Coffin Conversations - by dementia

President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia (Africa's smallest country) has long believed he had mystic powers, but he said a vision received on Jan. 18 makes it possible for him to personally cure AIDS and asthma, though only on certain days and for a limited number of people. The vision gave him recipes based on seven herbs mentioned in the Quran but authorized him to treat no more than 10 AIDS sufferers, on Thursdays and Mondays, and not more than 100 asthma patients, on Fridays and Saturdays. (Not surprisingly, the government self-reports success.) Jammeh's previous visions included making Gambia rich by exporting oil, but so far no deposits have been found.

A man who was fired for visiting an adult chat room while at work at IBM is suing the company for $5 million. He says he deserves sympathy, not firing, since he is an Internet addict.

The man claims chat rooms relieve the post-traumatic stress he has suffered from since seeing his best friend killed in Vietnam in 1969.

The court papers claim the New Yorker's stress caused him to become a sex and Internet addict. He is seeking protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Five Deer Park, N.Y. teens have been arrested since October for "fence plowing," the latest rage among certain Long Island youths, according to Suffolk County police. The concept is simple: Pick out a fence, run toward it at high speed, and launch yourself like a missile to plow through the wood.

Another 10 fence plowing incidents are still under investigation in the Deer Park area, police said. The arrests were made after the suspects were caught on a surveillance camera installed by a home owner whose fence was plowed five times, police said.

The identities of the suspects were not made public. Along with bruises, the arrests could leave a mark on the suspects' permanent records: Police said some face felony criminal mischief charges.

Lt. Robert Edwards, commander of the Suffolk First Precinct in West Babylon, said the teens got the idea after seeing videos of other fence-plowing stunts on the Internet. He did not know if the teens in Deer Park posted any videos of the vandalism.

"They heard about it through other people who heard about and saw it on the Internet," Edwards told Newsday. "That's where they got the idea."

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A media exhibit featuring a campaign for a fake drug to treat a fictitious illness is causing a stir because some people think the illness is real.
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Australian artist Justine Cooper created the marketing campaign for a non-existent drug called Havidol for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD), which she also invented.

But the multi-media exhibit at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York, which includes a Web site, mock television and print advertisements and billboards is so convincing people think it is authentic.

"People have walked into the gallery and thought it was real," Mahmood said in an interview.

"They didn't get the fact that this was a parody or satire."

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MOUNTLAKE TERRACE, Wash. - The owner of a coffee stand north of Seattle is offering free coffee for a year to anyone who helps catch a robber.

Troy Malchow hopes the offer will create a buzz that finds the man who pointed a gun at him Wednesday at Perfetto Espresso.

Airport security can be very frustrating in this age of post-9/11 paranoia, security theatre and the War on Liquids. But one German tourist in the Phillipines should probably have found a better outlet for his dissatisfaction – because he could now face six years in jail for dropping his trousers before walking through an X-ray machine

When John Peffer got made redundant from his job at a funeral home, he didn't take it lying down.

Instead he allegedly started his own phoney funeral business by carrying caskets in an SUV and asking his girlfriend to act as a priest.

A Good Samaritan taxi driver who allowed three people injured in a car accident to shelter from from the cold in his cab was left counting the cost - after emergency services destroyed the taxi to 'rescue' the trio.

Cabbie Peter Andersson, 45, from Lulea in central Sweden said: 'They had a few cuts and bruises and I let them shelter in my cab. They looked worse than they were.

Some colleges in Malaysia could soon offer students courses on how to keep public toilets clean.

Tourists and Malaysians frequently complain about the nation's public lavatories, saying they often lack toilet paper, soap and even seats.

Shawn Hornbeck's parents received the best possible news when their son was found alive more than four years after his abduction.

For self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Brown, however, the news was not so good.

Nashville, Tenn. -- Hoping to prompt Nashville�s lunch crowd into realizing that whether fish, foul, or human, a corpse is a corpse, a naked, "charred" PETA member will slather herself with barbecue sauce while another PETA member "cooks" her on a charcoal grill downtown tomorrow.

Date: Wednesday, January 31