[eggplant43]

Fifth in circle of friends dies by suicide

02/20/03

PAIGE PARKER

They all died before his senior year: one by accident, one by heart failure and four by suicide. Jared Stait had lost more friends by college than most people lose in a lifetime.

The suicides, especially, stuck with him. Three months ago, Stait filmed a spot for a suicide prevention group that would be distributed on college campuses. Suicide, the 20-year-old told friends, is not the answer.

Early Sunday something came undone. Stait came home from a Corvallis party, e-mailed his girlfriend and hanged himself.

Suicide prevention experts say anyone who experiences multiple deaths -- especially anyone in their teens who loses loved ones -- stands a greater risk of attempting or completing suicide.

Stait's family and friends think he suffered a brief, well-hidden bout of depression that was exacerbated by money problems and a recent move to Corvallis. They suspect a night of drinking -- something he rarely did -- lowered his inhibitions and clouded his judgment.

"It can happen to anyone," said Jared's mother, Vickie Stait. "There's nobody who is immune to this."

Jared Stait's family describe a thoughtful young man who skipped eating one day so he could afford a collector's Monopoly set for his sister. His friends say he was so responsible in high school that many of their parents would only let them go out on the town if Stait came along.

Three years ago, Stait 's sister Megan filmed a public service announcement called "Suicide Shouldn't Be a Secret." Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher launched the ad on national television and in movie theaters.

Nancy Johnson, a Portland woman whose son died by suicide in 1997, founded the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Northwest, which sponsored the announcement.

Knowing her brother's experience with death, Megan suggested Johnson enlist him for a suicide-prevention announcement that would be distributed across the nation. Jared Stait filmed his portion in the fall.

"I'm sure he believed in that message," Johnson said. "But the really bad thing about depression is it disturbs the way you think. It's a lying, awful disease."

A member of Beaverton High School's 1999 championship football team, Stait graduated in 2000. He attended a California community college and played on the football team's offensive line.

In December 2001, he began dating Erin Miner, an Oregon State University student. To be closer to her, Stait transferred to Portland Community College, then to Linn-Benton Community College.

"We had this whole plan," Miner said. "I would graduate. We would move in together. We had big plans."

He would teach history and coach high school football. She would sell pharmaceuticals. . Stait would drive an Aston Martin DB5 -- James Bond's car in the movie "Goldfinger." They would live in Portland's Pearl District or on Northwest 23rd Street and sleep under a bedspread that didn't have flowers.

Stait's cousin, Jimmy Harding, says Jared Stait pulled good grades in his classes at Linn-Benton despite a learning disability.

On Monday, after months of trying, he landed a job delivering Oregon State University's student newspapers. On Friday, he ate a fondue dinner with Miner and his family.

Don Stait says his son bought his 17-year-old sister, Megan, flowers because he wanted her to get a present on Valentine's Day.

Miner slept in Saturday morning and Stait made her cinnamon rolls. That night, she hosted a party in her apartment, and he drank two shots of Southern Comfort before leaving for another party. Miner says she knew he had been drinking when he called her at 1 a.m., but she didn't think he was too drunk to drive.

When she couldn't reach him by phone later that night, Miner drove to his home. She found his clothes draped over a bedroom chair and a rambling e-mail on her account.

Miner discovered Stait hanging by a thin rope from a patio beam. Miner and Stait's roommate cut the body down and performed CPR, but it was too late.

At 3:30 a.m., Stait became the fifth in a wide circle of childhood friends to die by suicide.

"Anybody that experiences multiple losses is at higher risk for suicidal behavior," said Ron Bloodworth, coordinator of the Youth Suicide Prevention program for Oregon Department of Human Services. "If the multiple losses relate to losing people close to you to suicide . . . I would assume the risk would be even greater. If under the influence of alcohol or drugs, it may further lower their inhibitions."

Stait's family and friends will celebrate his life at a memorial service at 11 a.m. today at the Living Enrichment Center, 29500 Grahams Ferry Road in Wilsonville.

