Jokes and Stories from this months issue.

*THE DRAMATIC drug busts for the new designer steroid tetrahydroyestrione (THG) may change sport forever. This remarkable steroid was devised and manufactured to be undetectable by normal urine testing. Then a well-placed American coach alerted the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) by naming certain athletes who were using the drug and provided the agency with a syringe containing the substance. Subsequent exhaustive testing by Dr Don Catlin's IOC-accredited laboratory in Los Angeles revealed the presence of THG, described by USADA chief executive officer Terry Madden as "a very sophisticated designer steroid created by very sophisticated chemists." He concluded, "We have uncovered what appears to be intentional doping of the worst sort. This is a far cry from athletes accidentally testing positive as a result of taking contaminated nutritional supplements. Rather, this is a conspiracy involving chemists, coaches and certain athletes using what they developed to be an 'undetectable' designer steroid to defraud their fellow competitors plus the American and world public who pay to attend sports events."
When the lab at UCLA re-tested 350 urine samples taken at the American Championships last June a number of positives for THG were discovered. It was then decided by the IAAF Medical Commission to re-test all the samples from the World Championships in Paris last August. The plot thickened when a group of athletes coached by Remi Korchemny was targeted at a training base in Saarbrucken, Germany. Here both the A and B samples of Britain's Dwain Chambers, European 100m sprint champion, was found to contain THG. Chambers denied taking the drug. Under IAAF rules, however, athletes are held strictly accountable, just as drunken drivers are in Britain. The presence of a prohibited substance in the athletes' body triggers an automatic two years suspension, subject to an appeals process. Others to test positive for the new steroid included shot putter Kevin Toth, hammer thrower John McEwen, and ace 1500m runner Regina Jacobs. Surely more heads will roll. Meantime, the cost of detecting drug cheats is escalating. Each doping control test costs 256 US dollars. The price tag on the 400 tests conducted in Paris therefore came to a cool $102,400. To re-test those urine samples doubles the cost: i.e. $204,800! Maybe the testing labs are the real winners in this expensive game. (Information: Mel Watman, 'Athletics International')
*GLENN MILLER (born in 1909) was the most popular bandleader in the western world by 1944. Sadly, he also died that year. On the afternoon of 15 December 1944, he flew from an airfield near Bedford, southeast England to Paris, France which had been liberated from Nazi control in August. He took off in a single-engine C-64 Norseman aircraft piloted by flight officer John Morgan. With Miller was his old buddy Lieutenant Colonel Normal Baessell. Miller planned to lay the ground for a Christmas show by his band for allied troops in France. Amazingly, Morgan filed no flight plan before he took off; something that is mandatory procedure everywhere, as any airman will tell you. At this time RAF Bomber Command was aborting a raid of 150 Lancaster bombers on rail-yards in the German Ruhr district due to foggy weather conditions. The RAF had designated an area of the English Channel as a no-fly zone for other aircraft. This was to allow returning bombers to jettison their unused payloads into the sea. Now if Morgan had adopted a direct flight path from Bedford to Paris, he would have taken his aircraft straight across this no-fly zone. Surely an experienced pilot would have been acutely aware of the danger?
But as Morgan did not file a flight plan (or the plan was lost somehow) we cannot know for sure which route he took. As the returning Lancasters dumped their unused bombs into the channel, several crewmen reported seeing a small aircraft nose-diving into the sea. The turbulence created by hundreds of huge bombs exploding in the sea would have been sufficient to cause a pilot to lose control of a light aircraft with a cruising altitude of just 2,000 feet.
In 1985 a British diver named Clive Ward claimed to have found the wreckage of a C-64 Norseman on the seabed in the area. But he did not find any evidence of human remains at the site. Much later, the German tabloid newspaper 'Das Bild' floated another theory of Miller's mysterious disappearance. The report claimed that Miller arrived safely in Paris on 15 December 1944, but died soon afterwards of a heart attack whilst in the arms of a prostitute who had been left behind by the Nazis as a secret agent. She may even have given him something to trigger the cardiac arrest. This conspiracy theory would pre-suppose a massive cover-up by US military authorities, including of course eradicating all evidence of Miller's arrival at Orly airport in France, and a flight plan filed at the airfield in England. The rest of the band arrived at Orly on 18 December 1944 and were surprised to find no leader to welcome them - Miller's disappearance was not officially announced until Christmas Eve that year. The band and their great music lived on, but sadly Glenn Miller did not. (Research, 'The Miller's Tale' by Ron Stebbing).
