Universal Press Syndicate - Features - News of the Weird

Universal Press Syndicate - Features - News of the Weird - Samples

Return to News of the Weird Sample One Sample Two Sample Three	News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd Sample One LEAD STORIES While two co-appellants chose to have lawyers represent them before the Supreme Court of Canada in their challenge of their marijuana convictions, David Malmo-Levine spoke for himself, addressing the justices for 40 minutes on May 6, arguing that his right of "substance orientation" was similar to someone's right of sexual orientation. After his session (which he began by waving hello to the justices), Malmo-Levine revealed that his entire courtroom wardrobe was made of hemp and that he had taken a few hits of hashish beforehand. Said he, "I was happy, hungry and relaxed, but I was not impaired." [Reuters, 5-7-03, Globe and Mail, 5-7-03] The annual World Pole-Sitting Championships began May 1 in Berlin (and if the winner is decided after Nov. 17, he will have a new world record). Contestants sit on a 15-inch-by-23-inch platform, 24 hours a day, and electronic sensors detect if anyone leaves the platform for any reason except for the 10-minute break every two hours. The event's organizer said the Dutch are the sport's "purists," that in Dutch competitions, "you don't get to sit on a board, and you can't come down (for restroom breaks)." [Reuters, 5-15-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Things People Believe A juror in the recent London trial in which five Irish car-bombers were convicted was let go by the judge for inattention because she carried out spiritual rituals in the jury box while clutching a witchcraft book in one hand and placing the other, as required by the ritual, on the floor. And in York, Pa., trial is nearing for Matthew Turner, 22, who was arrested last year after pursuing a man for his adrenal gland, which he thought would bring a week-long high if licked or eaten; allegedly, he had stabbed the man in the side, and when the man escaped, Turner chased him relentlessly through town, knife drawn, until police caught him. [Daily Telegraph, 4-10-03] [York Daily Record, 4-30-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Compelling Explanations In April, when the Republicans on the New York City Board of Elections killed a plan to repair voting machines that had underrecorded votes in the 2000 election (with most of the unlucky voters being Democrats), Republican Commissioner Stephen Weiner denied that his party's disinterest in properly functioning machines showed bias against Democrats: "There are some people who don't want (their vote) register(ed), but who report to the polls for civic reasons." [Newsday, 4-16-03] Maximizing the opportunity to avoid detection, some illegal immigrants from Mexico choose to enter the United States through a desolate mountain-desert area east of Yuma, Ariz., but in May 2001, 14 of them died of dehydration in a blistering sun. In April 2003, their families filed a $42 million lawsuit in Tucson against the U.S. Interior Department for having failed to install water stations in the area. [Arizona Daily Star, 5-8-03] At a May court appearance in Melbourne, Australia, to answer charges of unsanitary food at his Rajah Sahib Tavern and Tandoori Grill, Larry Mendonca denied that the moldy items that inspectors found were part of his restaurant's fare. Moldy relish and 8-year-old pickles? Mendonca said they were his personal foods, not the restaurant's. A bowl of chilis topped with mold? His. A moldy jug of salad dressing? His. Besides, he said, "It was scum, not mold." [Herald Sun, 5-7-03] Responding to a February incident in St. Clair Shores, Mich., in which a girl performed oral sex on a boy during a middle-school class (both were suspended), the superintendent and the principal wrote to parents: "Just like our country was shocked into awareness when never-before acts of terrorism occurred in New York City, our district was shocked into awareness when middle-school students engaged in indecent acts in the classroom." (The boy's parents filed a lawsuit over the suspension, pointing out that their son was a "victim" in that, when the girl started, he had no "legal duty" to resist.) [Macomb Daily, 3-12-03] Pennsylvania's attorney general and prosecutors in Arapahoe County, Colo., made similar interpretations of child pornography laws recently in defending their decisions not to reveal information. The attorney general said he could not publicly identify Web sites he had ordered suppressed by Internet service providers