and liver, and requires him to be fed through a gastrointestinal bag. He can't sleep without medication, which was stopped when his mother's health care program cut off payment. The stepdad figured a cocktail would cheer him up.
• Alim Hassan of Jersey City, New Jersey, demanded that his wife convert to Islam, and when she refused, he allegedly stabbed her to death, then turned the same knife on her daughters Sharon Yassim and Marlyn Hassan, before taking a bus bound for Canada. The Mounties stopped him at the border and turned him back toward Mecca.
• The four children of Pamela Reser told a McMinnville, Oregon, jury that their mother had sex with them when they were aged 8 and under, then forced them to have sex with one another. Mom was sentenced to 116 years, but after three years in prison the kids admitted they made up the whole story. Kids say the darndest things.

* Both terminals at Oakland International Airport were evacuated after an elderly woman without a plane ticket wandered through a security checkpoint exit and into a secured area. After thoroughly checking the woman's walker and asking her to remove her orthopedic support hose, the airport was reopened.

* Madeline Carmichael of Brooklyn beat to death her three- year-old daughter Latanisha and hid the body in a trunk behind a closet wall for 20 years. It's amazing what you can do with potpourri.

• * Two days after Paul Gilbey died in the World Trade Center attacks, trying to rescue his co-workers at EuroBrokers, his wife Deena was told that she and her two American sons would be arrested and deported. Since she and her husband were both British citizens, she could only stay in the country as long as her husband's work visa was valid. When she appealed to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, she was told that her green card application hadn't reached a certain level of the process, and that granting her card would set a dangerous precedent, even though her 7-year-old and 4-year-old sons were born in America. Now she's living off her dead husband's life insurance and waiting to be sent to England--because we can't be too careful about Brit stay-at-home moms who might harbor a secret admiration for terrorist killers of their husbands.

Scenes from domestic life: 

• * William Stephens of Georgia broke into the home of estranged girlfriend Jennifer Ingram, microwaved her Rottweiler puppy for 10 to 15 seconds, took it out, stabbed it, put it back in and microwaved it some more. He told Jennifer he wanted to do the same to her, but she wasn't that petite. * Clinton wept. Lott leapt. Bush swept. * Faiz Mohammad, who claims to be 105 years old, was released from months of captivity at the Guantanamo military base in Cuba, saying "I don't know why the Americans arrested me. I am just an old man." Mohammad said he wasn't angry, though, because he was presented with a new cotton sweatshirt and socks when he was sent back to his village of Dehrawad in Uruzgan Province, 400 miles southwest of Kabul. "They treated us well," he said. "We had enough food to eat. We could pray and wash with water five times a day. We had the Koran and read it all the time." And then, of course, there was that free trans-Atlantic airfare. * The Church of England published a report on itself predicting that it will wither away by the year 2030, acknowledging that the church is "prone to scandal and open to ridicule," and that it seems like "an outdated, discredited, dying institution that the country is walking away from without a backward glance." In some parts of England, as few as 0.7 per cent of the population attends services, the report continued, and membership has been in decline since 1904. The good news is that Anglicans don't have enough altar boys to have sex scandals. * Nine members of a Romanian and Albanian kidnapping ring were arrested for allegedly plotting to kidnap Spice Girl Posh, also known as Victoria Beckham. The thugs apparently planned to ambush her outside her house north of London and use chemical knockout spray to subdue her and both of her two young children. But they were foiled by . . . The News of the World! Reporters had infiltrated the gang in order to teach it a lesson: never, ever, cut off tabloid access to a celebrity. * Eighteen-year-old Zena Mahlangu danced bare-breasted at the traditional "umhlanga" ceremony in Swaziland, during which King Mswati III picks out his future wives and concubines. Later Zena was picked up from her school by two female courtiers and taken to a royal lodge to be "prepared" as the king's 13th wife. Unfortunately for the king, his future mother-in-law turned out to be a leader in Swaziland's feminist movement and an executive at the postal and telecommunications company. The result: Mom went to the nation's highest court with charges that her daughter was kidnapped. Human rights organizations weighed in on the side of the mother, saying the king violated the United Nations Charter and that the nubile maidens were victims of "rape." Zena herself, however, sent word that she loved the king, no doubt leading to exchanges such as the following: "Mom! You're gonna ruin everything!" "Young lady, I'm bringing you home right now!" "Yeah, right! Who's the kidnapper now?" "Don't smart-mouth