My Favorite Bits From
[News of the Weird]

News of the Weird is a weekly syndicated column by Chuck Shepherd containing
synopses of bizarre news stories reported in various sources and is carried
in over 200 newspapers. All material is Copyright (c) 1994-6, by Universal
Press Syndicate. All rights reserved. Released for the entertainment of
readers. No commercial use may be made of the material or of the name "News
of the Weird." Just imagine what fun it must be to sift all day through
newspapers for wacky stuff and make a living from it.

[-------] WEIRDNUZ.350 (News of the Weird, October 21, 1994)
by Chuck Shepherd

The Democratic Process

* After voting earlier this year to disband their police force, residents of
Osage, W. Va., voted in June to disband the whole town government. A major
reason was dissatisfaction with the large number of traffic tickets being
issued. [Cumberland Times-News-AP, 6-16- 94]

* High points in recent references to underwear in the Taiwan parliament: In
May one legislator waved a pair of women's underpants symbolically to
complain about the low state of Taiwan's national flag, and in June, a
female legislator charged the podium and slapped another female legislator
who had remarked that the first woman's underwear was showing. [Iowa Daily,
May94; Syracuse Herald-American-AP, 6-5-95]

* Bill Frist, a Republican challenging U. S. Sen. Jim Sasser in Tennessee
this fall, revealed in a 1989 book that, while a Harvard medical student in
the 1970s, he procured cats for experiments by claiming at animal shelters
that he wanted them merely as pets. A woman who worked for the Tennessee
Humane Association during that time said Frist violated at least three state
and federal laws with his scheme. [Knoxville News-Sentinel, 7-27-94]

* In June Kansas state Rep. Richard Alldritt accused his colleague Melvin
Neufeld of attempting to extort a vote from him on a budget bill by
threatening to tell Alldritt's wife that Alldritt was fooling around with
women. Alldritt failed to change his vote, and according to the district
attorney, Neufeld squealed on him. [Rochester Times-Union-AP, 6-30-94;
Washington Post, 7-5-94; Washington Times, 7-1-94]

* In St. Joseph, Mich., Harry Caldwell III won the Democratic primary race
for county commissioner despite being jailed three weeks before the August
voting day because he had paid up only $5 of the $34,980 he owed in child
support. In San Jose, Calif., George Shirakawa was re-elected to the city
council in June, a month after he died, but in nearby Martinez, Calif.,
voters soundly rejected a dead man, Dan Hallissy, who was on the ballot for
county assessor. [Syracuse Herald-Journal-AP, 8-4-94] [San Francisco
Chronicle, 6- 9-94; San Francisco Examiner, 6-8-94]

* According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, U. S. Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.)
told a Little Rock radio station audience in July that fear of malpractice
lawsuits leads some physicians to overprescribe tests. Said Dickey, "They
might take you in there and perform a C-SPAN even though you don't need it."
[Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Jul94]

Grown-Ups

* In February, a jury in New Orleans ordered Dr. James Bennett to pay $5,000
to a nurse whom Bennett shot (as a "joke") in the buttocks with a surgical
staple gun. Bennett had shot the woman as she bent down to retrieve sponges
in the operating room only seconds after he had used the gun to close a
surgical wound. [New Haven Register, 2-6-94]

* In April, in a quiet Wheaton, Md., neighborhood of split-level homes,
police said Gilmore "Bo" Addison and his son, Mark Anthony Addison, got into
a gunfight over whether Dad had taken his son's money. Mark retrieved his
AK-47 assault rifle and peppered Dad's bedroom door, and, Dad, returning
fire with his .22-caliber rifle, hit Mark in the leg and buttocks as he
scurried down the stairs. [Washington Times, 4-25-94]

* In New Brighton, Minn., in February, a 32-year-old man and his 24-year-old
girlfriend were arrested after a food fight in a grocery store. After
arguing loudly, the couple began throwing sweet potatoes at each other.
Eventually, the man allegedly threw the woman into several vegetable racks,
sending the contents spilling to the floor. As both continued to brawl on
the floor, she allegedly stuffed lettuce into the man's mouth. [Focus News
(Fridley, Minn.), 3-1-94]

WEIRDNUZ.351 (News of the Weird, October 28, 1994)
by Chuck Shepherd

Lead Story

* Former hostage Terry Anderson, who was kidnaped by terrorists in Beirut in
1985 and held for nearly seven years, filed a lawsuit against 13 federal
agencies in September because they refused to release U. S. government
documents pertaining to the kidnaping. Among the agencies' rejection letters
was one from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which said it would not
release records unless Anderson provided an "original notarized
authorization" from his captors waiving their privacy rights. [Washington
Post, 10-3- 94]

* The Leesburg (Fla.) Daily Commercial reported in December on the response
of shoplifting suspect Darlene Oar, 25, when asked for personal ID by
Officer Scott Gray at the station house. When Gray asked Oar her color of
hair, Oar allegedly stood up, pulled her pants down to her knees, and asked,
"Why don't you look?" Oar was warned she would face additional charges if
she continued to expose herself. [The Daily Commercial, 12- 31-93]

* According to a grievance by workers at a Mississippi poultry plant, as
reported in U. S. News & World Report in July, the company does not permit
workers more than three bathroom breaks a week without a doctor's note, and
employees must pay 10 cents a cup for drinking water on the job. [U. S. News
& World Report, 7-25-94]

* In a July article, the Daily Oklahoman newspaper quoted state Sen. John
Monks as once arguing, while defending the "sport" of cockfighting, "The
first thing the communists do when they take over a country is to outlaw
cockfighting." [The Daily Oklahoman, 7-4-94]

* Early in the morning on October 30, a man described by the New York Daily
News as a "career criminal" was apprehended in the middle of a burglary at
an upscale Fire Island, N. Y., home. The residents had arisen to check out
noises in the house but found no one. However, in the vicinity of a closet
door, they heard flatulence and discovered Richard Magpiong, 56, hiding in a
closet. They held him until police arrived. [N. Y. Daily News, 11-1-94]

* According to Department of Justice figures, 30,000 inmate lawsuits were
filed last year (added to heavy backlogs--over 28,000 in New York alone)
against prison officials for "civil rights" violations, the vast majority
described by judges and court officials as frivolous. Among the lawsuits
were those by prisoners complaining: that the prison canteen supplied
"creamy" peanut butter when he bought "crunchy"; that guards wouldn't
refrigerate his ice cream snack so that he could eat it later ($1 million
lawsuit); that his toilet seat was too cold; that, as an inmate-paralegal in
the prison law library, he should make the same wage that lawyers make; that
prisons should offer salad bars ($129 million); that a limit on the number
of Kool-Aid refills is "cruel and unusual punishment"; and that the
scrambled eggs were cooked too hard. In New York, 20% of the entire budget
of the Attorney General's office is spent on prisoner lawsuits. [New York
Times, 3-21-94; St. Petersburg Times-Newhouse, 7-15-94; Columbia Daily
Tribune-AP, 6-26-94; Boston Globe, Oct94]

* In July, ex-student Jason Wilkins sued the University of Idaho for
$940,000 to pay for injuries he suffered when he fell through a third-story
dormitory window while mooning students. Wilkins had climbed onto a
three-foot-high heater to reach the window but claimed the University should
have posted warnings. [San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune-AP, Aug94; USA
Today, 8-23- 94]

* The Missouri Pacific Railroad announced in August that it had paid an
undisclosed amount of money to the families of a Mexican couple to settle
their wrongful-death lawsuit. The two undocumented immigrants were hit by a
train and killed when they stopped on the tracks near McAllen, Tex., to
rest. Law enforcement officials said such immigrants often rest on railroad
tracks where they are safe from border patrol heat sensors. [McAllen
Monitor, 8-19-94]

* Robert Garner, who won the Republican nomination for Hawaii's
congressional seat in September, dropped out of sight after that and missed
the entire campaign before losing the election in November to incumbent
Patsy Mink. The party hired private detectives to track him down but
discovered his address and phone number were invalid and that he had no
credit history. One person who signed his original nominating petition said
he thinks Garner is well and may be living on a boat. [The State (Columbia,
S. C.) -AP, 10-24-94

* In September, after six losing quixotic campaigns for parliament in
Denmark, standup comedian Jacob Haugaard actually got elected. Among his
campaign promises this time were good weather, better Christmas presents,
guaranteed tail winds for all cyclists, and standard-size dust bags in
vacuum cleaners. [Wall St. Journal, 10-6-94; Chicago Sun-Times-Reuters,
9-23-94]

SEEDS OF OUR DESTRUCTION

* Reminding the public that the Endangered Species Act of 1973 applies to
"mammals," two activist petitions were recently filed with government
agencies urging that (1) black Americans and (2) Old Order Amish and
Mennonites be given protection under the Act. In the first, Milwaukee
activists Bob Thompson and David Young told the Milwaukee Sentinel in
September that since young black males are about 15 times more likely to be
murdered than whites, some pristine wilderness should be established for
their preservation. The U. S. Department of the Interior once rejected a
similar petition for the Samish Indian Tribe on the ground that its members
were not "wild." [[Milwaukee Sentinel], 9-26-94]

I DON'T THINK SO

* According to doctors in Pittsburgh, Pa., in June, Sherri Lynn Rossi was
hit in the head more than 20 times with a blunt object and left covered in
blood and in a coma on the side of a road. When she came out of the coma,
she identified her attacker as her husband, Richard A. Rossi, Jr., pastor of
the local, independent, charismatic First Love Church, telling police that
Rev. Rossi had alighted from his own car, "started acting weird," taken the
wheel of her car with her inside, driven to a rural area, and beat her. Rev.
Rossi immediately denied the charge, insisting that the hijacker must have
been a man who looked like him and had a car like his, and that it was "very
possible, oh, yes" that his wife's attacker was satan in human form. In
October, Sherri Lynn Rossi abruptly withdrew her accusation, said she was
looking forward to resuming their family life, and concurred that her
attacker might have been a demon in human form. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
10-15-94]

LEAD STORY

* Among the Republicans swept into office in November was Steve Mansfield,
elected to Texas's highest court that handles criminal appeals. Among
Mansfield's pre-election lies or exaggerations (freely admitted in a
post-election interview in the publication Texas Lawyer) were his claim of
vast criminal-court experience (he is an insurance and tax lawyer), that he
was born in Texas (actually, Massachusetts), that he dated a woman "who
died" (she is still alive), and that he had "appeared" in courts in Illinois
(never) and Florida (advised a friend of his, but not as a lawyer). During
the interview, Mansfield said that he lived in Houston as a kid, but when
the reporter asked him if that was a lie, Mansfield reluctantly admitted it
was. Mansfield called those and other instances "puffery" and
"exaggerations" and said he would stop doing that now that he is one of the
highest- ranking judges in Texas. [Texas Lawyer, 11-21-94; Houston Press,
11-17-94]

LEAST COMPETENT PERSON

* In July in Kirkland, Wash., a 30-year-old man on a motorcycle, who said he
wanted to test a radar sign that measures how fast vehicles approaching it
are traveling, rode to the end of the street, turned around, gunned his
engine, and raced toward the sign, which he watched rise to "59" mph.
However, the man then smashed into the sign; he was taken to Evergreen
Hospital Medical Center with numerous cuts and bruises. [Seattle Times,
7-8-94]

* In October, before a meeting of "alternative" physicians in Greensboro, N.
C., Dr. Robert Willner, who believes that AIDS is not caused by HIV but
rather by the drug AZT (a widely- prescribed AIDS retardant), twice
defiantly drew blood from an HIV-infected man and injected it into his own
hand. [Washington Post, 11-1-94]

UH-OH

* In August, Margaret Jean Burke was cited by police in North Haven, N. Y.,
for driving while intoxicated after a crash involving a car driven by Bruce
T. Davis. Davis, a lawyer, operates the New York City-area personal injury
service advertised widely on television, 1-800-LAWYERS. Said Davis, "[Burke]
certainly hit the wrong person." [Hampton Chronicle, 8-11-94]

* In June the crematorium at the Meadow Lawn Memorial Park in San Antonio,
Tex., was destroyed by a fire that broke out when workers began cremating a
body that weighed more than 300 pounds. The facility's owner said that the
fat in the body caused an unusually high temperature, which caused the
ordinary crematorium fire to rage out of control. [San Antonio Express-
News, 6-24-94]

* In October in Rio de Janeiro, student Jose Costa brawled with the owner of
a pit bull, Alexandre de Andrade, before police broke up the fight. The
incident began when Costa, in the midst of a night drinking with friends,
started to urinate against a tree and accidentally sprayed the dog, which
was also urinating against the tree. [[Bangkok Post, Oct94]]

* The latest case of a rodent emerging from a toilet occurred in Ada, Okla.,
in September, when a squirrel climbed out just after Charlene Netherton was
finishing up. And in July, a tourist spent eight days at a hospital in
Thailand recovering from an outhouse incident in Cambodia: A pig, which was
rummaging around in the pit, bit the man as he was seated. [Ada Evening
News, 9-27-94] [[Bangkok Post, Jul94]]

* Dallas County (Missouri) prosecutor Wayne Rieschel told reporters in May
that, after consulting with the state attorney general's office, he could
find no law of any kind violated by the owner of a tanning salon who
secretly videotaped his female customers nude. Among the 83 victims were
Rieschel's wife and daughter. [Albuquerque Journal-AP, 5-26-94]

* According to a videotape of the May meeting of the Wisconsin Taxpayers
Party, guest speaker Rev. Matthew Trewhella told the audience that church
congregations should be prepared to fight physically against legalized
abortions. Trewhella said he had trained his 16-month-old son to identify
which finger is his trigger finger and told parents not to play "pin the
tail on the donkey" but rather to substitute the exercise in which a child
is blindfolded and learns to take a gun apart and put it back together.
[Church and State Journal, Fall 1994]

* In August, the Wall Street Journal reported on Idaho scrap- metal dealer
Tom Johansen's legitimate 1993 purchase of state- of-the-art nuclear
reprocessing equipment from a Department of Energy (DOE) surplus sale.
Johansen also was able to obtain operating instructions for making
bomb-grade uranium with the equipment by paying DOE a $280 photocopying fee.
The Wall Street Journal said the sale went through because the DOE man in
charge was about to retire and could not persuade his superiors of the
inappropriateness of selling such dangerous materials. [Wall Street Journal,
8-3-94]

* In August, postal clerk Joannie McCaughey and three others were issued
formal reprimands by their supervisor in Cambridge, Mass., because they had
punched in for work at 8:59 a.m. for a 9 a.m. shift. "Future deficiencies .
. . will result in more severe disciplinary action," read the reprimand,
"including suspension or removal from the Postal Service." Said the
supervisor, Michael Hannon, "It would become an abusive situation" if every
employee wanted to punch in one minute early every day. [Wall Street
Journal, 10-4-94]

* An August Associated Press report on the Pitkin County jail in Aspen,
Colo., contained only praise from former "inmates." The jail, which has a
library, gym, videocassettes for rent, and luxurious views of Red Mountain,
was applauded by Dewi Sukarno, widow of the former Indonesian dictator, who
once did 24 days for assault. "I will treasure [memories of the jail] the
rest of my life." [[Fort Collins Coloradoan-AP, 8-25-94]]

* In September near Queensville, Ontario, skydiving student Sharon
McClelland, 26, who had just amazingly survived a 10,000-foot plunge into a
marsh when her parachute malfunctioned, struggled to her feet and rushed to
apologize to her instructor Kevin Killin because she had not followed
procedures to open her backup chute. [Albuquerque Journal-AP, 9-5-94]

MISCELLANEOUS ELOQUENCE

* Professor Constance Penley of the University of California, Santa Barbara,
interviewed by the Chicago Tribune in August on the significance of "Beavis
and Butthead," said it is about "the arrogance of white male privilege."
"[T]he only people who get to be that stupid and live are white guys."
[Chicago Tribune magazine, 8-14-94]

LEAD STORY

* A Tokyo company, Juonsha, recently began offering a mail- order curse kit,
featuring a straw doll to represent the hexee, along with eight accessories,
including nails, a curse manual, and a curse-blocking doll to ward off
return curses. The company at first marketed to boys and girls bullied at
school but discovered the major market is women who hope to put spells on
neighbors, in-laws, and husbands. Among the hints in the manual: "It is
important to specify the kind of misfortune [you wish upon the victim]." "It
is important to imagine the unhappy scenes." [Japan Times-Jiji Press,
11-8-94]

