In March, a 20-year-old man was charged with attempted murder in Prince Albert, Saskatche-wan, for stabbing a 29-year-old man, an acquaintance, in the head. The victim walked out of his apartment after the stabbing, fully conscious and speaking, despite the fact that the butcher knife was still embedded in his skull. He survived.
Astro nut
NASA revealed in May that it had inadvertently allowed an astronaut impostor to sit at the Mission Control console at Alabama’s Marshall Space Center during a shuttle flight in which actual astronauts were preparing to rescue a satellite from space. Jerry Allen Whittredge was arrested in Houston and charged with lying to NASA officials, but his lawyer said he is mentally incompetent to stand trial. Asked how NASA could not identify its real astronauts, an official said merely that Whittredge made a credible impression.
Heavy lifting
Sometime between March and May, thieves stole an 18-ton steel bridge that connected an isolated cottage to a main road near Bytow, Poland. And in May, in Liverpool, England, thieves stole about 250 feet of an entire street (5,000 cobblestones).
Second opinion
In February, Timothy Devine, 37, thought he had merely been struck in the ear while in a Boston park and that he could walk off the pain, but he decided to go to Quincy Hospital, whose attendants confirmed his emerging suspicion that he might have been shot in the head. And in May in Sacramento, Calif., a 19-year-old man was convicted of four counts of attempted murder, based in part on the testimony of one victim who said he was not aware for several days afterward that he had been shot in the stomach and another who said he thought at first he had been hit in the nose by a rock until a doctor told him a bullet had entered through an ear and exited through a nostril.
Unscheduled flights
In May, according to Pasadena, Calif., Fire Department Chief Joe Nestor, about 1,000 swifts (a small migratory bird similar to a swallow) flew down the chimney of a couple’s home and filled their house. There was no explanation for that, but the explanation in Augusta, Ga., for the thousands of bees that quickly covered Betty Robinson’s 1984 Buick in April was the new brand of air freshener she was using in the car. And in May in Weymouth, England, about 20,000 bees covered Jane Clark’s house. Clark, trapped inside, could not get the town council to help her because, said a spokesman, bees are a protected species. (After two days, the bees left.)
Bouncing baby boy
In New York City in March, Adonis Gomez, 2, playing on the sofa in a third-floor apartment, bounced out the window but landed safely in the lap of Barbara Jones, 31, who was sitting in a wheelchair on the sidewalk below.
Car and driver
In May at Beaver Brook Golf Course in Haydenville, Mass., Todd Obuchowski was credited with a hole-in-one on a par-3 hole after his tee shot went over the green and onto a highway, hit a passing Toyota, ricocheted back to the green and rolled into the cup. At least eight golfers witnessed the shot.
Air freight
In Aalesund, Norway, in May, Kristin Nalvik Loendal, 9, riding her bike down a steep hill and failing to stop at an intersection at the bottom, swerved into the path of an oncoming car and was knocked into the air. The driver of the car stopped to help the girl but couldn’t find her. As he discovered several hours later, she had landed in the bed of a truck going in the opposite direction and sustained only bumps and bruises.
Appeals process
Justin Clark, 19, was arrested and charged with burglary in Sioux Falls, S.D., in April after a homeowner surprised him. According to police, Clark fled, then led police on a high-speed chase before crashing his car into a tree. As Clark ran through a nearby neighborhood, in which several residents were out in their yards, he kept up a steady chatter, informing them that the reason he was running was that the police were after him and asking whether any of them could help him. Several people tackled Clark and held him for the authorities.
I'm working on site at Vodacom in Midrand, one day this woman stares out the window and shouts there's a cow on the highway! We start laughing, and there it was, on the N1 heading to Pretoria... a cow on the highway!!! It was causing havoc in the traffic, but it turns out if fell off some slow moving truck and wasn't hurt. We called the Metro police and they managed to get it off the road.
Dutch artist Iepe created the sport of chess boxing, which began in earnest in Amsterdam in November with several matches of six four-minute chess rounds alternating with five two-minute boxing rounds, with victory coming by knockout, checkmate or, if the match goes the distance, judges' scoring of rounds. Both the Dutch Chess Federation (KNSB) and the Dutch Boxing Federation (NBB) have endorsed the sport, and cards of matches have been scheduled for Berlin and Moscow.
Hot sauce with that?
California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante (runner-up to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the October recall election) is not the family's only public figure. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in September, his sister Nao Bustamante, 39, is a prominent performance artist whose work includes wearing a strap-on burrito for men to kneel before and bite in order to absolve themselves of "500 years of white man's guilt," and also sticking her head into a plastic bag filled with water and tying it around her neck to resemble a Houdini stunt, to create "an urgent situation to respond to."
Mini driver
In November, a Norwegian court ordered the government to buy a 22-year-old, 4-foot-2 man a car because of his severe anxiety about riding public transportation due to his size, which has made him the subject of taunts ever since he was a child.
Come on down
News of the Weird reported in 2001 that Dr. Stuart Meloy had inadvertently discovered a side effect of an electrical implant whose purpose is to block spinal pain: It taps into the nerve that produces orgasms in women. By November 2003, Meloy had Food and Drug Administration approval for clinical tests of this "side effect," but said, surprisingly, he was having trouble attracting volunteers at his clinic in Winston-Salem, N.C. He said the only volunteer to that point had had a terrific experience, but that at least eight more women were needed.
Like a hole in the head
A 14-year-old Spokane, Wash., boy has made nearly a full recovery after a September incident in which a pal accidentally slung a steel rebar rod at his face; it penetrated 6 inches, between his nose and lip, knocking out two teeth and piercing his tongue. And in August a Truckee, Calif., man miraculously survived an accidental fall from a ladder onto an 18-inch-long auger bit firmly locked into his drill, which penetrated his right eye, nudged his brain and exited above his ear.
Divine comedy
Brian Lawrence, 38, died of a heart attack in September, five days before he was due in court to answer the charge that he and his girlfriend had had sex in New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral in August 2002 as part of a radio station's stunt. Eight people on a 16-day sightseeing tour sponsored by their First Baptist Church of Eldorado, Texas, were killed in October when their bus slammed into a tractor-trailer in Tallulah, La. And at least 39 Hindu pilgrims were killed in August in a stampede of crowds waiting to ritually bathe their sins away in the holy Godavari River in western India.
Sins of omission
In a November report, The New York Times revealed that the highly touted Houston school district (praised as exemplary by President Bush) used apparently highly stylized statistics to show its widely admired low dropout rates and campus crime rates. A subsequent school district audit found that "thousands" of dropouts had been left out of the earlier record, and the Times further found that the district's principals had reported only 761 campus assaults in four years while the schools' own police officers reported 3,091.
Cough-y break
George Duncan was finally fired by the New York Department of Corrections in November, after having taken 744 "sick" days in 15 years for spikes of high blood pressure, none of which were ever authenticated by doctors examining Duncan afterward. And a week before that, the city of Vicksburg, Miss., took a step to alleviate its own problem with employees' illnesses: Henceforth, city workers will be expected to give 48 hours' notice before taking sick days.
Visionary leadership
According to an October Boston Globe profile, New Bedford, Mass., city council candidate Raimundo Delgado is a charismatic politician despite his freely disclosed bipolar disorder, which has resulted twice in his involuntary hospitalization during the campaign. Among his proposals: to create a "city underwater"; to "free the dogs, the sheep, the goats"; to grow a tropical forest in place of local Route 18; and to give $10,000 raises to numerous city employees that he has met. He lost the council election and an earlier mayoral election, though he did outpoll an opponent with schizophrenia.
Bad ideas in the news
"Mentally Disabled Taught How to Vote": a November Mainichi Daily News report on how employees at a nursing home in Yokkaiichi, Japan, have for years instructed residents how to print out names of their favorite candidates on ballots. "Woman Gets Probation for Chasing Kids With Dildo": an October article in the Pottstown, Pa., Mercury about Linda Schultz, 36, engaging in inexplicable conduct in front of three small children and being referred for psychological counseling.