your mother!" "Well, you're embarrassing me in front of my friends!" "Those people aren't your friends!" "I want to live in a palace!" "Oh, this house is not good enough for you all of a sudden!" "What. Ever." * French President Jacques Chirac cancelled a high-level meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair after saying Blair had been rude to him. "I have never been spoken to like this before," said Chirac, after being corrected by Blair during a spirited dispute in the European Council, with Blair saying Chirac was "plain wrong" about an agricultural policy. If the leader of all the world's Frenchmen can claim that someone was rude, there's hope for Mike Tyson in international politics. * Hundreds of French prostitutes swarmed the streets of Paris, demonstrating in front of the Senate against Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister who is sponsoring a bill to crack down on them under a new crime called "passive soliciting." If the law passes, any woman who's dressed in such a way as to give the ordinary person the impression she's soliciting can be fined $3,800 or get six months in jail--which could be hell on Calvin Klein models during Paris Fashion Week. * The U.S. Postal Service announced it's facing a critical shortage of "flat tubs," those white plastic containers with the convenient handles that make perfect storage boxes. Even though there's a warning label on every box reading "Maximum penalty for theft or misuse of postal property $1,000 fine and 3 years imprisonment," flat-tub thieves don't seem particularly impressed. Now that the Christmas rush season is fast approaching, there aren't enough containers to handle the mail. Here at Joe Bob's Week in Review, where we refuse to pay the $10,000 or serve the 30 years, we suggest a general amnesty. * Michael Jordan filed suit against a hairdresser/model/actress named Karla Knafel, claiming she had made a $5 million "extortion demand" on him, threatening to expose the details of their relationship more than ten years ago. Knafel is famous from the 1991 classic erotic thriller "Bikini Island," in which she played the memorable role of "Auditioning Girl," but got her big break when Jordan paid her $250,000 the first time she asked him for money. Apparently Jordan had grown tired of the concept and didn't want to see "Karla II." * In an effort to cut down on Donut Bellies, the city of Chicago is paying a $250 bonus to any police officer who can pass a fitness test. About a third of the city's 13,500 cops signed up for the test, with the remaining 9,000 opting for transcendental meditation. * The eight-story Darwin Centre opened in London, displaying more than 22 million pickled creatures, including sharks, boa constrictors, giant stingrays, swordfish and a Komodo dragon. Many of the items were collected by Charles Darwin and Captain James Cook during their voyages around the world, and more than 60 tons of alcohol were needed to preserve the specimens, which are owned by the Natural History Museum but rarely displayed until now because of lack of space. Oliver Crimmen, the museum's curator of fish, told the Times of London that he is especially fond of the arapaima, world's largest freshwater fish, which normally lives in the Amazon but in this case spent its sentient years at the London Zoo. Since the collection is so vast, there have been rumors for years that various Members of Parliament have been dissected, pickled and hidden among the jars, notably one Oswald Whitcomb, of the East Surrey Whitcombs, who stood for Cheltham in the 1780s. Keep a keen eye out, lads. * The World Trade Center death toll went down again, to 2,795, after two more people were found alive--Peter Montoulieu of Miami and Tina Spicer of New York. Peter just thought it would be cool to hear his name read out on TV on September 11th, and Tina hangs out in goth clubs. * Selina Johnson and Orville Wilson became the latest of 48 defendants convicted in Chicago of smuggling liquid cocaine in baby-formula cans and renting babies from their parents so the scam would look realistic on airline routes out of Panama and Jamaica. The ring was discovered when police noticed several burping deaths on the Southside. * Angus Deayton, popular host of the BBC program "Have I Got News For You," was forced to resign after details of his cocaine habit and fondness for prostitutes were reported in the London tabloids. A candidate for Betty Ford spin control in a country that doesn't know Betty Ford--such a waste. * As Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, celebrated 100 years of educating the rich and famous of the Middle East-- including King Hussein of Jordan, academic lion Edward Said, Omar Sharif, George Antonius and arms czar Adnan Khashoggi--the college received a call from Mohamed "Dodi" al-Fayed, asking when he should show up. Unfortunately for Dodi, the call was fielded by college secretary Armand Khahill, who in 1988 had publicly exposed as false al-Fayed's claim of being a Victoria alumnus. Apparently, though, the Egyptian entrepreneur has a whole chapter in his upcoming autobiography, detailing his glorious Victoria College days. Give him 14 more years and he'll be the valedictorian. * Scenes from our secure republic: 

