Weird news often but not always funny

I's been awhile since we sampled the goodies at newsoftheweird.com. What a shame! It's usually studded with pithy stuff for our rightist purposes. A few recent cullings:

In additional fallout from the budget cuts and personnel reductions at the IRS, the supervisory revenue official for the Dallas region disclosed in April that his office had so few collectors that it would pursue only scofflaws who owe the government at least $1 million. "I have to say," the supervisor told a reporter, "nobody's ever going to knock on (the) door" of anyone who owes from $100,000 to $999,999. [Washington Post, 4-8-2015]

The owner of a New York City condominium apartment that sold for $100.5 million recently received a property tax reduction of $360,000 last year -- and is likely to keep receiving reductions over as many as 25 years, based on "Section 421-a" benefits the state enacted to encourage "affordable" housing in the most desirable parts of New York City. The tax abatements are available to developers that promise to create "affordable" units in the same zones ("affordable" to families making under about $40,000 annually), but in recent years, the new "millionaire" units (with tax breaks) have outnumbered the new affordable units by about 11-to-1, according to a February New York Times report, costing the city over $1 billion a year in revenue. [New York Times, 2-2-2015] [Gothamist.com, 3-18-2015]

Just west of Ferguson, Missouri, is Kinloch (pop. 299), where newly elected mayor Betty McCray was unable to start work on April 23 because the losing incumbent administration merely locked her out of City Hall ("impeaching" her for "voter fraud" in the April 7 election, despite St. Louis County election officials having already certified her victory). Of McCray's two predecessors, one was once also locked out of office by police, and the other had to go to court to get his mayoral job back after admitting that he had missed child-support payments. [KTVI-TV (St. Louis), 4-23-2015] [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1-29-2014]

It seemed like a good idea when the town of Celoron, New York, agreed in 2009 to pay for a bronze statue honoring the village's only celebrity. Lucille Ball had spent her childhood years there, and even today, everyone "Loves Lucy." The result was apparently a monstrosity, described in news reports as "frightening" and unrecognizable by anyone who has ever watched Lucy's TV shows or movies. The original sculptor first suggested a fee of $8,000 to $10,000 to make a better one, but after Mayor Scott Schrecengost started a fundraising campaign, the sculptor offered to make another one for free. [CNN, 4-7-2015]

Is This a Great Country or What? Counting only the pool of bonus money (not regular salaries), employees of New York securities industries in 2014 earned roughly twice as much as the total income paid to all employees in the United States who worked full time at the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour). (The statistic, from a report by the Institute for Policy Studies and reinforced by a University of Michigan professor using figures from the New York State Comptroller and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was featured in a March New York Times analysis.) [New York Times, 3-13-2015]

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