COURTROOM ANTICS

* In Detroit, Mich., in September, the lawyer for accused murderer Rondelle
Woods, 23, delivered part of his closing argument to the jury in rap: "Went
to a party, sweet 16, decided to stay on the scene . . ." Woods was
acquitted. But in Las Vegas in December, Eric Clark, 22, pleaded with the
judge, in rap, for a light sentence: "I'm sellin' dope, and I was gettin'
paid, too blind to see how I was gettin' played . . ." He got 23 years. [USA
Today, 9-28-94; Hollywood Reporter, 12-16-94]

* In November and December, three judges in Fiji came under fire from
women's groups for decisions in rape cases. In one case, Fiji's chief
justice said that a teenage girl would not suffer from her rape at
knifepoint because, after all, she was sexually experienced. In another
case, a judge freed six men who admitted to having sex with a 15-year-old
girl, saying that the girl was "well-built" and looked older. [Columbus
Dispatch-AP, The State (Columbia, S. C.), 12-8-94]

* In September, Pulaski, Tenn., juvenile court judge Robert E. Lee, Jr.,
annoyed at defendant Heather Adams, 16, honored the girl's parents' request
and ushered them into a private office, supplied a six-foot-long bamboo
reed, and permitted each parent to smack the girl eight times on her clothed
bottom. Judge Lee said the parents had planned to spank Adams, anyway, and
that he supervised them so there would be no question of child abuse. [The
Tennessean, 9-10-94]

* In April, defendant Arthur Hollingsworth decided to waive his
constitutional right of silence and to testify on his own behalf in his
trial for armed robbery of a Houston, Tex., convenience store. Despite
Hollingsworth's previous recalcitrance, prosecutor Jay Hileman first got him
to admit that he was in the store at the time it was robbed and that he was
armed. Then Hileman asked, "Mr. Hollingsworth, you're guilty, aren't you?"
Hollingsworth replied, "No." Hileman pressed on. "Mr. Hollingsworth, you're
guilty, aren't you?" Hollingsworth: "Yeah." Hileman said he had no further
questions. [San Antonio Express-News, 4-22-94]

THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

* Non-Whitewater news from Arkansas: In Eureka Springs, alderman candidate
Louise Berry died on October 6, but her supporters continued to run ads
against her opponent. On November 8, because of the effectiveness of the
campaign, Berry pulled out a narrow victory. In September, attorney-general
candidate Dan Ivy won his fight to stay on the ballot despite having been
convicted of beating his wife two months earlier. Mrs. Ivy had helpfully
made an audio recording of the beating; on the tape, Ivy appeared mainly
concerned about recovering valuable coins his wife had put in a safe-deposit
box. After Ivy told her he wanted his coins, she reminded him it was Sunday
and that the box was not accessible; during the remainder of the 30-minute
tape, Ivy says "I want my coins" 76 more times. Ivy lost the election.
[Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Aug94, Sept94]

* In August, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Billy Inmon collapsed and had to
be hospitalized after a 27-day hunger strike outside the Capitol in
Columbus. He was trying to get incumbent George Voinovich to debate him, but
Voinovich never did. However, 18 days into the strike, a man protesting
Inmon's anti-gay policies urinated on Inmon's tent, provoking Inmon to point
a gun at him. [Canton Repository-AP, 8-29-94]

* In the April election for city council in Ypsilanti, Mich., incumbent
Geoffrey Rose turned over his voter list to student Frank Houston, 18, who
had offered to help him get out the vote. Armed with the list, Houston went
door to door and then won the election himself as a write-in candidate. He
told reporters afterward that he did not deceive Rose: "All I ever said all
along was that I was going to get people to vote." [Greenville (S. C.)
News-AP, 4-7-94]

* Marion Barry, re-elected as mayor of Washington, D. C., after serving six
months in prison on a 1991 cocaine possession charge, was assisted by the
75-felon-member Coalition of Ex- Offenders, who went door to door
campaigning for him. According to organizer "Roach" Brown, the Coalition
members were especially helpful because they went into the toughest
neighborhoods to register D. C.'s substantial criminal population, most of
whom were unaware that a 1976 law gave them voting rights. [Washington
Times, 10-18-94]

CLICHES COME TO LIFE

* In April in Grand Junction, Colo., Ed Tucker bought his son a toy airplane
made in Taiwan. When he unpacked it, he found a note in English written by a
man who said he was being held prisoner and subjected to human rights abuses
and begging someone to help him. [Independence Examiner-AP, 4-20-94]

* In June, Damian Michael Toya, 22, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter
in Albuquerque, N. Mex., for shooting his father to death. Toya claimed his
father had long ridiculed him for being gay and unmanly. According to Toya,
the father's last words, when Toya pointed the gun at him, were, "You don't
have the guts to do it." [Albuquerque Journal, 6-23-94]

* Federal law permits victims' lawyers in civil rights cases, if they win,
to have their fees and expenses paid by the losing party. Among the expenses
that Rodney King's lawyers submitted to the City of Los Angeles for
compensation were these: Accompanying King to see the film "Malcolm X"
($1,300); reading a newspaper article about the trial (20 minutes) ($81.25);
and attending King's 1991 birthday party ($650). The total requested was
$4.4 million, more than King himself won in the lawsuit ($3.8 million). [N.
Y. Times, 10-30-94; St. Petersburg Times-Seattle Times, 10-17-94]

* According to a Thanksgiving press release from the Butterball company, the
highlight of calls to the company's emergency hotline occurred in 1993 when
a woman reported that her pet chihuahua had jumped into the cavity of the
family's turkey and was stuck. [Greensboro News-Record, Nov94]

WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND

* In July, Robert Minahan, a chef who specializes in crocodile cuisine at a
resort in the Kakadu National Park in Australia, was attacked by a 6-foot
crocodile while swimming at Barramundi Gorge. Said Minahan, "It feels
strange to be on the other end of the food chain." [Athens Messenger-AP,
Jul94]

* In Grand Junction, Colo., in September, retired Chicago police officer
Arthur R. Smith, 56, allegedly a hit man who fired several gunshots at Rita
Quam, but missed, had a heart attack and died when police officers arrived
to arrest him. [Chicago Sun- Times, 9-15-94]

* In September, four women, using a chemical spray, allegedly attacked
another woman who had beaten them to a parking space at the Galleria mall in
Glendale, Calif., sending the woman to the hospital. Police went to the
parking lot, looking for the women, and found them having an argument
outside their car because the keys were locked inside. After finding the
chemical spray, police charged the women with assault, then helped open the
car--and found shoplifted clothing in the back seat. [L. A. Daily News,
10-1-94]

* The Chicago Tribune, reporting in July on the trial of a marriage
matchmaker in Guangzhou Province, related the testimony of a barber who
agreed to offer his unwilling wife to the matchmaker for a scam in which
they would sell the woman to a farmer, collect the fee, then immediately
retrieve her. The barber was first cheated out of the promised reward and
now faces life in prison for selling his wife. Furthermore, the wife
preferred the farmer, anyway, and will not be returning to the barber.
[Chicago Tribune, Jul94]

I DON'T THINK SO

* In November, acting on a tip, Juneau, Alaska, police raided the hotel room
of an Oregon man and found cocaine and $10,000 in cash, which the man later
relinquished in his haste to leave the state before charges were filed. When
police asked him why he had such a large amount of cash, he said it was
given to him by a woman (whose name he could not recall) as a reward for
great sex. [Anchorage Daily News-AP, 11-4-94]

* Ener Arcilla Henson, 34, was arrested in Glendale, Calif., in January and
charged with stealing a "humvee" military vehicle from the local National
Guard armory. Police said Henson was driving the vehicle at night without
lights, refused to acknowledge them when they signaled him to pull over, and
said, when finally stopped, that President Clinton had given him the humvee.
[[Los Angeles Daily News, 1-9-95]]

LEAD STORY

* In December, a jury in Ellsworth, Wis., deliberated for three hours before
ruling against Stewart Blair in his lawsuit against his friend Maurice
Poulin for injuries incurred when Blair tripped over a snowplow blade. Blair
claimed that Poulin caused the fall when he startled Blair by accidentally
passing gas in his face. And in a postscript to the trial, as the jurors
ceremonially exited the courtroom, the foreman accidentally, audibly passed
gas as he walked by the judge. [Eau Claire Leader-Telegram, 12-3-94]

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

* And in August, police in Chandler, Ariz., confiscated a videotape
allegedly made by four teenage boys known as the Insane Skate Posse and
containing inspirational promotional messages of mayhem and destruction
designed to recruit new members for their gang. They are shown having fun by
smoking marijuana, drinking beer, destroying a parked car, and making
harassing phone calls. [The Arizona Republic, 8-14-94]

OVERREACTIONS

* Recent Sensitive People: Brenda L. Hunter, 31, Zion, Ill., allegedly shot
her brother because she did not like the kind of cheese he was putting on
their chili dinner; Michael R. Waggoner, 37, Knoxville, Tenn., allegedly
shot a man five times in a bar because he thought the man had asked "Have
you got a light, baby?" when the man actually ended the question with
"buddy"; Anthony Foti, 35, Missasauga, Ontario, was charged with severely
punching and kicking an elementary school principal because one of his
teachers was wearing a skirt that was too short. [Chicago Tribune, 1-20-94;
Knoxville News-Sentinel, 9-20-94; Edmonton Journal-CP, 9-29-94]

* In June, in Liberty, Ohio, police officer Bradley L. Sebastian, tired of
waiting for his food order at Denny's, stormed into the kitchen, held his
service revolver to the cook's head, and told her he would kill her if she
didn't hurry up. In August, in Oklahoma City, a Hardee's restaurant worker,
angered that a drive-through customer continued to complain about the delay
in his order, stripped off his headset, ran to his car, grabbed his gun out
of the trunk, and threatened the customer before fleeing. [Warren Tribune,
6-10-94; Saturday Oklahoman, 8-20-94]

* Christian-oriented radio station WKID in Vevay, Ind., was burglarized and
set afire in September, probably by the man who became angry earlier in the
day when a DJ refused to play his request. [Editor's Note: The song was
"Don't Take the Girl" by Tim McGraw. DJ's seeking to avoid trouble are
advised to honor all requests to play that song.] [USA Today, 9-29-94]

WEIRDNUZ.368 (News of the Weird, February 24, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* After a 34-year-old man somehow convinced a 19-year-old Central Bible
College student to submit to a gynecological exam in his motel room so she
could be cleared for a "scholarship" offer, Springfield, Mo., prosecutors
said in January that the man's only crime apparently was a misdemeanor
deceptive business practice. And police in Nashville, Tenn., are in a
quandary this month about whether to charge Raymond Mitchell, 45, with a
crime. Six women reported that he telephoned them, convinced them to
blindfold themselves and to wait for him, and had sex with them. Each of the
women said she assumed it was a boyfriend calling. One woman had sex with
Mitchell in that manner several times without realizing he was a stranger.
[Springfield News-Leader, 1-15-94, 1-18-95; Tennessean, 1-22- 95, 1-26-95]

BRIGHT IDEAS

* The New York Times reported in January that among United Nations Secretary
General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's suggestions for greater UN recognition in
1995--its 50th anniversary--were advertisements featuring a beautiful woman
in an expensive car driving by the UN building and exclaiming, "Ah, the
United Nations!" [N. Y. Times, 1-3-95]

* In her Chicago trial in November for trying to hire a hit man to kill her
husband, physician Wynne Superson denied the charge and testified that her
desire to see her husband dead was just a fantasy. However, prosecutors
produced a tape in which a police informant discussed a hit man with
Superson, who said she could not afford to pay money but would offer the hit
man oral sex every day for the next ten years. [Chicago Tribune, 11-11-94]

* Last spring, New Jersey officials stopped a rash of purse- snatchings in
restrooms along the Garden State Parkway by removing hooks from ladies' room
stall doors. (Thieves would reach over the stall doors and remove purses,
which women had hung on hooks while they used the toilet.) According to a
Philadelphia Inquirer story in June, the thieves then reinstalled the hooks
at their own expense, facilitating the theft rate to rise once again.
[Philadelphia Inquirer, 6-14-94]

CREME DE LA WEIRD

* In January, anesthesiologist Channagirie Manjanatha pleaded guilty to
criminal negligence in Regina, Saskatchewan, for leaving the room for 15
minutes during surgery to make a phone call, thus leaving an oxygen machine
unmonitored, which resulted in brain damage to the patient. And in November,
the North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners suspended neurosurgeon Raymond
Sattler for nine incidents including one in which he took a lunch break in
the middle of aneurysm surgery, leaving the patient's brain exposed with no
other physician in the room. [Edmonton Journal-CP, 1-7-95; Charlotte
Observer-AP, 11-25-94; ]

WEIRDNUZ.383 (News of the Weird, June 9, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

WELL-PUT

* John Christo, a friend of accused abortion-clinic murderer John Salvi,
admonishing the media in January for portraying his friend as a serial
killer: "There's nothing wrong with John whatsoever other than he killed a
couple of people." [Biloxi Sun-Herald-AP, 1-2-95]

* Defense lawyer Paul Fernandez, explaining in a Paterson, N.J., court in
March why his client, a 14-year-old boy, might have sexually assaulted an
11-year-old girl: They were "two kids who had nothing better to do. They
don't have cable TV, what do you do?" [Newark Star-Ledger, 3-9-95]

* Kingston, Ontario, city councilman Dave Meers, at an April council meeting
in which he argued the uselessness of inviting candidates for the provincial
legislature to appear before the council to give their platforms: "We all
know that all politicians are liars, including ourselves." [Sault Star-CP,
5-4-95]

* Texas Sen. David Sibley, describing tough negotiations in February on
pending state tort reform legislation: "It was like playing pick-up sticks
with your butt cheeks." [Austin American- Statesman, 2-11-95]

* University of Arkansas football coach Danny Ford on the September decision
by freshman Chad Roe to give back his football scholarship and return home:
"He signed with us just to get [an engineering] education, and that's the
wrong reason. I wish he had told us that [sooner]." Little Rock Free Press-
Hawgs Illustrated, Oct94]

NOT WHAT THEY HAD IN MIND

* A Republican Party of Virginia open house in May to attract black voters,
set up for a 6,000-seat convention hall in Richmond, attracted a crowd of
nine. [Newport News Daily Press, 5-6-95]

* In March a federal judge awarded $871,000 in damages to six Belize
nationals on the payroll of U. S. drug agents. The six had been hired to fly
cocaine to Miami in order to sting the drug runners who would meet the
plane, but at a scheduled stopover in Honduras, the cocaine was detected by
Honduran officials, who arrested the six and subjected them to 12 days of
torture before U. S. officials were able to intercede. [Chicago Sun Times,
3-13- 95]

* In February, federal prison inmate Rodney Curtis Hamrick, 29, was charged
with threatening the life of President Clinton from behind bars. Hamrick was
originally imprisoned in the mid- 1980s, with a modest sentence, for writing
bad checks. Since then, for expressing his dissatisfaction about his trial,
he has had about 50 years added to his sentence for threatening President
Reagan, the judge who sentenced him, and his prosecutors, and building five
small fire bombs while in prison and mailing two of them to the prosecutors.
[Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, 2-15- 95]

WEIRDNUZ.384 (News of the Weird, June 16, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In May police in Prince William County, Va., and Clearwater, Fla.,
dejectedly perused law books to find crimes with which to charge men whom
they believed to be peeping Toms. Police in Virginia said James Harrison
Burdick, 23, had rigged a ladder to look into a high school girls' locker
room, but state law makes it illegal only to peep into a dwelling, not a
public building. Police in Florida said that Fred J. Dohring, 50, held a
video camera under a stall in a coed beach changing room but that the only
surreptitious taping that is illegal is audiotaping. [Washington Post,
5-17-95; St. Petersburg Times, 6-1-95]

LEAST COMPETENT PEOPLE

* One of China's most-discussed stories of 1994, according to a November New
York Times report, was an account originally in the official Legal Daily
paper about a couple who had failed for months to conceive a child. A doctor
examining the woman found her still to be a virgin and possessing the belief
that a couple's merely sleeping in the same bed constituted a reproductive
act. [N. Y. Times, 11-27-94]

