Lead Stories
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In January a 51-year-old woman calling herself “Mrs. B” picketed the Roman Catholic diocese of Norwich, Connecticut, wearing a black ski mask and carrying a sign reading “The Bishop Forgot My Exorcism.” She believes that between 1993 and 1999 she was possessed by as many as ten demons, and though she appealed to six dioceses in three states, none provided her with an exorcist–which she characterizes as “unpardonable neglect.” Among her signs: speaking in languages she’d never heard (such as Gujarati) and having her eyes move “without my permission.”
Edward Blaine, 61, who served nearly 20 years after a 1963 conviction for bank robbery, was arrested in January and charged with robbing the Union Bank & Trust in Port Royal, Virginia. Apparently he’s grown even more incompetent with age: Police said Blaine fled with hundred-dollar bills falling out of his pockets and arrived at his getaway car (a rental) to discover he’d locked the keys inside. He grabbed a piece of wood and tried to smash the window, then gave up and threw the wood at a nearby truck–provoking the man who owned the truck to grab a gun and chase Blaine down. Blaine tried to shoot the man in the ensuing struggle, but he couldn’t get his pistol out of his coat pocket and shot himself in the leg. Then the man shot Blaine, wounding him in the same leg.
Creme de la Weird
The Atlanta firm Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences studies consumers’ brains with MRI machines while they look at pictures of products, so that researchers can see which areas are stimulated and thereby infer subconscious emotional connections and true preferences. On the Canadian public radio program Marketplace in December, a Brighthouse spokesman tried to say as little as possible about this “neuromarketing” technique: “Right now [our clients] would rather not be exposed. We have been kind of running under the radar with a lot of the breakthrough technology.”
