Alo-Ha! Friday

CHARLES MEMMINGER

Trying to pluck weapons
from Saddam’s nest

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I learned from a young woman reading the news on a local radio station recently that U.N. inspectors are hoping to get "unfeathered" access to Iraq's weapons programs. Obviously, that will take a lot of pluck. I suspect the word she was going for is "unfettered," but I like "unfeathered" better. It implies the stripping away of the Saddam's showy outer fluff to get to the naked truth about his weapons programs. The Arab world should be giving us unfeathered access to Osama bin Laden's whereabouts, too. Birds of Saddam's and Osama's feather should be defrocked together.

Now the news:

Visiting workers stiffed

LONDON (Reuters) >> Two British mental health workers visited a woman patient, chatted with her and then left without realizing she was dead.

The workers said they visited the home of a paranoid schizophrenic and found her sitting in the kitchen with the curtains drawn and her back to them.

"She didn't seem to want us there," one worker said.

The next day, two other workers followed up on the visit discovered the woman was dead.

(Hey, she wasn't paranoid. She KNEW people were ignoring her.)

Living la vida Tehran

TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) >> An Iranian woman cut off her henpecked husband's ear after he dared to query why she was late coming home.

"My wife does judo and gets angry very easily," the husband said. "I'm not allowed to say anything she doesn't like, and if I disobey her, she beats me up."

("On the other hand," he added, " I live in a hot, barren wasteland lorded over by vicious religious clerics, so life is pretty sweet.")

When Barbie goes bad

ATHENS (Reuters) >> Greece has banned the sale of "dead dolls," toys with fiery eyes, scarred faces and bloodied mouths that come in their own little coffins.

(Great. This really screws up our Christmas shopping.)

'Honolulu Lite' on Sunday:

All this talk about cutting back on P.E. in public schools brings back warm memories of that special hour of the school day: climbing into dirty, smelly gym clothes, getting all grimy and sweaty playing "football" with 20 kids on each side, spending the rest of the day stinking up the classroom because it was too dangerous in the locker room to take a shower ... Those were the days.

Quote me on this

"There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot."

-- Steve Wright

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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com

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