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Alison Cook looks back at 1996: Year of the Rat

Continued from page 2

The Easter Bunny barely escaped being flattened by the same guy
John Lienhard, the erudite host of public radio's "The Engines of Our Ingenuity," was walking his dogs when a motorist followed him onto a lawn and ran him down, breaking both his legs.

Then they interrogated him about the John Lienhard case
After Chris Hawkins plowed his 1985 Cadillac halfway through a southeast Houston home, injuring three children and two adult residents, he was cited for failure to drive in a single lane.

They were doing a slow burn
Three women who had just torched the car of a romantic rival were stopped by a Baytown cop who noticed that two of them had smoking hair.

Quentin Tarantino asked if he could come, too
Judge W.R. Voight ordered a teenager convicted of a drive-by shooting to attend an autopsy so he could appreciate the effects of violent crime.

Smile and the world smiles with you; smirk and you smirk alone
Visiting judge Allen Stilley tacked another three years onto Tony Lanell Moore's 12-year sentence when he noticed him smirking during a statement by the aunt of the youth he helped murder.

It was worse when they hauled Mother Teresa in on littering charges and booked her as Teresa Rodriguez

Seventy-nine-year-old Lucille White was jailed for a month on kidnapping charges after she took her husband of 59 years, a ward of Harris County, from a Houston nursing home and drove him to Longview in hopes of admitting him to a better facility. Upon her transfer to the Harris County Jail, she was denied bail when authorities mistook her for Lucille Davis, a woman with a rap sheet; Marvin Zindler had to spring her.

Somewhere, Lee Strasberg is smiling
Kevin Kyle Pever was charged with impersonating a police officer after he stopped a motorist, using a light blue car equipped with flashing lights and siren, and wrote a parking ticket. Police who arrested him at home found assorted weaponry, police shoulder patches, four pairs of handcuffs and a two-way police radio, which they used to call HPD dispatchers. They drove Pever to the police station, where he recommended a parking spot where he said the car would not be towed.

Our roving cultural ambassadors
The Houston-based Bandidos biker gang was suspected when anti-tank grenades damaged two Hells' Angels clubhouses in Denmark, part of a Scandinavian turf war that included a shootout at the Copenhagen airport, followed by a funeral at which attendees wore armbands reading, "God Forgives, Bandidos Don't."

Good thing they didn't have anti-tank grenades
Six Aeros players were arrested after a bar fight at Sam's Boat, during which they flung food at each other, progressed to baskets and chairs, then kicked, hit, punched and threw headlocks on policemen who tried to escort them from the club.

Somewhere, Lee Strasberg is laughing
Two nude Fort Bend teenagers told Houston police they were carjacking victims who had been robbed, stripped and stuffed in a car trunk; they turned out to be inept robbers who had abandoned their loot, gun and Jeep when convenience store employees gave chase.

Situation Normal, All Fouled Up

Good thing he didn't name it "Apocalypse Now"
Evangelist Loren Davis's DC-3 cargo plane, the "Chariot of Fire," belly-flopped onto the lawn of a Conroe residence and burned up; nobody was hurt.

Lucky her
Margareta Luna won a free visit from an exterminator and an entomologist when she wrote a letter to Combat, the roach bait manufacturers, claiming that "I have the worst roach problem in America." The experts estimated that there were 25,000 to 30,000 roaches in her house.

They're keeping mum about the open bag of Chee-tos
NASA inspectors found that the shuttle Atlantis had launched with two loose wrenches aboard: one inside a solid rocket booster and another on the floor of an engine compartment.

Either that, or very small Chee-tos
Unveiling photographs of microscopic segmented, tubelike shapes found in a meteorite, NASA scientists announced the squiggles might be evidence that there once was life on Mars.

They're flooding over a four-leaf clover
After the Sierra Club complained that clover was flourishing in the new wetlands the state had created to compensate for Grand Parkway construction, the Department of Transportation agreed to re-grade the area so it could retain rainwater.

Where are those $500 hammers when you need them?
Astronauts on the shuttle Columbia had to cancel two high-priority space walks when the airlock door jammed.

And you should see their fire ant bites
Twenty-two members of the Hollywood crew filming Locusts in Fort Bend County came down with poison ivy after a night shoot in a weedy field.

Next on Channel 2: Rob Johnson shows you how to escape ...
Truck driver Jesse Martinez was almost buried alive when a ruptured grain silo poured a mountain of winter wheat onto his 18-wheeler.

They thought polynomials were what Marvin Zindler's suits are made of
Ninety-two percent of the Houston high school students who took a new state algebra exam flunked it.

Prime suspect: David Adickes
Vandals tipped a 1,000-pound metal globe sculpture from its pedestal in
Jones Plaza and rolled it across Smith Street.

Walking on water doesn't count
Because of problems getting the ice to freeze, Southwestern Bell had to postpone the opening of its outdoor skating rink, "Miracle on Main Street."

Our Distinguished Visitors

Four Seasons fatwa
Ralph the Swimming Pig had his reservations canceled abruptly by the Four Seasons Hotel out of deference to a Muslim dignitary. The swine was taken in by the Crowne Plaza, where he was housed on the executive level, provided with a limo and given a red carpet to walk on each time he entered or exited the lobby.

If you've seen one country club, you've seen them all
At a charity benefit, iconic New York cabaret pianist Bobby Short repeatedly referred to the River Oaks Country Club as the Riverdale Country Club.

Actually, it's closer to Riverdale
The cable food show Dining Around, in a segment on Houston restaurants, gave the address of Tony's as 1801 Post Oak in Seabrook.

Including the entire membership of Weasels Anonymous
A party for book-touring O.J. Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro, thrown by oilman Johnny Mitchell, was beset by numerous gatecrashers.

He left out the last line: "You 12 nitwits."
In front of cheering parishioners at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, O.J. Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran gave a 20-minute sermon in which he quoted James Baldwin, Charles Dickens, the Book of Jeremiah and himself ("If it doesn't fit, you must acquit").

Vernon Maxwell and the entire Aeros hockey squad pitched in for bail
St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Donovan Osborne was handcuffed and charged with public intoxication and trespassing when he refused to leave the Roxy nightclub at 2:05 a.m.

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