"Megan's really devastated now because she knows she's helped thousands but she wasn't able to help Jared," said Johnson, who worked with the Stait children on the suicide-prevention projects.

"Jared must have known that his family would hang on to him and just never let him go, get him treatment and never let him go."

[n2gun]

Chinese Study How to Clean Up Chewing Gum
The Associated Press
BEIJING

The Ministry of Science and Technology is involved. Eight Chinese research institutions want a piece of the project. It's even part of a code-named project: "863 program."

All to tackle a problem that has been bedeviling the Chinese government for many months now: how to clean up little blobs of discarded chewing gum from public places like Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

It's no small affair in China, where 2 billion pieces of gum are masticated annually, according to the state-controlled China Daily newspaper.

The project, which will cost 1 million yuan (US$120,000), is designed to develop a special "gum-removal lotion" that can effectively dissolve the discarded gum, China Daily reported Friday.

Yu Xichun, director of the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Association's science and technology office, said the problem has become a public sanitation headache.

During the National Day holiday last year, 600,000 tiny wads of chewed gum were left in Tiananmen Square by tourists, costing more than 1 million yuan (US$120,000) to clean.

Beijing instituted a new law in November that slaps fines of 20 to 50 yuan (US$2.40 to US$6) on public gum-spitters.

The initiative is part of the country's "863 program," its high-tech development plan.
Friday, Feb. 21, 2003

[n2gun]

Free Nikes anyone

**************************************************

Overboard Shoes Drifting Toward Alaska
The Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska

Enough soggy Nike basketball shoes to outfit every high school team in Alaska are drifting through the Pacific Ocean toward the state after spilling from a container ship off Northern California.

There's just one hitch.

"Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates," said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in Washington state who tracks flotsam. "The effort's worth it because these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All 33,000 are wearable."

A beachcomber told Ebbesmeyer about the shoe spill after finding two new Nikes washed up on Washington's Olympic Peninsula on Jan. 9 and 16. Unfortunately, they were sizes 10 1/2 and 8 1/2. Both were lefts.

A little research by Ebbesmeyer confirmed that a ship lost cargo Dec. 15 during a storm, including three 40-foot containers carrying an estimated 5,500 pairs of shoes each.

"Nikes will be soon in your neck of the sea," Ebbesmeyer said in an e-mail to the Anchorage Daily News last week.

Over the past decade, Ebbesmeyer has tracked 29,000 duckies, turtles and other bathtub toys; 3 million tiny Legos; 34,000 hockey gloves; and 50,000 Nike cross-trainers that went overboard in the Pacific in 1999.

He and government oceanographer Jim Ingraham have published their results in academic journals as well as Ebbesmeyer's newsletter Beachcombers' Alert.

This time, Ebbesmeyer took the serial numbers off the shoes to trace the shipment. Nike told him the shoes were being shipped from Los Angeles to Tacoma, Wash.

After the two shoes washed ashore on the Olympic Peninsula in January, Ebbesmeyer calculated that they had moved more than 450 miles in a month _ up to 18 miles a day. At that pace, he calculated the Nikes could bob and weave an additional 1,600 miles by the time the current eases in mid-April, sprinkling basketball shoes along the Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian coasts.

___

On the Net:

Beachcombers Alert: http://www.beachcombers.org

[eggplant43]

Homeless man gets shocking tax bill


TIM LABARGE / Statesman Journal

John Ramer recently received notice from the IRS that he owes about $6 million in past taxes, interest and late fees. Ramer, who is living at the Union Gospel Mission, says the bill is an error.


The IRS says the Salem man owes nearly $6 million.

MICHAEL ROSE
Statesman Journal
February 22, 2003

John Ramer has a set of secondhand clothes from a Salvation Army Thrift Store, room and board at the Union Gospel Mission in Salem, and a tax bill from the IRS over six figures.

The tax man wants down-on-his-luck Ramer to hand over $5,981,104.02. During a visit to a local IRS office, Ramer was taken aside and asked whether he had done any day trading.

