Commentary: Joe Bob's Week in review

A New York federal judge threw out a lawsuit against McDonald's charging that the hamburger chain was responsible for making two teenage girls fat. The girls had been eating all their meals at McDonald's and were under the impression that this diet would lead to Olympic athletic careers.

A new language law in Romania forbids all American slang in public discourse, so that, for example, the word "hot dog" may not be used. Street vendor signs will have to advertise the sale of "a kind of sausage in a kind of roll." Most Romanians think the law is a kind of excrement emerging from a kind of male farm animal.

Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting firm were paid $4.3 million to bring law and order to Mexico City with his famous "zero tolerance" enforcement plan that targets "quality of life" crimes. First new policy: get the Chiclets sellers off the streets.

Astronomers decided that Pluto is not a planet after all, and the Hayden Planetarium removed it from its list of planets. Apparently it's just an iceball with delusions of grandeur. In related news, geologists decided that Lake Erie is not such a "great" lake, either.

Thousands of acres of grape fields in California's San Joaquin Valley were plowed under and burned after an oversupply of Thompson seedless grapes decimated the raisin industry. Do your part. Just three more raisins per day on your morning muffin could mean the difference between bankruptcy and mere despair.

The Italian government is sending inspectors to restaurants all over Europe to verify that so-called Italian restaurants are really Italian. If they determine that the menus are genuine, that the ingredients are from Italy, and that the cooking methods and service are all Italian, they'll award the restaurant a "Certificate of Authenticity." If not, they'll send Guido.

A grizzly bear mauled an animal-rights activist near West Yellowstone, Mont., after he surprised it and then made the mistake of running away. At the victim's request, the bear will not be shot, but will be sentenced to anger-management training.

Elite Models, which represents Cindy Crawford, Christie Turlington and Heidi Klum, sued two New York escort agencies using versions of the same business name, claiming it could cause confusion among the public. A Japanese businessman was reportedly furious after ordering all three.

The French government launched a crackdown on explicit sex on television and in novels while arresting the customers of prostitutes in an effort to return to family values. The latest call for moral uplift was made by the 12 mistresses of French Cabinet members.

Yoni Cordon, working at the Kargher chocolate factory in Hatfield Township, Pa., fell from a platform into a 7-foot-deep vat of chocolate and drowned. Willy Wonka has no song for this.

In other fatal vat news, Jose Padilla of Lathrop, Calif., was found dead at the bottom of a 29,000-gallon fermentation tank at the Canandaigua Winery in Escalon. Padilla was one of several temporary workers hired to help out during the crush-harvest season. He was crushed but, fortunately for his family, not fermented.

In Japan, you can buy a toilet seat equipped with electrodes that shock your butt and measure your body fat, a toilet seat that glows in the dark, a toilet seat that raises automatically when an infrared sensor detects the presence of a human, a toilet seat that plays harp music or nature sounds, a toilet seat that blasts the air with heat and air conditioning, a toilet seat that measures urine sugar levels with a retractable spoon on a mechanical arm, and a toilet seat with a buttock-massaging water jet. We would list all the other automated Japanese toilets, but that would be anal.

Animal-rights activists scored a major victory when they shut down the annual greased-pig contest at Farm City Day in Hendersonville, N.C. After 47 consecutive years of children chasing two greased pigs, Carolina Animal Action filed a lawsuit, and Henderson County Parks and Recreation Director Rick Harris said, "Oh, the hell with it." The pigs will now be taken to a safe haven and properly fed and cared for until they can be butchered for a barbecue.

You don't need eight glasses of water a day, concluded Dr. Heinz Valtin of the Dartmouth Medical School, and the most likely result of drinking that much water is "you're just going to need to go to the bathroom more," says Paula Trumbo of the Institute of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board. In fact, you can chug so much water that it can be fatal, and furthermore, the water in coffee is just as good for you as the water from an Evian bottle. Can we go back to third-grade health class and sneer contemptuously now?

Whitney Houston was sued for $100 million by her father's company, which brokered her deal with Arista Records but claims to have never been paid. Whitney says money is not that important in family matters, because "I ee-yi ee-yi will always love yew!"

Daytona Beach, Fla., passed an ordinance requiring women to cover at least one-fourth of their breasts, and both sexes to wear clothing on at least one-third of their buttocks. This already sounds like some very precise computations are going to have to be made by city police officers, but the chief will issue protactors and tape measures to any cop on beach duty.

Gowhar Kheirandish, a prominent Iranian actress, was arrested for kissing a director on the forehead while giving him an award at a film festival. Iranian authorities suspect that she may have gone too far.

Next September, Seattle will vote on a 10-cent tax on espresso, leading to hopes that those people will calm down. Yes, we know how much you hate newcomers.

Scenes from domestic life:

First Catalina Cabassa, a researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was found dead in her Queens apartment from three stab wounds to the chest and neck. Since she had filed three domestic incident reports against her husband, Robert Cabassa, police naturally went looking for him -- and found him 23 days later, calling a TV reporter from a pay phone in East Harlem. The husband's explanation: his wife "walked into his knife." Three times. Apparently that deep gash in the neck came from her limbo-ing into the knife.

Scenes from our secure republic:

An American Airlines flight took off from San Francisco, bound for Chicago, but was diverted to Salt Lake City after Maxim Segalov attempted to recharge a double-A battery with a cigarette lighter. Segalov, a native of Belarus studying at San Jose State University, was arrested for . . . uh . . . alchemy?

(Joe Bob Briggs writes several columns for UPI. Contact him at [email protected] or through his Web site, joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221.)