Lead Stories
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For 23 years Dennis Hope, 55, of Gardnerville, Nevada, has operated a business that sells deeds of title to land on the moon, Mars, and Venus. In September Hope told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he’s earned $6.25 million so far, or an average of $272,000 a year–the current price of an acre is $19.99 (plus $1.51 in lunar tax). The idea for the business arose from something he learned in college: specifically, that the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibited signatory countries from exercising sovereignty over celestial bodies but was silent about ownership by individuals. Hope claims to have written letters to the UN (and to the Soviet and American governments) explaining his plan and asking if anyone had a problem with it; he says no one ever wrote back.
Budget cuts in Alabama (and the recent failure of the governor’s tax-increase referendum) have sharply curtailed the number of troopers its department of public safety can assign to nighttime highway patrol–currently the level is down to five or six for the entire state. However, during college football season as many as 17 troopers spend all day every Saturday providing security for ten Alabama teams. According to an October report from the Associated Press, the schools have technically agreed to reimburse the state for the troopers’ expenses, but the government has yet to make a serious attempt to collect.
Among the worst jobs in science, according to the October issue of Popular Science: (15) fish counters, who watch the fish ladders built into dams in the Pacific Northwest for eight hours at a time, pressing a particular button every time they see a fish of a certain species swim past; (11) the two remaining government bureaucrats whose job it is to convince Americans of the merits of the metric system; (4) mosquito researchers in Brazil, who endure up to 17 bites a minute on three-hour shifts (the most troublesome species only responds to human bait) and hope not to get malaria; (1) flatus odor judges working for Minnesota gastroenterologist Michael Levitt, who feeds subjects pinto beans, gathers the resulting gases in plastic tubes, and then has the judges sniff more than 100 samples, rating them for noxiousness (the chief culprit seems to be hydrogen sulfide).