Good thing Ramer also has a sense of humor: “I feel like holding up a sign: ‘Will work for new portfolio.’ ”

The 30-year-old Ramer, who is positive he has never hit the state lottery jackpot, has a collection of notices demanding payment for taxes and interest from 1994.

To owe the kind of money the IRS says he does, Ramer should have earned about $15 million.

He was making about $7 an hour at the time.

Today, Ramer is unemployed and getting around town on a mountain bike. He ended up in Oregon after turning himself in for a theft committed in 1998. He went to a Salem car dealership and took a “test drive” in a used pick-up truck and kept driving until he reached Montana.

For a short time, Ramer did volunteer work at the Candy Kitchen Wolf & Hybrid Rescue Ranch in Pinehill, N.M.

“If we paid him anything, it wasn’t more than $300 or $400 — and he owes me a hundred bucks,” said Leyton Cougar, facilities director of the animal sanctuary. Ramer helped care for wolves that were once kept as pets.

Mark Mueller, a certified public accountant in Salem, said IRS mistakes are rare. He’s seen tax bills that were off by a couple thousand dollars. Never, in 20 years, has Mueller come across a million dollar goof.

IRS spokeswoman Shawn George confirmed the agency was investigating Ramer’s case and taking it seriously.

There was one piece of good news on Ramer’s IRS notice. The agency found an error in his favor worth $18.

[eggplant43]

February 24, 2003

For roadkill gourmets, it’s finders eaters
By MIKE JACCARINO Staff Writer, (609) 978-2010

Jack O'Neil was driving on the outskirts of his hometown, Hammonton, one afternoon in early November when he spotted some roadkill.

Most people continue driving past such a sight, but O'Neil is one of the few who stops and takes a look.

Ten minutes later, the doe was in the back of his pickup. A day later it was steaks and cutlets in his refrigerator, and at some festive point after that, it lay on the dinner plates of family and friends. All told, that wayside deer probably fed 40 people.

"I don't like to see meat go to waste," said O'Neil. "There's nothing wrong with (roadkill). All hunters do it."

In 1997, the state Department of Environmental Protection issued nearly 700 permits to take wayside roadkill home for cooking.

(The number was far smaller in 2002, but the final tally is not yet completed.)

The DEP insists that a person taking roadkill home first get a permit from local law enforcement to ensure that game restrictions weren't violated.

The person taking the deer could have accidentally hit the animal, or just come across a recently killed one, as was the case with O'Neil. If it's not too rotten or badly bruised, a permit can be acquired and the venison can be brought home, filleted and eaten just the same as a deer hunted in a forest.

In Stafford, Michael Melchionne, the township's animal control officer, said that about a quarter of the times he and his crews arrive to remove roadkills some local resident already has snatched it.

"They have police scanners," he said. "They listen for when a car hits a deer and then head out. Sometimes, we're there in 10 minutes and it's already gone."

King of the roadkill eaters

The vast majority of the roadkill permits are issued in rural counties. Gloucester, Burlington, Passaic and Ocean lead the list most years. Ocean, spurred on by wooded Jackson Township, was tops in 2002 with 18.

It also appears that as one goes farther west into the Pinelands, more people eat roadkill.

Jackson is nearly in the center of the state, off Route 528, and Hammonton accounts for the majority of the permits issued in Atlantic County. There were eight given out there in 2002.

In Hammonton, it is commonplace to pick up a buck here and a doe there, said Farmer Parzanese, 51. Asked if he thought the practice was disgusting, Parzanese's face hardened, "Let me tell you something. I don't care what anyone thinks. That's good food."

And then there's Harry Jacobs, 72, aka "Hammonton Harry," "Roadkill Harry," or as Jack O'Neil said, "King of the Roadkill Eaters."

Jacobs has made something of a post-retirement profession out of collecting and eating roadkill. Every morning during the deer rutting or mating season, a six-week stretch in late winter, Jacobs drives about a 100-mile route clear up to Lakehurst in search of roadkill.