In March, Thailand kick boxer Parinya Kiatbusaba, 16, ran his won-lost record to 20-2 (18 knockouts) and garnered much world press coverage because out of the ring, he is a flamboyant transvestite. "It is hard to fight beautiful men," he said. "I can easily knock them out. On the other hand, I want to hug and kiss them."
Air head
On April 23, Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster Lanny Frattare interrupted his play-by-play to announce the death of actor James Earl Jones, about whom Frattare rhapsodized briefly for his role in the baseball film "Field of Dreams." The person who actually died was Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray, whose imminent demise from liver failure had been forecast in numerous stories over the previous several days.
Greasing the deal
In March, the Romanian soccer team Jiul Petrosani sold midfielder Ion Radu to the Valcea team for about $2,500 worth of pork. (Jiul Petrosani earlier traded defenseman Liviu Baicea to Valcea for 10 soccer balls.)
Ruling the heart
An official Valentine’s Day poster at Langara College in Vancouver, British Columbia, featuring a silhouetted female and a male ready to kiss, drew fire from a campus gay and lesbian group, which suggested a "neutral" image of two hands clasping. That latter image itself was later derided by a Langara student union representative as possibly offensive to a person with no hands.
Volley folly
In November, the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department, in an official inspection report, urged that the Ice House nude-dance club should immediately correct two food-contamination conditions. First, it was serving pizza at less than the required 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Second, wrote the city inspector, a sanitation risk was being posed by a dancer named Stephanie Evans, whose act consisted in part of expelling Ping Pong balls from her vagina to various points in the room, in that the balls could possibly land on pizza slices or in customers’ drinks.
Mercury uprising
Authorities in Texarkana, Ark., arrested Johnny Brown, 18, and Justin Calhoun, 17, and charged them with breaking into an abandoned neon sign plant in December and taking away containers of a shiny, silver liquid that, according to witnesses, they later played with all around town. The liquid was highly poisonous mercury, which Brown, Calhoun and some friends, among other stunts, dipped their arms in just to watch it bead up and drip. Since the break-in, the young men’s mercury spree has forced the evacuation of 10 homes, the boarding up of a Subway sandwich shop, the temporary closing of Pleasant Grove High School, and the medical treatment of 64 people.
Brazilian nuts
The Guardian (London) newspaper reported in May on the enormous television audiences in Brazil watching the nightly, Jerry Springer-like show "Ratinho Livre" (roughly, "The Mouse, Unleashed"), a forum for the downtrodden. Among recent interviewees were patients with horrible medical conditions begging for otherwise-unaffordable treatment (e.g., 8-year-old boy with 21 tumors in his mouth); a woman whose eyes were skewered and ears lopped off in a domestic fight but whose husband was still on the lam; and an equally unpopular husband and wife, whom the audience urged to assault one another.
Flush times
In February, Christian Poincheval, a radio station manager in LeMans, France, introduced Petit Lutin toilet paper for the "reading room," on which are printed short articles on French current affairs, geography and culture, with no-stain ink and new editions to be released monthly.
Faking the mold
In January, inventor Michael Samonek, inspired by dentists’ use of alginate molds for such things as artificial teeth and teeth-whitening, announced a Clone Your Own Genitals kit for $19.95. For realistic coloring, he uses peach Jell-O and condensed milk for light skin, black cherry and condensed milk for darker.
"In my weird politically incorrect hypothetically incoherent contradicting obscured world definitively maybe"
At 10 p.m. on Oct. 19, Ralph Parker, 93, in his Chevrolet Malibu, eased up to a tollbooth on Interstate 275 in St. Petersburg, Fla., inattentive to the fact that there was a dead body lodged in his windshield (the result of a collision about three miles away). According to police, Parker was off by about 10 miles when asked where he was and by two months on the date, and he thought the body had just fallen from the sky. Parker's son, 66, said he was aware his father had been deteriorating mentally, yet Parker's driver's license was renewed last year through his age 99, based on Florida's lax renewal policy (toughened for the state's 54,000 age-80-and-up drivers only by a vision test). (By contrast, for example, Florida requires 16 hours' training every two years for its licensed cosmetologists.) [St. Petersburg Times, 10-21-05]
Actor Robert Blake, testifying in October at the wrongful-death trial against him brought by the family of his ex-wife Bonnie Lee Bakley, said the reason why he had traces of gunshot residue on his hand after the murder was because he regularly plays with cap guns, according to a report in the New York Post. "Without sounding like I'm pretty weird, I missed my childhood. (F)or me, (toy soldiers and) cap guns bring it all back. If (that) makes me nuts, then label me." [New York Post, 10-13-05]
Neelesh Phadnis, 24, acting as his own lawyer, earned himself a conviction in Seattle in October for killing his parents, in large part (according to a Seattle Times story) because of his defense that the crimes were committed by, first, a gang of 400-pound Samoans, later augmented during his testimony to include their girlfriends, two whites, two blacks, a Native American and a transsexual, and later still, to be described as more than 30 armed Samoans. (They were all slow runners, too, for Phadnis said he outran them all to escape, despite being seriously wounded. When he finally summoned the police, he told the arriving officers that he was too tired and hungry to talk about his parents' bodies and that they should "go home.") [Seattle Times, 10-7-05, 10-8-05]
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The Litigious Society
Chicago lawyer Stephen Diamond has filed about 100 lawsuits since 2002 against companies for failing to charge him sales tax on items he bought, earning himself about $500,000 in settlements and judgments, according to an October Wall Street Journal report. Diamond has exploited a law in Illinois that allows citizens to receive part of the proceeds from certain law violations, including from companies that might be authorized to collect sales tax on Internet purchases but have chosen not to because the law is not completely settled. (Tennessee and Virginia, which have similar laws, have amended them to prevent lawsuits like Diamond's.) [Wall Street Journal, 10-14-05]
Park Hyatt hotel maid Louise Kelsey, 58, testified in August in Melbourne, Australia, that she was kissed against her will in 2001 by a hotel guest (an Uruguayan soccer player in town for a World Cup match) and suffered a post-traumatic stress disorder that led to her being declared legally blind in 2002. Though a doctor for the defense derided it as "the most powerful kiss in history," the hotel's insurer agreed to its liability in October and said it would negotiate the money amount. [Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 9-1-05; Herald Sun (Sydney), 10-7-05]
Lee Ka-wai filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong's Small Claims Tribunal in September against the Rolex Corp., claiming intense psychological trauma from a rash she developed on her wrist after wearing the company's US$3,800 Oyster Perpetual watch. Lee blames the rash on the label on the back of the watch, which Rolex says everyone knows must be removed after purchase but which Lee left on out of fear that removal would void the warranty. [Toronto Sun-AP, 9-14-05]
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Latest Rights
In September, to preserve "respect and dignity" for newborns, the neonatal unit of Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax, England, officially banned visitors' "cooing" at infants. Said hospital official Debbie Lawson, "Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me." To illustrate the rule, officials displayed a doll holding a sign reading: "What makes you think I want to be looked at?" [BBC News, 9-26-05]
Australian Rights: (1) Mr. Jirra Collings Ware was awarded the equivalent of about US$7,300 from his employer by the Federal Magistrates Court in Sydney, Australia, in October after he was fired for being repeatedly drunk at work (even once urinating into a trash can). Ware says he has Attention Deficit Disorder and that his employer, OAMPS Insurance Brokers, should have done more to accommodate the illness. (2) On the complaint of imprisoned rapist Simon Jacob Smith, 25, police in Melbourne, Australia, agreed in October henceforth to protect prisoners' privacy by not publicly releasing their mug shots without giving them a chance to appeal in court. (The new policy does not apply to photos of escapees or to those relating to solving crimes.) [Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 10-20-05] [The Advertiser (Melbourne), 10-10-05]
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Creme de la Weird
Animal control officers raided a house in Torrance, Calif., in October on reports that birds were being improperly kept there and ultimately found about 300, of which about 120 were dead. Gerard Enright, 61, was arrested when police caught him in the act of performing a tumorectomy on his No. 1 pigeon, Twister, that he had sedated with vodka. Enright is not a surgeon but said he had watched his veterinarian closely enough to know what he was doing. [Court TV-AP, 10-13-05]
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Best Recent Headlines About Toenails
