New Film Reconsiders Marilyn Monroe's Death • Japanese Bra Grows Rice

• Production company FilmEngine has announced plans to re-open the investigation into Marilyn Monroe’s death. FilmEngine has acquired the life rights of Lionel Grandison, the man who claims he was forced to falsify Monroe’s death records.

The project, creatively titled Marilyn, will bring Grandison’s story to the big screen for the first time. Grandison claimed Monroe was murdered, and that he was forced to cover up the crime under threat of death. • A schizophrenic man suffering from delusions about his chronic blushing committed suicide last July. Musician and artist Luke Shears thought that his continual blushing was being monitored and posted on the internet. Today a New York inquest heard the details that lead up to Shears’s decision to gas himself, the UK Independent reports. • Hippocrate Mertsaris, 35, has been charged with sexual abuse and sexual harassment after he grabbed a woman’s inner thigh in her office earlier this year. Mertsaris’ lawyer claims he did not mean to harass the woman, but instead “whacked” her in the butt as a result of his spastic movements from cerebral palsy. • Too broke to travel? A Finnish company has made it possible for your stuffed animal to do your wandering for you, for the ridiculous price of $140. The “Standard Journey” includes a trip to a northern Finnish town, where the teddy bear will “take” holiday photos before being sent home to their owner. • For top female tennis player Dinara Safina, “life is not all glitz and glamour.” In fact, it’s pretty goddamn boring. Safina gets up early, eats a healthy breakfast, and is “not a party animal.” That sounds fun. • Baltimore police are investigating the case of an 18-month-old girl who has been diagnosed with gonorrhea. They are conducting a test to determine if she was raped, but no criminal charges have been filed yet. • Nola Ochs, current record-holder for the oldest college graduate, will obtain her masters degree in liberal studies this Saturday, the Kansas City Star reports. “For some reason, I really enjoy walking across that platform and receiving an award,” she told reporters on Tuesday. “Maybe I’m a little vain — I don’t want to be, but maybe I am.” • Japanese police have arrested a 26-year-old unemployed man for allegedly posting online threats against the eight-year-old Princess Aiko. The man told police that he posted his comment, which promised to kill Aiko-sama by “smashing her head with a hammer,” in order to get a reaction, and that he never expected police would become involved. • Zama Coursen-Neff, writing for The Daily Beast, examines the overlooked problem of child exploitation in the U.S. Many children work as field-hands throughout the country, picking lettuce, spinach, asparagus, and other crops. American law currently allows children to work on farms at younger ages, for far longer hours, and under more hazardous conditions than in other jobs. • In other agricultural news, a Japanese company has created a bra that can grow rice. Company officials say the undergarment is designed to raise awareness of food self-sufficiency and inspire women to consider farming. • Michigan police are looking for more than $250,000 worth of Lover’s Lane adult products that was stolen from a delivery truck. The missing items include lingerie, clubwear, sex toys, lube and “all kinds of romantic stuff.” Police are keeping an eye out for the goods on eBay and black market outlets. • George Alan Reker has announced his resignation fr “ex-gay” organization, the National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. “I am immediately resigning my membership in NARTH to allow myself the time necessary to fight the false media reports that have been made against me,” he said in a statement. “With the assistance of a defamation attorney, I will fight these false reports because I have not engaged in any homosexual behavior whatsoever. I am not gay and never have been.” • Mark Stanford admitted to press on Wednesday that he spent last weekend in Florida with his Argentine lover, trying to rekindle the affair. Stanford was at a news conference on an unrelated issue when he was asked about a trip out of state. He responded: “As a matter of record, everybody in this room knows who I was with over the weekend… And,” he added (we imagine somewhat awkwardly), “you know, the purpose was obviously to see if something could be restarted on that front.” •