because, to identify those sites would be "disseminating" child pornography. And the Colorado prosecutors refused to show defendant Joseph Verbrugge the 200 photographs it would use against him (as is required in all criminal cases) because to do so would be to disseminate child pornography to him. (In January, a Colorado appeals court rebuked the prosecutors.) [Wired-AP, 4-3-03] [Rocky Mountain News, 1-31-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- People Different From Us Convicted killer Roderick Ferrell, 23, asked for a new trial in March, telling a judge in Tavares, Fla., that he had an inadequate defense at his 1996 murder trial. Ferrell had admitted then that he was the leader of a teenaged, goth-outfitted "vampire clan" that often cut their arms open to suck each other's blood and which murdered the parents of one of its members. Ferrell told the judge this time that he had been seeing a psychiatrist in 1996, whereupon the judge asked who had originally told him he needed help; Ferrell replied, "The school, the sheriff's office, my mom. Basically the whole city." [The Daily Commercial (Leesburg, Fla.), 3-8-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Recurring Themes Cat-hoarder Heidi Erickson, 42, had two Boston-area homes raided in April and May, at which authorities rescued a total of 112 sickly cats and found several cat carcasses. Erickson is one of the more aggressive hoarders on record, both for her proclivity for litigiousness (40 cases in seven years) and the circus-like atmosphere she created at a subsequent court hearing (during which she denied the accounts of numerous witnesses that the cats were ailing). She told one person her mission was to breed the "imperfections" out of Persians. Erickson said she was a victim of discrimination (epileptic disability, sexual lifestyle) and would challenge any eviction or any restrictions by authorities in Beacon Hill and Watertown, Mass. [Boston Globe, 4-29-03 et seq.; Boston Herald, 4-29-03 et seq.] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Masters of Disguise A man escaped in February after robbing a Wienerschnitzel drive-thru in North Long Beach, Calif.; identifying him was difficult because he had smeared what appeared to be chocolate pudding over his face. And Edwin Lockhart, 48, had less success than that robbing a Sun Trust bank in Palatka, Fla., receiving a 10-year sentence in April; he was identified despite having stuck several sanitary napkins on his face. [Long Beach Press Telegram, 2-19-03] [Palatka Daily News, 4-24-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Affirmative Action in Action In May, a second Indian mayor, Amarnath Yadav of Gorakhpur, was removed from office because "he," a eunuch, had run as a female but was declared by a court to be just an effeminate male and thus ineligible to seek a female-reserved electoral office. Also in May, the South African Rugby Football Union fined its Golden Lions about US$4,000 for momentarily having only two black players on the field, when league rules require a minimum of three at all times. [BBC News, 5-12-03] [Reuters, 5-14-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Readers' Choice In May, a county human services procurement officer in Portland, Ore., mindful of the sometimes-quixotic needs of the agency's mental-health clients, included in a list of potential resource requirements a person fluent in the "Star Trek" language Klingon (but later said no actual job openings are envisioned). And in May, Microsoft's British division announced it was developing an Internet-ready portable outhouse with computer and plasma screen, to be unveiled this summer at various British festivals; Microsoft headquarters then told reporters the project was a hoax, but after consulting with the British division, headquarters conceded that it was a real project but said it was being discontinued. [St. Petersburg Times, 5-11-03] [Associated Press, 5-13-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, in the Last Month ... Police chief Beverly Lennen instituted an advance-reservations system at the jail, to serve activists who wanted to be arrested protesting a visit by President Bush (Santa Fe, N.M.). The museum director who housed Marco Evaristti's installation, in which patrons were invited to turn on a live goldfish-containing blender, was acquitted of animal cruelty charges because the two unlucky fish died instantly (Copenhagen, Denmark). Five stowaways, having boarded a ship in Buenaventura, Colombia, bound for Miami, emerged joyously when it docked after five days at sea, but then learned that it wasn't Miami, that mechanical trouble had forced the vessel back to port at Cartagena, Colombia. [The New Mexican, 5-10-03] [Fox News-AP, 5-19-03] [Reuters, 5-16-03] ^ Top
