It's Like a Weird Al Yankovic Parody Song

You know, the one that made fun of the Jerry Springer show with reference to the "gay Jewish black dude" who gets into that awful fight with the KKK. Except that it seems to be real, and potentially worrisome. From the January 21, 2008 New York Daily News:

Police stumbled upon a bomb-making factory Sunday in the home of a Columbia professor who specializes in the spread of infectious disease - and are investigating whether he and his roommate have terror ties.

Cops evacuated the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood around the Remsen St. home of Michael Clatts, a medical anthropologist, after finding seven pipe bombs fitted with fuses in his flat, police sources said.

The frightening cache was discovered almost by accident - Ivaylo Ivanov, the man living with Clatts, accidentally shot off the tip of his left index finger and sought police help in the street about 1:15 a.m.

When investigators went to the 37-year-old Ivanov's apartment, they found the bombs, already capped on both ends and filled with powder. One of the pipe bombs was inserted into a Nerf football, cops said.

A 9-mm. handgun, two ammunition magazines, a 12-gauge shotgun, silencers, a bulletproof vest, a crossbow and bomb-making equipment, including a drill and threading machine that could be used to make pipe bombs, were also recovered, cops said.

Investigators with the NYPD-FBI were questioning Ivanov, a native of Bulgaria, to determine whether he had any terrorism or Russian Mafia connections, a source told the Daily News.

"Russian Mafia aren't fazed by getting a fingertip shot off - and they certainly don't go to the cops for help," the source said.

Neither man so far has popped up on any foreign criminal watch list or is a known member of an organized crime ring, sources said.

To add to the weirdness, Ivanov, who claims to be Jewish, according to this January 22, 2008 New York Times article, admitted to a series of swastika painting incidents on local Jewish synagogues and school buildings. But the pipe bombs were for fishing. I believe that, don't you?

And what about the roommate, Michael Clatts? Well, he spends an awful lot of time doing research about homosexuality, AIDS, and drug abuse--gobs of papers. That doesn't necessarily mean that he's gay, of course. But when the Society Of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists had a meeting several years ago, Clatts was the chair of a panel titled "Out in the World: The Role of Eros in the Tourism of Sexual Minorities." And as a number of troublemakers, like this commenter over at Ann Althouse's blog pointed out, his department is a very PC operation--the sort of place that I would expect a modern Weather Underground sort to work:

The Department of Sociomedical Sciences is distinguished by its focus on the social determinants of disease and health. This is accomplished by examining the correlation between epidemiological trends and structural inequities in order to expose the fundamental social causes of public health events, including discrimination, stigma, and poverty.

For some odd reason, unlike other faculty members, Professor Clatts' page is curiously empty now.

Maybe Clatts had nothing to do with his roommate's curious method of fishing, or artistic use of swastikas. You know, some people just aren't very curious about what their roommates leave around the place.