* A May Associated Press story summarized several schemes in which
scoundrels managed to take advantage of rabid anti- government and militia
types with fraudulent fund-raising pitches. Perhaps the most gullible
victims were those of Scott Hildebrand and three others, who were convicted
in Michigan after somehow convincing several people to pay a $300 filing fee
so that they could share in the pot of "$600 trillion" Hildebrand claimed he
had just won in his lawsuit against the federal government for abandoning
the gold standard in 1933. [Austin American-Statesman-AP, 5-12-95]

* In Toronto, Ontario, in December, two men were arrested for burglary by
officers responding to a 911 call. The suspects' getaway ended abruptly
when, as they leaped off of a porch, the 17-year-old landed on top of the
22-year-old and suffered a badly sprained ankle, while leaving his colleague
with a fractured skull, broken ribs, a broken collarbone, and a collapsed
lung. [Sault Star-CP, 12-21-94]

* Jorge Rodriguez, 22, went before a Kenosha, Wis., municipal judge in
November on a charge that he had hit a parked car while driving drunk.
Rodriguez earnestly handed the judge a Monopoly-like "Get out of jail free"
card that had been distributed by a candidate for sheriff as a gimmick
during the just-ended campaign. Said the prosecutor, "Clearly, the defendant
had the impression it was legitimate." Rodriguez received a fine and
probation. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 11-11-94]

* William Edward Woods, 49, was arrested in Tampa, Fla., in May on fraud
charges after he had gone to a Paine Webber office and asked for a $50
billion line of credit. As collateral, Woods offered the brokerage firm a $1
billion bond allegedly issued by the city of Moscow, Russia, and a $625
million certificate of deposit allegedly issued by a bank in Croatia, plus a
receipt for $66 million in gold that was supposedly waiting for him in the
warehouse of treasure hunter Mel Fisher. A state official called Woods's
alleged scheme "the preposterous, raised to the 10th power." "[I'm] amazed
[the Paine Webber people] didn't break out laughing." [St. Petersburg Times,
5-24-95]

* Inmate Frederick McGowan, 26, who had walked away from the Blue Ridge
Community work-release facility in Taylors, S. Car., on March 10, was
recaptured a week later when he returned to the center to pick up his
paycheck. (Officials, aware of the way Mr. McGowan's mind works, were
waiting for him.) [Augusta Chronicle, 3-18-95]

* Police in Howland, Ohio, arrested a 17-year-old man in January and charged
him with breaking into Gilmore's Greenhouse Florist and carrying out seven
hanging plants. Police arrived at the man's home by following a trail of
petals. [Youngstown Vindicator, Jan95]

* In January, police in Edmonton, Alberta, charged Kevin Krishna Niranjan,
30, with mischief after they tracked him down from a failed bank robbery.
Police said Niranjan, unarmed, entered the Bank of Nova Scotia and yelled,
"Freeze! This is a holdup!" However, because he remained in the doorway and
gave no other instruction, people in the bank merely stared at him,
bewildered. According to the bank manager, Niranjan finally yelled something
to the effect that he didn't think the staring was funny and ran out of the
bank. [Edmonton Sun, 1-19- 95]

* In February, Mayor Burhanettin Ozfatura of Izmir, Turkey, who was upset at
an attempt by Sen. Bob Dole to block U. S. aid to Turkey, banned the sale of
Dole bananas in his city. (Sen. Dole has no connection to Dole bananas.)
[Chicago Sun-Times, 2-27-95]

WEIRDNUZ.385 (News of the Weird, June 23, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* On May 31, a small plane buzzed the U. S. nuclear weapons plant at Oak
Ridge, Tenn., and dropped more than 100 sheets of pornographic photos. Oak
Ridge police suspected that the culprit was the former boyfriend of a female
plant employee, who had earlier accused the man of stalking her. And two
weeks earlier, pilot Robert B. Moore, 38, was convicted in Independence,
Kan., of littering during an airborne frolic, when he tried to demonstrate
his prowess by selecting a target and bombarding it with toilet paper. [The
Tennessean-AP, 6-2-95; Washington Post, 5-20-95]

PEOPLE WITH TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS

* A Chicago Sun-Times wire service report in April identified a Chinese boy,
Zhang Zhuo, 12, as having just set a record by reciting from memory the
value of pi (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) to 4,000
decimal places--a feat which took him 25 minutes. However, two months
earlier, a Seattle Times wire service story had identified a Japanese man,
Hiroyuki Goto, 21, as having captured the world record--to over 42,000
decimal places--a feat which took him over nine hours. [Chicago Sun-Times,
4-24-95; Seattle Times, 2-26-95]

* In October, Gary Taylor filed a formal Charge of Discrimination against
the City of Austin, Texas, for having fired him, allegedly because he had
filed a complaint against the city's Electric Utility Department over what
he called the practice of "painting." According to Taylor, painting is a
departmental "abusive sexual hazing ritual" in which workers gang up on
another employee in honor of his birthday or other special occasion, pull
his pants down, and spit on his genitals. [Plaintiff's complaint in Taylor
v. City of Austin, No. 92-10773, October 11, 1994]

LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINAL

* Amy Brasher, 45, was arrested in San Antonio, Tex., in January after a
mechanic notified police that 18 packages of marijuana were packed alongside
the engine of her car, which she had turned over to the mechanic for an oil
change. According to police, Brasher later said she did not realize that the
mechanic would have to raise the hood to change the oil. [San Antonio
Express-News, 1-19-95]

WEIRDNUZ.386 (News of the Weird, June 30, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In a May column, film critic Roger Ebert reported on the popular Japanese
animated film, "Pompoko," which features a family of cute badger-like
animals, but said the film would not likely be successful in America. The
badgers' secret weapon is an ability to make their testicles grow large so
that they can crush opponents. Said a Japanese film fan, "The Japanese are
more open about bodily parts." He said kids in Japan find the secret weapon
"hilarious." [Chicago Sun-Times, 5-23-95]

* Recently, Chesapeake, Va., inmate Robert Lee Brock filed a $5 million
lawsuit against Robert Lee Brock--accusing himself of violating his
religious beliefs and his civil rights by getting himself drunk enough to
engage in various crimes. He wrote, "I want to pay myself five million
dollars [for this breach of rights] but ask the state to pay it in my behalf
since I can't work and am a ward of the state." In April, the lawsuit was
dismissed. [Austin American-Statesman-AP, 4-8-95]

* Bob Glaser filed a $5.4 million lawsuit in March against the city of San
Diego, Calif., for the "emotional trauma" he suffered at an Elton John-Billy
Joel concert, held at a municipal stadium. Some women, thwarted by long
lines for their rest room, had entered the men's room, and Glaser said he
was "extremely upset" at the sight of a woman in front of him using a
urinal. [San Francisco Examiner, 3-31-95]

* Tucson, Ariz., lawyer Howard Baldwin filed a lawsuit in February against
the local electric company, charging that meter reader Chuck Leon literally
frightened his poodle, Jasmine, to death. According to Baldwin, when Jasmine
saw Leon in the back yard, she crashed into a glass door, "involuntarily
urinated," then escaped out the rear gate. She was found dead the next day,
allegedly of exhaustion. [Arizona Daily Star, 2-24- 95]

* Protective fathers of teenage daughters in the news: In October, according
to police in Oshkosh, Wis., Thomas A. Hunt, 48, roughed up the boyfriend of
his 15-year-old stepdaughter, wrapped him head-to-toe in duct tape, and
abandoned him in a nearby town. And in Toronto, Ontario, in January, Desmond
Kelley was sentenced to 15 months in jail for a 1993 incident in which he
forced his daughter's boyfriend to leap from a fifth- floor balcony after
catching the couple naked. [Milwaukee Sentinel, 11-9-94; Edmonton
Journal-CP, 1-28-95]

WEIRDNUZ.387 (News of the Weird, July 7, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

* An account in a March issue of The Medical Post magazine reported on the
failure of a recommended abdominal-colic therapy for babies. According to
the therapy, parents were to place the baby in a child's car seat on top of
a running washing machine, letting the warmth and vibration settle him down.
However, in the reported case, the baby vibrated off of the machine, fell to
the floor, and suffered a seizure. [The Medical Post, 3-14-95]

* In February, Regina Louise Vaughan, 20, was charged with statutory rape
after she applied for public assistance and named, as the father of her
child, the then-13-year-old boy for whom she regularly babysat in Portage
des Sioux, Mo. [St. Peters Journal, 2-19-95]

LEAST COMPETENT PERSON

* Bowling Green, Ohio, student Robert Ricketts, 19, had his head bloodied in
May when he was struck by a Conrail train. He told police he was trying to
see how close to the moving train he could place his head without getting
hit. [[Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune, May95]]

WEIRDNUZ.388 (News of the Weird, July 14, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* An Associated Press dispatch from Thailand in January reported on a
Bangkok mechanic named Somsong Thanopwattana, who ingests quantities of lube
grease, which he first tried five years ago. He prefers 20/50 grade and says
his bowel movements are the best he's ever had. His doctor, however, has
cautioned him against the diet, pointing to grease's combustibility and
warning him against passing gas close to an open flame. [Asahi Evening
News-AP, 1-16-95]

THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

* Phoenix, Ariz., police arrested a Christian school headmaster, Michael
William Wetton, in March and charged him with child abuse. A woman and her
15-year-old daughter had met with Wetton to consider enrolling the girl,
and, according to police, Wetton demonstrated the school's Christian
discipline by forcing the girl to strip and submit to a paddling while
reciting the Lord's Prayer. [Arizona Republic, 3-22-95, 5-20-95]

I DON'T THINK SO

* According to Allentown, Pa., district attorney Robert Steinberg, the
skinhead brothers Bryan and David Freeman, who are charged with the brutal
February murders of their parents, don't really believe the skinhead
doctrine of racial hate. Steinberg says they have told others they acquired
their forehead tattoos (e.g., "Berserker") "because it was a good way of
meeting girls." [Columbia Daily Tribune-Knight-Ridder, 4-27-95]

* In a May letter to a California state senator, the Motion Picture
Association of America wrote that Hollywood is not responsible for any
increase in violence in society and that "in fact, the opposite may be
true." According to MPAA executive Vans Stevenson, the sexual revolution and
the civil unrest and rioting on college campuses in the late 1960s and early
1970s must have been produced by kids' watching "healthy" shows like
"Captain Kangaroo." [San Jose Mercury News, 5-5-95]

WEIRDNUZ.389 (News of the Weird, July 21, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* During May and June, the following animals were spotted out and about in
public: four pigs, roaming through the New York City boroughs of Queens and
Staten Island; a five-month old kangaroo (a circus escapee) running loose in
Minneapolis; a deer, which sauntered through the terminal at the Kansas City
airport; a monkey meandering through a Hollidaysburg, Pa., neighborhood; two
elephants that walked out of their cage in the Toledo (Ohio) Zoo and took a
stroll around the grounds; and a goose that snatched a golfer's 8-iron at
Pebble Creek Golf Course in Cincinnati and fled. [N. Y. Times, 6-16-95; San
Jose Mercury-News-Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jun95; San Francisco
Examiner-AP, 6-2-95; Columbus Dispatch-AP, Jun95; Cincinnati Enquirer,
5-19-95]

COURTROOM ANTICS

* In an April interview with the Vancouver Sun, lawyer Russ Stanton
complained about getting only $53,000 in damages for a recent client whose
ovary was removed by surgical error. He cited a case in which a man received
$80,000 for a testicle removed by surgical error. Said Stanton, "In my view,
one ovary has got to be worth one testicle." [Sault Star-Vancouver Sun,
4-21-95]

* In a February court hearing in Norristown, Pa., attorney Charles Peruto,
Jr., was in the process of arguing that his client, accused of selling
drugs, was entitled to a low bail because he was not likely to flee before
his trial. At that moment, however, the client, Howard "Wing Ding" Jones,
bolted from the courtroom and led deputies on a one-hour chase before he was
recaptured. [Arizona Daily Wildcat-AP, 2-16-95]

* In Dublin, Va., in April, Judge Colin Gibb declared that Marshall
Lineberry was entitled to unemployment benefits even though he had been
suspended from his job for fighting. The Volvo plant that employed Lineberry
had a tradition in which a man dressed as a rooster would playfully hassle
any employee reporting to work late for a shift. When the rooster approached
Lineberry and cock-a-doodle-do'ed, Lineberry leaped at the "rooster" and
began choking him, the act for which he was suspended. Judge Gibb found that
employees so hated the tradition that someone would soon have attacked the
rooster if Lineberry hadn't. [Carthage Press-AP, 4-8-95]

* In February, the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct reprimanded a
Houston judge, J. R. Musslewhite, for various indiscretions including
drinking on duty and fondling female lawyers. The Commission found that in
early 1993, Musslewhite consumed liquor in his office that had been admitted
into evidence in a DUI case, telling the prosecutor, "I'm glad you lost so I
don't have to preserve the evidence." [Houston Post, 2-9-95]

SCHEMES

* In January, police in Lower Makefield Township, Pa., filed several charges
against self-employed plumber Michael Lasch for using the phone company
"call forwarding" service to have calls to his competitors automatically
rung through to him. One rival plumber said he probably lost "thousands" of
dollars in business to Lasch in the month-long practice. [St. Petersburg
Times-AP, 1-29-95]

* According to a news report in the March issue of Spin magazine, artist H.
R. Giger, who is suing the band Danzig for unauthorized use of Giger's
artwork on their T-shirts, needed to serve the complaint papers to band
leader Glenn Danzig in person. Giger hired a process-server, who bodysurfed
through the "mosh pit" in front of the band during a New York City concert
to get the job done. [Spin, March 1995]

* In February, a spokesman for the taxi drivers in Prague, Czech Republic,
admitted that some of the drivers had installed electrical wires in the back
seat, activated by a button in the dashboard, to permit drivers to
administer shocks to passengers who refused to pay the cab drivers'
notoriously high fares. [Baltimore Sun-Reuters, 2-17-95]

I DON'T THINK SO

* In June, George Washington University, which was vying to sign up New York
City high school basketball star Richie Phillips for its team even though
Phillips had pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a classmate, announced that
it would award a four- year, $100,000 scholarship to the girl Phillips
assaulted, even though she had not applied for it and is only a high school
sophomore. However, GWU official Bob Chernak told reporters that the
scholarship "is in no way related to" the Phillips situation. [St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, 6-18-95]

WEIRDNUZ.390 (News of the Weird, July 28, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

NAMES IN THE NEWS

* Names that showed up recently on police blotters: Pleading guilty to rape
in Denver, William Freelove; sentenced for assault in St. Joseph, Mo., Jesse
James; cited for speeding in Parma, Ohio, Amelia A. Earhart; ...and jailed
in Des Moines, Iowa, was Shannon Cooper, who police said went out
bar-hopping, temporarily abandoning her children, Champaigne, 2, Chardonay,
1, and Chablea, 3 months. [Rocky Mountain News, 4-22-95] [Franklin County
Watchman-AP, 2-20-95] [Columbus Dispatch-AP, Dec94] [Des Moines Register,
11-18-94]

WEIRDNUZ.391 (News of the Weird, August 4, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In "News of the Weird" in January 1991, the plight of Merhan "Alfred"
Nasseri, 49, was celebrated. He was well into his third year as a full-time
resident of the lounges of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris because he was
unable to enter or leave France. (He arrived in 1988 on a two-day trip but
without a passport or visa. He said his Iranian passport had been
confiscated when he took part in an anti-Shah demonstration in 1975.)
Airport employees were bringing him food and newspapers, and he passed the
time writing in his diary and studying the history of economic analysis.
Well, according to a Los Angeles Times story in May 1995, he's still stuck
there, and his diary is now 6,000 pages long. [Seattle Times-L. A. Times,
5-20-95]

SEEDS OF OUR DESTRUCTION

* In April, New York Newsday reported that the owners of the Exxon Valdez,
which was banned from its profitable Alaska route following the 1989 oil
spill, has applied to the Maritime Administration for a federal subsidy,
which the owners say is necessary to make any other uses of the ship
profitable. [New York Newsday, 4-2-95]

* In 1992, an advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsen proposed that
emergency relief food and supplies could be placed in the nuclear warhead
housing of an SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile and fired into remote
areas of the world as humanitarian aid. That suggestion was not accepted,
but the ITAR-Tass news agency reported in June that an SS-18 launched from a
nuclear submarine near Murmansk, across nine time zones, delivered 1,270
pieces of mail to Kamchatka. [Chicago Sun-Times, Jun95]