Return to News of the Weird Sample One Sample Two Sample Three	Sample Two LEAD STORIES An obscure California law makes it shockingly easy for anyone to anonymously force a motorist into a formal hearing over his driving skills, according to a May story in the Southern California newspaper OC Weekly. The Department of Motor Vehicles said the so-far-underused law was designed to allow relatives of diminished-skill elderly drivers to ease them off the road, but that the legislation places no limits on who can use it. Any complaint, even a bogus one with no proof, leads to a formal hearing at DMV with license suspension a possible outcome, and DMV says it must enforce the law unless the legislature changes it. [OC Weekly, 5-16-03] May marked the debut of Minnesota's gun-carry law, whose critics complained that it is much easier on handgun-possession than even Texas' law. Licensees may carry guns openly in any parking lot in the state (except federal facilities), including school parking lots (although possession of a knife in a school parking lot is still a felony). Guns are still prohibited on other school property, but the law reduces licensees' penalty for that from a felony to a misdemeanor. Private establishments can prohibit guns, but only with a state-dictated sign at each entrance, and then the "penalty" for violation is to be told to leave. [Star Tribune, 5-19-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Entrepreneurial Spirit New Product Launches: "Purring Kitty" software that makes Nokia cell phones vibrate continuously to create a "discreet massager" (according to the British firm, Vibrelet). A healing stone that when heated, is a smell-remover, a sterilizer, and a treatment for heart disease (according to the developer, the government of North Korea). A fashionable but electrically charged woman's anti-assault coat, with rubber lining and vinyl outer layer sandwiching 9-volt circuitry that, when armed, delivers a finger-in-a-wall-socket-type jolt to anyone who touches it (from Advanced Research Apparel). And the 4-year-old, but recently trendy, half-inch, gold-enameled good-luck charm in the shape of curled feces (from Ryukodo of Kyoto, Japan). [Wired News, 4-12-03] [Las Vegas Sun-AP, 5-14-03] [Wired News, 5-22-03] [Agence France-Presse, 4-18-03] "We figured that (every small business) obviously worth doing is already being done by 50 other guys in Miami, so we had to do some thinking first," said "Anton" to the Miami New Times in April. That thinking resulted in Anton's belief that "thousands" of people would pay a dollar each to view his (and his partner "Frank"'s) painstakingly created display of exactly 1 million toothpicks. After hundreds of hours of counting and banding the picks, the two men were at last word ready to look at venues and marketing proposals. [Miami New Times, 4-17-03] While the average chief executive of a $2.7 million, not-for-profit organization is paid just over $100,000, the swimming coach who is head of the De Anza Cupertino Aquatics program in California's Silicon Valley last year earned over $350,000, according to an April report in the San Jose Mercury News. The CEO-coach Pete Raykovich took over the program (training swimmers, from toddlers through internationally competitive athletes) when it was small and gets 10 percent of revenues plus a salary of $85,000, and the board of directors appears to have no regrets about Raykovich's pay. [San Jose Mercury News, 4-14-03] Lawrence Omansky was arrested in April in New York City and charged with kidnapping business partner Lawrence Schlosser, who had criticized Omansky's property management work at a meeting in Omansky's office in the TriBeCa section of Manhattan. Allegedly, during the meeting, Omansky bound Schlosser and forced him into a 3-foot-high crawl space under the second floor, where Schlosser remained for 28 hours before untaping himself and escaping. Said Omansky's lawyer, "The case will ultimately be viewed as a business dispute." [New York Times, 4-18-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Weird Science Doctors at Chimkent (Kazakhstan) Children's Hospital told the BBC in April that they had removed a fetus from a 7-year-old boy; it was thought at first to be a cyst but when removed, actually had hair and bones and is now believed to have been the boy's Siamese twin that grew in the wrong place. And in May, Groote Schnuur Hospital (Cape Town, South Africa) reported