Jacobs pulled his first roadkill off the side of the road around 1968, just after he took a job at the power plant in Salem. It wasn't that he needed the food, although officials say some of the people who take roadkill do it to get by. Jacobs just didn't want to see the food go to waste.

"I give most of it away anyway," he said.

Indeed, some people around Hammonton, like Parzanese, said they get as much as 80 pounds of venison from Jacobs during deer season.

"I don't need the food," said Jacobs, who receives Social Security and a union pension. "It keeps me alive, gives me something to look forward to beside nothing."

Not for everybody

The number of DEP roadkill permits issued each year has fallen in the recent past.

In 1997, 699 permits were issued; 608 in 1998; 514 in 1999; 355 in 2000; and 203 in 2001. The figures are falling at a time when there are possibly more deer in the Garden State than there has been in a long time. Clearly, roadkill is not for everybody.

Those who do eat roadkill share a few qualities. They predominately hunt and are familiar with how to filet a deer.

They're also rustic folk. Parzanese got the name "Farmer" as a child for wearing overalls to baseball practice.

Jacobs raises rabbits, chickens and goats on a 10-acre plot he owns near his First Street home. "I'm a survivor," he said proudly.

But above all, the overriding trait in common is that roadkill eaters don't appear to care very much about image and what other people think.

For better or worse, Jacobs' lawn is cluttered with debris and there's a bucket of something out front that seems to be rotting. He's drinking sour-tasting wine at 10 in the morning.

Parzanese wears a beat-up Giants sweatshirt. And when O'Neil was asked about eating roadkill, he replied, "Who cares what it looks like? It's still good meat."

Jacobs has a good story that supports this idea. His daughter married a man who was from a well-heeled Delaware family.

At first, when Jacobs brought around roadkill, his son-in-law didn't go for it. Now, he can't get enough. In fact, the only time Jacobs' son-in-law now refuses the dish is when his high-minded parents come to town.

[eggplant43]

Back to regular view
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-ency25.html





No one knows everything, but this guy's coming close

February 25, 2003

BY ART GOLAB STAFF REPORTER




Did you know Renaissance painter Caravaggio killed someone over a disputed score in a tennis game?

A.J. Jacobs does.

It's one of many obscure facts Jacobs has gleaned in his quest to become "the smartest person in the world" by reading all 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Reading about 100 pages a day, Jacobs has gotten as far as the I's and has learned enough to become pretty annoying at cocktail parties.

"My wife is beginning to get tired of my little facts," he said. "I don't know if it makes me more popular or whether it makes people want to wring my neck."

Jacobs was already pretty smart before he started his project. After all, this senior editor at Esquire magazine is a philosophy graduate of Brown University.

He persuaded publisher Simon & Schuster to pay him good money to write a book about his experience, due out in 2004. The book is tentatively titled: The Know It All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Guy in the World.

Jacobs, in town to play editor-for-a-day at the home of Encyclopaedia Britannica, is happy to spout facts.

While most of us learned in school that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, we didn't learn that Hawthorne, later in life, compulsively wrote the number 64 on every scrap of paper he could get his hands on.

Jacobs also found that philosopher and mathematician Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes.

"You have your extreme and strange details," Jacobs said. "But you also have profound concepts."

Jacobs loves learning the histories of things "we don't typically think of as having histories."

Canned laughter, he found, predated "I Love Lucy" by a few thousand years. It goes back to Roman and Greek playwrights who hired people to laugh at the plays. But the practice reached its height in 19th century France when people were hired not only to laugh at comedies but to cry during tragedies.

"The TV networks today could learn from that," Jacobs said. "Maybe a particularly sad episode of 'ER' could have some weeping in the background."

Jacobs should know. Before joining Esquire, he spent five years at Entertainment Weekly, a stint that helped spur his present quest.

"I had filled my head with so much flotsam and jetsam of inane entertainment trivia that I had forgotten all the important stuff, so I felt it was time to fill in my huge gaping holes of knowledge."

When Jacobs gets done reading the encyclopedia, he hopes to appear on "Jeopardy."

"Maybe it will pay for the Britannica that I bought," he said.







