Crazy for Fiber

Bizarre Auction – Coffin

For the JFK-assassination plot junkie who has everything: L ee Harvey Oswald’s coffin. Body not included.

A Los Angeles sale house said on Tuesday it would sell the simple pine coffin in which the suspected killer of President John F. Kennedy was buried for almost 20 years.

Bidding will start at $1,000, but the item is expected to fetch physically powerful interest from museums and collectors of presidential memorabilia when it goes on the block on December 16.

“There’s just a lot of attention in Kennedy and anything to do with his assassination,” said Laura Yntema, auction manager at Santa Monica, California-based Nate D. Sanders.

The coffin was uncovered in October 1981 after a legal dispute between Oswald’s widow, Marina, and his brother, Robert. Marina successfully sought an exhumation to test a conspiracy theory that a double Russian agent had been buried in her husband’s place, according to the auction house.

A medical exam showed the badly decomposed body was indeed Oswald’s, and he was gone back to Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park in Fort Worth, Texas, in a new casket.

The original coffin, which had suffered wide water damage, is being sold by Baumgardner Funeral Home, the local undertaker which handled the re-internment.

ATMs dirtier than public toilets: study

British scientists have found that public banking machines are in fact dirtier than public washrooms, containing bacteria that can cause diarrhea and other unlucky illnesses.

'We were astonished by our results because the ATM machines were shown to be a lot contaminated with bacteria; to the same level as nearby public lavatories," Richard Hastings, a microbiologist for BioCote, which supported the study, told the Telegraph newspaper. "In addition, the bacteria we detected on ATMs were similar to those from the toilet, which are well-known as causes of frequent human illnesses."

The researchers took mop up of public banking machines and then took separate swabs of nearby public washrooms. The samples were allowed to grow overnight and then contrast under a microscope.
The study came on the heels of a public view survey that asked people to list the dirtiest public places. The study compares those consequences with its findings from the swabs.

Public washrooms topped the list of thought-to-be dirtiest places, according to the Telegraph, followed by public telephones, bus stops, subway stations and bus seats.

"But it's ironic that while people distinguish chip and pin pads to be the least dirty, our swabbing experiments have actually shown them to be dirtier than public lavatories," Hastings said.