(1) "Woman Charged $1,133 to Clip Toenail" (a September Associated Press report on a class-action lawsuit against Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle for allegedly excessive fees, including a test-preparatory toenail clipping). (2) "Man Sues Over Leg Amputation After Ingrown Toenail" (a September story on the WOAI-TV-radio Web site in San Antonio, Texas, reporting a farmer's lawsuit against Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Waco, Texas, claiming that he contracted the flesh-eating bacteria after ingrown-toenail surgery). [Seattle Times-AP, 9-9-05] [WOAI.com-AP, 9-14-05]
A well-to-do couple (the husband owns a surveying company) were convicted in Manchester (England) Crown Court in October of creating an elaborate scheme to avoid two camera-detected speeding tickets and were fined the equivalent of about $20,000, almost 200 times the cost of the tickets. Stewart and Cathryn Bromley had offered an alibi, explaining that the driver of their car was a (fictitious) Bulgarian friend, and Cathryn made up a postcard "from" the man "to" the Bromleys that incriminated him, and then actually traveled 1,400 miles to Bulgaria to mail it with an authentic postmark. [Manchester Evening News, 10-14-05]
More Schemes: (1) Robert and Viki Warren were sentenced to six and five years in prison, respectively, in September in Charlotte, N.C., for fraudulently collecting more than $9 million in federal crop insurance payouts by having their employees saturate a tomato field with ice cubes and then beat the plants to make them appear weather-damaged. (2) Britain's Ann Summers lingerie store chain said in October that it has begun to install customer-activated peepholes in changing rooms so that women could show off for their companions (some of whom previously regarded accompanying a woman shopping for clothes as boring). [Fox News-AP, 9-13-05] [Wales on Sunday, 10-16-05]
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Least Justifiable Homicides
Archie W. Roth, 68, was indicted for murder in Yorktown, Va., in May for killing his wife; he said he was angry because the couple had been living in the home for "several years" but still hadn't unpacked. And Mark Raggiunti, 42, of Sharpsburg, Pa., pleaded guilty in July to killing his father after the father (who was blind) had yelled at him for leaving a light on. And Christopher Offord, 30, was sentenced to death in August in Panama City, Fla., for killing his wife because she had been nagging him to cuddle after they had sex, contrary to his desire to watch sports on TV. [Roanoke Times-AP, 5-27-05] [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7-20-05] [ABC News-AP, 8-4-05]
"In my weird politically incorrect hypothetically incoherent contradicting obscured world definitively maybe"
As traditionally domineering husbands reach retirement age in Japan, the wives of as many as half of them may suffer some degree of Retired Husband Syndrome (rashes, ulcers, other stress symptoms), according to an October Washington Post dispatch. Said one morose, 63-year-old woman, "I had developed my own life, my own way of doing things, in the years when he was (working long hours)," but, she told the Post, she now can't stand even to look at her husband across the dinner table and sits at an angle so she can stare out a window instead. According to psychiatrists treating RHS, the numbers may soon explode further unless husbands lower their expectations of spousal servitude. [Washington Post, 10-16-05]
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Great Art!
Among the extraordinary exhibits constructed especially for this year's Burning Man festival in late August in Nevada's Black Rock Desert was Don Bruce's and Tracy Feldstein's "The Disgusting Spectacle," a 23-foot-tall human head designed with a pulley and large hamster-type wheel that lets it pick its own nose. In a July interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, Bruce admitted that theirs wasn't the typical artsy Burning Man project: "Ours is stupid. That's stupid with three O's." [San Francisco Chronicle, 7-7-05]
The museum at Cherepovets, Russia (about 400 miles north of Moscow), recently introduced a collection of items actually used by students for successfully cheating in school, including a pair of women's panties on which logarithms and math formulas had been written upside down in black ink. Also on display: a sports jacket with (according to a September dispatch in the Chronicle of Higher Education) "enough secret mechanisms to keep a cardshark flush for decades" and a jeans skirt with 70 numbered pockets for cheat sheets. [Chronicle of Higher Education, 9-16-05]
Notorious performance artist Zhang Huan gave a live show of his books-themed photo installation "My Boston" at the city's Museum of Fine Arts in September, including burying himself under a pile of volumes, eating pages, and shimmying up a flagpole while weighted down with books. Zhang's previous notable works include "Seeds of Hamburg," in which he coated himself with birdseed and honey and sat in a cage with 28 doves. According to a Boston Globe reporter, some people "outside" the performance-art world might call Zhang a "crackpot." [Boston Globe, 9-28-05]
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Government in Action
All four of the Seminole County, Fla. (suburban Orlando), judges who hear drunk-driving cases have routinely tossed out all challenged breath-alcohol readings since January (a total of more than 700), according to a September Orlando Sentinel story, because the judges believe the defendants should be given access to the machines' computer code. (Without the readings as evidence, about half the DUI defendants go free.) The Florida Department of Law Enforcement says the machines are accurate and that, anyway, manufacturers protect the codes as trade secrets. [Orlando Sentinel, 9-9-05]
An Associated Press investigation revealed in September that $5 billion in Small Business Administration loans authorized in the wake of Sept. 11 was so poorly managed that businesses close to New York City's Ground Zero went begging for money while thousands of businesses throughout the country got emergency loans by creatively describing how they were hurt by the Islamist-terrorist attacks. More than 130 franchised fast-food shops; dentists and chiropractors; a South Dakota radio station; a Utah dog boutique; and a Virgin Islands perfume shop were among those who got the mostly guaranteed loans. SBA admitted that it assigned some ordinary loans to the 9-11 fund on its own and generously accepted others' 9-11 "qualifications." [Richmond Times-Dispatch-AP, 9-9-05]
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Readers' Choice
Probably the most notorious example of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's under-preparation for Hurricane Katrina was the over-ordering of 91,000 tons of ice cubes intended to cool the victims and their food and medicine. One now-famous truck, for example, picked up 20 tons of ice in Greenville, Pa., drove to a Carthage, Mo., FEMA facility, then to Montgomery, Ala., for a day and a half, then to Camp Shelby in Mississippi, then to Selma, Ala., then to Emporia, Va. (where it idled for a week to keep the ice frozen), and finally to Fremont, Neb., where the ice was put up for storage. (Update: On the day that Hurricane Wilma hit Florida in October, FEMA acting director David Paulison proudly noted that because of the over-ordering for Katrina, plenty of ice was on hand after Wilma.) [New York Times, 10-2-05; St. Petersburg Times, 10-25-05]
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News From the F State
In Homosassa, Fla., near Tampa, Ralph Padgett, 73, was arrested in October and charged with running down (on his riding lawn mower) estranged neighbor David Ervin, who was also on a riding lawn mower. And in nearby Zephyrhills, in October, retiree Bryan Toll became the third person this year to pay more than $200,000 for a manufactured home at the Betmar Village Mobile Home Park. (Well, it is an 1,800-square-foot double-wide, located next to a golf course clubhouse.) [St. Petersburg Times, 10-9-05] [St. Petersburg Times, 10-3-05]
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Creme de la Weird
In September, after law enforcement officers in North Carolina spotted a reportedly stolen ambulance and chased it through three counties until forcing it into a ditch north of Greensboro, they found the driver to be mohawk-hairstyled Leon Hollimon Jr., 37, who is not a medical professional but was wearing a stethoscope and with latex gloves in his pocket. Strapped to a gurney in the back was a dead six-point deer, and according to witnesses cited by the Florida Times-Union newspaper (Hollimon is from Jacksonville, Fla.), an intravenous line was attached to it and a defibrillator had been used. [Florida Times-Union, 9-28-05]
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Least Competent People
Lawyer Cindy Baker's client, Mike Koster, was charged with methamphetamine and marijuana possession and set for trial in October in Berryville, Ark., but he was also charged with possession of a bomb. Baker's trial strategy was to downplay the latter charge by bringing the actual bomb into the courtroom as evidence, but the horrified judge cleared the building and put out a call for the nearest bomb squad, and according to a source for the Carroll County News, the bomb was taken away and detonated. The judge also declared a mistrial and set a contempt of court hearing for Baker. [Carroll County News, 10-10-05]
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Clumsy People With Guns (All-New)
The following people accidentally shot themselves recently: a Fond du Lac, Wis., man, in the abdomen, while using a screwdriver to dislodge a round from his pistol (August); a Nacogdoches, Texas, woman, in the foot while trying to kill a snake on her property (September) (and the same woman, again trying to kill a snake, shot herself in the other foot the next day); a Tennessee Highway Patrolman, in the leg as he holstered his pistol while chasing a fleeing suspect near Maryville (August); a teenage boy, in the leg while fleeing after robbing a food store in New Caney, Texas (August); a 33-year-old Milwaukee man, in the leg while fleeing after robbing a man on the street (October). And Danny Walden, Taylorsville, Ky., was shot by the rifle he had set up in his home as a booby trap to protect his 115 marijuana plants (October). [Fond du Lac Reporter, 8-24-05] [Daily Sentinel (Nacogdoches), 9-18-05] [The Tennessean, 8-10-05] [WTRK-TV (Houston), 8-3-05] [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 10-24-05] [Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.), 10-5-05]
