Watercooler Stories

No wedding wows for Sweden's immigrants

LANDSKRONA, Sweden, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- A town in southern Sweden will allow only one "immigrant wedding" per month to be celebrated in its community center, a local politician said.

The "Folkets Hus," or "The People's House," the community center at Landskrona, Sweden, is mostly off-limits for those of certain foreign-born nationalities, the Helsingborgs Dagblad reported.

"We don't want to have too many," Lars Svensson, the center's manager and Social Democratic member of the Landskrona local council said.

When asked what he meant by the term "immigrant wedding," Svensson explained: "It's those who live in the city. There are quite a lot of Kurds and Palestinians who get married. There's something about having an oriental background; there can be between 400 and 500 guests."

Svensson said he didn't include "European immigrant groups" in his categorization, HD reported.

Svensson said the policy comes from alleged complaints of noise and untidiness.

When one 10-year-resident, originally from Kosovo, asked to book the center for a wedding, he was turned down by Svensson, who said, "Not for you, you all throw cake on the floor instead of in your mouths," HD said.

"We try to avoid discrimination. But the alternative is prohibiting these parties altogether," Svensson said.

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Neiman Marcus gives kids fantasy portal

DALLAS, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- This holiday season, young visitors can enter the Nieman Marcus store in Dallas though an 85-foot fantasy-themed portal, officials said.

Store designer Ignaz Gorischek's display begins with children age 4 through 10 crawling through a door in a plate-glass window at the storefront and into the 85-foot tube with windows that allows their parents to check on them, The Dallas Morning News reported.

Local children helped Gorischek, 53, think up displays for the tube featuring visual ideas about energy. Those ideas were turned into pretend elephants flying after eating peanuts and pretend monkeys levitating from energy transferred to their shoes after stomping grapes.

The crawl-through display was to open this weekend with a message for children, Gorischek said.

"The message is it's OK to dream big," Gorischek told The Morning News.

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'Meep' ban generates e-mail complaints

DANVERS, Mass., Nov. 17 (UPI) -- Officials at a Massachusetts high school that banned the word "meep" have been receiving e-mailed complaints about the move, police said.

Danvers Police Sgt. Robert Bettencourt said officials from Danvers High School have sent him copies of six e-mails complaining about the decision to ban "meep," a word popularized by Beaker from "The Muppet Show," the Boston Herald reported. Principal Thomas Murray said the ban was put in place because of a plan posted to Facebook for a major disruption involving the word "meep."

Bettencourt, who oversees school resource officers, said more complaints may have been forwarded to other members of the police department.

"It's kind of taken on a life of its own," Bettencourt said. "It's really not the word that's the problem. It's the behavior associated with the word by disrupting school and harassing people."

Copyright attorney Theodora Michaels said Assistant Principal Mark Strout informed her that her e-mail was among those given to police.

"My subject line said (in full), 'meep.' The body said (in full), 'Meep,'" Michaels wrote on her blog.

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Dog groups call Helmsley fund mismanaged

NEW YORK, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- Too little of Leona Helmsley's multibillion-dollar trust fund for dogs is being dispersed for canine care, more than 30 U.S. animal rights groups say.

The groups, including the Humane Society, allege the fund's trustees are mismanaging the money, the New York Post reported.

Helmsley, who owned New York hotels and apartment buildings, died in 2007, leaving the bulk of her $8 billion fortune to a charitable trust to be administered for the care for dogs.

The trust began making grants this year, but so far just $1 million of the first $136 million in grants has gone to canine-related causes, said the animal rights groups, which filed suit against the trustees in August in Surrogate's Court in New York.

The trustees didn't "even pretend to act to benefit the more discrete special interest identified by Mrs. Helmsley," the groups said in an update to their filing.

The trustees have countered that Helmsley's mission statement gives them "sole discretion" on the distribution of her money.