Copyright © The Sun-Times Company

[n2gun]

Don't let PETA find out.

N.J. Parkway Purging Pooping Pigeons
The Associated Press
WOODBRIDGE, N.J.

For the pigeons, cars cruising through some Garden State Parkway toll lanes have been sitting ducks since E-ZPass was installed.

But they will soon be induced to fly the coop.

Electrified wire mesh that thwarted roosting will soon be humming again at four toll plazas under a $69,999 contract approved Thursday by the New Jersey Highway Authority.

The "pigeon deterrent system" was disconnected while a contractor started to install the E-ZPass system, the agency said.

The contract with Avian Flyaway Inc. also covers installation of the system at a fifth toll plaza that has recently become a pigeon haven, said Timothy C. McDonough, executive director of the agency that operates the 173-mile highway.

The work is to be completed by the end of April and is not expected to close any toll lanes or cause traffic delays, McDonough said.

Avian Flyaway, of Rockwell, Texas, had installed the system in the late 1990s because the droppings posed a health hazard to toll takers and diminished the quality of life for drivers, McDonough said.

"This we think is the most humane way of handling the situation," McDonough said. "It's a series of mesh wires, that when the pigeon lands on them, it gives them a jolt. It's not life-threatening. It just scares them."

[eggplant43]

Bureaucrats get EBay fever

State sells penknives confiscated at airports at online auction

Suzanne Herel, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 28, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...28/BA64041.DTL



That pocketknife you surrendered to airport security screeners might now be tucked away in someone else's pocket -- someone who bought it on EBay.

Under the handle CaliforniaGold2000, the state is using the Internet auction house to convert scores of confiscated items to cash.

So far, $16,281 has been made selling objects taken from passengers at Oakland and Sacramento airports -- the only ones in Northern California to participate in the state program.

Among the oddest items confiscated and sold were at least three circular saws, hatchets, curtain rods and a little girl's baton, said Robb Deignan, spokesman for the surplus property disposal program, a division of the California Department of General Services.

Also sold: 5,364 pocketknives, 350 pounds of scissors, 594 corkscrews and 309 leatherman tools.

The Transportation Security Administration, which employs most airport screeners, allows airports to decide how to get rid of the mountains of items collected, said spokesman Nico Melendez.

They are too numerous to return to their owners, Deignan said.

Since November, when the program started, 2,400 pounds of objects have been delivered from the Sacramento airport, and 2,250 pounds from Oakland.

In cash-strapped, tech-savvy California, someone in the state's surplus property program thought up the idea of selling the things on EBay, Deignan said.

California may be the only state in the country that has employed EBay for the purpose.

"We're putting items that are reusable back in the hands of people," Deignan said. "On EBay, it's egalitarian. It opens the bidding to the world."

In Southern California, Los Angeles International, John Wayne and Ontario airports participate in the surplus program.

Meanwhile, airport officials in San Jose and San Francisco say they will continue to dispose of the mostly metal items by hiring haulers to take them to recyclers.

The state had been selling other surplus items, such as electronics taken in police raids, on EBay for several years, and already operated two public sales warehouses -- in Sacramento and Fullerton, Deignan said.

The scissors, knives and tools taken by airport screeners are perfect for EBay because they are relatively valuable and easy to transport, he said.

As the effort to sell the confiscated airport items online has progressed, employees have become more knowledgeable about what EBay buyers want, and how best to sort the lots.

Most of the things for sale online are of the garden-variety pointy type: "10 collector knives, Gerber," "200 money clips, lots of styles and brands" and "mountains of miscellaneous used hand tools."

Bidding starts at $9.99, with the most expensive auction so far bringing $835 for 350 pocketknives.

The proceeds are divided between the state and federal governments. The state uses its share to offset the cost of the program, Deignan said.

He said he has heard no complaints about the program -- aside from the state employee who told him that the EBay descriptions should be more poetic.

But when some airline passengers who had unwittingly donated items to the cause were informed of the program, they weren't too pleased.