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The Continuing Crisis
In August, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan placed ads in Colombian newspapers and magazines "ordering" certain leaders of the revolutionary group FARC to come to America and appear in his courtroom in Washington, D.C., to answer charges of kidnapping U.S. citizens. Hogan's assistant said the law requires notification and that no one seems to have the secretive FARC's address. [The Ledger (Lakeland, Fla.)-AP, 8-22-05]
"In my weird politically incorrect hypothetically incoherent contradicting obscured world definitively maybe"
Student Sarah Sevick filed a formal complaint in September with the U.S. Department of Justice, accusing Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, of violating the Americans With Disabilities Act by not letting her keep her "assistance animal," which is Lilly, her ferret. Sevick says that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, including panic attacks, and that Lilly "soothes" her, but the school said it was concerned with other students' safety. (In other ferret news, the British upscale clothing firm Burberry threatened to sue a pet-accessories shop in Dudley, England, in October, for selling outfits in the familiar Burberry "check" pattern, including a cap and cape designed for ferrets.) [KSAT-TV (San Antonio), 9-20-05] [Daily Telegraph (London), 10-12-05]
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Straight From the Police Blotter
From the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "(Carver County) Aug. 24: Hostility. A door-to-door salesman complained about the attitude of the people in the neighborhood in the 100 block of W. Shasta Circle." And from the Union Democrat (Sonora, Calif.): "(Tuolumne County, Oct. 13) 1:13 p.m., Sonora, A man came to the Sheriff's Department to 'find out how to legally kill' a person who was harassing him." [Star Tribune, 9-7-05] [Union Democrat, 10-17-05]
From the University of Utah Department of Public Safety report for October (2005-22280): "Unwanted Guest. A security officer from Primary Children's Medical Center called to report a man in that hospital who had no legitimate business there and wouldn't leave. University Police responded and were told by the man that he comes to Primary because he can find longer cigarette butts there because the doctors and nurses at Primary don't smoke their cigarettes all the way down like everyone else does. The man left when ordered to do so by the police." [University of Utah Department of Public Safety Report, October 2005]
Adam Taylor, a quite-proper executive at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, was charged with illegally (and apparently motivelessly) firing several shots from an air rifle in a city park, but swears that he has no recollection of the incident and is totally baffled by the apparently accurate witness-reports of his guilt. Said his lawyer in September, "There is absolutely no reason on Earth why a 38-year-old man with his background would suddenly take an air rifle and fire it in the park ..." [BBC News, 9-21-05]
Tyler Ing, 20, told the London (Ontario) Free Press in October that his parents "looked at me real weird for a few minutes" but that now "they're proud. My mom shows the (Guinness Book of World Records) to all her friends." The entry that she shows is her son's honor, recently achieved, for having the world's longest nipple hair, certified at 8.89 cm (3.5 inches). [London Free Press, 10-13-05]
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Cliches Come to Life
In a September rape trial in New York City, witness Roberto Suarez testified that he saw two men in the room with a waitress just before she told him that she had been raped, and then when asked by the prosecutor to identify the two men, Suarez looked past the defendants and pointed to, respectively, Juror No. 8 and Alternate Juror No. 3. The New York Daily News reported that some jurors laughed so hard that they cried. [New York Daily News, 9-21-05]
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Well, Of Course!
(1) Transsexual convicted prostitute Monica Renee Champion, 37, was finally picked up by police in Richmond, Va., in August; there had been arrest warrants for indecent exposure against her in the city's South Side as a male and in the city's North Side as a female. (2) Tyrone D. McMillian, 33, who was arrested after a high-speed chase through three New York towns in August, told the arresting officers: "I've been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto and NASCAR on PlayStation. I thought I could get away." [Richmond Times-Dispatch, 8-27-05] [Times Union (Albany), 8-12-05]
(1) Paris Satine, 46, the madame of a legal brothel in Maroochydore, Australia (north of Brisbane), who was a nominee at an awards banquet for Excellence in Business (which was being held at a local hotel), was arrested for soliciting clients during the event. (2) London's Sunday Telegraph reported in July that, because of the shortage of military supplies caused by troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, British Army soldiers on training exercises were ordered simply to shout "bang bang" rather than fire practice rounds. [Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 9-9-05] [Sunday Telegraph (London), 7-17-05]
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The Poor Dears
In August, convicted child murderer Mark Allen Harris was awarded $50,000 by a jury in his lawsuit against Kanawha County, W.Va., jail officials after he fell out of the back of a van transporting prisoners, breaking bones in his face and knocking out some teeth. Also in August, in Albuquerque, N.M., a filthy and disheveled John Hyde, 48, being arraigned in the murders of four people, including two policemen, complained to the judge about police behavior, "Your honor ... I have been put in a red jump suit like Elvis Presley ... My hair looks ridiculous ... I was not allowed to groom myself." [WEWS-TV (Cleveland)-AP, 8-16-05] [Albuquerque Journal, 8-21-05]
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People Different From Us
In July, police in Lawrence, Kan., gave Ezekiel Rubottom's foot back to him, convinced that, contrary to a neighbor's inquiry, it wasn't evidence of a crime. Rubottom, 21, had tried to explain that he'd had his clubbed left foot amputated and merely wanted to keep it as a memento in a bucket of formaldehyde on his front porch. A spokesman for Lawrence Memorial Hospital told the Journal-World newspaper that there have been "women that want their uterus ... people take (home) tonsils ... they take (home) appendixes." Rubottom added a porcelain horse and a can of beer to his bucket to make it what he called "a collage of myself." [Lawrence Journal-World, 7-26-05]
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Least Competent Criminals
In September, Anthony R. Martin, 52, of Belleville, Ill., became the latest person to call the police and complain that someone had stolen his illegal drugs. But there was more: Martin told the investigating officer that a hostile neighbor had taken his marijuana plants, but when he showed the officer the room where he usually kept them, the plants were actually still there. Martin then said whoever took them must have returned them. He was charged with growing marijuana. (He also admitted that he had been drinking that night.) [News-Democrat (Belleville), 9-10-05]
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The Classic Middle Name (all new)
Arrested recently and charged with murder: Kenneth Wayne Keller, Denton, Texas (August); Ronald Wayne Lail, Burke County, N.C. (September); Timothy Wayne Condrey, Caroleen, N.C. (September). Sentenced for murder: Tyler Wayne Justice, Alice, Texas (September). Committed suicide while suspected of murder: Michael Wayne Baxter, Edgewater, Md. (October). And in February, convicted double-murderer Russell Wayne Wagner was found dead in his cell in Jessup, Md., of an apparent heroin overdose, but in July, at the request of a sister, he received an official military burial at Arlington National Cemetery because he had been honorably discharged after his Army service in Vietnam. (Current law blocks from national cemeteries only criminals with death sentences.) [Dallas Morning News, 8-13-05] [Charlotte Observer, 9-22-05] [Daily Courier (Forest City, N.C.), 9-22-05] [Alice (Tex.) Echo-News Journal, 9-15-05] [The Capital (Annapolis), 10-8-05] [Washington Post, 8-5-05]
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Unclear on the Concept
(1) Maria Julia Mantilla, recently crowned Miss World, denied a plastic surgeon's boast that he had given her buttock implants and trimmed her ears, protesting that "I'm not the creation of a surgeon. He just did my bust and my nose." (2) Wailing loudly and apparently incredulous at being ordered to jail, a scantily dressed Natalia McLennan, 25, was taken directly to a lockup from a New York City courtroom in September, after being charged with prostitution; McLennan had recently posed for the cover of New York magazine, proclaiming herself to be the city's top-grossing "escort" and acknowledging that she provided sex for clients. [Reuters, 6-22-05] [Reuters, 9-29-05]
"In my weird politically incorrect hypothetically incoherent contradicting obscured world definitively maybe"
wizardofid wrote: London's Sunday Telegraph reported in July that, because of the shortage of military supplies caused by troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, British Army soldiers on training exercises were ordered simply to shout "bang bang" rather than fire practice rounds.