only the 15th documented case of a fetus developing in the mother's liver (and the fourth to survive). [BBC News, 4-30-03] [BBC News, 5-23-03] Curator Mark Norman of Australia's Melbourne Museum revealed in January that he had captured and photographed the male of the world's most sexually unequal species. When the blanket octopus male (2 cm long) mates with the female (6 feet long), it uses a special extension arm to transfer sperm from its penis (after which the male dies). Females, which may weigh 10,000 times as much as the males, are typically found with several such extension arms lodged inside them. [The Age (Melbourne), 1-23-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- People Different From Us The world did not end on May 15, contrary to warnings by Japan's 1,200-member Pana Wave Laboratory cult, whose public activities (covering themselves and their property in white sheets for protection against electromagnetic waves beamed by "communists") had drawn media attention just before "doomsday." The Pana Wavers are believed not to be dangerous, although one member said that if the group's guru, Ms. Yuko Chino, soon succumbs to her (supposedly) microwave-induced cancer, the cult will, in revenge, exterminate "all humankind." [The Independent (London), 5-14-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Least Competent Criminals At the May court hearing in Nashville, Tenn., for Denza D. McGee, 19, accused of fatally shooting a man, McGee's buddy Gerald Cunningham, 23, showed up to give moral support. However, the witness who was in court to identify McGee said she also recognized Cunningham as McGee's partner in the home invasion and shooting, and Cunningham was pulled out of the gallery and arrested. [Tennessean, 5-22-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update As reported in News of the Weird in March 2002 (to apparently many skeptical readers), the 37-year-old female inmate who died at the Pine Grove Correctional Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada, succumbed from a toxic reaction to methadone that she had consumed by drinking the vomit of a fellow inmate who was on a methadone maintenance program. A coroner's inquest in March 2003 heard witness after witness describe inmates' practice of trading their methadone-laced vomit for various inmate favors, and the two inmates who admitted vomiting for the victim have since been additionally sentenced for drug trafficking. [Prince Albert (Saskatchewan) Daily Herald, 3-4-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Things You Thought Didn't Happen British circus trainer Roger Perkins stole the show at the Royal Easter Circus in April with his prize sow, Miss Piggy, who climbs a ramp to a diving tower and then free-falls into a swimming pool. And Pete Ondrus and his wife, Barb Lambert, told the Greenville, Mich., Daily News in May that they were looking forward to a summer of ballparks and fairs in which they would stage races between their favorite cow, Dusty Roads, and two other trained race cows. [Sydney Morning Herald, 4-13-03] [Associated Press, 5-22-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Readers' Choice Lynda Taylor, 38, was arrested in Stuart, Fla., in May and charged with aggravated assault, specifically, wearing perfume, spraying Lysol and lighting scented candles. She and her husband, David, have been having marital trouble, and David, who suffers from extreme chemical sensitivity, says Lynda is purposely trying to kill him to get his recent worker compensation settlement check. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution-Cox News Service, 5-9-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, in the Last Month ... After protests, organizers of a children's beauty pageant changed their minds and decided that their original plan to have "swimsuit" and "sexy body" categories was not a good idea (Bangkok, Thailand). A motorist drove his car into a self-service car wash hoping to drench a small fire in his engine, but by the time he realized he didn't have any coins, the fire had spread, eventually destroying four of the car wash's eight bays (West Seneca, N.Y.). A 38-year-old man attempted to dispose of gunpowder by tossing it into his lighted fireplace, resulting in burns to his head and arms (Pike Creek Valley, Del.). [The Star (Kuala Lumpur)-Associated Press, 5-27-03] [Buffalo News, 5-21-03] [NBC10.com (Philadelphia), 5-21-03] ^ Top