* In April, trustees of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,
Ky., endorsed their president's position that new faculty hires must adhere
to the belief that the Bible prohibits female pastors. One week later, to
the trustees' chagrin, in the Seminary's annual Francisco Preaching Awards
competition, the top three finishers were Ms. Kimberly Baker, Ms. Mary Beth
McCloy, and Ms. Dixie Petrey. [Christian Century, 6-7-95]

* In February, Hong Kong legislator Eric Li proposed a law to strengthen the
family by limiting extramarital affairs. Li would ban affairs that involve
financial support to the mistress or which produce children; however,
affairs that involved neither of those conditions and which had not reached
their second anniversary would be legal. [New Haven Register, 2-18-95]

LEAST COMPETENT PERSON

* Steven Kemble, 21, was arrested in St. George, Utah, in March when he
attempted to flee the Tom Tom CD's & Tapes store after allegedly shoplifting
a CD. After being detained briefly by a clerk, he then broke free, dashed
out the door, and ran smack into a pillar in front of the store, knocking
himself briefly unconscious. [St. George Spectrum, 3-30-95]

WEIRDNUZ.392 (News of the Weird, August 11, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* Russell Herman died of cancer at the V. A. hospital in Marion, Ill., in
August 1994 and left a will bequeathing "trillions" of dollars to various
institutions and people who are now demanding to be paid. Herman believed
that he was a "deep cover" CIA agent involved in drug-smuggling and that his
estate was therefore due trillions of dollars in government compensation,
and his wife and other claimants and potential claimants (many of them
right-wing and militia types) have filed papers in Gallatin County, Ill.,
where the will was processed, charging a government coverup. Among the
beneficiary causes are a municipal rehabilitation in Cave-in-Rock, Ill.
($2.4 billion) and the fight for "states' rights" ($189 trillion). Also,
Mrs. Herman has an 1875 Peruvian gold certificate that she says would be
worth trillions if only the government would let her cash it in. [Chicago
Tribune, 6-13-95]

CULTURAL DIVERSITY

* The Washington Post reported in May that a religious campaign on women's
wigs is being waged in Jerusalem, with "ultra- Orthodox" Jews declaring that
the wig is an insufficient covering for the head of a married woman and that
a woman wearing a wig is "preparing herself for hell," in the words of one
public slogan. Another wall message announces, "When the Messiah comes, the
first thing he will do is eliminate the wig." [Washington Post, 5-28-95]

* Wild Blue, an indoor beach park in Yokohama, Japan, reviewed by the
Baltimore Sun in a June story, is host on a typical weekend day to 4,000
people who pay about $46 to get in, plus steep rental prices for beach
chairs and bodyboards. Among the "perfect" features: 90-degree "weather,"
86-degree artificial waves, 86-degree artificial sand on a rubberized floor,
and time-controlled sunlight to simulate peak tanning as well as sunsets.
Said visitor Akihito Nakayama, "It's artificial. That's why we like it."
[Baltimore Sun, 6-14-95]

* In March, Pakistani stock brokers led ten goats through the Karachi Stock
Exchange out to the parking lot, where they were slaughtered in a sacrifice
intended to end the recent slide of the Exchange. At the next morning's
opening, the Exchange's index continued to fall--12.57 points to a 16-month
low of 1,683. [Chicago Sun-Times, 3-21-95]

* Steven R. Shenk, 38, was arrested on drug possession charges in Tewksbury,
N. J., in May after a neighbor complained of his odd behavior. Allegedly,
Shenk crawled around his yard on all fours, ate grass and leaves, approached
a small cart the neighbor uses in working on his lawn, hugged it, and
undulated against it as if having sex. [Bridgewater Courier-News, May95]

* The district attorney of Rockland County, N. Y., resigned in May after a
former mistress revealed secrets about their three- year affair. According
to the woman, Ken Gribetz made a "contract" to be her sex slave, referred to
himself on her answering machine tape as a "bad girl," and stored his cross-
dressing wardrobe (including a gold lame miniskirt) in her home. [New York
Daily News, 5-4-95]

* In August in Leonia, N. J., Kevin Simpkin, 27, was arrested and charged
with stealing a Snapple beverage delivery truck while dressed in a Snapple
driver's uniform and Snapple T-shirt. He had recently been fired from his
job at a Snapple office because he was allegedly stealing the merchandise.
After interviewing him, police Lt. Arthur Greiner said that Simpkin "just
has an uncontrollable appetite for Snapple beverages." [Edmonton Journal,
4-19-95; Arlington Heights Daily Herald, 4- 19-95]

MISCELLANEOUS ELOQUENCE

* According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune's June roundup of wisdom from
the just-completed session of the Louisiana legislature, Rep. John Travis of
Jackson, La., said (when opposing an apparently-popular measure): "I can't
believe that we are going to let a majority of the people decide what's best
for this state." [Times-Picayune, 6-21-95]

                          It Just Gets Stranger...

WEIRDNUZ.393 (News of the Weird, August 18, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

WEIRD SCIENCE

* The Wall Street Journal reported in May that Dutch farmers can now
purchase machines to allow cows self-service milking. A cow desiring to be
milked approaches the milking machine's robot, which is activated by a
computer chip in the cow's collar. A typical farmer saves about four hours a
day, and, said one, "The cows tend to like it." [San Jose Mercury News-Wall
Street Journal, 5-9-95]

* In March, Gannett News Service reported that among the maladies being
studied as part of returning soldiers' "Gulf war syndrome" were complaints
by "scores" of wives that their husbands' sperm painfully "burns" them on
discharge. Among the symptoms were blisters, rashes, itching, and vaginal
swelling. [Chicago Sun-Times-Gannett, 3-5-95]

* At a March conference, a University of Pennsylvania radiologist told
colleagues he had successfully sterilized all 17 rabbits in his experiment
by squirting a substance similar to Super Glue into their fallopian tubes
and said he would seek FDA approval to test his procedure on women. And in
May, Pacer Technologies announced it was seeking FDA and Department of
Agriculture approval for using a variant of its Super Glue to prevent
salmonella contamination by sealing the rectums of chickens and turkeys. The
product would be known as Rectite. [New Haven Register-AP, 3-29-95] [Inland
Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario, Calif.), 5-16-95]

* In a March issue of New England Journal of Medicine, a 45- year-old
Houston, Tex., plastic surgeon described how, when feeling dizzy after
receiving an electrical shock, he hooked himself up to the office
defibrillator and gave himself two massive jolts to slow down his heart,
thus saving his life. [New Haven Register-AP, 3-2-95]

OOPS!

* In May, Edmond Scrivens, 48, an inspector at the "solid waste transfer
station" near Rockville, Md., was buried under a truckload of hospital
refuse dumped by a driver who did not see him. Unable to move except to
operate his radio, he called out, gave instructions as to his location, and
waited about 20 minutes until rescue workers dug him out. [Washington Post,
5-18-95]

* In June, police in Clearwater, Fla., were called to the apartment shared
by Kenneth Anderson, 23, and Lisa Moses, who were having a domestic quarrel.
As one of the officers counseled Moses in a bedroom, he happened to see
three duffel bags on the bed at about the same time that he began to smell
marijuana. Three thick plastic bags of $20 and $50 bills were also on the
bed. Inside the duffel bags, officers found about $23,000 worth of
marijuana. [St. Petersburg Times, 6-2-95]

THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

* In May in the Bronx, N. Y., former Boy Scout leader David Weiser, 31, was
charged with assault in connection with a private club he ran whose
induction ceremony seemed to be the severe paddling of boys' buttocks. About
40 boys and young men were members, and police seized photographs and wooden
paddles from the club, as well as club records and copies of its by-laws.
Unexplained in news reports was why Weiser called the club the "CB Mafia"
and what the club did, other than recruit new members. [New York Times,
5-18-95]

WEIRDNUZ.394 (News of the Weird, August 25, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In June in Van Nuys, Calif., Raphael Dale Rodriguez, 24, was charged with
beating his girlfriend (maximum fine in California, $1,000) and strangling
her pet rabbit (maximum fine, $20,000). In December, two Oklahoma police
officers faced charges--one of beating his girlfriend so badly she suffered
a ruptured eardrum (maximum jail time in Oklahoma, 90 days), and the other
of kicking a cat at the Oklahoma City airport (maximum prison time, 5
years). And in Tallahassee, Fla., in May, sheriff's deputies charged Aaron
Moore with bludgeoning his mother to death and were set to charge his
friend, David Baity, with having sex with her corpse when they discovered
that there is no law in Florida against having sex with a corpse. [Los
Angeles Times, 6- 28-95] [Columbia Tribune-AP, 12-26-94] [St. Petersburg
Times- AP, 7-11-95]

POLICE BLOTTER

* In May, state police in Tennessee arrested Jack Allan Iles and charged him
with telephone harassment after he called in a bomb threat to the office of
the state attorney general in Nashville. According to the employee who
received the call, Iles threatened to deliver an Oklahoma City-style bomb
but then asked for the address of the office. [The Tennessean, 5-4-95]

* A man escaped after robbing a First National Bank branch in Farmington, N.
Mex., in March and brandishing a road flare that he called a bomb. Police
later discovered that his getaway car was a white Dodge Caravan that he had
just taken out for a test drive from a local dealer and which he returned
immediately after pulling off the robbery. [Albuquerque Journal, 3-28-95]

* Eleven days after the Oklahoma City bombing, promoters the Suncoast Gun
Show in Tampa, Fla., told dealers not to display military manuals and books
that contain recipes for napalm and Molotov cocktails. Said one dealer, to
the St. Petersburg Times: "We're totally surrounded by guns, but they don't
want me to sell a book?" [St. Petersburg Times, 4-30-95]

* An April Gannett News Service story described how some TV stations have
assured the Federal Communications Commission in official documents that
they have met their legal obligation to serve "children's educational and
informational needs." Among the controversial assurances was the one of WLWT
in Cincinnati, which listed two "Donahue" shows, "Teenage Strippers and
Their Moms" and "Parents Who Allow Teenagers to Have Sex at Home."
[Burlington Free Press, Apr95]

WEIRDNUZ.395 (News of the Weird, September 1, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In March, police in New York City charged salesman Joel Levy, 32, with
assault. According to police, Levy's live-in girlfriend arrived home
unexpectedly after Levy had just put in an order for a call girl to come
over. Levy improvised a plan to intercept "Brandy" in his building's lobby,
have a liaison, and then to dash back upstairs before his girlfriend got
suspicious. When he saw a good-looking woman in the lobby, Levy assumed it
was Brandy, nudged her into an elevator, and, according to police, pawed and
fondled her while waving a $50 bill, saying, "You know you want it. You know
you'll do anything for it." The woman was not Brandy but rather an assistant
district attorney from Brooklyn. [N. Y. Post, 3-10-95]

GOVERNMENT IN ACTION

* Until July, when the state passed a law to correct the problem, hospitals
in Alabama were allowed to charge rape victims for the forensic exams from
which evidence, such as sperm and blood samples, were gathered against the
perpetrators. In other Alabama crimes such as burglary, the forensic
examination for blood, fingerprints, etc., is paid for by the state. [N. Y.
Times, 7-25-95]

* In July, an official in the office that supervises road construction crews
in Minneapolis issued a directive, in response to complaints, that workers
stop "eyeing," "staring at," or "ogl[ing]" women while on duty. In a
subsequent clarification, the official said "sneak[ing] a look" would be
okay and said men, as well, should not be ogled. [Minneapolis Star Tribune,
7-19- 95, 7-20-95]

* Elifonso Lopez, 39, was recently granted a new trial after five years of
protesting his innocense of his 1990 rape conviction. An investigation into
law enforcement records by The Brownsville (Tex.) Herald revealed that Lopez
had an ironclad alibi that was ignored at his trial: He was in prison
serving a sentence for drunken driving when the rape occurred. [Houston
Chronicle-AP, 6-18-95]

* According to records disclosed in July by an Associated Press inquiry,
Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles, who makes just over $100,000 a year, has a lower
salary than 796 other state employees, including his own chief of staff.
[St. Petersburg Times-AP, 7-30-95]

* In March, twelve hours before a massive, extensively-planned drug raid was
to take place in Washington, D. C., the D. C. Department of Public and
Assisted Housing issued a press release praising its role in the raid.
Officials thus had to call off the operation, rendering practically useless
eight months' planning, coordination among four law-enforcement agencies,
and a large number of arrest and search warrants obtained by thousands of
hours of investigation, surveillance, and undercover drug buys. [Washington
Post, 3-23-95]

* In April, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a $559,500
grant to the American Association of Community Colleges to answer the
question, "What is an American?" [Washington Times, 4-13-95]

* In March, the U. S. Supreme Court let stand a 1988 decision that Paul E.
Spragens, a quadriplegic man who earns money typing with his toes, be kicked
off the Social Security rolls and ordered to return almost $20,000 he had
received over a three- year period. During that time, Spragens averaged $350
a month working as a free-lance book indexer; as soon as his earnings hit
$300 a month, according to law, he was no longer eligible for benefits.
[Rocky Mountain News-AP, 4-7-95]

* In May, the Washington Times reported that a federal judge had transfered
parole supervision of an assistant to D. C. Mayor Marion Barry, from the D.
C. parole board to a federal board. That was because the assistant, Rhozier
"Roach" Brown, a convicted murderer, drug dealer, and thief, had
inexplicably been released early by the D. C. board from his prison sentence
and, due to a "clerical error," freed of his obligation to repay $45,000 to
an orphanage he was convicted of swindling. [Washington Times, 7-9-95]

* According to records obtained by the New York Post in May, the New York
City Transit Authority's worst bus driver, Leroy Goodwin, 56, is still
driving despite 103 at-fault collisions over his 22-year career and even
received a safe-driving award in 1986 sandwiched between collisions number
68 and 69. [New York Post, 510-95]

FAMILY VALUES

* The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in July that Jim Harnsberger, 40, a
Republican party operative who founded the local Center for Family Values,
has been married five times and owes almost $20,000 in child support.
According to the newspaper, a former girlfriend said of Harnsberger, "He
said he would cut me up into little pieces and throw me into the ocean and
no one would ever know." [Sacramento Bee, 7-25-95]

* In January in Little Rock, Ark., a 41-year-old man clubbed his 32-year-old
brother with a handgun, then fired two shots at him, in a dispute of which
of the two would take their mother to her doctor's appointment. [Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, 1-27-95]

* In August in San Bernardino, Calif., Lisa Nester, 24, and her husband, 23,
pleaded guilty to abandoning their son, Wolfgang, 3, on June 2 at a shopping
center in California while they took off for a Grateful Dead concert in San
Francisco and then went on to Maryland, where they were spotted 24 days
later. Because of Lisa's previous, uninspired parenting, her mom and dad
have custody of her four children from other relationships. [Washington
Post, 8-2-95, 6-28-95, 6-27-95]

WEIRDNUZ.396 (News of the Weird, September 8, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* Terence Cunningham, a Palo Alto, Calif., Unitarian, embarked earlier this
year on what he estimated was a $70 million fundraising campaign to build a
rocket ship and lunar landing vehicle for the purpose of placing an
indestructible copy of the Holy Bible on the moon for safekeeping. There,
Cunningham told the newspaper Mountain View Voice, the Bible would be
preserved against tampering or in case civilization is destroyed on Earth
from plagues, wars, or, in his words, "acts of God." [Mountain View Voice,
7-28-95]

UH-OH

* Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., hosted the first International
Tuba-Euphonium Conference in June. One composition included a crescendo that
required 750 tubas to play at once. [Chicago Sun Times, 5-10-95]

* In May, over the opposition of state Sen. Joe Neal, the Nevada Senate
passed a bill to prohibit people from carrying guns while drunk. Neal argued
that the bill would hurt activities of gun clubs, some of which permit
drinking during target-shooting socials. [USA Today, 5-2-95]

* In May, researchers at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory proposed to
the nuclear weapons plant in nearby Aiken, S. C., that certain bantam
chickens could be raised in radiation- contaminated areas without harm to
later human consumption-- because the chickens' bodies metabolize out the
dangerous levels of radiation in about ten days. Said one researcher, "If .
. . you call it radioactively cleaned meat and you put it on the [grocery]
shelf for half price, I bet people in this country would eat it." [The
Observer (Charlotte, N. C.)-AP, 5-6-95]

* In April, a 54-year-old truck driver filed a $10 million lawsuit in
Gallatin, Tenn., over a defective penile implant that he says "took all the
manhood from me." The man said he suffered blisters, bruising, infection,
and embarrassment. According to his attorney, "He could be just walking down
the street, and it would erect on its own." [Tennessean, 4-2-95]