dunno why but that really cracked me up.
cool posts wizard!
The Ohio High School Athletic Association apologized to football player Bobby Martin of Colonel White High in Dayton after the referees barred him from a September game because he was not wearing the required shoes and knee pads. Martin was born without legs and plays on the punt return team, moving quickly around the field with his arms. An OHSAA official said the referees were just being overly cautious, but Martin said, "That's the first time in 17 years" that someone had made him feel disabled. (At halftime, Martin briefly considered tying some shoes around his chest and attempting again to play.) [Cincinnati Enquirer, 10-1-05; Sports Illustrated, 10-17-05]
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Can't Possibly Be True
Inmate Scott Bolton filed a lawsuit in September against the Luzerne County, Pa., prison and a slew of corrections officials, blaming them for the severe injuries he suffered in a 2003 alleged escape attempt, claiming that tighter security would have foiled his breakout. Bolton suffered spinal cord injuries (which have permanently confined him to a wheelchair) when fellow inmate-conspirator Hugo Selenski pushed Bolton out of a window, several floors up, apparently to speed their leaping exit. Asked a corrections commissioner, incredulously, "(An inmate) is dumb enough to act as a human mattress for Hugo, and (we're) responsible?" [Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, 9-29-05]
Reba Schappell, of Reading, Pa., a professional country music singer who is also a conjoined twin with sister Lori, was profiled in a September segment of the BBC radio series "Who Runs Your World." Said Reba, "When I am singing, Lori is like any other fan, except she's up on the stage with me (covered in a blanket to reduce the distraction)." Said Lori: "I do not ask for anything from Reba. I don't get in to her concerts free just because she's a conjoined twin. I have to pay, just like every other fan that comes to the concert." [BBC News, 9-21-05]
(1) Stephen Sodones, 62, was hospitalized in critical condition in August but ultimately recovered after being bitten three times on the hand by a copperhead snake, which he was helpfully carrying to safety across Route 23 near Jefferson, N.J.; according to a neighbor interviewed by the Newark Star-Ledger, animal-lover Sodones stops traffic to let ducks cross roads and once tried to revive a bumblebee by warming it in his hands. (2) Delshawn Prejean, 35, was arrested in Jacksonville, Fla., in June after a Starbuck's waitress squealed on him for leaving a small pile of marijuana as a tip. [Star-Ledger, 8-17-05] [WKMG-TV (Orlando)-AP, 7-1-05]
At the Weavers School in Wellingborough, England, teachers were told in August to tolerate 15- and 16-year-old students' cussing, even the "f word," at least up to five times per class. According to London's Daily Mail, the teachers were to merely keep a count of the words on the board, which the school believes shows tolerance for occasional bad language, but which more cynical teachers and parents believe will encourage the students to max out usage in each class. [Daily Mail, 8-29-05]
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Signs of the Times
(1) Ismael Velasquez, 47, was convicted of drug possession in Round Rock, Texas, in September because he failed at flushing his baggie of cocaine down the toilet of a Shell station; police attributed their evidence-recovery success to the station's new, low-flow toilet, which caused the baggie just to swirl around. (2) Among the latest citizens to (as per the First Amendment) "peaceably assemble" and "petition government for a redress of grievances" were "hundreds" of sex offenders who gathered in September in Palm Bay, Fla., to protest the town's severe restrictions on where they can live and travel. [Austin American-Statesman, 9-15-05] [WKMG-TV (Orlando), 9-15-05]
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Awesome!
(1) Hungry Howie's Pizza deliveryman Thomas Stefanelli, 37, was shot in the leg during a June robbery in Tampa, Fla., as he made his rounds, but he fought the robbers off and, not really aware that the pain in his leg was from a gunshot, dutifully delivered his other four pizzas before returning to the store and examining his wound. (2) In London, in July, an unnamed teenager was rescued from a construction site at 4 a.m., about 10 stories up on the arm of a crane, which she had climbed during an apparent sleepwalking episode; she had to be brought down on a hydraulic lift. [St. Petersburg Times, 6-7-05] [CNN-Reuters, 7-6-05]
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Family Values
(1) Pastor Marshall Wedderburn was given a "conditional" sentence and probation by a court in Kitchener, Ontario, in June after he admitted that he had whipped his 11-year-old daughter in church with a microphone cord because she appeared not to be paying attention to his sermon. (2) Elaine Walker became the latest parent to decide to relocate without letting her child know about it. She moved out of their home in Redmire, England, in July, leaving the equivalent of about $40 to her 15-year-old daughter, along with a note announcing that she and an older daughter had moved to Turkey (where she had recently met a man). [Toronto Star-CP, 6-25-05] [The Guardian (London), 8-6-05]
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Fetishes on Parade
(1) Toru Nagasawa, 29, a construction worker in Kawasaki, Japan, was arrested in July after allegedly forcing a man to give up his contact lenses; at his home, police later recovered 124 pairs of eyeglasses and 30 pairs of contacts, stored in plastic bags. (2) Stephen Schroeder, 60, was arrested in Wilmington, N.C., in August, as the man who has been stealing teenage boys' clothes for 25 years, with an inventory of 137 pairs of shoes and enough other items to fill a van and a truck. According to police, Schroeder said he had a need to "hold" and "possess" the clothes. [Agence France-Presse, 7-29-05] [Wilmington Star-News, 8-10-05]
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Least Competent Criminals
Kim Bedwell, 52, and Gladys Bedwell, 50, were arrested for alleged marijuana manufacturing in Clarkston, Wash., in September, discovered when police happened to chase a black bear through their neighborhood and into the Bedwells' back yard. Apparently, frightened that the commotion was a drug raid, Kim tried to toss a marijuana plant over a high fence, but it landed on one of the officers. And in San Jacinto, Texas, in May, William Bluder, 21, was arrested for armed robbery but attempted to escape by diving head-first through some bushes outside a convenience store. However, unknown to Bluder, the bushes obscured a brick wall, which he hit with full force. [Register-Guard (Eugene, Ore.), 9-23-05] [City of San Jacinto Police Dept. Press Release, 5-30-05]
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Cultural Diversity
Royalty by Opportunistic Encounter: After a lifelong search, Marty Johnson, a Minnesota mortgage broker, finally located and visited his birth father this year, according to an ABC News report. Dad is John Ogike, who was an exchange student from Nigeria when he had a brief affair with Marty's mother, who gave Marty up for adoption, but today John Ogike is chief of the Aboh village in Nigeria, and Marty will be accepted as the new chief upon his dad's death (but Marty is unsure whether to accept). [ABC News, 6-4-05]
Human Rights in Action: The Sri Lankan Daily News reported in September that the government's cabinet has decided to lower the age of consent for sex from 16 to 13 because, according to Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, too many men were being arrested under the old law. Also in September, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered the government to ban the traditional practice of confining women to cow sheds during their menstrual periods. [Sri Lankan Daily News and Reports, 9-17-05] [BBC News, 9-16-05]
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Undignified Deaths
A 49-year-old woman and her 30-year-old daughter were accidentally run over and killed in August in Indianapolis as they scuffled with each other just after midnight and rolled into the street, in front of an oncoming car. And a 38-year-old man whose family owns the Catacombs Extreme Scream Halloween attraction in Kansas City, Mo., was killed while working on the exhibit when the horror house's elevator malfunctioned. [Indianapolis Star, 8-20-05] [TheKansasCityChannel.com, 7-26-05]
"In my weird politically incorrect hypothetically incoherent contradicting obscured world definitively maybe"