  * John Chwaszczewski, a construction worker in Williamsburg, Virginia, opened fire with an assault-style rifle on a helicopter landing in his neighborhood to pick up a businessman. "Maybe I overreacted, but I did feel this was terrorism at its utmost," Chwaszczewski said. It does make an odd kind of sense. Al Qaeda, suffering from a manpower shortage, doesn't have the resources to attack the White House, but that COLONIAL capital . . .

  *

   Scenes from domestic life: 

  * Juan Carlos Guerrero, a Mexican animal handler, was mad because his wife left him, so he kidnapped her at knifepoint, drugged her with knockout gas, and abused her for four days in a Montauk, New York, basement. She eventually came to her senses.

  * In these parlous days, it's time once again for the Joe Bob semi-annual review of our secure republic:
  • Alert immigration officials nabbed ten naked Chinese men who waded ashore at Newport Beach, California, after being dropped off by a Taiwanese fishing boat. They would have been able to blend into the crowd, but one was wearing a flesh-toned Speedo and was stared at for being "sooooooo nineties."
  • Three peace protesters were arrested and jailed after they sailed paper airplanes toward machine-gun-toting security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway. It might seem like an overreaction, but American security sources said that it was only the beginning of a conspiracy that could ultimately involve paper-football thumping.
  • Betsylew Ross Miale-Gix of Brier, Washington, was arrested at Bradley International Airport near Hartford, Connecticut, after trying to carry boomerangs onto her flight. Miale-Gix is a member of the United States World Cup team in boomerang and one of the top ten boomerang throwers in the world, so obviously, if Bin Laden could get to her . . .
  • A woman boarding an America West plane in San Francisco joked to a flight attendant, "Have you checked your crew for sobriety?"--and was escorted off the plane, taken to the station manager, questioned, and not allowed to continue on the delayed flight. The airline justified the detention under the new Ashcroft Wiseass Rule.
  • Wyatt Forman, boarding a United Airlines flight from Denver to Phoenix, was selected by the airline's computer- profiling system for special security scrutiny, and a mark was placed on his boarding card. At the gate he got the full treatment: pat-down, examination of shoes, complete examination of every item in his carry-on bag, and of course extensive electronic wanding. Forman, unemployed and not using a credit card, is no longer considered a terrorist threat, although government officials are not ruling out the possibility of other 7-year-old bombers.
  • A World War II Air Force hero, travelling to West Point to give a speech, was told his Medal of Honor was a sharp object and couldn't be carried on board. All future Medals of Honor will be made of the same material used for plastic picnic forks.
  • Congressman Sanford Bishop of Georgia boarded a Delta flight from Washington to Atlanta, sat on the ground for an hour because of a weather delay, and then was told that he couldn't use the bathroom for the first 30 minutes of the flight due to security regulations at Reagan National Airport. He told the flight attendant that he understood the rule, but his bladder didn't. Trying to avoid a urinary disaster, he requested a paper cup, stepped into an area where the other passengers couldn't see him, faced the exit door, urinated into the cup, and eventually deposited it in the cabin lavatory. Meanwhile, the cockpit radioed ahead to Atlanta police, who detained the congressman and questioned him. The FAA is considering a fine of $1,100 under the "unruly passenger" statutes, which require all passengers to urinate on themselves if necessary, otherwise the terrorists will have won.
  • Edgardo Cureg, a mathematics student at the University of South Florida, was sitting in the first-class section of a Continental Airlines plane at Newark International Airport, getting ready to return to Tampa. While chatting with a Sri Lankan professor from his university, he was ordered off the plane, along with the professor and a third man, Michael Dasrath, a financial analyst. Cureg is originally from the Philippines, and Dasrath was born in Guyana. Dasrath says he witnessed a woman calling the captain over, pointing at him, and saying, "Those brown-skinned men are behaving suspiciously." Even though they were all American citizens and had all cleared security twice, we can't be too careful about international meetings of Filipino, Guyanese and Sri Lankan terrorists plotting on those Tampa flights.
  • Hassan Sader of Arlington, Virginia, a tennis coach and an American citizen, boarded a Seattle-bound American Airlines flight at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, put his carry-on bag of tennis rackets in the overhead bin, and settled into his seat. A female passenger called over a flight attendant and pointed in his direction. Shortly thereafter, he was asked to leave the flight. Then, in the pattern that's becoming very familiar, American booked Sader on another flight, tending to discredit their original assumption that he's a security risk. But who knows what this guy was capable of, especially if he's trained in the two-handed backhand smash down the line.
  • Assem Bayaa, an audit manager for Arthur Andersen in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was kicked off a United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York, causing him to miss his connection to Saudi Arabia. In this case, the guy had been screened so closely and repeatedly that he was the last passenger to board. Then a flight attendant approached him and asked him to step to the front of the plane. Then some security guys showed up and told him "the crew does not feel comfortable with you on board." (Why couldn't the flight attendant tell him the same thing?) Beware the sneaky new Certified Public Accountant suicide bombers.
  • White House spokesman Ari Fleischer praised security screeners who required him to remove his shoes for a search before boarding a commercial flight. This is known as the Rasputin Theory of Terrorism.
  • U.S. Representative Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, was required to remove her shoes twice while waiting in the same line at La Guardia Airport in New York. "It's probably because I bought a one-way ticket at the last minute, and because I have blond hair and a lot of wrinkles," she told The New York Times. Or maybe she just had ratty-looking shoes.
  • Deolinda Smith of New York City, a 70-year-old mentally ill woman, was deported to the Dominican Republic by the Immigration and Naturalization Service even though she's an American citizen born in Ossining, New York. The deportation hearings were carried out while Smith was in a mental hospital, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, diabetes and a heart condition. An INS spokesman explained that, when they accused her of being an illegal alien, she didn't contest it. And you have no idea how many sick and elderly females pretend to be Americans when they're actually fugitives from Santo Domingo nursing homes, which are known Al Qaeda facilities.
  • Boarding a flight to Milwaukee at Reagan National Airport in Washington, Al Gore was told, "Sorry, sir, you have to go through extra screening." His briefcase and suitcase were closely searched as passengers looked on and called friends on cell phones. The following day, the search was repeated when he boarded in Milwaukee on the way to New York. This is the "How Did He Get More Votes Than Any Person in History Except Reagan?" theory of terrorism.
  • The Transportation Security Administration tested the security systems at 32 major airports by using undercover agents carrying fake guns, bombs and other weapons. Overall, the screeners failed to detect prohibited items 24 per cent of the time. The worst airport: Los Angeles, at 41 per cent. Best airports (under 10 per cent): Miami, Newark, Fort Lauderdale and Honolulu. The old fake-coconut trick only works at LAX.
  • A United Airlines flight took off from San Francisco bound for Baltimore, flew for an hour, then turned around and went back because a passenger named Mohammed Ahmed was supposedly on the FBI "watch list." San Francisco police met the plane, questioned Ahmed, and decided he wasn't on the watch list after all. The 161 passengers were sent on another flight two hours later, and given a $25 voucher for their exposure to Flying While Arab.
  • After Richard C. Reid tried to light a fuse on his tennis shoes on the famous Paris-to-Miami American Airlines flight, a crew member yanked the shoes off Reid's feet and took them into the cockpit. That's certainly how we want a bomb handled and disposed of.
  • British actor Steven Berkoff, performing his one-man show "Shakespeare's Villains" in Ann Arbor, Michigan, overstayed his visa by one day and was deported. Check his shoes.
  • The Lincoln Center Festival in New York invited an Iranian acting troupe to perform its traditional music drama "Ta'ziyeh" as an expression of friendship after 9/11, but 10 of the 28 members of the cast were denied visas. Lincoln Center substituted another play, hoping the fear of bombs won't produce a bomb.
  • Alon Pinkas, the Israeli consul general to the United States, was boarding his flight home to New York from San Francisco when a National Airlines pilot told him he didn't want him on the plane. "I don't want to take a high-profile dignitary on my plane," the pilot said. Pinkas and his wife had to reschedule their travel on Continental Airlines, because, after all, an Israeli diplomat might be trying to . . . uh . . . hmmm . . . well . . . he must have been up to something.
  • A terminal at Los Angeles International Airport was evacuated after a scanning machine flagged a suspicious package that turned out to contain tubs of jam. We presume it was farkleberry, the preferred dessert of Arkansas-based terrorists.
  