* Larry Wayne Harris, a septic-tank inspector in Dublin, Ohio, and a member
of the Aryan Nations white supremacist group, was charged in May with
purchasing vials of freeze-dried bubonic plague under false pretenses. He
had told American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Md., that he owned a
lab and was a serious researcher of bubonic plague. [N. Y. Post, 5- 17-95]

* Driver David Zaricor, 19, was charged with manslaughter in July in
Jefferson County, Mo., in connection with a November auto collision that
killed a 70-year-old woman in another car. Highway Patrol records reveal
that Zaricor had told a trooper at the scene that he lost control of his car
when his girlfriend bit him during a sex act. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
7-28-95]

* In July, Reuters news service reported that a Leeds, England, dentist
named Garrett had been fined about $300,000 in damages for unnecessary and
painful dental work designed to boost his income. One patient, starting at
age 15, over 25 sessions treating 13 teeth, had 18 pins, 10 crowns, and two
root canals. [Reuters wirecopy, 7-26-95]

WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND

* Among the budget cuts that Albany, N. Y., mayor Thomas Whalen III made
during his term of office was the closing of a certain firehouse--to the
sharp protests of its neighbors. In January, after Whalen left office, his
car caught fire near the former firehouse and burned up. [USA Today,
1-27-95]

* In January in Baltimore, Md., Michael Wayne Heim, 26, pleaded guilty to
arson. In June 1994, he had stolen his ex- wife's car, intending to set it
on fire in the street and aim it into the home of her mother. However, the
flames got out of hand with Heim still in the car, and the resulting crash
and fire left Heim in a coma for 23 days and caused him to require several
skin grafts. [Baltimore Sun, 1-13-95]

FIRST THINGS FIRST

* Vicente Vinarao, director of the Bureau of Corrections in the Philippines,
complained in July that he was having trouble carrying out his duties
because his Bureau lacks funds. There are 54 people on death row, sentenced
to die in a gas chamber, but there is no gas chamber. An emergency bill last
year authorizes that executions be carried out by electrocution until such
time as a gas chamber is built, but the electric chair was destroyed several
years ago by lightning. [San Jose Mercury News-Reuters, 7-24-95]

* Newspaper editor Glenn Sorlie died on May 2 in Belgrade, Mont., of a staph
infection, but his wife failed to notify anyone until May 4 so his obituary
would be published first in his weekly newspaper, the High Country
Independent Press. If she had notified authorities earlier, the Bozeman
Daily Chronicle would have published the story first. Said Mrs. Sorlie,
"[H]e wouldn't want to get scooped on his own death." [AP wirecopy, 5-8-95]

* The Washington Post reported in April that the Defense Department is
testing two anti-vomiting drugs that it hopes will allow soldiers, for the
short-term after a nuclear attack, to continue to perform their mission
before they ultimately die of

WEIRDNUZ.397 (News of the Weird, September 15, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In July, Costa Rica's Supreme Court ruled that the country's hit-and-run
driving law was unconstitutional in that it punished the driver who caused
the accident if he fled. The Court reasoned that, because murderers and
other criminals cannot be punished for leaving the scene of a crime--because
of their right not to incriminate themselves--hit-and-run drivers can take
off, too. A driver involved in an accident but who was not at fault may
still be required to stop. [Tico Times, 7-21-95]

INEXPLICABLE

* In a 1994 survey by the American Association of University Professors,
Long Island's Nassau Community College was revealed to have the highest
salaries of any two-year college in the country. The New York Times reported
in June 1995 that one of the school's arts professors, who taught just two
ceramics classes during the spring semester, has a $107,000 salary. [N. Y.
Times, 6-12-95]

* After filing a missing persons report in April on his wife, Leasa, Bruce
Jensen, 39, learned that Leasa was really feminine- looking Felix Urioste,
34, who had convinced Bruce to marry him in 1991 after a single sexual
encounter during which Urioste remained clothed. Said the devout Mormon
Jensen, to the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, "There's no way to describe
this feeling [of learning he was married to a man for almost four years]."
[Salt Lake Tribune-AP, 7-14-95]

* In February, William J. Stoecker, 37, was named in a 49-count bank-fraud
indictment. According to prosecutors, Stoecker--a former welder with only a
high-school education--somehow talked several bankers into lending him $400
million. [Chicago Sun-Times, 3-3-95; Arizona Republic, 2-24-95]

FEUDS

* According to a March Wall Street Journal story, the eyeglass industry in
Germany is experiencing a vicious trade war in which smashing competitors'
windows and pulling other pranks are becoming common. When optician Siegmund
Reiss opened up a shop in a new building, he discovered that saboteurs had
stashed rotting meat between his walls during construction in order to drive
grand-opening customers away. [Wall Street Journal-AP, 3- 24-95]

EEEH-UUUH, GROSS!

* In July in New York City, John Bryant, 73, conversing with his son while
waiting for attention at the Harlem Hospital Center after having been shot
in the forehead by his girlfriend, began gently massaging the wound and
finally pulled the bullet out with his fingers. [N. Y. Times, 7-28-95]

WEIRDNUZ.399 (News of the Weird, September 29, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In a recent science journal article, researchers from Humboldt State
University in California reported that the toe jam of black- tailed deer
contains chemical compounds that can kill several common types of bacteria
(including one that causes acne) and fungi (including one that causes
athlete's foot). A Tucson, Ariz., firm has begun to manufacture synthetic
versions of the compounds. [Dallas Morning News, 8-7-95]

SEEDS OF OUR DESTRUCTION

* The trade association of legal prostitutes in Canberra, Australia,
announced in August that it would launch a boycott of French underwear,
hosiery, and cosmetics in order to punish France for resuming
nuclear-weapons testing in the South Pacific, and prostitute groups in
Melbourne and Sydney may soon follow suit. Also, Australia's largest chain
of adult sex shops and cinemas has taken all French products off its
shelves. [Wall Street Journal, 8-10-95]

* In July, French president Jacques Chirac awarded the Grand Officer of the
Legion of Honor, the nation's second-highest military order, to Major
General Jean-Claude Lesquer, for commanding the troops that sank the
Greenpeace environmentalists' protest ship in Auckland, New Zealand, harbor
in 1985. [Montreal Gazette, Jul95]

* In August, the County Board in Walworth County, Wis., attempting to make a
policy to cover an upcoming march by the local Ku Klux Klan but bowing to
Lake Geneva Supervisor Frank Janowak's desire not to call the Klan a "hate
group," passed a resolution encouraging peaceful counteractions to "unhappy
groups" like the Klan. [Independence Examiner-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
8-10-95]

* According to Rafael Ruiz Harrell, an official with a Mexican human rights
organization, who spoke with reporters in July, Mexican law validates
confessions made by torture if they are ratified by one other confession,
and the ratifying confession, too, can be obtained by torture. "So all you
have to do," he said, "is torture two people." [AP wirecopy, 7-12-95]

* The Wall Street Journal reported in July that MTV's upcoming foray into
feature film will lead with a romantic comedy, "Joe's Apartment,"
chronicling Joe's adventures wooing his girlfriend in a New York City
apartment that has 3,500 roaches. Representatives of the ASPCA supervised
the roach sequences, including one in which the three-inch-long "Tiny"
appears to rope an evil house cat and ride him out of the apartment. Said
the film's executive producer, "Not one cockroach was harmed during the
filming." [Wall Street Journal, 7-10-95]

* Biker Patrick Woodward was arrested in June in Coldwater, Mich., and
charged with assaulting and kidnaping a 23-year-old man who Woodward says
sexually assaulted his 14-year-old daughter. According to the Coldwater
Daily Reporter, Woodward admitted that he had offered the man four choices
as punishment for the sexual assault: arrest by the police, a facial scar, a
general beating, or a gunshot to each buttock. The man chose number four,
and, according to the newspaper, Woodward delivered. [AP wirecopy, 6-26-95]

AMERICAN VALUES ABROAD

* In Huzhou, China, Lu Jie, age 10, filed a lawsuit against the local zoo
after he was bitten by a panda. The official Xinhua news agency said the
lawsuit was the first of its kind in China. [Columbus Dispatch, 7-20-95]

* In May, Takao Onoda, an official with the Ministry of Transportation in
Japan, responding to U. S. claims that a Japanese seatbelt manufacturer
makes shoddy products, denied any Japanese responsibility. Instead, he
blamed Americans' laziness in not caring properly for the belts, including
their spilling soft drinks on them. [Columbus Dispatch-Scripps Howard,
5-24-95]

* U. S.-style performance art recently arrived in Russia. Alexander Brener
was arrested earlier this year in Moscow for dressing in boxing trunks and
gloves in Red Square and demanding that President Boris Yeltsin come fight
him. Previously, in the name of art, Brener has attempted to copulate with
his wife at a monument, defecated in front of a Van Gogh painting at a
museum, driven staples into his naked buttocks at an art house, and
masturbated from the top of the diving tower at Moscow's leading municipal
swimming pool. [ARTnews, May 1995]

WEIRD ANIMALS

* Oscar, the performing hypnotic Labrador dog, ran away from trainers just
before a sell-out show in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August. Oscar's owner Hugh
Lennon asked the public to be on the lookout for Oscar, but not to look at
him directly in the eyes. [Daily Express (Ireland), 8-23-95]

WEIRDNUZ.400 (News of the Weird, October 6, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In September in Newport, R. I., burglary suspect Jamie Johnson, 24,
fleeing police, scaled an iron picket fence, struggled with cops at the top,
then fell off and ran briefly before being arrested. At the police station,
cops noticed Johnson was bleeding at the crotch. According to the Associated
Press, police "returned to the [scene] and retrieved Johnson's testicles,
which were still impaled on the fence." They said Johnson had never
mentioned that he was in pain. [Springfield Union-News-AP, 9- 15-95]

* In April, the 1000-ton riverboat, Showboat Branson Belle, which was built
on the shore of landlocked Table Rock Lake near Branson, Mo., was launched
on 160-foot-long rails connecting the construction site with the lake. To
lubricate the rails without using environmentally-unfriendly industrial
grease, the shipbuilders used 40 crates' worth of unpeeled bananas.
[Mechanical Engineering, August 1995]

* A list of most-popular nursing home and retirement home songs (published
in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), according to St. Louis disk jockey Michael
Laurance, who entertains at about 80 such places in the area, included
"YMCA" (the Village People), "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" (Meat Loaf),
and "1999" (Prince). [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8-13-95]

CHUTZPAH

* During June and July, West Liberty, Ky., prison inmate Lou Torok, serving
time for child-molesting, managed to persuade the governors of six states to
proclaim October 7 as "Love Day." [USA Today, 7-27-95]

* In August, Alvin Waff, apparently confusing the brake and gas pedals,
drove his car through the front window of the Hanger Restaurant & Lounge in
Hampton, Va., sped across the floor, and smashed against the bar, doing
about $5,000 in damage. According to a Hanger employee, Waff then got out of
the car and calmly asked for a beer. He was later arrested and charged with
reckless driving. [Newport-News Daily Press, 8-4-95]

* John Bennett, Jr., the president of a Pennsylvania charitable foundation,
was accused earlier this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission of
converting about $4 million in foundation money to his own use. Furthermore
in May, the foundation filed for bankruptcy protection in Philadelphia.
Shortly afterward, Bennett complained about the judge's decision to limit
him to $5,000 monthly for living expenses--from foundation funds--during the
proceeding, claiming that he needed almost twice that amount. [St. Louis
Post-Dispatch-AP, 6-15-95]

* Several days after the Oklahoma City bombing in April, Libyan leader
Moammar Gadhafi predicted that "thousands of militias" would soon wage
revolution in America and urged President and Mrs. Clinton to seek political
asylum in Libya, "the only safe country in the world." [Newark
Star-Ledger-AP, 5-1-95]

SCHEMES

* Paragon Cable in New York recently began a new approach to customers with
delinquent accounts. Instead of cutting off service altogether, which would
create additional expense to restart when the customer paid up, Paragon
merely fills those customers' entire 77-channel lineup with C-SPAN. Paragon
said the project has been successful. [U. S. News & World Report, 7- 31-95]

* In August, the New York Post reported on the thriving market in the theft
of old newspapers at curbside, destined for recycling. Thieves' turning the
newspapers in before the city gets to sell them will cost New York City more
than $2 million this year. The Boston Herald even reported that
"mob-connected" garbage collectors in New York City were stealing and
recycling fresh daily newspapers dropped in bundles at newsstands. [New York
Post, 8-22-95; Boston Herald, 7-23-95]

THINNING THE HERD

* Mr. Joe Buddy Caine, 35, passed away in Anniston, Ala., in September, of
rattlesnake bites. He was bitten while tossing the snake around in a game of
catch with his friend Junior Bright, who himself was hospitalized with
bites. [Houston Chronicle- Scripps Howard, 9-9-95]

WEIRDNUZ.401 (News of the Weird, October 13, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In an August story on improvements to the Seattle, Wash., waste treatment
plant, the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce reported on the Vancouver firm
that manufactures the hard-shell diving suits used by the "pilots" who jump
into the tanks and monitor effluent flow. The suits provide air for up to 48
hours, contain voice and video connections to the surface, and have
thrusters for propulsion throughout the sewage. The longstanding brand name
of the diving suit is The Newtsuit. (Republicans should relax; the suit is
named after the firm's founder, Phil Nuytten.) [Seattle Daily Journal of
Commerce, 4-29-95]

THE LITIGIOUS SOCIETY

* Warren E. Smith filed a $3 million lawsuit in Roanoke, Va., in April
against palm reader Lola Rose Miller because she sold him bad numbers to
play in the state lottery. He is suing for the amount of that week's grand
prize, which he says he should have won. [Washington Times, 4-5-95]

* In May, Jose and Maria Tercero filed a lawsuit against the Santa Fe, New
Mexico, School Board and various officials for unspecified injuries suffered
by their son, Jesse, from the act of carving a jack-o'-lantern last October.
The Terceros said forcing Jesse to carve the pumpkin violated his religious
freedom because he does not celebrate Halloween. [Albuquerque Journal,
5-22-95]

* The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled in February that the King of Clubs
Bar in Minneapolis could be sued by a wife whose husband assaulted her on
the way home after the couple had stopped by the bar for a few drinks. [St.
Paul Pioneer Press, 2- 21-95]

* In June, a jury in Pensacola, Fla., awarded nearly $600,000 to Pedro
Duran, 56, in his lawsuit against the CSX company. Duran lost his left arm
and suffered a broken back and leg when a CSX train hit him as he lay on the
tracks, passed out from a round of drinking. According to trial testimony,
an engineer spotted what he thought was a lump of trash on the tracks and
sounded the whistle as a precaution for 54 seconds before the collision.
However, the "lump of trash"--Duran--didn't move. [Orlando Sentinel-AP,
7-1-95]

* In July, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld a $40,000 verdict against
the Fort Kent Golf Club. Jeannine Pelletier had sued because, on the 1st
fairway almost ten years ago, she hit a golf ball that struck a railroad
track that cuts across the fairway, and the ball bounded back and hit her in
the face. [Boston Globe, 7-20-95]

* In May, Laura Carlton, 23, accepted an out-of-court settlement by the City
of Victoria, British Columbia, in her lawsuit for injuries she suffered when
a police officer inadvertently shot her during a raid. She had sued for
around $200,000--$50,000 of which was for her loss of earnings as a
prostitute, which she regarded as a stepping stone to a future as an exotic
dancer. [Edmonton Journal, 5-28-95]

* In August, Carolyn J. Christian and her minister-husband filed a $160,000
lawsuit against a school that trains guide dogs after a blind man, learning
to use one of the school's graduates in a Bradenton, Fla., shopping mall,
stepped on the woman's toe, possibly breaking it. (A few days later, the
Christians withdrew the lawsuit, citing public outrage.) [St. Petersburg
Times, 8-9- 95]

I DON'T THINK SO

* Martin George Clever, 32, arrested in Lakewood, Colo., for burglary in
July, told police that he entered the home in the early evening because he
saw two naked dolls in the yard pointing to a sliding-glass door. He said he
thought they were inviting him inside. [Denver Post, 7-18-95]

* Charles McFarling, 39, cited by police in Indianapolis in June in a
traffic collision that killed a woman in another car, said he ran the red
light because he was thinking too intensely about material he had learned
the day before in a defensive-driving course. [Indianapolis Star, 6-7-95]