Brett Backwell, Australian rules football player for Gleneig, a suburb of Adelaide, whose broken finger has hampered his playing for three years, decided in September to forgo bone fusion in favor of just having half the finger amputated. "(I)f that's going to help me to succeed at this level (of pro football), then it's something you've just got to do." (In 1985, San Francisco 49ers all-pro defensive back Ronnie Lott chose to have the tip of one finger amputated because surgery, and the rehabilitation necessary to repair the finger, would have caused him to miss one game.) [The Age (Melbourne), 9-13-05] [We Were Champions, by Phil Barber (2002)]
The Moscow Cats Theater still plays to packed houses in Russia, as described in News of the Weird in March 1998, but founder Yuri Kuklachev brought 26 of his improbably trained housecats to New York City's TriBeCa Performing Arts Center this fall to play weekends through October. Among the tricks: front paw stands; "tightrope" walking on a pole; and traversing the pole from underneath by grasping it with four legs (but one cat does it using only two legs). Kuklachev says each show is different because "(s)ometimes a cat doesn't want (to perform) one trick, so he does another." [New York Times, 9-17-05]
Megalomaniac Roundup: (1) Turkmenistan's supreme leader Saparmurat Niyazov, chronicled here in 2002 (when he whimsically changed the names of the seven days of the week and the 12 months of the year) and 2004 (for insisting that all licensed drivers pass a "morality" test), said in September 2005 that his country would build a huge, natural-habitat zoo for a large array of species, including penguins, in a desert-like area of the country. (2) And North Korea's Kim Jong-il was touted by a spokesman in August 2005 as one who never forgets a phone number or even a single line of computer code. (Among his previously publicized skills in News of the Weird reports dating back to 1994 are writing operas, flying jets, producing movies and shooting 11 holes-in-one on the first round of golf he ever played.) [Agence France-Presse, 9-7-05] [Reuters, 8-2-05]
The Anchorage, Alaska, zoo has now completed the elephant treadmill it promised last year for its venerable "Maggie," age 23, and will unveil it in November, even though in the intervening year, she has lost about 1,000 of her then-9,000 pounds, through exercise and dieting. The treadmill is merely a humongous version of a treadmill for humans. [Reuters, 9-14-05]
Los Angeles has become the U.S. epicenter for surgery for women seeking to "firm up" their genitals, with Dr. David Matlock the leading practitioner of "vaginal rejuvenation," according to a dispatch in Toronto's Globe and Mail in August. Much of the impetus comes from patients' (or their husbands' or boyfriends') desire for vulvas as trim and youthful as those of actresses in porno movies. News of the Weird first covered the phenomenon in December 1988 when a Dayton, Ohio, gynecologist was accused of surgically tightening a woman's vagina without her consent (at the behest of her husband during surgery for another condition). The doctor, James C. Burt, who wrote an early book on the subject, "The Surgery of Love," eventually lost his license and a $5 million malpractice verdict. [Globe and Mail, 8-13-05; New York Times, 12-11-88, 6-22-91]
Florida artist Maria Alquilar returned to Livermore, Calif., in August to fix the large mosaic she created at the city library a year ago when the city paid her $40,000 but failed to spellcheck her names "(Albert) Eistein," "(William) Shakespere," "(Paul) Gaugan," "(Vincent) Van Gough" and seven others. She had initially refused to make the corrections, dismissing the errors as merely "words" and angry at being ridiculed, but she relented after the city offered her $6,000 more. [San Francisco Chronicle, 8-10-05]
With increased job anxiety in China's market economy, more Chinese men and women are opting for painful body-lengthening procedures to get taller. A June 2005 report on China Radio International updated the 2002 News of the Weird story, in which "hundreds" were enduring the months-long "Ilizarov procedure" (forced breaking of bones in the leg, then manually adjusting leg braces four times a day that pull the bones slightly apart, then waiting as they grow back and fuse together). As a 33-year-old, 5-foot-tall woman (aiming for 5-4) said in 2002: "I'll have a better job, a better boyfriend, and eventually a better husband. It's a long-term investment." [China Radio International, 6-30-05]
News of the Weird has reported several times on psychotherapists who help patients "recover" "repressed" memories. According to the therapists, suddenly "remembering" a really astonishing event means that the event must have actually happened, but increasingly, patients realize that they were merely persuaded by aggressive psychotherapy (such as the Chicago-area woman who in February 2004 was awarded $7.5 million from two doctors who had, over a 12-year period, facilitated her false "memory" that she had bred children for a satanic cult). In August 2005, a leading skeptic of such therapists, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, reported (in a National Academy of Sciences publication) how her research team had planted "memories" in her subjects' minds, actually convincing strawberry ice cream lovers, falsely, that they had forgotten that they used to hate the stuff. [Los Angeles Times, 8-2-05]
Kaziah Hancock and Cindy Stewart are back in court in Salt Lake City after the Utah Court of Appeals granted them a new trial in July to try once again to get money from a breakaway Mormon sect headed by Jim Harmston. Hancock and Stewart had won $300,000 in 2002 after Harmston took their land in exchange for giving them a place to live and promising them a face-to-face meeting with Jesus Christ. (Harmston's defense was that God had told him to break that promise.) [Casper Star-Tribune-AP, 7-8-05]
Legislation advancing $453 million for the Alaskan "bridges to nowhere" described in a News of the Weird story in April 2004 (which would connect Ketchikan, pop. 7,800, with the town's airport, replacing a five-minute ferry boat ride with a bridge almost as big as the Golden Gate, and a two-mile-long span connecting Anchorage with a sparsely populated port) was finally passed by Congress in August 2005, as part of the 6,300 "earmark" pet projects of legislators, totaling $24 billion. The projects are back in the news as Congress considers cutting some in order to fund reconstruction on the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina. [U.S. News & World Report, 8-8-05]
Former Cornelius, N.C., dentist John Hall pleaded guilty in July (an "Alford plea," acknowledging only the sufficiency of the evidence against him) to seven counts of misdemeanor assault on female patients, specifically, squirting semen into their mouths from a syringe. The state Board of Dental Examiners had revoked his license in 2004 after finding two syringes of semen in his office with patients' DNA (from saliva) on them. Hall's sentence was five years' probation, and his lawyer said he thought Hall would move to Jacksonville, Fla., and go into the flooring and tile business. [Charlotte Observer, 5-25-05]
Robert Norton starred in News of the Weird several times since 1988, owing to his habit of (and more than 20 arrests for) annoying his Pekin, Ill., neighbors by doing yardwork naked. (When, in 1999, a judge finally told him that he would go to jail if he did it again, Norton said, "I can't (promise) anything.") He passed away in July 2005, at age 82, and despite his wishes, family members made sure that he was wearing clothes when he was buried. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch-AP, 8-3-05]
It was reported here only a month ago as one of the "most frightening stories of the week," but as it turns out, the story had already been topped. In July, 644 people had gotten together in Kimberly, British Columbia, and simultaneously played accordions for half an hour. Thanks to a proud News of the Weird reader, it can now be reported, shudderingly, that the next month at a St. John's, Newfoundland, folk arts festival, the record was broken, by 989 accordionists. [Canadian Press, 8-6-05]
"In my weird politically incorrect hypothetically incoherent contradicting obscured world definitively maybe"