  * Abu Bakar Bashir, suspected of masterminding the massacre at a Bali disco, was asked if he had anything to say to the relatives of the victims, and he said, "My message to the families is please convert to Islam as soon as possible"--in order to avoid the fate of everyone who died in the blast and went to hell. He then blamed the United States for the bombing, held a prayer service in which he prayed for Osama bin Laden, and said that in the future it won't matter anyway, because the new Islamic government of Indonesia will ban all night clubs. Then he checked into a hospital to avoid being questioned by Jakarta police--right before we were going to ask him who he liked in the World Series. * Saddam Hussein issued "Get out of jail free" cards to tens of thousands of prisoners, virtually emptying the nation's penal institutions in a move that pretty much gave Amnesty International the week off. * Ice-T will marry Coco. Normally you have to go to a nursing home cafeteria to find that combination. * A stone inscription reading "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" was unearthed in Jerusalem on a limestone burial box. Rumors that a graffiti prankster had inserted the word "older" in front of "brother" have proved unfounded. * Somebody electronically attacked nine of the 13 root computer servers that manage global Internet traffic by transmitting data at 30 to 40 times the normal amounts, causing them to shut down for an hour. Experts enacted defensive measures and the attack stopped. In Modesto, California, however, a Pamela Anderson download of 13 billion bytes had to be started all over again. * Mohamad Akbar Popal, a University of Nebraska graduate, took over as chancellor of Kabul University, rehired all the professors who were purged by the Taliban, reopened enrollment to women, and restored the book to the library. * Cuban Premier Fidel Castro has scientists working around the clock to clone Ubre Blanca, the most prolific milk-producing cow in the world, once capable of giving 241 pounds of milk in a single day. Ubre Blanca has been dead since 1985 but has remained in a climate-controlled glass case at the entrance to the National Cattle Health Center, and her tissue samples have been preserved. Castro has, of course, been dead since 1991, but his tissue continues to make four-hour speeches. * Monica Isa, a streetwalker in Turin, Italy, was arrested and charged with restraint of trade for drastically lowering her prices in an effort to force the other hookers out of business. The 24-year-old Sierra Leone native cut her normal fee from 35 euros to 5 euros, or about $3.20, and the other girls in the red- light district reported her to police. The upcoming trial promises to be a repeat of the Microsoft battle against Netscape, with Isa arguing that her fees are globally competitive, and her accusers arguing for European protectionism. The government maintains that her testimony is that of a three-dollar hooker. * The chief of the MacLeod clan in Scotland is selling an entire mountain range that has been owned by the clan for a thousand years--in order to finance roof repairs at his castle. John MacLeod closed a deal to sell the Black Cuillins, a series of peaks on the Isle of Skye, to an unnamed American for $8.9 million--and the other MacLeod's are a little upset. Dunvegan Castle, the 800-year-old family seat, is leaking, though, so what's wrong with unloading a little heather for the sake of a good solid flying buttress, even if it means the area will become slightly more commercial? The American is reportedly already in negotiations with the famous McDonald clan. * Bette Greene's novel "The Drowning of Stephan Jones" was banned in eight school districts in Horry County, South Carolina, after parents claimed that it "promotes homosexuality," contains objectionable language, and blends religious themes in a conflicting manner. The superintendent acted after receiving a letter from Eugene Carroll Craig of Myrtle Beach, who said, "I did not feel that the book should be afforded the dignity of a review board. I looked upon it as a rattlesnake that had crawled into the living rooms of everybody's home in Horry County and needed to be killed right then and right there." The same book has previously been removed from curricula and school library shelves in Boling, Texas, in 1993, because it "teaches anti- Christian beliefs and condones illegal activity," and banned from Mascenic Regional High School in Ipswich, New Hampshire, in 1995. Then there was the 1998 case when the school district of Barron, Wisconsin, removed it and got sued by the ACLU. It's a popular 1991 novel about teens who commit hate crimes against a homosexual couple in a small Arkansas town--which is just, of course, so impossible to imagine. * Blackman, a new board game invented by Chuck Sawyer, involves six players who all start out as 18-year-old black men, in college, the military, the ghetto or show business. First to get to a space marked "Freedom" wins. The rules are purposely complicated so that you're prone to make the wrong decisions due to being ill-informed. Meanwhile you have to weather cards with penalties like "Police chase you for a traffic violation--miss 3 turns" and undergo the agonizing option of whether to take a crime card or not. It could mean big money--$10,000 for a drug deal, for example--or it could send you to federal court with a public defender. It's sort of the reverse of Monopoly, and Sawyer has already sold 15,000 copies through his website, www.blackmangame.com. While in prison, by the way, it's not only possible to get assaulted, but to impregnate women and incur child support. It also becomes increasingly difficult to score that sitcom card providing $40,000 a week. Greta Van Susteren has already condemned the game, according to The Washington Post. She opened an interview with Sawyer by saying, "Is he exploiting his people to make money?" No, he could only do that if he drew the popular Don King card. * A 29-year-old Taiwanese national has performed about 50 castrations on his kitchen table in Oak Park, Michigan, but his latest one, in which he removed the testicles of a 48-year-old Birmingham man, went awry when he was unable to stop the bleeding. Fortunately the man is recovering after several hours of emergency surgery. Police are uncertain as to whether the Taiwanese man committed any crime, although he was turned over to immigration authorities on a visa violation, and they grudgingly admitted that it takes balls. * Eight Members of Parliament introduced a bill authorizing the government to acquire a cat to patrol the halls of Parliament and rid it of mice. It is considered most prudent that it be a Labour as opposed to Tory cat, as it would be likely to be hungrier. * Krispy Kreme donuts were introduced into Canada for the first time, challenging the national donut king Tim Hortons, and early results from the debut store in Mississauga, Ontario, are so spectacular that heart surgeons throughout the nation are selling their homes and trading up. 
  * Scenes from our secure republic: 
  * Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian director who has been honored at the Cannes Film Festival many times and won the Palme D'Or in 1997 for his movie "A Taste of Cherry," was denied a visa to appear at the New York Film Festival where his new film "Ten" premiered. U.S. embassy officials in Paris, where he applied for the visa, said they wanted 90 days to "investigate his background"--making it too late for the appearance. The background of the 62-year-old director can be ascertained via a one-hour search on the Internet, but that would be trifling with potential cinematic terrorism, wouldn't it? 
  * Scenes from domestic life: 