* In court testimony in August in the New York City terrorist bombing trial,
since-convicted Fadil Abdelghani testified that, although he was caught on
videotape stirring the bomb's oil and fertilizer, he had no knowledge that
he was making a bomb. Asked a prosecutor, "Something came over you and you
had an urge to start stirring?" Said Abdelghani, "I had nothing to do, and I
wanted to help [my cousin's friends]." [New York Times, 8-23-95]

* Police in Collinsville, Ill., arrested Earl Templeton, 38, and charged him
with passing three counterfeit $100 bills. According to police, Templeton
said he was not trying to enrich himself but rather to stimulate the
economy. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 6-17- 95]

* In May, Dorothy Diane Rose, who is in a halfway house in Tampa, Fla., the
result of a 1990 trial in which she was found not guilty by reason of
insanity for strangling her two toddlers, petitioned her judge in Tampa,
Fla., to be released because she has a job lined up. According to a
counselor, a local couple wants to hire her as a babysitter. [Tampa Tribune,
May95]

* In Sonora, Calif., in August, former U. S. Forest Service employee Gary
Gunderson, 43, was convicted of theft of what prosecutors said were
"truckloads" of items of government property. Gunderson said he might have
borrowed a few things but that because he suffers from Usher's syndrome,
which he said causes visual impairment, he wasn't able to see well enough to
realize that he had a lot more stuff than he thought. [Sacramento Bee-AP,
8-31-95]

RECENT PASSINGS

* In March, in Rich Hill, Mo., Mr. Edgar Allen Poe, age 75; in April, in
Charlestown, R. I., Mrs. Eleanor Rigby, age 80; in May, of a fall just after
he reached the summit of Mount McKinley, Mr. Brian McKinley, age 37; and in
Anchorage, Alaska, in September, Mr. Phillip Morris, of lung cancer at age
45. [Kansas City Star, 3-23-95] [Providence Journal-Bulletin, 4- 12-95] [New
York Times-AP, 5-8-95] [Anchorage Daily News, 9-19-95]

WEIRDNUZ.402 (News of the Weird, October 20, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* According to an August story in the Ft. Lauderdale Sun- Sentinel, Kevin
Moore, 45, has been hounded for at least eight months by legal actions
instituted by Anne Victoria Moore, who claims--incorrectly, according to
police--that he is the Kevin Moore who was once married to her. She
perseveres even though various government agencies have informed her that
the man she is harassing is 11 years older than, six inches shorter than,
and facially dissimilar to, her ex-husband. First, she placed a claim on the
wrong Moore's house, then one on his bank account, and, in the latest
action, she filed charges against him for failure to pay child support.
[Roanoke Times-Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, 8-31-95]

WELL-PUT

* Accused Wausau, Wis., poacher John Sadogierski, allegedly to police
investigators who confronted him for killing and eating a trumpeter swan and
a sandhill crane and who was asked what the crane tasted like: "Bald eagle."
[St. Paul Pioneer Press-AP, 8-3- 95]

THINNING THE HERD

* In September, Mr. Robert Kevin Brown, 31, passed away after his truck
plunged into a ravine alongside I-95 in Price William County, Va. According
to Virginia State Police, Brown had been dissatisfied that traffic, at 55
mph, was moving too slowly for his taste and so leaned out his window to
make a gesture to another driver, which caused him to lose control of his
vehicle. [Washington Post, 9-21-95]

WEIRDNUZ.403 (News of the Weird, October 27, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In September, Barry A. Briskman, 59, was sentenced to 20 years in prison
in North Hollywood, Calif., for his inexplicably successful seduction of two
13-year-old girls. According to the prosecutor, Briskman had convinced the
girls that he was a space alien from the planet Cablell, sent to Earth to
recruit a team of beautiful, super-intelligent girls for a female-dominated
utopia headed by Queen Hiternia, who was temporarily based atop the
Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas. For their trip through space, Briskman told
the girls he would have to immunize them vaginally until their "IRF" counts
reached 100, and following each sex session, he telephoned the "Andrak 4000"
computer to report the latest infusion and to get a readout on how many more
IRFs each girl needed. Briskman is presently in prison in Nevada for
demonstrating similar persuasive skills on a 12-year- old girl. [Los Angeles
Times, 9-16-95]

LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS

* A man, unidentified in newspaper accounts, was arrested in Memphis, Tenn.,
when he tried to enter an office building after robbing a nearby bank.
Unknown to the man, the building housed Memphis's police department. Police
had heard of the robbery on the radio and watched from an upper floor as the
man fled the bank, ducked into an alley, hid the money, and innocently
approached the front door of their building as a phalanx of officers
gathered and waited for him. The man opened the door, froze, and asked,
"This isn't the police department, is it?" [Memphis Commercial-Appeal,
6-19-95]

* Jerry Wilson, 19, was arrested in Charleston, W. Va., in August and
charged with burglary after police found him lying, bleeding badly, on the
floor of the apartment he had broken into. They had been sent by rescue
personnel after Wilson called 911 because he had cut himself so badly
breaking through the window. [Jefferson City Capital News-AP, 8-9-95]

* In Des Moines, Iowa, in May, Ruth Bradshaw, 93, awoke to find her house
being burglarized and decided to pretend that she knew the perpetrator not
as a burglar but as a friend of her truck- driving grandson. She welcomed
him "back" into the home, served him breakfast, and insisted that he lie
down and relax a spell, at which point she called police. Bradshaw
attributes her smarts to her career as a bootlegger and a pastor. [Des
Moines Register, 5-6-95]

LATEST RELIGIOUS MESSAGES

* In May, some teenagers discovered the body of traveling salesman DeWitt
Finley, 56, in a truck on a back road in the Klamath Mountains in Oregon. He
had starved to death over a nine-week period in which he was stranded in
heavy snow, despite the fact that the road was clear several hundred yards
beyond the truck. Diary entries indicated that Finley had failed to venture
out of his truck because he was certain God would provide for his rescue.
[Daily News Journal (Murfreesboro, Tenn.)-AP, 6-3-95]

* In July, the pig wrestling event at the annual St. Patrick Catholic Church
Roundup in Stephensville, Wis., was canceled because of complaints that the
pigs squealed too much. Said a Church spokesperson, "Some city folks come
out here and . . don't understand." [Independence Examiner-AP, 7-1-95]

* An Associated Press story in September reported on the popularity of Jesus
Malverde as the adopted patron saint of drug dealers in Culiacan, Mexico.
Local farmers regularly credit him for their success at growing and
smuggling drugs and worship icons of him in local buildings. [Albuquerque
Journal-AP, 9-4- 95]

* Nathan Frederick Klimosko, 21, was sentenced to two years' probation in
Kelowna, British Columbia, for hitting and choking his girlfriend into
unconsciousness. The fight started in a car when the two disagreed over his
interpretation of a certain passage from the Bible, and he reached over and
smacked her in the face, blackening her eye. [Barrie Examiner-CP, 5-20-95]

* In March, Michael Beaudin, 36, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in
Montreal for negligently causing the death of his 5- year-old son Jonathan.
Beaudin, a member of the Rose and the Cross religious sect, had said the son
needed to be "purified" and had given him enemas with over 400 times the
recommended dosage of water. [Montreal Gazette, 3-11-95]

THINNING THE HERD

* In Dubach, La., Mr. David Hanna, 38, fooling around with his friend Billy
Barham, was accidentally killed when Barham missed while trying to shoot a
can off Hanna's head. [USA Today, 8-30- 95]

WEIRDNUZ.404 (News of the Weird, November 3, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* According to an October Wall Street Journal article, the number of
bellybutton reconstructions in Japan went up 375% in the last year, in part
because many Japanese have come to believe, as author Hogen Fukunaga writes,
"The navel is the core of everything about the person." Said a Tokyo
hospital president, "People want navels that aren't assertive." The perfect
navel, surmised the Journal reporter, is "vertical, very narrow, and
absolutely symmetrical." The navel is a popular theme in the Japanese
language; for instance, a favorite kids' insult is, "Your mother has an
outie." [Wall Street Journal, 10-4-95]

QUESTIONABLE JUDGMENTS

* In September, police in Meadville, Pa., announced that the summer drought
in the area was responsible for their success in finding marijuana farmers.
Said a police spokesman, almost all of the vegetation is brown because of
the drought, but the marijuana stays green because the owners take such good
care of the plants. [USA Today, 9-12-95]

* A San Diego, Calif., couple, both 35, suffered only minor injuries in
September when their car went off of I-10 at 75 mph. The couple, who police
said were nude when they arrived on the scene, were having sex in the front
seat, and the driver lost control. And in San Antonio, Tex., five days
earlier, motorcyclist Liem Ngo, 38, was killed when he collided with another
cyclist, probably, according to police, because the other cyclist's
passenger, a 38-year-old woman, had just bared her breasts at Ngo,
distracting him. [Detroit Free Press, 9-17-95; San Antonio Express-News,
9-12-95]

* In July, a 25-year-old female sixth-grade science teacher in Muroran,
Japan, exasperated at the rowdiness of her students, slashed one of her
wrists in front of them in an attempt to scare them into being quiet. She
had to be rushed to the hospital. [The Daily Mainichi, 7-12-95]

* When a band called On the Edge played the largest prison in Maryland,
outside Hagerstown, in August, three female band members engaged in risky
behavior. According to a corrections officer, they were "straddl[ing] the
stage poles" and lying down on the stage "in every provocative position and
imitat[ing] sex acts." The women "were yelling suggestive things to the
inmates, who were responding in a sexual frenzy, climbing the fences." (The
fences were sturdy; no inmate-band contact occurred.) [Washington Times-AP,
8-18-95]

* In August, hotel owner Robert W. Vermillion, 52, died in Williamsburg,
Va., from smoke inhalation. He had rushed into his flame-filled garage to
attempt to save his Porsche but was overcome before he could get it out. And
in August, six people on a farm near Nazlat Imara, Egypt, drowned after
diving one at a time into a well trying to capture a chicken that had fallen
in. The chicken survived. [Washington Post, 8-2-95; Toronto Sun- AP, 8-4-95]

CLICHES COME TO LIFE

* A July international men's conference in Ottawa was attended by nearly 150
men (who paid $350 each), which was a vast improvement over the previous
year's attendance of five. One difference was that this year, the conference
was not organized in-house but was contracted out to two women. [Barrie
Examiner-CP, 7-3-95]

* Poland's leading "playwright of the absurd," Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz,
was buried in Soviet territory when he committed suicide in 1939, but his
casket was sent to his beloved Polish mountains for reburial in 1988. In May
1995, a special commission celebrating Witkiewicz's work discovered that,
somehow, Witkiewicz's casket contained the body of a woman. [Edmonton
Journal, 5-6-95]

THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

* A 64-year-old Dade City, Fla., man accused by authorities in March of
fathering at least one, and perhaps all nine, of his 44- year-old sister's
children recently had his trial postponed until early 1996. The man,
identified only as William, warned authorities that prosecuting him will
doom society because he needs six more months to finish up his work on "the
prism" (a wooden table with a hole in the middle in which William stands),
which he promised would enable him harness all the world's energy to control
the weather, end the fighting in Bosnia, and make the state's child welfare
office obsolete. Said William, the prism is "the only way humanity will get
out of limbo." [Tampa Tribune, 10-19-95]

WEIRDNUZ.405 (News of the Weird, November 10, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* The Houston Chronicle reported in September on the growing support among
American Muslims for once-accused child molester Sadri Krasniqi of Plano,
Tex. Krasniqi, an Albanian- American, was arrested in 1989 after witnesses
reported him fondling his four-year-old daughter under her dress, and state
authorities removed the girl, and her brother, to a Christian family. In
1994, after many delays, charges were dropped against Krasniqi when
prosecutors became convinced that because parent-child sex is so
unimaginable in Albania, parental fondling--even genital fondling--is
accepted. (Muslim critics said such fondling is correctly forbidden among
Americans because pedophilia is so common here.) However, even though no
longer facing charges, Krasniqi and his wife have so far been denied the
return of their children. [Houston Chronicle, 9-17-95]

THE CONTINUING CRISIS

* Earlier this year, in a study of the psychological well-being of 91
Canadian customs officers, researchers from the Kingston (Ontario) Sexual
Behavior Clinic concluded that the officers whose work consists of looking
at pornography all day showed no ill effects. (Canada generally has stricter
laws against pornography than most U. S. states because authorities more
readily accept the belief that viewing pornography is dangerous.)
[Geist-Utne Reader, December 1994-January 1995]

* According to a Texas District Attorney, more than 100 prosecutions for
drug possession are in jeopardy because defendants had the good sense after
their arrests to pay the state "drug tax." The legislature enacted the tax
in 1989 to help law enforcement, but a court ruled recently that to both
collect the tax and prosecute the defendant would be unconstitutional
"double jeopardy." The latest case was the August dismissal of charges
against San Marcos college professor Harvey Ginsburg, who had paid a $2,450
tax on 11 ounces of marijuana. [Dallas Morning News-AP, 8-5-95]

* In September, the Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Kalmar, Sweden, applied
for a permit to hook up the crematorium in its memorial park with its other
buildings. The Church wants to use the heat from the crematorium to warm the
other buildings inexpensively. [Reuters wirecopy, 9-6-95]

* In October, Juanita Winston, 27, fresh out of jail on probation and
child-support violations, looked up her old boyfriend, William Narr, in the
Norristown, Pa., liquor store where he worked and tried to persuade him to
resume the relationship. According to police, Winston--who outweighs Narr by
40 pounds--threw him onto a truck ramp in the back of the store, broke 23
liquor bottles, wrapped him in an apron, and sat on him for over two hours
until he agreed to reconcile. [Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct95]

GROWN-UPS

* Two career firefighters and six volunteers were suspended in Seat
Pleasant, Md., in September after they brawled over who should get to carry
the big hose into a burning house. [Washington Times, Sept95]

* In August, principal Al Williams of Hotchkiss (Colo.) High School resigned
after his alleged conduct at a student assembly came under criticism.
According to news reports, Williams demonstrated for students the concept of
"maturity" by having two girls, one flat-chested and the other not, stand in
profile and touch their elbows behind them. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 8-31-95]

* In October, a jury in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., awarded $277,000 to former
high school soccer player Gary Beharrie, who was severely kicked by an
opponent in a 1992 game. The jury found that the kick was administered on
orders from the opposing coach, Phil Drosdick, who told a player near
Beharrie to "Waste him!" because his team was losing. [St. Petersburg Times,
10-12- 95]

GEOGRAPHIC CENTERS OF WEIRD

* Peterborough, Ontario: In October, Robert McKellar, 36, pleaded guilty to
spying on female co-workers through a two-way mirror in the employee
changing room at a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. And in July, police said
Darren Laite, 26, was discovered lurking in the tank of a women's outhouse
just east of town. [Sault Star-CP, 10-20-95; Toronto Star-CP, 8-23-95]

* Union, S. Car.: In the town of killer-Mom Susan Smith, Doris Murphy, 41,
pleaded guilty in October to beating her partially- paralyzed elderly aunt,
stomping her prescription bottles, and tossing her walker into a tree. [USA
Today, 10-6-95]

* Dover, N. H.: Jeremy Brown, 21, was arrested for beating up his girlfriend
in October in a dispute over whether the O. J. Simpson jury had reached the
proper verdict. And in August, David Cobb, 59, of Dover, was charged with
assault and 594 counts of child pornography. Cobb is a former Phillips
Academy teacher who reportedly took kids into the woods, left them briefly
while he changed clothes and reappeared in pumpkin mask and underwear and
asked the kids to fondle him, then went back into the brush and reappeared
clothed as David Cobb. [Newark Star- Ledger, 10-5-95; Burlington Free
Press-AP, Oct95]

WEIRDNUZ.406 (News of the Weird, November 17, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* German romanticism professor Jukka Ammondt, 45, of the University of
Jyvaskyla in Finland, closed out a two-week American singing tour in October
with a performance at the Embassy of Finland in Washington, D. C., doing
Elvis Presley songs in Latin. According to a Washington Post report, Ammondt
sang Latin versions of, among others, "It's Now or Never" ("Nunc hic aut
numquam") and "Love Me Tender" ("Tenere me, suaviter"). [Washington Post,
10-21-95]