"As far as the concept is concerned, I think it's ridiculous," said Bernard Wormgoor, who was flying out of Oakland with his wife when she was asked to relinquish a pair of nail scissors that her mother had given her some 40 years before.

"They don't own it. They took it away -- that doesn't mean you relinquish ownership," he said. "I don't want to use the word 'theft,' but it starts smelling like it."

Nicola Place of Danville agreed.

Flying out of Oakland on a business trip, she lost a Swiss Army knife her dad had given her more than 20 years ago. "It broke my heart," she said. "It had been everywhere with me."

Thinking about it ending up on EBay, she said, "It makes me sad. . . . It irks me that they can take it away and make money off us. It's bad enough they take it away."

On the other side of the virtual auction block, however, are a number of satisfied customers.

In fact, CaliforniaGold2000 boasts an admirable EBay rating, with just one negative comment out of 310 sales in the past six months.

The lone complaint came from user Squishypig, who claimed the item purchased was not as described, horribly packaged and that a refund was difficult to obtain.

CaliforniaGold2000 replied, in part, "there's no pleasing everybody."

Among the successful, satisfied bidders was Nevada City businessman Greg Cook, owner of Friar Tuck's Restaurant and Wine Bar, which burned down last March.

Cook is preparing to reopen the joint this spring, and he was in the market for corkscrews.

Never having bought an item off EBay in his life, he dipped his toe in the bidding in the last hours of an auction for 42 wood handle corkscrews -- and got them, $36 for the lot.

"They're $20 ones. They're beautiful, I've been showing them to everyone," Cook said. "We do a big wine business. The wood handle ones are nicer because when you work all night, they're nicer on your hands.

"I'm real happy," he said.

[~Candy~]

Damn, I hope my comb made someone happy

[eggplant43]

I got it, and it was only $690.79 plus shipping! What a deal.

[eggplant43]

Judge duct tapes defendant's mouth
Man 'was being very disruptive'

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) --A Texas judge ordered a defendant's mouth to be taped shut after the man kept interrupting his lawyer and the judge during an aggravated assault trial.

For about 20 minutes Tuesday, Carl Wiley, 36, ignored pleas from state District Judge Jim Bob Darnell and his own mother to keep quiet during a hearing outside the jury's presence.

Finally, Darnell ordered bailiffs to seal Wiley's mouth with duct tape.

"He was being very disruptive and he was trying to fire his second court-appointed attorney, and I informed him that when the attorney is appointed by the court, only the court can fire the attorney," Darnell said.

"Mr. Wiley continued to interrupt him," Darnell said, referring to attorney Steve Hamilton, "so the court duct-taped his mouth until the jury came in. Then I had him removed from the courtroom."

Hamilton declined to comment on the incident or on his client's conviction later Tuesday for ramming his vehicle into his estranged wife's car. She was not injured.

No sentencing date has been set.

[n2gun]

eggie
there is a thread about that one. Search under duct tape. You can get a laugh.

[n2gun]

Jennifer Lopez Travels in Style
Fri Feb 28, 9:20 AM ET Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!



LONDON (Reuters) - American actress and singer Jennifer Lopez used six limousines to travel from one top-class hotel to another equally swish hotel -- a distance of about 100 yards, British newspapers reported.



The Daily Mail newspaper said onlookers were dumbstruck as the singer and 30 or so members of her entourage spent 15 minutes clambering into the vehicles for the short trip along swanky Park Lane between the Metropolitan Hotel and the Dorchester hotel.


"No one could understand why they didn't just walk," the newspaper quoted one hotel guest as saying.


Lopez has attracted widespread coverage since arriving in Britain earlier this week to promote her new film "Maid in Manhattan."


Newspapers have been full of stories about the 32-year-old booking 14 suites at the Metropolitan Hotel for $14,000 a night to house her team, reported to include dieticians and make-up artists.

[eggplant43]

The phrase "starving children in......." comes to mind

[eggplant43]

My apologies. I did not see your thread that was started two days before I posted the duct tape articles. All I can say at this point is "Great Minds"