  * In Brooklyn, two Egyptian men, both named Mohammed, tried to put out a contract on six members of their respective families, according to police. Mohammed Khatib wanted his wife killed, because she's "a fat Jew" and he doesn't like his kids wearing yarmulkes, he told the undercover cop he thought was a hitman. But he also wanted his wife's 18-year-old son killed because "he's just a bum," plus his wife's sister because she's "nosy," plus his sister-in-law's son because he's a Hebrew teacher who taught Khatib's children to speak Hebrew. Fortunately Khatib's friend, Mohammed Kadri, had a kinder nature. He only wanted two relatives killed, at the going rate of $10,000 each. We're guessing that anger-management classes aren't going to do it for these guys.
  * As a sniper terrorized Maryland and Virginia, law enforcement officials called for his execution and called on him to turn himself in--on the same day. They then talked about how smart he is. * Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize and his eyes got even more crinkly. * Singer Harry Belafonte called Secretary of State Colin Powell a house slave who "serves the master." Powell called the comment unfortunate. Both Belafonte and Powell are of Jamaican descent, but it's unclear which man would prevail in a limbo contest. * Serial killer Aileen Wuornos, one of the toughest-looking prostitutes in long-haul trucker history, was executed in Florida after dropping her appeals and firing the lawyers who argued that she was crazy. Her final words were, "I'll be back like 'Independence Day' with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mother ship and all. I'll be back." Thank God she was in full possession of her faculties. * Zambia refused to accept shipments of corn from the United States, because the corn has been genetically modified. The 2.5 million starving Zambians, on the other hand, have been modified in the conventional way. * Organizers of the annual Columbus Day Parade in New York shunned the stars of "The Sopranos," saying they perpetuate an Italian-American stereotype, causing Mayor Michael Bloomberg to withdraw from participation. Making the march, however, was Tony Renis, the composer of "Quando Quando Quando," confusing the issue of what exactly constitutes a stereotype. * Five people were killed and 47 injured in Bombay riots sparked by Rev. Jerry Falwell's assertion that Muhammad was a terrorist. Muslim organizations had called for a strike, but it quickly deteriorated into a battle with knives and rocks after the protesters were challenged by Hindus. Falwell called on all parties to settle their differences in a Christian manner. * North Korea admitted having a nuclear weapons program, saying it wanted to "nullify" its 1994 Non-Proliferation Treaty with the United States. It got the idea last year when the United States "nullified" its 1973 Non-Proliferation Treaty with Russia. That whole international law thing is just looking so 19th century. * The National Civil Rights Museum, housed in the former Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King was shot, opened an exhibit called "Lingering Questions," featuring 200 never-before-seen items collected by Memphis police investigating James Earl Ray for King's murder. The King family and many other civil rights proponents believe that Ray was not the killer but a mere scapegoat for the government. The museum also includes the rooming house across the street, where federal agents believe Ray fired the fatal shot from the bathroom. Featured in that same bathroom are James Earl Ray's after-shave lotion, his hairbrush, a pair of his boxer shorts, and his rifle--the one that, uh, he didn't use. * As the deadline neared for the United States Olympic Committee to choose its favored site for the 2012 Olympic games, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that his sole competitor, San Francisco, "is a very nice small town." Tony Bennett left his heart there, of course, but he left his body in New York. * A 55-gallon drum of pig sperm was found in the Arie Crown Woods near Countryside, Illinois. Cook County firefighters recovered the drum, thinking it might be toxic waste, but were relieved to know it was merely the result of swine having mid- life crises. * In other barnyard-animal-sperm news, scientists in Pennsylvania announced they've created pig and goat sperm inside the bodies of lab rats. See, they got these really nasty pictures of farm animals off the Internet, and . . . * Little Red Riding Hood sparkling wine was the closet you could get to champagne in East Germany under Communism, so the 1856 winery in Freyburg turned out 15 million bottles of it each year. That changed when the Berlin wall came down and all East German products were considered second-rate and hokey--especially something called Little Red Riding Hood ("Rotkappchen" in German). When demand dropped to only a million bottles a year, it looked like the jig was up for goofy bubbly in red foil bottles. But a group of Freyburgers, backed by a tiny Freyburg bank, streamlined the company, bounced back, got production up to 49 million bottles last year, and have now taken over one of their largest competitors in West Germany, Mumm-MM--a rare victory for the east, where most of the businesses from Communist Germany have folded. Now producing all kinds of German brands and 100 million bottles a year, it won't be long until we can all buy Hansel & Gretel merlot spritzers. * The Michigan legislature voted 53-43 against a bill that would have banned tongue-splitting. The proposal was intended to prevent medical professionals from splitting peoples' tongues into two parts to make them look like serpents' tongues. Even though the procedure can cause excessive bleeding, infection, nerve damage, swelling and permanent speech impediment, the lawmakers decided it was a personal decision that shouldn't be infringed on by law. The 53 politicians voting against the measure were criticized by the bill's supporters as having a conflict of interest; all of their tongues are, in fact, forked. * God knocked down the Maryland state tree, a 460-year-old 96- foot-tall oak with a circumference of 31 feet, 10 inches. Keen readers of "Joe Bob's Week in Review" will recall that God had previously eliminated the habitat and climate necessary for the Baltimore Oriole to remain in Baltimore. For obvious reasons, Chesapeake Bay crabs are now panicked and reported to be reinforcing their shells with a Teflon finish. * Paul Trummel, a 70-year-old man evicted from a retirement home, has been held in a Seattle jail for three months for refusing to delete from his Web site the names and addresses and personal data on employees at the retirement home. First Amendment groups have rallied to his defense. Also, the food is better. * A judge in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, fined 20 members of an Amish sect $95 each for refusing to put bright orange reflective triangles on the backs of their horse-drawn buggies. The Amish had argued that the symbols were a violation of their religion, which apparently forbids the color orange, the triangular shape, and anything reflective. * Sixty-three year-old Evel Knievel wants to make one last jump before he goes to that big motorcycle ramp in the sky, hoping it will help hype his new Evel Knievel Xperience Cafe in Primm, Nevada. (The cafe will include a sports bar, memorabilia museum and virtual reality rides modeled on his past jumps.) If Knievel does come up with a new stunt, it will be his first since 1980, when he jumped a row of buses in the Seattle Kingdome. He wants to make the last jump his longest yet, at about 200 feet, which he says is possible because of today's lighter materials, better shock absorbers and other technological changes. By setting the ramp at a lower angle than in the past, he thinks he can hit 100 miles per hour on the straightaway. There's nothing he can do, however, about that George Hamilton movie. * Scenes from domestic life: 
  * Robert C. Fleming Jr. of Athens, Alabama, was charged with assaulting Jim Wilson with a knife at a Dixie Youth baseball game in which their sons were playing on opposing teams. Wilson needed more than 100 stitches on his back and face, because Fleming throws such a mean splitter. *

