CNN has a story about a woman named Andrea Curry-Demus showed up at a hospital in Pennsylvania on Thursday with a newborn baby that still had part of its umbilical cord attached.  Apparently, she must have claimed that she’d given birth before she could make it to the hospital.  Naturally, the hospital performed some tests and determined that Curry-Demus was not, in fact, related to the baby.

On Friday, the police made the gruesome discovery of a woman’s body in an apartment.  Finding a body in an apartment isn’t too unusual, but what was is that the body was bound and the poor person had been eviscerated and her unborn baby cut from her body.  And it was in Curry-Demus’ apartment.

Curry-Demus has subsequently told the police that she bought the baby for $1000 from someone named “Tina”.

This isn’t the first time that Curry-Demus has been involved in something like this.  She tried to steal a baby at knife point in 1990 and when that didn’t work, she took a 3-week old baby being treated for meningitis at a hospital home after its mother had gone home for the evening.  She was sentenced to a few years for this little crime spree.

The scary thing is that Curry-Demus may not have come up with this little plan all on her own.  She might have been copying what Lisa Montgomery did to Bobbie Jo Stinnett in 2004.  Montgomery was convicted in October 2007 for almost the exact same crime.

Why do these people think they will get away with something as horrific as this?

A recent entry by Ryan Boren talks about the features that will be added to WordPress 2.6.  Some of them are performance-related or bug fixes, while there are also a number of features that some people will probably find useful.

One I’m glad to see listed is the ability to move wp-config.php out of the root directory of the webserver.  This file defines a number of mission-critical variables that are used by the rest of a WordPress installation, including the connection information for the MySQL database, information about the database schema and other things that you don’t want to have accessible to the general public because they can be used to exploit vulnerabilities in your system.  Fortunately, if your server is properly set up anyone trying to access it through conventional methods will get an empty file for their efforts.  But, if your server isn’t properly set up then it’s possible that they could get a copy of the information contained in it, which is a Bad Thing.

As well as the security tweaks, there is a feature to make it easier to track changes to entries called post revisioning.  Though I use Windows Live Writer to write most of my entries, this will still be handy.  And if you’re running a multi-author blog using WordPress, this will help you track changes made by different authors working on the same entry and even go back to a previous version, if necessary.

The next version is currently in the beta-testing stage and if you’re really keendaring, you can download the WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 here.  Assuming everything goes according to schedule, the production version should be released sometime in July according to Ryan’s entry.

According to a story on CTV’s website, a waitress in Owen Sound was fired after she shaved her head for a local cancer research fundraiser, raising in excess of $2,700 in the process. Now, she’s not bald like Lt Ilia from the first Star Trek movie — she has a buzz cut. But the owner of Nathaniel’s restaurant, Dan Hilliard, effectively fired her, though apparently she’s still on the payroll and she can return to work when her hair grows back.

This smacks of a human rights violation and I hope that she files a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Personally, I will never spend a penny in Nathaniel’s or any other restaurant Dan Hilliard may own and I encourage you to do the same.

CNN’s coverage of the CareerBuilder.com annual survey of worst job interview mistakes made me reminisce about job interviews I’ve done over the years, from both sides of the table and I’m happy to report that, as far as I know, I haven’t done any of the don’ts on their list. I know a couple of people looking to change jobs, which means they’ll have to go through the interview process at some point. Hopefully they won’t do any of the following things that were reported in the survey results:

• Ask the interviewer for a ride home after the interview
• Smell their armpits on the way into the interview room
• Tell the interviewer they were fired from their last job because they beat up their boss. (You have to wonder how long that last interview went on for.)

But, my favourites are probably these two:

• Flush the toilet during a phone interview
• Answering their cell phone during the interview and asking the interviewer to leave the room because it was a “private” conversation

You wouldn’t think you’d actually have to tell someone either of those were inappropriate, eh?

The Globe and Mail had a story this morning about the next latest-and-greatest way of disposing those pesky corpses: gooification alkaline hydrolysis. Basically, you take a large pressure cooker, add some lye and a corpse, and heat it up under 60 pounds per square inch and wait. In no time at all, you’ll have a big pot o’ brown goo that used to be the dearly departed.

Seriously. I don’t need to make this stuff up!

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I found this in an entry on Gadling by Jamie Rhein:

It’s from the 10th anniversary celebration of Les Misérables at Royal Albert Hall.  There were seventeen different Jean Valjeans from around the world, each of whom sang a few lines from "Do You Hear The People Sing" and "One Day More" in their native tongue.

I haven’t seen a huge number of "Broadway" shows, but of those I have Les Mis is one of my favourites.

Pennsylvania is coal country. There are numerous coal mines there, both of the deep shafts in the ground type and the huge pits on the surface type. Needless to say, mines of any type are dangerous places and you can easily get yourself killed by falling into one if you’re trespassing on mine property at 1am.

Apparently Nathan Bowman didn’t learn this lesson.

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