Among the "10 Worst Jobs in Science" in Popular Science's annual November listing: Harvard researchers in Borneo who catch orangutan urine (in plastic sheets, the way firefighters catch jumpers) for studying reproduction-hormone levels; gear-packing monitors who run toward (not away from) the gases and molten rock of erupting volcanoes (dozens have been killed or wounded); U.S. Geological Survey workers at two picturesque California lakes monitoring "extremophile" microbes that thrive in the most putrid environments (work that one says resembles being surrounded by 100 "extremely flatulent people"); and "human lab rats" such as students employed in an industry-funded University of California at San Diego study for $15 an hour to have pesticides sprayed into their eyes. [Popular Science, November 2005]
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Leading Economic Indicators
Chief executive officers at 367 top U.S. corporations were paid, on average, $431 last year for every $1 paid to their companies' average production worker, according to publicly available information jointly compiled in September by Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. In 1990, the ratio was about $100-to-$1. (If the federal minimum wage had increased since 1990 by the same rate as the multiple for CEOs' pay, it would have risen from $5.15 an hour to $23.03, but, of course, it's still $5.15.) [New York Times, 9-4-05]
Cutting-Edge Products: (1) In September, China's Guangzhou Haojian Bio-science Co. introduced new condoms whose names read phonetically as the "kelintun" and the "laiwensiji," which of course resemble the names of a former U.S. president and his acquaintance. (2) Women's Wear Daily reported in October that rock star Marilyn Manson said he was finalizing a personal perfume deal with a "major" company, as a precursor to his own full cosmetics line. [Agence France-Presse, 9-20-05] [Women's Wear Daily, 10-10-05]
Parents pf McGovern Elementary School students in Medway, Mass., complained to the Boston Herald in October because Paul Trufant's septic-sewage service, located across from the school, boasts the identifying slogan on all its trucks: "***** Happens." Trufant said he would advertise however he wants to: "This is America, not Iraq." [Boston Herald, 10-5-05]
More Weird Mating Habits: (1) In October, researchers said they had tagged a great white shark and tracked him 12,400 miles over nine months, from Africa to Australia and back again, ostensibly seeking to mate; according to the report in the journal Science, sex was the best explanation because food was so plentiful around Africa. (2) The male nursery web spider uses a cheap trick to get sex, according to an October report in the journal Biology Letters; the male gives the larger female a dead insect, then collapses, feigning death, distracting the female, which turns to the insect, at which point the male springs back to life and mounts her. (On the other hand, the female sometimes just eats the male, after or instead of copulating.) [New York Post, 10-7-05] [Daily Telegraph (London), 10-5-05]
Those Versatile Goats: (1) David Valentine, 12, often bounces on a trampoline with his pet goats, D.J. and Blessing, but officials in Miami Township, Ohio, threatened to crack down this fall since goats are not permitted within the town limits; David's parents say the goats are necessary to help with David's Attention Deficit Disorder. (2) The economy of the section of Morocco around Tiout is dependent on a renowned cooking oil made from nuts of the argan tree, but only nuts that have been eaten and excreted by goats (that actually climb into the trees and stand on branches to eat the nut-bearing fruit). According to an October New York Times dispatch, locals are trying to shift gradually from predigested nuts without spoiling the oil's taste. [Cincinnati Enquirer, 11-4-05] [New York Times, 10-27-05]
Python Mania: In a 10-day period in October in and near Miami-Dade County, Fla., non-native but super-predatory Burmese pythons killed and swallowed a turkey, a 15-pound cat, and (most famously, unsuccessfully) a 6-foot-long alligator. (The alligator ultimately burst the snake open, and the turkey's bulge prevented the python from slithering out of the bird's pen.) Officials have captured 150 pythons in recent years and estimate 250 more are in the area, the result of people discarding pet snakes once they reach adult length.) [St. Petersburg Times, 10-16-05]
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Signs of the Times
Erica Salmon, originally a fantasy-football-league "widow" because of her husband's seasonal mania, has now become mogul of her own fantasy league: of famous fashion designers. According to an October report by the Des Moines Register, managers draft teams consisting of three clothing designers, plus one each designer of shoes, handbags, jewelry and celebrity clothing, and then three celebrities, and they get points daily for the number and quality of name-mentions in Women's Wear Daily and other fashion and style magazines. As with football leagues, trades are permitted once a week. [Des Moines Register, 10-20-05]
More Signs: (1) Judge Norene Redmond, facing the necessity to release prisoners from overcrowded Macomb County (Mich.) Jail, asked the public (via an October online poll) which types should be freed first; drug-possession and DUI defendants were deemed the most worthy, but Redmond said the final decision was hers. (2) An October Business Week report labeled mothers who are obsessed with buying their toddlers only upscale merchandise as "Yoga Mamas" who extend their own lifestyle to their babies; the report suggests that the toddler who receives a $129 pair of shoes would probably "have more fun with the box they came in." [Detroit Free Press, 11-4-05] [Business Week, 10-31-05]
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Least Competent People
Shortly after Hurricane Wilma struck Florida in October, officials said 911 operators in Palm Beach County were flooded not only with storm-related calls but with self-imposed injuries. Some of the problems (according to an October Palm Beach Post story): brush-clearing chain-saw accidents; the old "cigarette-lighter-to-check-fuel-level-of-a-generator"; people falling off roofs while making repairs; setting up a generator too close to a window; cooking inside on a charcoal grill; pouring gasoline into a generator while it's running; failing to respect downed power lines; and stacking items atop a previously "on" electric stove so that, when power resumes, they catch fire. [Palm Beach Post, 10-28-05]
Police in Twin Falls, Idaho, confiscated almost $1 billion in counterfeit money in October in a doomed scheme in which the loot consisted only of bills of the denomination of $1 million (which does not legally exist); a man from Buhl, Idaho, had tried to give a bank that amount as collateral for a loan. And according to police in Lafayette, Ind., in September, Earl Devine's counterfeit money was not much better: Though a popular name for $100 bills is "Benjamins" (for the face of Benjamin Franklin), Devine's $100 bills still had the face of Abraham Lincoln from the $5 bill he allegedly used as a model. [Fox News, 10-17-05] [CNN-Court TV, 8-19-05]
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Readers' Choice
In October, a 33-year-old pastor at the University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, standing in a baptismal pool preparing to immerse a parishioner in front of hundreds of congregants, mishandled a microphone and was electrocuted. On the same day in Johannesburg, South Africa, a pastor at the Jerusalem Apostolic Church drowned during a river baptism ceremony when he and the parishioner (who also drowned) lost their footing on rocks in the river bed. [CNN-AP, 10-31-05] [The Star (Johannesburg), 10-31-05]
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Gas Pedal, Brake Pedal, Whatever (all-new)
Accidents by elderly drivers whom police suspect momentarily confused the gas pedal for the brake (or accelerated in the wrong gear): Age 90, crashed into another car in a funeral procession, injuring nine, Birdsboro, Pa. (May). Age 89, crashed into a Winn-Dixie, injuring seven, Lakeland, Fla. (November). Age 87, crashed into a hospital's lobby, injuring five, Bismarck, N.D. (October). Age 83, crashed into a garage and house, killing the driver, Chicago (September). Age 82, crashed through four walls and a steel door of a security company, injuring one, Anderson, S.C. (November). Age 80, crashed into four parked cars, no injuries, Rockford, Ill. (November). Age 78, crashed into several cars and a large crowd at an auto auction, injuring 20, Yaphank, N.Y. (July). Age 77, crashed into the operating room of an eye clinic, just missing a sedated patient, no injuries, Newark, N.J. (August). [Lancaster New Era, 5-21-05] [Tampa Tribune, 11-9-05] [Washington Post-AP, 10-25-05] [Chicago Tribune, 9-26-05] [WFTV-TV (Orlando)-AP, 11-4-05] [Rockford Register Star, 11- 2-05] [Newsday, 7-23-05] [Star-Ledger (Newark), 8-24-05]