*EXACTLY WHY did Elvis Presley never perform abroad - apart from a short Canadian tour? The answer may lie in a new biography of Presley's manager, 'Colonel Parker', written by Alanna Nash. She notes that Parker feared deportation all his life, and never allowed Presley to perform anywhere without him. Parker was the former Andreas van Kuijk who fled his native Holland in 1929 after murdering a shopkeeper, and settled in the USA without a legal passport. In America, van Kuijk transformed himself into 'Tom Parker' specalising in carnivals. Whilst promoting musical acts, he discovered the gold mine named Elvis Aaron Presley. Though he is closely associated with Tennessee, Presley was actually born (on 8 January 1935) in Tupelo, Mississippi. When they met, Elvis was singing at shopping centres and barn parties. His biggest gig was playing the Louisiana Hayride for $18 on Saturday nights. Within six months of signing with Parker, Elvis was the biggest name in show business and he just got bigger and bigger.
Parker controlled Elvis absolutely and took at least 50 per cent of his earnings. He always denied this, stating to curious reporters that "Elvis takes 50 per cent of everything that I make!" The Colonel rejected serious movie scripts for his star pupil; forcing him instead to do ham Las Vegas shows and stupid movies like 'Double Trouble'. Much of Parker's greed fed a seven figure gambling habit, and he was never arrested as an illegal immigrant, but then he never risked applying for a US passport. Though he did his mandatory military service in Germany from 1958-1960, Elvis sadly never performed in the UK for his millions of loyal fans in Britain.
A massively overweight Elvis Presley eventually died on his toilet seat on 16 August 1977, a victim of gross excesses such as alcohol and calorie-rich junk food. He was just 42 years old. Colonel Parker bizarrely showed up at the funeral in an Hawaiian shirt and baseball cap. He was strangely unperturbed at the sudden death of his major star, and refused to even glance at the dead singer's body as it lay in an unopened coffin in the funeral parlour.
"Elvis didn't die!" Parker shouted, "just his body did!" From a business standpoint, perhaps the only one that mattered to Parker, this was probably correct. Presley as a dead icon was as valuable as ever and also much easier to control. Today, sales of Presley's music and memorabilia are worldwide, and his home at Graceland, Memphis, is the most visited tourist site in the USA. The image of the 'King of rock and roll' has been reproduced more times on tee shirts and posters than that of Jesus Christ, Marilyn Monroe or Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. Until his death in 1997, the arrogant Colonel Parker never attempted to make himself likeable. "You don't have to be nice to people on the way up if you are not coming down," he often said. ('The Colonel' by Alanna Nash, Amazon.com).
*DUMBO THE elephant tried to check into the Lek Hotel, Pattaya on 15 October last year. On being told that he didn't have a reservation, he lost his cool and went on the rampage, wrecking furniture in the hotel lobby. Staff and guests screamed in terror and ran for cover as the elephant knocked over sofas, desks and plants in a rage as he tried to locate the main door. The poor beast was eventually pacified by his mahout, who promised to pay for the damage, estimated at 20,000 baht. As the elephant handler earns just 150 baht per day, this may take a while - about 133 days (19 weeks) assuming that the poor man does not eat in the interim.
*AT THE annual Mafia conference in Sicily at the Godfather Hotel in Palermo there is a daily ritual. Each delegate leaves all his cash in a basket outside his room each morning and by 4pm (16.00 hrs) it is returned to him - freshly laundered.
*MOVIE QUOTE: "The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate, it is the sand of the Coliseum. He (Commodus) will bring them death, and they will love him for it." (Senator Gracus/Derek Jacobi in 'Gladiator', 2000).
*ACE FORMULA one racing driver Jackie Stewart (born 11 June 1939) won three world titles and was also an excellent marksman. He won the British clay pigeon championships on five occasions.
*THE FEMALE angler fish weighs up to half a ton. The male, however is only a few millimetres long, and spends his whole life attached to her nose. Hen-pecked husbands and Ronnie Corbett will know exactly what that feels like.
*SEVEN THINGS overheard at a barbecue hosted by President George Walker Bush: (a) "Laura, honey, am I on fire again?" (b) "A toast to all American tax payers who paid for this spread." (c) "Secret Service! Vice president Dick Cheney is heading for the dessert trolley!" (d) "After 35 days of vacation, I think that I've earned a day off." (e) "It's true that we haven't found any relish yet, but we believe it exists and will continue to search for it." (f) "Who made this potato salad - Chemical Ali?" (g) "Dang! These hot dogs are so good, I think I'll invade Frankfurt to corner the market. Where the hell is it?"
*NATURAL HISTORIANS will tell you that the woolly mammoth died out thousands of years ago. But in 1899 a story appeared in newspapers, which narrated how an explorer named Henry Tukeman had hunted the last surviving one in the wilderness of Alaska. Tukeman recounted how he was travelling in the region in 1890 when he met an old Indian named Joe at Fort Yukon. He showed Joe some scrapbook photos and when Joe saw a picture of an elephant, he became very excited, saying that there were bigger, hairy
beasts of this type in Alaska. Together they set out on a hunt and eventually found a fully-fledged mammoth taking the afternoon air by a mountain river.