  Scenes from our secure republic: 

  * Della Maricich, who has flown more than a hundred times since September 11th and knows the security rules, was boarding a flight at Portland International Airport when she noticed a screener remove her handbag from view. She asked the screener to keep her bag in her sight at all times, in accordance with Transportation Security Administration guidelines. The agent refused. Maricich asked to speak to a supervisor. A National Guardsman showed up and asked her to follow him back to the terminal. Because she had called for a supervisor, the soldier said, she would not be allowed to fly out of that airport that day, and furthermore she was a "troublemaker." After all, it's well known that many terrorists have Prada fetishes. * Speaking in Cincinnati, President Bush became the first president in 40 years to discuss armed conflict overseas without using the word "quagmire." * ABC, CBS and NBC decided not to broadcast the President's speech on Iraq, because there was no formal request from the White House to do so. Let's hope somebody formally requests coverage of the next hurricane. * Tullio Lombardo's 15th-century marble statue of Adam tumbled off its pedestal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shattering its arms and legs into dozens of pieces but apparently causing no damage to the principal feature that distinguishes Adam from Eve. * Two hundred professional nannies and housekeepers marched on New York City Hall, seeking strict enforcement of state minimum- wage and overtime laws. The demonstration dispersed when some guy on the Upper East Side said he couldn't find his favorite shirt. * President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, after West Coast longshoremen agreed to go back to work for 30 days but their employers refused to approve the contract extension. So in essence he ordered guys back to work who had already agreed to go back to work. It's one of those Boss Man Logic things. * Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe was stabbed in the gut by a Muslim computer technician named Azedine Berkane, who later gave two reasons for the act: because he hates gays, and because he hates politicians. The French can never give a simple answer. * "Islamic Fun!" is a new CD-Rom for Muslim schoolchildren that includes a "kill the Israelis" game. In "The Resistance," the game says, "You are a farmer in south Lebanon who has joined the Islamic Resistance to defend your land and family from the invading Zionists." By answering multiple-choice questions, you can earn ammunition and then fire at Israeli tanks as they roll across the screen. There are three playing levels: for children 5 to 7, 8 to 10, and 11 and over. Questions include "What was the crime of the Jews of Khyber?" and "Who said 'I know I have been elected thanks to the votes of US Jews. I owe my election to them. Tell me what I have to do for the Jewish people' to Ben Gurion?" After a poll of Joe Bob Report readers, seeking the answers to both questions, we were annihilated by Israeli artillery. * A 13-year-old Brooklyn boy tried to enter Siamese-twin fetuses, preserved in formaldehyde, in his school's science fair, but his teacher freaked out and called the cops. The kid explained he got the fetuses from his mother's boyfriend, who in turn inherited the jar from his grandmother. The New York medical examiner is investigating the fetuses for evidence of . . . uh . . . suspected sideshow profiteering? * Rats gnawed through body bags and pigged out on corpses in the morgue at the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office. By the time rat-removal experts got the problem under control, 12 corpses had been snacked on. Eleven of the 12 were unidentified people, including one who had been there since 1995. The 12th body brought it on himself by the presence of Krisy Kreme trace residue on his fingers. * Two 17-year-old boys called in fake bomb threats from pay phones in the waiting area of Sing Sing while on a tour of the prison. Apparently the tour guide didn't take them far enough inside. * Boulder, Colorado, passed an ordinance banning sofas on outdoor porches. The reason given by the city council is that too many students at the University of Colorado are getting drunk and burning up the couches. This being Boulder, there's a group called Citizens' Right to Air Couches and Upholstered Furniture, but it gets better. One community activist speaking against the new ordinance was named Rob Smoke. Oh sure, Mister Smoke, we know why you want that couch. * Yaser Esam Hamdi, the 21-year-old Taliban soldier who has been held without charges for several months, does not deserve a lawyer even though he's an American citizen, the Justice Department told a federal judge. And if he has a court-appointed lawyer, he shouldn't have the right to actually meet with the lawyer. In fact, Hamdi does have a lawyer, Federal Public Defender Frank W. Dunham Jr., even though he may not realize it. "To me this is scary stuff," Dunham told The Washington Post. "This guy is a U.S. citizen and according to the government he can be held for life without ever seeing a judge or a lawyer." Oh Frank Frank Frank, what's so scary about that? That is just so nineties. * Priority Mail, which costs a minimum of $3.50, takes an average of 13 hours longer to reach its destination than First Class mail, which costs 37 cents. Hey, they said it was a priority, they didn't say whether it was a high or a low priority. * Awdah al-Zahrani of al-Baha, Saudi Arabia, learned the literal meaning of "a tooth for a tooth" when he was sentenced to have two of his teeth pulled out. Nine years ago he had been convicted of hitting a man in the face with a rock during a land dispute, causing the victim to lose two teeth. He was jailed for a year, whipped, and fined $20,000, but the victim said that wasn't enough. Refusing to pardon him, the victim forced the court to carry out strict Islamic justice, and the teeth were extracted in a public square. All he wants for Ramadan is . . . naw, even we have our limits. * Neal Horsley of Carrollton, Georgia, runs a Web site featuring "homicidal mothers"--pictures of women photographed while entering abortion clinics. He prints their names and, when he can find it out, details of their medical procedure, thanks to a posse of 24 guerrilla photographers helping him from all over the country. Abortion clinics have responded by erecting curtains around parking lots, shielding the women with umbrellas, and otherwise trying to frustrate the efforts of Abortioncams.com, but Horsley still has plenty of pictures and claims to be getting 2 million hits a month. Unfortunately, Roe v. Wade was upheld by the Supreme Court after Horsley had already been born. * The Ivory Coast government agreed to pay $2,000 to witch doctors who claim they were responsible for the nation's victory in the African Nations Cup over Ghana back in 1992. The shamans, based in Akradio, were asked to concoct white magic for the team that year, then were so outraged that they weren't paid that they put a jinx on the national team--which, sure enough, hasn't won the African Nations Cup since then. Now that the hex is off, the Ivory Coast national team is practicing with a crystal soccer ball. * The Health Ministry in Minsk declared McDonald's dangerous to the health of the citizens of Belarus, and said that no more land would be allotted for construction of McDonald's restaurants. Dissatisfaction with McDonald's had been growing ever since last year's incident in which a patron was scalded by a Vodka Burger. * Eating cooked duck embryos called "balut" is the Filipino version of Viagra. Now a Manila fast-food marketer envisions "balut" franchising that will create a gourmet microwaveable version to be sold in shopping malls along with tapioca drinks and deep-fried pigskins. Eating all three makes you extremely virile, with the only known side effect a tendency to quack, oink and sing Perry Como Songs during sex. * Scenes from our secure republic:
  * The New York Police Department held a three-hour briefing for landlords, telling them to be suspicious of tenants exhibiting "odd behavior." There are so few of those in New York. * Scenes from domestic life:
  * Charles Grubbs and Melody Wyman were exchanging wedding vows in a romantic ceremony on Mount Rainier in Washington when a gust of wind swept both of them into a crevasse along with their minister. All three were evacuated by helicopter to St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, where a hospital chaplain finished the ceremony and adjusted traction tension. * Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of New Jersey, read a poem at a festival suggesting that thousands of Israelis stayed away from the World Trade Center on September 11th because they knew about the attacks in advance. Governor James McGreevey asked him to resign his post, but Baraka refused, saying he takes his poet laureate duties seriously and it's not a job for wimps. He then announced his next reading would feature a new poem, "O! The Comely Seagull! I Hear Your Cape May Song!" * Steve S. Kim, a postal worker from Des Plaines, Illinois, became the first person to go postal and go global at the same time when he fired seven shots in front of the United Nations to protest human rights abuses in North Korea. FBI agents escorted him to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where they promised not to go medieval. * The hog industry asked the government to buy 94 million pounds of frozen pork--three times the amount the Department of Agriculture bought last year for the school lunch program. Attention Jewish third graders: next year could be hell. * An arsonist torched the Cedar Bridge in Winterset, Iowa, pictured on the cover of James Waller's "The Bridges of Madison County." The chief suspects are deconstructionist English professors. * The Pentagon narrowed its list of military options for Iraq. A surprise attack is now out. * A record 3.6 million British viewers tuned in for the Channel 5 documentary "Michael Jackson's Face," which chronicled the singer's changing appearance over the past 30 years, complete with interviews with psychologists calling him "bizarre" and "unnatural." In the closing segment, psychologist Eileen Bradbury speculates about where Jackson will be in ten years. "It looks fairly bleak, really," she says. "With somebody on his trajectory, there is always the fear that in the end there's nowhere to go, apart from complete self-destruction." Not true-- there's always that starring role in "Phantom of the Opera." * Uri Even will become the first openly gay member of Israel's Knesset after being named by the Meretz Party to replace a retiring member. Nissim Zeev, a member of the orthodox Shas Party, said that Even is "making sodomite vermin kosher," which sounds like something Lucy Ricardo would sell door-to-door in the Catskills. * For the second time in four months, reporters at The Washington Post withheld their bylines from articles in a protest over their union contract. Predictably, there were riots all over the District of Columbia as readers were deprived of their morning ritual of studying the names of people they've never heard of. * The Museum of Sex opened at Fifth Avenue and 27th Street, and like all New York institutions, it already has a hip nickname: MoSex. Curators promise everything you want to know about prostitution, burlesque, birth control, obscenity, sex scandals and, of course, midget-flogging. * The People's Party in Denmark wants to close the bridge between Denmark and Sweden because too many Islamic immigrants are sneaking in and they don't want the "Scandinavian Beiruts" that already exist in Swedish cities. A "Scandinavian Beirut" is, of course, one of those places where they serve cheese shishkebab. * A saffron-robed Buddhist monk took 30 people hostage with an AK-47 in the Thailand Parliament building, berating officials on his cell phone and firing into the air, before being tackled by cops posing as reporters. He was having a bad karma day. * Oprah Winfrey bought seven beachfront properties on the island of Maui, including one parcel containing the bones of the volcano goddess Pele. Pele has no idea. * Sony Music introduced its most elaborate CD copy-protection technology, and within a week newsgroups had discovered that by scribbling on the rim of a Sony CD with a felt-tip marker, it can be copied just fine. Sony's next plan is to buy up all the felt- tip markers. * The grave of a castrated priest who wore women's clothing and jewelry has been unearthed near Catterick, Yorkshire, and archeologists say he was most likely a follower of the fertility goddess Cybele in the 4th century. Forget the religion, though, we want to know where he shopped. Fibers that last 1700 years? Polyester is more biodegradable. * The London minister of police, John Denham, was rebuked by Scotland Yard for making a speech in which he said it was time to "get down to the nitty-gritty" in the training of officers. "Nitty-gritty," said Police Constable Chris Jefford of Scotland Yard's Directorate of Training, "is a prohibited term in the modern police service as being a racist term." The term was invented by slave-ship workers to describe prisoners in the lowest reaches of the ships. Minister Denham stood corrected, and added that in the future he would use the phrase "let's get down to the little bastards below deck." * The Capital Christian School in Sacramento expelled a five- year-old girl after finding out her mother, Christina Silvas, works as a stripper. Yes, Jesus loved hookers, but the Bible doesn't say anything about exotic dancers. * Genetic scientists at Hebrew University near Tel Aviv are developing a featherless chicken, hoping it will grow faster, be less fatty, and save valuable plucking time. They're also breeding a kinkier rooster to ensure the bald chickens will get . . . uh . . . plucked. * Faced with declining market share, Victoria's Secret will start carrying more boring "everyday" bras, instead of the lacy push-up varieties. No word yet on how easy they'll be to unfasten at close quarters. * Mitzi Pumphrey of Sandusky, Ohio, claims that a Wendy's chicken sandwich exploded on her face and hands, causing severe burns. Her lawyer explained that the design of the hot chicken sandwich is faulty, and that Wendy's fails to put warning labels on it, making future explosions not only possible but, post 9/11, highly likely. * Women who have frequent unprotected sex are less likely to be depressed than women who do not, according to New York University research psychologists. The secret: semen contains hormones and other chemicals that function as antidepressants. The longer a woman goes without contacting the semen, the more depressed she gets. Women having unprotected sex attempt suicide at a rate of only 4.5 per cent, compared to 13.2 per cent when the partner uses a condom. The research confirms the scientific principle established two decades ago by Monty Python on behalf of the Catholic church, expressed in the production number in "The Meaning of Life": "Every Sperm Is Sacred!" * The new Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being at the University of California/Berkeley--where else?--will scientifically explore "inner peace" through the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, biology, African-American studies and Latino studies. (What, no Divinity School?) Sign up now for courses like "Tradition and Healing in the Canadian Inuit" and "Self-Esteem Across the Life Course," because sometime this fall, as an experiment, we intend to set off a cherry bomb in the lobby to see how much inner peace they have. * Scenes from our secure republic: 