Return to News of the Weird Sample One Sample Two Sample Three	Sample Three LEAD STORIES No state has had more serious budget anxiety attacks recently than Oregon, which saw some public schools close early this year after running out of money. However, another crisis surfaced in April when death-row inmate Horacio Reyes-Camarena told prison officials he would reluctantly accept the kidney transplant that would save Oregon taxpayers most of the $120,000 a year they now pay for his dialysis (and must, by law, pay until his execution, which may be as long as 10 years away, because of appeals). Some law-abiding Oregon kidney patients are being turned down for transplants because post-transplant drugs are too expensive. [Reuters, 5-27-03] Just as Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham's daily, quirky, minutely detailed, written diaries are in the news (e.g.,"6:50-7:00 - Apply scalp medication"), the Pentagon was seeking bidders for contracts to create electronic "diaries" (the LifeLog program) that could record virtually all facets of a person's daily existence (via sensors, microphones and wearable cameras), to be dumped into gigantic databases, searchable to detect behavior patterns that might be useful to the military. A Pentagon spokesman said not to be alarmed, that only consenting subjects would be used, but one privacy advocate told Wired magazine that LifeLog could be "TIA cubed," referring to the previously revealed Total Information Awareness program, which would track everyone's purchase transactions and computer usage. [Wired, 5-20-03; Dayton Daily News-AP, 6-3-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cultural Diversity A February BBC report noted the fascination among tribes in Meghalaya, India, to appear mischievously worldly by giving their children prominent Western names (such as those of candidates in the Feb. 26 local elections, Adolf Lu Hitler R Marak, Tony Curtis, Rockefeller Momin and Hilarious Dhkar). Also popular are Roosevelt, Churchill, Bush, Blair, Clinton and Saddam. [BBC News, 2-26-03] Officials in Saudi Arabia recently began to campaign against the culture of intrafamily marriage, which is practiced by almost half the country, according to a May New York Times dispatch. "Saudi Arabia is a living genetics laboratory," said an American researcher stationed there. Several genetic disorders have festered, but in many tribes, such disorders (attributed to God's will) have not in any way diminished the ideal of first-cousin marriages. [New York Times, 5-1-03] In February, a 6-month-old girl was married in a Hindu ceremony in a village in southern Nepal, according to an Agence France-Presse report. Her cradle-robbing husband is 3, and their farming-cast families feared that if the children didn't tie the knot then, each one's marriage prospects would diminish as they got older. [New York Times-Agence France-Presse, 2-26-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Latest Religious Messages From a religious advice column in Arab News (an English-language daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia), 5-9-03: "(Question:) A person feels very uncomfortable during prayers because he gets recurrent thoughts that he might have discharged wind (during the prayers, and thus) invalidated the ablution." "And it is all without sound or smell." "(Answer:) (A) wind discharge is ascertained by sound or smell. If neither is present, then no wind discharge has taken place (and therefore the ablution has not been invalidated)." [Arab News, 5-9-03] In May, a priest of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Parma, Ohio, Monsignor Robert V. Yarnovitz, pleaded no contest to indecency charges for an incident at a conference in nearby Huron Township. According to police, Yarnovitz was wandering, drunk and pantsless, through the Sawmill Creek resort and when confronted by police, he repeatedly and aggressively answered their every question by uttering "Michael" and a slang phrase commanding someone to perform oral sex on him. (A spokesman at Yarnovitz's church said the incident "was not characteristic of Monsignor.") [Lorain Morning Journal, 5-2-03; Plain Dealer, 5-20-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- People Different From Us Nancy Fortson Reynolds, 49, pleaded guilty in May to having embezzled more than $1 million from an Athens, Ga., animal vaccine manufacturer during the five years she handled the company's accounts payable. According to a police detective, Reynolds and her husband spent all of the money on a multitude of consumer products, making only one enduring capital expenditure: constructing an addition onto their double-wide mobile home. [Athens Banner-Herald, 5-28-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The District of Calamity (continued) Last year's edition of the Washington, D.C., public school system's standardized-test guide for elementary students was such a disaster of errors and typos that the new edition was anticipated to be a showcase of near-perfection. However, some critics told The Washington Post in April that this year's guide was even more embarrassing. For example, one question, featuring an image of nine flowers, asks the student to count them out, but the only multiple-choice answers available were numbers between 22 and 30. Another contained only this information: If 234 people saw a theater's first show, and 456 saw a theater's second show, how many people saw both shows? [Washington Post, 4-14-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Recurring Themes In a 2002 story, News of the Weird mentioned Cuba's Guinness-Book-record milk-producing cow, Ubre Blanca. In April 2003, a German newspaper profiled Susan Schulze, 31, of Leipzig, who the paper said was the country's most prolific milk-producing human, having provided 50 gallons of her breast milk (collected in four to six daily sessions for more than a year) to a children's clinic at the University of Magdeburg. [Daily Telegraph (London), 4-13-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- People Out of Control Barbara Schwarz is history's most prolific filer of Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a May profile in The Salt Lake Tribune. Schwarz says she is a daughter of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and a granddaughter of President Eisenhower and said she endured a number of kidnappings and mind control and microchip-implanting procedures in her quest to learn the whereabouts of her alleged husband, whom Schwarz said disappeared after he was charged with murdering Barbara Schwarz (yes, the same one). She has, said the Tribune, "carpet-bombed" "every" federal agency with "thousands" of FOIA requests, followed by "dozens" of follow-up lawsuits (one containing 2,307 pages, naming 3,087 defendants). [Salt Lake Tribune, 5-5-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Least Competent Criminals A 36-year-old man was tackled by customers after he had robbed the Zions Bank in Salt Lake City shortly after it opened on May 2. Several customers had had their eyes on him after they had seen him waiting outside for the bank to open but already wearing a hooded sweatshirt and mask, and the man meekly waited in a bank line for his turn before snatching money from a teller. And serial killer Robert Maury had his appeal turned down by the California Supreme Court in April. He had claimed that the Shasta County "secret witness" program should have concealed his identity when he called a hotline with crime tips, including the whereabouts of three murder victims, but police photographed him when he came by to collect his reward, and eventually he was convicted of those three murders. [Salt Lake Tribune, 5-3-03] [Redding Record Searchlight, 4-25-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Undignified Deaths Last Words: (1) Jackson Thomas was stabbed to death in May in Brooklyn, N.Y.; he had made comments about his wife's putting on weight, leading to an argument, provoking her to grab a knife, but Mr. Thomas advanced on her, saying, "What are you going to do, stab me?" (2) And a week before that, in West Hempstead, N.Y., taxicab passenger Kenneth Hill, 39, died after the driver hit him with a tire iron; he had been chased by the driver after he tried to skip out on a $5 fare and continued to taunt the driver, saying, "I'm not going to pay you, and there is nothing you can do about it." [New York Post, 5-12-03] [Newsday, 5-5-03] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, in the Last Month ... A deputy governor in Japan resigned after criticism that he had continued to play a pachinko pinball gambling machine for a half-hour after a chaotic, magnitude-7 earthquake hit a few days earlier (on a day in which he was actually the acting governor) (Akita prefecture). Cockfight breeders filed a lawsuit against the federal government claiming that new restrictions on transporting fighting chickens constitute illegal ethnic discrimination against Cajuns and Hispanics (New Orleans). A gas station booth was rammed by a car with a dead man at the wheel; the man had shot himself to death hours before with the engine idling, and rigor motris caused his foot finally to either fall off the brake or hit the accelerator (Boston). [Associated Press, 5-30-03] [CNN-AP, 5-30-03] [Boston Globe, 5-28-03] ^ Top
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