"If the government won't protect my kids, who will?"
-- panelist on WHDH-TV, on the dangers of the Internet.
"A surgeon who treated some of Maryland's most critically injured patients for two years has been fired because he had no license to practice medicine. Dr. Arthur Boyd Jr. was dismissed Tuesday from the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center.
"Boyd, 48, has failed at least 11 licensing exams in Tennessee, Michigan and North Carolina, and was convicted in 1985 of offering a Michigan state employee a $20,000 bribe for an advance copy of the exam, The (Baltimore) Sun reported Wednesday, citing court records. However, Boyd was 'a capable surgeon' and records show no instances of his patients being harmed, said trauma center spokesman Joel Lee."
--AP newswire, October 14.
"The driver of a late-model Chevrolet pickup, Donald Burns, 55, was dead at the scene of the accident, just north of 81st Street on US 169, said police spokesman Lucky Lamons. The man's name was not released pending notification of relatives."
--The Tulsa World, September 30.
"Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) said of the raid on Waco, 'The only law that [the FBI] clearly established [David Koresh] broke that I can see so far is he had sex with consenting minors. Do you send tanks and government troops into the large sections of Kentucky and Tennessee and other places where such things occur?'"
--Reason, November 1995.
"To conceal UN plans to withdraw from the besieged town of Gorazde before the NATO air raids, Welsh-speaking radio operators from the Royal Welch Fusiliers were used to foil Serbs' eavesdropping on communications. 'It was quite successful,' said a British Defense Military spokesman. 'Welsh isn't a bit like Serbo-Croat.'"
--Newsweek, October 2.
"Some people claim there's a woman to blame, but I know it's all Newt and Bob Dole's fault."
--Singer Jimmy Buffett's altered version of "Margaritaville," as he performed it at a Clinton fundraiser, quoted in the October 2 Newsweek.
"I can't believe it's him! He called today from work and said he wanted to go to the game. I was flipping through the TV channels just now and I saw it. For a second, I thought it might have been him. But then they said on TV, 'some stupid fan ran onto the field,' and my husband isn't stupid. ... He's never done anything like this before. Could he really have been this drunk?"
--Lucy Murray, whose bond trader husband had run onto Wrigley Field to attack relief pitcher Randy Myers, quoted on the AP newswire, September 29.
"Expires after one year"
-- at the bottom of the Thayer elevator inspection sticker, immediately below the handwritten date "1/13/94."
"In his speeches to the survivors, residents of Oklahoma and the nation, President Clinton sounded like the titans of WWII -- Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. The disaster turned a maligned, beleaguered president into a national leader."
--Dr. Paul M. Lerner, Amtrak Express magazine, September/October 1995.
"Now that I'm here we are going to turn this program around 360 degrees."
--Former University of California, Berkeley basketball player Jason Kidd on being drafted by the Dallas Mavericks as quoted in The Los Angeles Times.
"A state legislator was arrested for drunken driving after driving around Minnesota for hours while threatening suicide with a BB gun. Rep. Bob Johnson was taken to the county jail Wednesday under a suicide watch. It was his third drunken driving arrest in seven weeks....Johnson, 49, has been heavily criticized for threatening to cut the State Patrol's budget because officers refused to give him a ride to former Gov. Rudy Perpich's funeral on Sept. 25."
-- AP newswire, October 12.
"Virginia is known as the mother of presidents. But the old lady hasn't been in the family way for more than a century."
-- Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), quoted on the AP newswire, October 12.
"An emergency dispatcher lectured a woman on her use of a racial slur while intruders tried to break into the caller's house....[Manassas, VA police chief Christopher] Tutko said the dispatcher, a white woman whom authorities have not identified, erred by chastising Ms. Alanis during a second, follow-up call for referring to the prowlers during her initial call as 'niggers.'"
--AP newswire, October 11.
"Passengers in vehicles should board in their vehicles and should not leave the vessel until it reaches the opposite shore. Vehicle passengers not remaining on the vessel risk being denied boarding as walk-on passengers once our capacity is reached."
--1995 schedule of the Bridgeport & Port Jefferson Steamboat Company.
"Imagine a BMW with an Uzi submachine gun and crack cocaine in the back seat. The driver isn't going to say to himself, 'Wow, the marginal tax rate is down 5%! I think I'll open a dry cleaning shop...'"
--George Will, to members of the Harvard Republican Club, October 15.
"When Joy Glassman's son decided he wanted to be a firefighter, she did what any mother would do. She tried to help advance in his career. Glassman allegedly set five fires in Northern California for her son's company to put out. Now, the woman is facing arson charges. Her son did not know of her alleged activity, but he has resigned his position with the fire department."
--Reason, November 1995.
"The views on the nation's scenic highways are beautiful, but they may not be natural. Seems that for many years the Forest Service has leaned on transportation officials to paint rocks on parts of some highways. When rocks are newly exposed because of landslides or construction, it takes them years to age. Rather than wait, the government has artificially aged them."
--Reason, November 1995.
"The October issue of the Somerville Community News, a self-described socialist newspaper, was typically piquant. An unsigned editorial ... was factually incorrect when it said [School Committee member Julie DiPasquale] was 'found guilty of ethics violations' -- a phrase that was crossed out by hand with a felt-tip pen, but still readable in some copies. Warren Goldstein-Gelb, a member of the editorial collective that publishes the newspaper, said a team of volunteers blacked out the DiPasquale characterization in 10000 copies so the issue could be distributed before the October 3 election."
--The Boston Sunday Globe, October 15.
"We recommend that children come [only] when they're 3 or older."
--Raffi, on the growing practice of parents bringing predictably ill-behaved toddlers to live concerts, The Boston Sunday Globe, October 15.
"Procol Harum was the accidentally misspelled pedigree of the group's drug dealer's Siamese cat."
--The New York Times, October 15.
"Boy oh boy you showed us what a dummy he was! (How did he ever get into Dartmouth?)"
--letter to The Dartmouth Review, October 3.
"The Ganja in the Caribbean is four times stronger than in the United States or Mexico."
--Orlando Patterson, Harvard University's John Cowles Professor of Sociology.