"In my weird politically incorrect hypothetically incoherent contradicting obscured world definitively maybe"
Eating disorders have such a hold on many young women that some Internet sites glorify anorexia and bulimia as a quasi-divinity, using religious language to command obedience to a goddess of thinness known as "Ana," according to a May story in Minneapolis' Star Tribune. Said one Minnesota college freshman, "Ana is definitely a higher power, not higher than God, but higher than myself." There are Ana prayers, Ana psalms and Ana commandments. One site has instructions for a ritual at an altar, culminating in a blood contract "with the anorexia deity." An Arizona doctor reported that a 13-year-old anorexia patient suddenly spoke "an incantation, like a hex, as if to scare me off." [Star Tribune, 5-1-05]
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The Entrepreneurial Spirit
In April, the Fat Duck restaurant, in the countryside west of London, was voted in a poll by 500 industry experts as the world's best (in spite of specialties such as "sardine on toast sorbet" and "leather, oak and tobacco chocolates"). (It had rallied from a bad health inspection report the year before, according to The Guardian newspaper, in which it was graded "borderline" for staphylococcus and listeria, and experienced "cross-contamination" and hand-washing problems.) [Reuters, 4-21-05; The Guardian (London), 5-2-05]
Almost ready for release is Spanish designer Pep Torres' "Your Turn" washing machine, developed to encourage sharing of housework. Household users, such as a husband and wife, initially register their fingerprints, and Your Turn will not then operate by the same person's print twice in a row. Another product, still in development, is Briton James Larsson's use of lie-detector technology on restaurant utensils so that socially incompetent diners can better gauge how their dinner dates feel about them, by measuring stress as they eat. Reasoned Larsson, "Geeks have major challenges dating." [BBC News, 5-1-05] [Nature.com, 3-17-05]
Tobin Bros. funeral home in Melbourne, Australia, introduced a rental option this year for families that seem to have gotten over their grieving: a leather-upholstered, chrome-outfitted van, with mini-bar and DVD player, so that the family can relax on the way to the cemetery (with room for the casket in back). Owner Martin Tobin said the van might not be for everyone. [Sydney Morning Herald, 4-21-05]
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Science on the Cutting Edge
Professor Mikhail Sokolshchik of Russia's National Medical Surgical Center performed a two-stage penile lengthening early this year on a 28-year-old virgin, adding 5 inches to what was an almost dysfunctionally small organ. Sokolshchik first removed the tip and stitched it onto the patient's forearm so that he could graft more tissue onto it (from elsewhere on the arm). After the tip lengthened, he reattached it to its proper place. According to an April dispatch from Moscow in London's Daily Telegraph, Sokolshchik is optimistic that all functions will be restored (though he said the man will probably be permanently semi-erect). [Daily Telegraph (London), 4-10-05]
In April, two former Cornell University entomologists, in what they said was a show of respect, named three new species of beetles that feed on slime mold after President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. "We admire these leaders," said Quentin Wheeler, for their "courage" "to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy ...." The Agathidium bushi are found in Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina, while the cheneyi and rumsfeldi are native to Mexico. [MSNBC-AP, 4-13-05]
A French biologist, writing in an April issue of the journal Nature, described a species of Amazonian tree ant that not only builds complex traps (using plant fibers, regurgitated vegetation and organic mold) but then lies in wait to grab a passing insect with its jaws so that it can stretch it out in the trap in a manner resembling (according to an Agence France-Presse report on the article) "a victim on a medieval rack." [Agence France-Presse, 4-20-05]
In 2001, News of the Weird, summarizing a report in the Chicago Tribune, wrote that physician Krishnaswami Sriram of Lake Forest, Ill., had been charged with 64 counts related to Medicare fraud based on billings for, among other improbabilities, two 70-hour days, one day with 131 house calls, and 32 patient-visits subsequent to their dates of death. In April 2005, following hearings on the charges and the sorting out of Sriram's records, federal judge John Darrah absolved Sriram of trying to cheat the government and found him guilty only of "chronically inept" bookkeeping (at a total loss to the government not of $15 million, as prosecutors claimed, but $1,258). Sriram pleaded guilty to three counts and was put on probation. [Chicago Tribune, 4-29-05]
News of the Weird has already reported that some people have a fondness for inserting 3-inch steel hooks in their skin and hanging from pulleys for minutes, or even an hour, at a time. In April, about 100 such aficionados attended a gathering in Providence, R.I., and participants seemed thrilled, according to a Reuters dispatch. A Connecticut teen: "It was euphoric. It was spiritual. I'd do it again today if I wasn't so sore." A woman, watching her boyfriend slowly swing: "Look at his face. He's so serene. We've had some really rough times this year, and he needed this really bad." A Canadian man: "The first couple of times, I didn't enjoy it. The first time, I blacked out, and one time I was convulsing. But the third time I got better. I wasn't blacking out anymore." [Reuters, 4-5-05]
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Least Competent Criminals
Vickey Siles, 35, was arrested in New Haven, Ind., last year and charged with altering a check from the Globe Life and Accident Co. The check was for $1, but Siles had badly obliterated the amount and written in "$4,000,000.00." Furthermore, she believed that she could cash a check for that amount at a neighborhood check-cashing shop (but a clerk alerted authorities). The job was so pitifully done that in March 2005, a judge gave her only a suspended sentence and probation. [Fort Wayne News Sentinel, 3-19-05]
A Chicago gas-station clerk tricked a robber in February by the simple ploy of telling him there was more money "up there," pointing toward the ceiling. The robber looked, then said, "What are you talking about? There's no money up there." However, there was a surveillance camera there, and police were grateful for a full-face shot of the robber, according to WMAQ-TV. [WMAQ-TV (Chicago), 2-15-05]
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Gas Pedal? Brake Pedal? Whatever (all-new)
Accidents by elderly drivers who police suspect momentarily confused the gas pedal for the brake: Age 88, crashed into a bank (killing a customer), St. Pete Beach, Fla. (February). Age 85, crashed into a post office, West Salem, Ore. (December). Age 87, crashed into an animal hospital, Lynchburg, Va. (December). Age 88, hit two cars and two people in a Wal-Mart parking lot, Pembroke Pines, Fla. (January). Age 81, crashed into a car dealership after hitting her husband, a salesman, a car and a tree, Fort Myers, Fla. (April). Age 84, crashed into her son, waiting to be picked up at the front door upon discharge from a hospital, Manchester, N.H. (May) (He had to be readmitted.). [St. Petersburg Times, 2-23-05] [Salem Statesman Journal, 12-24-04] [Lynchburg News & Advance, 12-29-04] [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 1-18-05] [WJXT-TV (Jacksonville)-AP, 4-15-05] [New Hampshire Union Leader, 5-6-05]
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Recurring Themes
In Hong Kong in March, a 21-year-old man, reportedly upset about a recent breakup with his girlfriend, responded in a manner familiar to readers of News of the Weird: He tossed almost everything in his 35th-floor apartment out the window. (No injuries were reported.) And in Gang Mills, N.Y., in March, after neighbors reported a disturbance at the home of Billy Abbey, 31, police surrounded the house and, for the next 11 hours, tried to coax him out, but, as some perps have done in the past, Abbey slept through the whole thing, oblivious to the siege. [KXTV (Sacramento)-AP, 3-27-05] [Star-Gazette (Elmira, N.Y.), 4-2-05]
"In my weird politically incorrect hypothetically incoherent contradicting obscured world definitively maybe"
So send me some bad programming code..?? 
these are so good