GREAT ART

* Newsweek reported in June that a group of French artists tried to bring
shame to people's habitual failure to curb their dogs in Paris by decorating
about 200 assorted piles of dog poop on the street. The artists drew chalk
lines of plates around the droppings, then placed real flatware and glasses
next to the plates and real food, such as spaghetti, on the plates next to
the poop. [Newsweek, 6-5-95]

* Sotheby's New York City auction house reported in June that "Drains," a
sculpture of a sink stopper by Robert Gober (who specializes in making
household items into "art") sold for over $55,000. Gober said the sink
stopper represented "a window onto another world." [Edmonton Journal,
7-1-95]

* [CAUTION: BAD WORD AHEAD] Earlier this year, at an Ace Contemporary
Exhibitions show in Los Angeles, painter Keith Boadwee offered 50 pieces
that he created over a seven- month period by giving himself enemas of egg
tempura paints and capturing the expulsions on canvas. Above the paintings
in the gallery were TV monitors showing videotapes of Boadwee's production
process, including his squatting nude over canvases. Said Boadwee, "I wanted
to prove that I can make just as good a painting as [the "abstract
expressionists"] can, with my butthole." [Buzz, August 1995; Art in America,
October 1995]

* The four finalists for the 1995 prestigious Turner Prize, awarded this
month in London, include Damien Hirst, who has exhibited dead, skinned
cattle in copulating positions in formaldehyde [News of the Weird, November
25, 1994], and Mona Hatoum, who has created a video of microphotography of
the insides of her mouth and other body openings. [The Economist, 9-30-95]

* In New York City in August, French director Veronique Guillaud staged, as
performance art, a "peeping Tom" exhibition near Lincoln Center, with
several hundred art patrons on the street looking through binoculars at a
variety of Guillaud-staged scenes into 40 windows of the Radisson Empire
Hotel. Said one peeper, "You say, 'What will they think of next?' and then
they come up with [this].'" [New York Times, 8-6-95]

GEOGRAPHIC CENTERS OF WEIRD

* Gallup, New Mexico: Former Gallup school principal Fred David Johnson, 64,
was sentenced in October to 28 years in prison for kidnaping an 11-year-old
boy and sucking his toes. Another former Gallup school principal, Charles
Edwin Johnson, 54, has been charged with child-sex crimes. The two Johnsons
are not related--except that police said a homemade computer- disk "manual"
on how to seduce kids, written by Fred David Johnson, was found in the home
of Charles Edwin Johnson when he was arrested. [Albuquerque Journal,
10-16-95]

WEIRDNUZ.407 (News of the Weird, November 24, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In November in Tampa, Fla., Paul Covani, 18, filed a lawsuit against his
father, retired military physician Ricardo Covani, alleging years of abuse
and humiliation. According to the lawsuit, Dr. Covani not only verbally
abused his son but until recently systematically measured his son's body
parts, took nude photographs of him to chronicle his growth, brushed his
teeth at night, bathed him, and inspected his stools. [St. Petersburg Times,
11-4-95]

PEOPLE WITH TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS

* A researcher writing in the July issue of the European Journal of Physics
concluded that the torque of an average piece of buttered toast, falling off
of a table of average height, causes "an inevitable butter-down final state
[hitting the floor]." [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 7-5-95]

* A July Associated Press story described the work of Ellie Jenkins, a
counter for the Mosquito Control Commission in Savannah, Ga. Jenkins drives
around to 38 specified locations, stands with her arms and legs spread, and
ascertains whether she receives five bites a minute--which is the threshold
to summon county spraying trucks. And a June Toledo Blade story reported on
the work of Mike Pixley, who tests La-Z-Boy chairs at the company plant in
Monroe, Mich. Pixley rocks about 2,800 times a day, at $6 an hour. Said his
supervisor Judy Fay, praising Pixley, "I want someone who's self-motivated,
who sets their own personal goals." [Halifax (N.S.) Chronicle-Herald-AP,
7-6- 95] [Willimantic (Conn.) Chronicle-AP, 7-24-95]

* According to current and former members of Japan's Aum Shinri Kyo cult
(accused of the subway gas attacks) quoted by Reuters News Service in
September, leader Shoko Asahara collected a souvenir pubic hair from each of
the 30 to 40 female followers with whom he had slept. Asahara reportedly
placed the strands of hair in small plastic bags inside bottles, each
labeled with the woman's name. [Reuter wirecopy, 9-13-95]

CULTURAL DIVERSITY

* A municipal official in Tehran announced in August that seating and
standing room on its minibuses would be gender- segregated, as on Iran's
other buses. He reasoned that "if 10 men brush against [the 370,000 female
daily riders], 3.7 million accountable sins are committed every day." And in
May, 3,300 couples were married in a mass ceremony in Tehran designed to
discourage bachelorhood and its attendant masturbation. Said Ayatollah
Mohammed Yazdi, "[The masturbator's] eyes, his nerves, many of his body
organs will be so affected that medical science cannot cure him." [Orlando
Sentinel, 8-29-95] [New York Daily News-Reuter, 5-20-95]

* A September Associated Press dispatch from Sri Lanka reported that a
30-year-old man had been sentenced to prison on two charges: for having sex
with a cow, three months, and for raping a female human two weeks earlier,
another three months. However, the judge apparently thought the two
sentences were excessive and thus suspended the first one. [The Japan Times-
AP, 9-23-95]

* In July, preacher Abdul Talib Harun, 35, was sentenced to two years in
prison in Kuala Lampur for having 10 wives, which is six more than permitted
under Muslim law. All ten, with whom he has 17 children, strongly supported
Harun during his yearlong trial. The four lawful wives were also sent to
jail for a month for permitting the illegal cohabitation. [Chicago
Tribune-AP, 7-13- 95]

* According to a May Wall Street Journal article, Palestinians intent on
improving their personal religious standing now suffer from "martyr
inflation"--terming any relative who passes away to be a martyr. Muslims
believe that a martyr goes straight to paradise, sits with God, is absolved
of all sins, and enjoys 70 virgin brides. According to a Palestinian
journalist, "It's not easy to come to a family and say, 'Your relative is
not a martyr. He's just dead.'" [Wall Street Journal, 5-15-95]

CREME DE LA WEIRD

* Officials in South Hams District in England filed charges in October
against farmer Trevor Sedgbeer for defying an order to dismantle his
two-bedroom bungalow because it was built without a permit. Instead of
dismantling it, Sedgbeer removed the roof, filled the house with dirt to a
height covering the walls, and planted grass and bushes on it. When he
thought police were satisfied that the house had been torn down, Sedgbeer
removed all the dirt and reattached the roof, but authorities came by again
and saw that the house had reappeared. [The Daily Telegraph, 10-20-95]

WEIRDNUZ.408 (News of the Weird, December 1, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* The family of Santo Alba filed a lawsuit in Boston against the late Mr.
Alba's employer, Raytheon. Alba's workload had increased, causing him (said
the family) to commit suicide by sticking his head into the sheet-metal
cutting machine at his shop at work. And in Newport, R. I., also-stressed
Navy computer systems manager Raoul Payette blamed his supervisor and shot
her in the neck with a derringer. According to police, Payette had fixed
upon the Navy's workplace admonition to "Identify and Eliminate Barriers to
Quality"; "She was the barrier," he said. Someone with a worse job than
either man was the researcher on a study reported in a November journal
article on condom usage by Nevada prostitutes; that person's job was to
examine used condoms for breakage. [Inland Valley Daily Bulletin-AP, 11-6-
95] [Providence Journal-Bulletin, 10-31-95][American Journal of Public
Health, November 1995]

COURTROOM ANTICS

* In May, Hawaii's Intermediate Court of Appeals set aside the firearms
conviction of James G. Kahoonei because his bedroom was illegally searched.
The search was conducted by Kahoonei's mother, but the court ruled that she
was searching not as a mother but as an "agent" of the government in looking
for weapons. [Columbus Dispatch, May95]

* In March, Robert Licciardi, 36, who was freshly convicted of killing his
disabled father in order to get his hands on the family fortune and who had
acted as his own attorney during his trial, claimed in a letter to the
Stockton (Calif.) Record that he had incompetent counsel, that the judge was
"unfair," "prejudiced," and "unreasonable" for allowing Licciardi to
represent himself. [Stockton Record, 3-8-95]

* An Albany, N. Y., Bobbittization case against a woman hung on the parties'
comparative credibility, and one of the issues currently being considered by
the New York Court of Appeals is who was telling the truth about where the
slashed victim removed his undershorts. He said in the bedroom, but she said
in the kitchen (where he was about to rape her) and testified that the
undershorts therefore reeked of spices. Her lawyer now says the trial judge
made a crucial error: To verify the woman's version, the judge should have
sniffed the unlaundered shorts himself during the trial or passed them over
to the jury for sniffing. [Albany Times Union, 9-21-95]

* In April, a federal court refused to review the Novato, Calif., small
claims court decision in favor of Phillip Schlenker for $65 from the local
cable TV company. Schlenker won the judgment for a breach of contract in
that he was unable to enjoy "Monday Night Football" during 1993 and 1994
because the cable company was feuding with the local ABC-TV station in San
Francisco. [San Francisco Examiner, Apr95]

* In July in Chicago, a county circuit judge, James G. Smith, was transfered
to a lower-profile job because of his remarks during a medical malpractice
trial involving an Hispanic victim. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, when
defense attorneys pointed out that there had once been a shooting in the
malpractice victim's family (which could have led to the victim's subsequent
learning disabilities), Judge Smith said, "Of course, [shooting guns] is a
common practice among Hispanics. . . . Every New Year's, I had to dismiss
cases because it was common for them to step out and shoot at anything that
was out there." [Chicago Sun- Times, 7-15-95]

FETISHES ON PARADE

* In Somerset, Pa., in July, Mr. Ali Burke, 25, was arrested and charged
with disorderly conduct at a McDonald's after he squirted ketchup on the
nose of the Hamburgler and licked it off. [York Dispatch, 7-21-95]

WEIRDNUZ.409 (News of the Weird, December 8, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In 1992, a federal court jury in Montgomery, Ala., found that the fuel
retailers in Dothan, Ala., had conspired to fix prices but decided that the
plaintiffs had been damaged only to the tune of $1.00 (tripled in antitrust
law, to $3.00). Nonetheless, finishing up the case in November 1995, Federal
Judge Myron Thompson ordered the losers to pay the 19 victorious lawyers
fees totaling $2,035,658. [Journal of Commerce, 11-9-95]

GOVERNMENT IN ACTION

* The Louisiana legislature this year closed a ten-year-old loophole in its
drinking law. From 1985 until June 1995, the legal age for buying or
drinking liquor has been 21, but it was illegal to sell liquor only to those
under 18. [New Orleans Times- Picayune, 8-25-95]

* According to a recent journal article, Lehigh Valley Legal Services--a
Pennsylvania agency funded by the federal Legal Services
Corporation--earlier this year filed a lawsuit on behalf of an indigent
16-year-old boy to help him seek custody of the child he had fathered by
rape. Legal Services helped the boy challenge the constitutionality of
Pennsylvania law, which denies rapists the chance of custody. [Wall Street
Journal-Women's Quarterly, 9- 20-95]

* Lawrence Lawton, 55, filed a $1 million lawsuit earlier this year against
Broward County (Ft. Lauderdale), Fla., for its negligence in keeping him in
jail. He was locked up on a petty theft charge and a nine-year-old drunk
driving warrant in August 1991; it only dawned on the authorities in April
1993 that Lawton had not yet been sent before a judge--a total of 607 days'
incarceration, or four times his likely sentence. (Eleven days after his
release, he was arrested on a trespassing charge.) [St. Petersburg
Times-Knight-Ridder Newspapers, 9-25-95]

* For the second time this year, a Board of Veterans Appeals attorney was
convicted of destroying medical records and other documents involved in
current cases and passing along files for needless review, apparently just
because she couldn't keep up with the caseload. Jill L. Rygwalski was
sentenced 15 months in prison despite her attempts to blame her
procrastination on her supervisor, her husband, and her domineering father.
[Houston Chronicle-Washington Post, 9-10-95]

* Saying he had "no choice" in the matter, Secretary of the Interior Bruce
Babbitt in September signed over the title to more than 100 acres of federal
land in Idaho to a Danish firm for $275, though the mining rights to the
land are worth around $1 billion. Babbitt said he was required to make the
sale under the Mining Act of 1872, which is still on the books. In 1994,
under the same law, Babbitt signed over land containing about $10 billion in
gold to a Canadian company for about $10,000. [St. Petersburg
Times-Washington Post, 9-7-95]

* In May, the Army issued the Bronze Star for "meritorious achievement" to
seven soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment firing (mistakenly) on
stranded U. S. troops during the Persian Gulf war. The Army had originally
awarded three of the men medals "with valor," but revoked that distinction
after criticism by the General Accounting Office. The medal-winning soldiers
killed one American and wounded another before realizing their mistake. [St.
Petersburg Times-Washington Post, 5-5-95; Greensboro News & Record-AP,
4-16-95]

* A November New York Times story described the 12-hour course required in
Texas for applicants to get a license to carry a concealed weapon. The
program developer said he based much of the curriculum on the 1970s
pop-psychology books "Games People Play" and "I'm O. K.--You're O. K.," in
which a person is encouraged to understand his inner child. Said one
instructor, while suggesting to students that they not react violently to a
stranger who cusses them out in a traffic confrontation: "[Y]ou might say,
'Sir, we are both in the same unfortunate situation here. Let's see what we
can do to solve this conflict together.'" [New York Times, 11-8-95]

WEIRDNUZ.410 (News of the Weird, December 15, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

FAMILY VALUES

* A 28-year-old man in Renton, Wash., was arraigned in September for
unlawfully imprisoning his two sons, ages 8 and 7, inside their
expensively-furnished, immaculate apartment while he was at work. According
to a witness, everything in the home was meticulously kept up, "like a
showroom"; all cabinets and the canisters inside them were labeled as to
contents and the cabinets padlocked; and the kids were subject to a beating
if the father found anything amiss. (When a police officer who rescued the
boys tracked tiny pieces of leaves into the apartment, the boys immediately
got on the floor, picked up each speck, and smoothed out the carpet.)
[Seattle Times, Sept95]

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT

* Parole board transcripts released in August of the attempt at freedom by
convicted killer Winston Moseley, 61, reveal his appeal for sympathy: The
suffering of his three victims was only "a one-minute affair," he said, "but
for the person who's caught, it's forever." [USA Today, 8-7-95]

* From a March letter to the editor of the Kingsport (Tenn.) Times-News,
exposing local jail conditions, written by inmate Travis Nelms, 22, who had
been locked up for the ninth time since 1992: "We the inmates here at the
Sullivan County Jail [are] concerned that here we all [are] treated as
criminals." [Kingsport Times-News, 3-30-95]

* Charles Mahuka, who ran an anger-counseling seminar in Honolulu, was
charged in October in connection with the death of one of his counselees,
Miguel Gonzalez, who had showed up late and inebriated for a session. The
two argued and Mahuka punched Mr. Gonazlez, who lapsed into a coma and died.
[Hartford Courant, 10-12-95]

* In October, apparently angry that a truck was moving too slowly in traffic
for her taste, Lisa Lind, 26, pulled up alongside it in her car, held an
aluminum baseball bat out the window, and took several futile swipes at the
truck as both were moving down the highway. Police in Tustin, Calif.,
arrested her and noticed her personalized license plate, "PEACE 95." Said an
officer, "She told me she got it because she thought there was so much
violence going on in today's society." [Inland Valley Daily Bulletin-AP,
10-21-95]

WEIRDNUZ.411 (News of the Weird, December 22, 1995)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In October, the Miami (Ohio) University Student Senate voted official
recognition to the Miami U. Masturbation Society, thus permitting MUMS to
use University facilities for its meetings. According to its constitution,
MUMS hopes to promote "the safest sex possible," as well as to "challenge
social prejudice" and stereotypes, and "to strive toward manual dexterity"
and "hand-eye coordination." [The Miami Student, 10-27-95]

COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE TRUE

* In November, LaVerne Pavlinac was released from prison in Salem, Ore.,
after a man confessed to the murder she originally said she and her
boyfriend had committed. A jury believed her confession in 1990 that she and
then-boyfriend John Sosnovske killed a woman; both were sentenced to life in
prison. It turns out that Pavlinac confessed because it was the only way she
could think of to get out of her relationship with the allegedly abusive
Sosnovske. Said Pavlinac, "These things don't happen except in the movies."
[San Jose Mercury News-AP, 10-28-95]