  - Cincinnati International Airport was evacuated and closed for three hours after a screener found a cigar cutter in a man's boot. The terminal was searched with bomb-sniffing dogs and the man was arrested on "drug-related" charges. There are many reasons for keeping a cutter in your boot, and most of them have more to do with Dionne Warwick than Osama Bin Laden.

  * Scenes from domestic life: 

  - Larry Smith of Brooklyn flew into a rage when the 6-year- old son of his fiancee spilled a bottle of bubble-blowing solution. When the mother intervened and argued with him, Smith ordered the boy out of the room, strangled the fiancee with his hands and belt, then forced the boy into the bathtub and drowned him. Smith always hated Don Ho.

  * The two most famous airport questions-- "Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry an item on this flight?" and "Have any of the items you are traveling with been out of your immediate control since the time you packed them?"--were discontinued by the Transportation Security Administration after 16 years, since they determined that terrorists have been trained by Al Qaeda to answer "no" no matter how many times you try to trip them up. * Universal Studios Home Video announced the release of the entire first season of "Baretta" on DVD. It's just a coincidence. * Miss Universe, Oxana Federova of Russia, was fired for refusing to leave Moscow in order to perform her queenly duties. "She's an unbelievable beauty, and an unbelievably spoiled bitch," a pageant insider told The New York Post. "She doesn't want to do anything." Among rumors affecting the decision of pageant owner Donald Trump were that she was pregnant--she's gained 15 pounds--and that she was secretly married to the boyfriend who has showered her with gifts since the age of 16. (Marriage is a violation of the pageant rules.) At any rate, she kept refusing to make personal appearances, including the CBS broadcast of the Miss Teen USA competition, and so the first runner-up, Justine Pasek of Panama, will take over the crown. We hear Justine is a sweetie, which is good, because we don't know the word for "bitch" in Spanish. * L. Dennis Kozlowski, former chief executive of Tyco International, threw a $2.1 million party for his wife on her 40th birthday, half of it paid for by Tyco. The party was held at the Hotel Cala di Volpe Resort on the Italian island of Sardinia, where 100 guests were entertained for four days, greeted by gladiators, and drank vodka dispensed from the penis of an ice- sculpture replica of Michelangelo's "David." It was symbolic of what he was doing to shareholders. * William Rosenberg, the donut king, died in Mashpee, Massachusetts, at age 86. After opening the Open Kettle, a coffee and donut shop in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1948, he changed the name to Dunkin' Donuts, which today is the world's largest coffee and baked goods chain--larger even than Starbucks--with 5,000 locations in 37 countries. Health nuts, take note. It wasn't the donuts that got him. Bladder cancer. It was the coffee. * Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton demanded that MGM apologize for some jokes in "Barbershop" and delete them from all future DVD and video versions. The objectionable scenes are the ones in which comedian Cedric the Entertainer, as the character Eddie, riles up the barbershop patrons by talking about Martin Luther King's marital infidelities and saying he doesn't see why everyone makes such a big deal about Rosa Parks, since all she did was sit down. Oddly enough, they didn't object to Eddie's comments about Rodney King getting what he deserved. And they didn't mention one other joke--the profane putdown of Jesse Jackson himself. We're just sick and tired of the way white people--whoops! there weren't any white people involved in the production of "Barbershop." Never mind. * The Census Bureau said the number of poor people rose sharply last year, with 32.9 million Americans living below the poverty line. Democrats and Republicans disagreed on the meaning of the statistics, with Republicans suggesting that at least 20 million are undeserving poor, while Democrats suggested that the definition should be adjusted for those who "feel poor," which would make the total 97 percent of the population. * Funkmaster Flex, a deejay at New York's "Hot 97," was arrested on charges of hitting and choking deejay Steph Lova, who works at rival "Power 105," because of an interview she gave last summer with rapper Nas, who accused Funkmaster Flex of taking payola. When you're in a funk, don't flex, be a lova. * Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop chain of stores, published a September 11th diatribe against the United States in the London Independent. "How has the world changed since Sept. 11?" she wrote. "For one thing, Europeans no longer aspire to be Americans." She also said civil liberties have been "outrageously eroded in the name of patriotism," and that "Their government is a rogue state, rejecting international consensus on every front and threatening first-strike nuclear attacks and politically expedient invasions of sovereign nations. . . . Bush & Co. has slapped the international community in the face." The article ends with: "To hell with George Bush; God save America." Roddick, who stepped down as co-chairman of Body Shop earlier this year but still sits on the Board of Directors, was so upset that she needed a loofah scrub, an herbal wrap, and an Amazonian epidermal rinse. * The United Nations Committee Against Torture asked Saudia Arabia to stop amputating limbs and flogging criminals as punishment, telling the Saudis they're violating the 1987 Convention Against Torture that they signed along with 128 other countries, but the Saudi delegates in Geneva reacted angrily, saying that Shariah law has existed for 1,400 years, is derived from the Koran, and there's no way they're going to change it. The committee responded that Saudi Arabia could avoid all this bad publicity simply by executing more people, like the model Shariah state of Texas, because actual death falls outside of the UN's definition of "torture." * Scenes from domestic life:
  • Tattooed and shirtless, William Ligue and his equally bare-bod 15-year-old son Billy leapt from the stands and beat up Kansas City Royals first-base coach Tom Gamboa during a game at Chicago's Comiskey Park, then claimed that Gamboa had flipped them the bird. (Gamboa denies it.) Family members explained that the father has been drinking a lot, crying a lot, and getting a lot of tattoos lately because of the death of his one-month-old daughter in May. The poor little girl hated the Royals.
  • Jeane Lewis of New York used her husband's health insurance to buy penile implants for her lover, Andre Dovilas. When the fraud was discovered, the lover fled to Haiti before he could be arrested, a