Signs of the End Times. Or something.

Three New Yorkers convicted of vehicular homicide are appealing their convictions on the ground that they were too drunk to know that it was dangerous for them to drive.

Funding for clinical cancer treatment trials and other life-critical research at the National Institutes of Health has been cut due to the government shutdown. But the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was given $445 million on the first day of the impasse. Big Bird, it seems, trumps chemo.

An Ohio judge has told a man who disappeared in 1994 that he is still legally dead despite the fact that the man was standing right in front of him. Apparently it's too late to change the ruling. The State of Ohio seems to lack a mechanism for legally raising the legally dead, so I guess the gentleman is now legally as good as decomposed. They could at least have declared him a legal zombie.

A Pennsylvania grammar school is cancelling Halloween-oriented observances on the ground that some people think that Halloween has religious overtones. The school did not specify which religion.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's anxieity to cultivate an aura of moderation has inspired a debate in Iran over the continued use of the phrase "Death to America" as an official slogan. Perhaps it will now be permissible for Iranians to wish America a really bad- but non-lethal- case of the flu or an unpleasant skin disease instead.

In a less grotesque bit of strange news, scientists have developed an apparently valid test to confirm a diagnosis of early Alzheimer's disease based on how far away the patient can detect the smell of peanut butter with one nostril closed.

HT: Drudge