"There it stood", wrote Tukeman, "the great living beast which only two men had ever seen, tearing up great masses of lichenous moss and feeding just as an elephant would." The two hunters lit a fire, and when the mammoth rushed over to inspect it, Tukeman shot it with his .50 calibre buffalo gun. The mammoth crashed to the ground after taking six rounds. Then Tukeman and his Indian assistant roasted and ate some of the meat, which Tukeman described as "not unpalatable but terribly tough."
After the kill, Tukeman travelled back to San Francisco where he sold some of the mammoth bones to a naturalist named Mr Conradi for thousands of dollars. The Smithsonian Institute joined in the subsequent furor by expressing the sentiment that it had been a cardinal sin to have killed the last remaining prehistoric animal on earth. Just before his death in 1911 Tukeman finally admitted that he had concocted the whole story and scammed Conradi into purchasing some large elephant bones. Throughout history, it seems that such liars and con men have often prospered.
*THE HOAX of the famous 'Piltdown Man' is another classic example of how the scientific community can be fooled. In 1912 Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur palaeontologist, announced that he had found a curious skull in a gravel pit near Piltdown in the English southern county of Sussex. The British Museum started an investigation and later that year displayed a reconstruction of the strange fossil creature, which had been pieced together. Experts estimated that the 'Piltdown Man' had lived 500,000 years ago, which challenged most estimates of just how long man had been on earth.
For over three decades, the scientific community accepted the Piltdown Man as an authentic artifact. Then in 1953 a new team of British Museum researchers conducted further tests and published a report declaring the skull to be a fake. Using a fluorine-based test to date the bones, the scientists concluded that although the skull was about 50,000 years old, the jawbone was from a twentieth century corpse. The jaw had been stained with potassium dichromate to make it appear older. The experts concluded that someone had taken the jawbone and teeth of a modern ape, probably an orangutan, and stained them to look ancient. Although the culprit has never been officially named, the most likely candidate is Dawson, who died in 1915, still being hailed as the finder of a major relic. Since then, it has been discovered that Dawson regularly trafficked in other fake antiquities. He did this to gain fame and recognition as a great expert in the field rather than for financial reward. And he never did discover the "missing link" between ape and man.
*PHILIP THE Handsome of Spain was born on 22 July 1478. After his death in 1524 his wife kept his corpse, and continued to sleep with it beside her in bed for three years. She was known as 'Joanna the Mad'.
*THE ENGLISH Football Association Challenge Cup Competition was formed on 20 July 1871 to become better known over the years as the 'FA Cup'. The first final in 1872 saw the 'Wanderers' beat the 'Royal Engineers' by one goal to nil, watched by a crowd of only 2,000 people.
*HILAIRE BELLOC (1870-1953) was a French-born British writer of many talents. He even wrote his own epitaph, which read, 'When I am dead, I hope it may be said / "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." '
davidcox@loxinfo.co.th

STELLA AWARDS

The Stella's are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonalds. That case inspired the Stella awards for the most frivolous successful lawsuits in the United States.
Unfortunately, the most recent lawsuit implicating McDonalds - the teens who allege that eating at McDonalds has made them fat - was filed after the 2002 award voting was closed.

Here are last year's winners:
5th Place tie: Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $780,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms. Robertson's son.
5th Place tie: A 19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbour ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman apparently didn't notice that there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbour's hubcaps.

5th Place tie: Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr.Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner's insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.

4th Place: Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbour's beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little provoked at the time by Mr.Williams who had climbed over the fence into the yard and was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

3rd Place: A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

2nd Place: Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a night club in a neighbouring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.
1st Place: This year's run away winner was Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home, (from an OU football game), having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, the R.V. left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner's manual that he couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new motor home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit, just in case there were any other complete morons buying their recreation vehicles.

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