In this contest, readers are again asked to identify
the bogus news item. All four items are “reported” in similar
style, from The American Spectator News Service (some minor
details have been slightly altered). Three of them record actual
events. Readers of previous quizzes have been a bit snippy in
complaining about the ease of detecting the bogus item.
Nevertheless, in News Quiz #2 very few people actually guessed
the correct answer. Better luck this time. (And no cheating by
looking on the web!) A bottle of bubbly and an autographed copy
of the tie new book by American Spectator
editor Bob Tyrrell goes to the first three readers who
correctly identify the bogus paragraph.
Item 1
TAS NEWS SERVICE, HORSENECK BEACH, MASS. — A few
transgendered women caused a stir over Memorial Day weekend by
going topless on Horseneck Beach. According to police, complaints
were received after several individuals removed their tops and
revealed their surgically enhanced breasts. They covered up
before the police arrived, but even if they hadn’t, they were
doing nothing illegal, the police chief noted. Because they have
male genitalia, they can’t be charged with indecent exposure for
showing their breasts.
Item 2
TAS NEWS SERVICE, MANCHESTER, U.K. — A transsexual has won
a legal battle over the backdating of a pension. The 68-year-old
claimant was named Robert when he was born. The claimant
underwent a “gender reassignment” operation ten years ago and
sought a state pension the following year, upon reaching the age
of 60, the age women are eligible for pensions.
Relying on the Recognition of Gender Act 2004, which
requires married transsexuals to divorce before the government
will recognize their newly acquired gender, the government
pensions minister ruled in January 2008 that the claimant was
allowed to receive a pension only from the male retirement age of
65. But the couple, who had been married for thirty years, did
not wish to divorce.
The government declared that under the Act the claimant was
not entitled to be recognized as female while still married to
his wife, because one woman could not be married to
another.
The groundbreaking decision from the Lord Justices,
however, found that the pensions minister was wrong to treat the
claimant as a man for state pension purposes, and that the denial
was in breach of the claimant’s human rights.
Item 3
TAS NEWS SERVICE, WASHINGTON, D.C. — Following complaints
by high-school students and college-age adults that the free
Durex condoms offered by the city are not big enough and not of
good enough quality, D.C. officials have decided to start
distributing Trojan condoms, including the company’s super-size
Magnum variety.
“If people get what they don’t want, they are just going to
trash them,” said University of the District of Columbia student
T. Squalls.
“We thought making condoms available was a good thing, but
we never asked the kids what they wanted,” said D.C. Council
member David A. Catania, apologetically.
Officials have also begun to authorize teachers or
counselors, preferably male, to distribute condoms after they
have completed a 30-minute online training course called “WrapMC”
— for Master of Condoms.
The city, which has 600,000 residents, expects to hand out
more than four million condoms this year, an average of more than
six per person.
“We want to support the regularization of condom use
citywide,” said Shannon L. Hader, director of the city’s HIV/AIDS
Administration. “We are promoting this idea that using condoms is
healthy… to try to destigmatize condom use.”
Durex condoms cost the city 5.7 cents each, but the Trojans
will cost six to nine cents each (depending, of course, on
size).
Item 4
TAS NEWS SERVICE, ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Charges have been
dropped against a 43-year-old gym teacher, Louis Andrews, who was
accused of incest, a Class E felony in New York. Subsequently,
Monica Andrews, his daughter, bore a child and claimed Andrews
was the father. Because the alleged event occurred one week after
Monica’s 18th birthday, Andrews was not also charged with having
sex with a minor, police said.
During the course of the paternity suit brought by Monica
to prove that Andrews was the father of her child, Andrews’s
attorney’s wife, Joan Tyler, a gynecologist, while discussing the
case with her husband, made an interesting discovery. Andrews’s
blood type is A. The blood type of Andrews’s wife, Sharon, is B.
The baby’s blood type is A, but the blood type of the baby’s
18-year-old mother is O.
Fans of detective fiction will quickly spot the problem:
Monica could not possibly be the child of Louis Andrews, because
a child must inherit his or her blood type (A, B, AB, or O) from
the mother or the father. Thus, if a child’s blood type differs
from the type of both the mother and the man alleged to be the
father, the man could not possibly be the father of the
child.
Sharon Andrews, upon being confronted with the
impossibility of Andrews’s being Monica’s father, confessed to
having had an affair that resulted in the birth of Monica.