* In a first-person account in London's The Independent in September, Jenny
Gathorne-Hardy reported that she drilled a hole in her skull (with pain
relief only by local anesthetic) to test the theory that adults' brains
would function better if blood were allowed to circulate to the topmost
part, which is made difficult because of natural fusing at around age 18 to
21. Reported Gathorne-Hardy, "I feel calmer, and that particular mental
exhaustion I became so used to has gone." [Globe and Mail-The Independent,
9-22-95]

* Bronx, N. Y., deputy police inspector Anthony Kissik established
guidelines in October to help limit paperwork from rising crime in the 50th
Precinct: Henceforth, no assault charges will be filed if the victim suffers
merely bleeding, bruises, a fat lip, or a black eye. Only broken bones or
wounds requiring stitches will qualify. [New York Daily News, 10-11-95]

* According to a Knight-Ridder News Service report from Hanoi in September,
one of the country's most popular TV programs is "Ba Nu Tham Tu" ("Charlie's
Angels"). According to an official for the company that distributes the
show, it is very popular among "intellectuals." "The [actresses] are very
intelligent," he said, "and the acting is good." [The
Oregonian-Knight-Ridder, 9- 24-95]

* In 1991 Linda Mathews drove through a stop sign and hit another car--which
resulted in catastrophic injuries to the couple in that car. In September
1995, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Mathews had cut a deal with
her insurance company that paid her $50,000 while the victims of the crash,
who require expensive caretaking, have so far been paid nothing. Mathews
took an early settlement on her policy (made possible by the company's need
to protect itself on a legal issue), bought a house with it, and then
declared bankruptcy to shield herself from the expected huge judgment coming
against her personally when the victims' claims exceeded the amount of her
policy. [Star Tribune, 9-18-95]

* In August Kim Sun Myung, 70, thought to be the longest- serving prisoner
of war in the world, was freed in South Korea, where he had been
held--mostly in solitary confinement--since the outbreak of the Korean War
in 1951. Officials said he would have been released years ago had he only
publicly renounced his support for North Korea. [Columbus Dispatch-N. Y.
Times, 8- 20-95]

* In September, the Brazil Health Ministry cancelled a TV AIDS- education ad
campaign because of complaints from at least 18 men named Braulio. In the
ads, an unnamed man is conversing with his penis, whose name is Braulio,
about the pros and cons of indiscriminate, condomless sex. In preparing the
campaign, the Health Ministry had commissioned a poll which revealed that
Braulio was one of men's top five names for penises. [Arizona Daily Star-AP,
9-17-95]

NEW RIGHTS

* Hong Kong High Court judge Raymond Sears ruled in November, on a petition
from a drug trafficker, that a prison's practice of removing the
horse-racing results from daily newspapers before distributing them to
inmates violates prisoners' human rights. [Edmonton Journal, 11-4-95]

* William Townsend, Jr., was awarded $20,000 by a jury in Louisville, Ky.,
in November because he was excessively punished while an inmate at River
City Corrections Center. A guard had found contraband (two cans of Vienna
sausages) in Townsend's underwear and had squeezed his testicles three
times, causing a contusion and leaving him with pain long after his release
from jail. According to Townsend, the guard told him at the time, "That'll
teach you to bring Vienna sausages up here." [Louisville Courier-Journal,
Nov95]

* According to an October Washington Post story, the Federal Labor Relations
Authority recently ruled in a longstanding dispute that the Federal Aviation
Administration might have to tear out the interiors of the offices in the
radar tower at Denver International Airport. FLRA had found that FAA had
installed the tiles, wallpapering, and carpeting without consulting the air
traffic controllers' union, and that the union didn't like the color scheme.
[Washington Post, 10-27-95]

WEIRDNUZ.413 (News of the Weird, January 5, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* According to a November report in The Economist, Japanese inventor Yoshiro
Nakamats photographed every meal he ate for 30 years to help him ascertain
which foods energized the brain-- as research for his Yummi Nutri Brain
biscuits, which he says make people smarter and, in conjunction with
exercise and sex, stretch life expectancy to "144 years." Among Dr.
Nakamats's inventions for the latter two subjects are spring-loaded jogging
shoes and the Love-Jet clitoral stimulator. [The Economist, 11- 25-95]

THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

* In September, Robert Ferguson, 52, and his wife Deborah Reeder, 46, were
arrested on contempt of court charges in Franklin, Ind.--merely their latest
legal skirmish since their 1993 announcement that they were renouncing U. S.
citizenship and becoming tax-exempt. The contempt charge was over their
failed claim that their neighbors should hand over to them 200 acres of land
because the government had no authority to divide it up the way it has done
since the early 1800s. [Louisville Courier- Journal, Sept95]

* Chiropractors in the News: In July, the Massachusetts board that regulates
chiropractors considered revoking the license of Ronald Goldstein after
testimony from former patients that he touched them sexually during
examinations, tried to market a hypnosis service for breast enlargement, and
talked to them about his having been abducted by space aliens. And in
October Dr. John Schuett, 36, was charged with battery in Waukesha, Wis.,
after he allegedly ordered a woman into his office, grabbed her, put his
mouth over her right eye, sucked on it, stabbed her in the neck with an
acupuncture needle, and began reading aloud from the Bible. [Lowell Sun,
7-12-95] [Wisconsin State Journal, 10-4- 95]

LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS

* Norman Newmarch, 60, was charged with DUI in Toronto, Ontario, after his
car nudged a cruiser in the parking lot of a police station. He told
officers he had driven to the station because he wanted to ask police if he
were sober enough to drive. [Roanoke World-AP, Oct95]

WEIRDNUZ.414 (News of the Weird, January 12, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

INEXPLICABLE

* In an October interview with the Raleigh (N. C.) News and Observer, U. S.
Rep. Frederick K. Heineman said his combined Congressional salary and
pension income of $183,000 a year makes him merely "lower-middle class."
Said Heineman, "When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to
$750,000 a year, that's middle class." [Washington Post, 10-25- 95]

* During an October robbery at Super Jim's grocery in Chicago, employee
Vincente Arriaga was shot by the robber at a distance of 20 feet. According
to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times, the bullet barely broke Arriaga's skin
because it was slowed as it passed through the 8-oz. box of Tuna Helper he
was holding. [Chicago Sun-Times, Oct95]

CHUTZPAH

* At a September hearing for Charles Hocq, accused of battery in
Springfield, Ill., Judge Roger Holmes asked Hocq the standard questions to
determine how much his bail should be (e.g., do you have any family in the
community?). Hocq said he didn't understand the question. Holmes then asked
the direct question: If I made the bail amount lower, would you flee the
area and not come back for trial? According to the Springfield Journal, Hocq
replied, "I would." (Holmes then doubled the proposed bail, to $250,000.)
[Springfield Journal, 9-22-95]

* In December, a jury in Washington, D. C., awarded $175,000 to Mary Jo
Smith, who said she fell off a parking garage ramp at a hotel while rushing
to a luncheon featuring Hillary Rodham Clinton. Only $7,500 was for medical
expenses. Smith is the wife of Republican U. S. Sen. Robert Smith of New
Hampshire, who recently voted for legal reform legislation that would reduce
such large payouts that go beyond actual expenses. [Washington Post,
12-8-95]

* From an October letter to the editor from Bruce C. Brenizer, convicted
murderer, to the Wisconsin State Journal, the daily newspaper in Madison,
which had published a news story on him: "I am frankly disgusted with the
sloppy and sensationalistic reporting that appears in your paper. . . . You
are correct in suggesting that I . . . was responsible for the death of my
father, his live-in girlfriend, and her three children. But I was never
charged with the murder of my half-brother as you reported. That is the
trouble with you tabloid journalists, the facts are just not important to
you." (The Journal replied: "Mr. Brenizer is correct. The five people he
murdered included his half-sister, not his half-brother.") [Wisconsin State
Journal, 10-15-95]

* According to a story in the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard in July,
convicted con man Anthony Fiederer started the local Alzheimer's Foundation
in 1993 and raised $36,000, of which $200 went toward Alzheimer's research
and $14,000 was allegedly embezzled by Fiederer. The newspaper also reported
that Fiederer initially used his involvement with his Foundation to satisfy
a "community service" sentence on a previous conviction for swindling and
that he used Foundation funds to make court-ordered restitution to victims
in that case. [Eugene Register-Guard, 7-18-95]

LEAST JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDES

* Constance Agnes Miller, 60, was charged with beating her mother to death
in Erie, Pa., in September, allegedly because her mother wouldn't stop
calling her "Agnes." [Athens Messenger- AP, Oct95]

* In September, Mark E. Mire was convicted in Baton Rouge, La., for shooting
to death a man in a bar in 1994 because the man had said Mire's dog was
ugly. [Dallas Morning News-AP, Sept95]

WEIRDNUZ.415 (News of the Weird, January 19, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

SPORTS NEWS

* Sue Olsen, 38, finished the Grandma's Marathon (26 miles) in Duluth,
Minn., on June 16, then ran 100 kilometers in an ultramarathon in
Minneapolis on June 17 and 18, and followed that up late on June 19 by going
into labor and producing 7- pound, 3-ounce John Miles Olsen on June 20. [St.
Paul Pioneer Press, 6-28-95]

* Britain's Guardian Weekly reported in November that, even though Iranian
dress codes prohibit the country's fielding women's Olympic teams for
swimming, track and field, and basketball, they will have a women's kayaking
team. However, the coach acknowledged that the team members' robes and veils
add up to 10 seconds to their time over a 550-yard course. [Guardian Weekly,
11-12-95]

WEIRDNUZ.416 (News of the Weird, January 26, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* Latest Nicotine Urges: Connecticut inmate Frank W. Banks, assigned to a
no-smoking prison, was convicted in December of mailing harassing letters to
a judge; Banks said he thought threats via the U. S. mail would cause him to
be sent to a federal prison, where he could smoke. And in November, three
stranded Alaska hunters radioing for help claimed they had been without food
for three days so the rescue would be treated as an emergency; actually,
they had a week's worth of food with them but panicked because they had run
out of cigarettes. [Hartford Courant, 12-8- 95; Anchorage Daily News,
11-24-95]

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

* In October, a judge in Belfast, Northern Ireland, rejected plans for a
proposed restaurant called School Dinners that would feature meals served by
young women in short skirts wielding whips against patrons who did not clean
their plates. Though opponents called the restaurant immoral, the judge said
merely that the mock spankings would constitute "entertainment," which is
forbidden by the lease. Said one disappointed supporter, "We have had 25
years [of oppression]. Now is the time for the fun to come flooding back."
[Columbus Dispatch-AP, 10-26-95]

OUR ANIMAL FRIENDS

* A full page of letters from readers in a September issue of New Scientist
magazine reported sightings by London, England, subway riders who say they
saw pigeons board, and disembark from, subway cars in "purposeful" ways that
suggest they have figured out where they are going. [Philadelphia Inquirer,
10-1- 95]

* In September, Terri Hudson, 39, was jailed in Naperville, Ill., for
failing to hand over the family cat, Seymour, to ex-husband Jeff Sucec, who
won custody of it, along with the couple's 3- year-old son. [Chicago
Sun-Times, 9-22-95]

WEIRDNUZ.417 (News of the Weird, February 2, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* A pre-trial hearing will take place this month in Lamar, Mo., on Joyce
Lehr's lawsuit against the county for injuries suffered in a 1993 fall in
the icy, unplowed parking lot of the local high school. The Carthage Press
reported that Lehr claimed damage to nearly everything in her body.
According to her petition: "All the bones, organs, muscles, tendons,
tissues, nerves, veins, arteries, ligaments . . . discs, cartilages, and the
joints of her body were fractured, broken, ruptured, punctured, compressed,
dislocated, separated, bruised, contused, narrowed, abrased, lacerated,
burned, cut, torn, wrenched, swollen, strained, sprained, inflamed, and
infected." [Carthage Press, 1-9-96]

SCHEMES

* Johnny Lee Nichols, 25, was arrested in Rogers, Ark., in October and
accused of knocking on doors of several homes around 3 a.m. and asking if
anyone was interested in exchanging drugs or sex for some dynamite he had in
his car. [Northwest Arkansas Times-AP, 10-8-95]

* A Russian parliament committee announced in November that the country
could not yet comply with the world's ozone- protecting chlorofluorocarbon
(CFC) ban treaty (which took effect in January 1996). Russian scientists
proposed an alternative, however: a 10-year, $100 billion program in which a
system of 30 to 50 satellites would bombard the atmosphere with lasers in
order to stimulate production of ozone and thus compensate for the Russian
CFCs. [Reuters wirecopy, 11-15-95]

* A bomb threat that forced a Royal Jordanian Airlines plane to land in
Iceland in November en route to Chicago was discovered to have been made by
a Chicago woman who was merely trying to prevent her mother-in-law, a
passenger on the plane, from visiting her. And a former USAir flight
attendant was sentenced to eight months in prison in May for making a bomb
threat to force a landing so she could rest her ailing knee. [Washington
Times-Reuters, 11-11-95; Greensboro News Record, May95]

* In August, Salinas, Calif., doughnut shop owner Harjeet Singh pleaded
guilty to insurance fraud. After an employee was shot during a holdup, Singh
dragged the wounded man's body out to the sidewalk to make it appear he was
a customer, and not an employee, because Singh did not have worker
compensation coverage. [San Jose Mercury News, 8-26-95]

* Artist Charles Flagg, under pressure from the town of Darien, N. Y.,
because he was keeping an unregistered car on his property in violation of a
zoning law, dug a hole in his back yard in July, buried half the car,
front-end down, and called it a sculpture. [Sikeston Standard-Democrat-AP,
8-2-95]

* In Little Rock, Ark., in August, Donterio Beasley, 19, called a police
station to say that he was stranded and needed a ride downtown, but the
dispatcher told him that was against policy. A few minutes later, Beasley
called back to report a suspicious person loitering around a phone booth and
gave a description of himself, believing that police would come, give him a
ride downtown for questioning, then release him. He was charged with making
a false alarm. [Dallas Morning News-AP, 8-7-95]

LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS

* Police in Ft. Worth, Tex., arrested a man in December just after he robbed
a NationsBank branch. Cops were waiting because a bank customer had walked
next door to police headquarters to summon them after becoming suspicious
that a man was waiting in a bank line wearing a ski mask. [St. Petersburg
Times, 12-14-95]

OVERREACTIONS

* In October, Richard S. King, 36, pleaded guilty to making threatening and
obscene phone calls to two boys who were his son's Little League teammates
in Blue Springs, Mo., to get them to reconsider plans to quit the team.
According to prosecutors, King called the boys several times during a
business trip to China, threatened to kill one kid and his parents and to
commit sodomy on the whole family. [Independence Examiner, 10-26- 95]

* In October, Gerald Finneran, described as one of the world's leading
authorities on Latin American debt, was arrested at JFK Airport in New York
as he disembarked from a United Airlines flight from Buenos Aires. According
to passengers and crew, he had lost his temper when flight attendants
refused to serve him more liquor, assaulted them, defecated on a serving
cart, cleaned himself with the airline's first-class linens, and thus left
an odor that remained in the cabin for the remaining four hours of the
flight. (The flight could not be routinely rerouted to land sooner because
one of Finneran's seat neighbors was the president of Portugal, and flights
containing heads of state are harder to divert.) [New York Post, 10-31-95]

WEIRDNUZ.418 (News of the Weird, February 9, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

COMPELLING EXPLANATIONS

* A photo in the third issue of the new magazine Oneworld had black bars
over the breasts of the model Julianne while a photo of the Asian model
Zhing topless appeared without bars. According to a magazine spokesperson in
December, the decision was dictated by Oneworld's printer, who said Zhing's
breasts weren't big enough to be offensive. [New York Post, 12-7-95]

* In October, Ray Mitchell 3d was suspended from 12th grade at Bucks County
(Pa.) Technical School after he reported to his carpentry class with his
hair arranged into seven-inch-long spikes. According to the school's
director, Lamar Snyder, the hairstyle is dangerous to Mitchell's classmates:
"If a student . . . saw Mitchell walk into the room, they would say, 'Oh, my
God,' look up from the tools, and possibly hurt themselves.'" [Philadelphia
Inquirer, 10-11-95]

* A study published in a 1995 issue of the Journal of Urology estimated that
600,000 men in the U. S. are impotent from injuries to their crotches, about
40% of them from too-vigorous bicycling. And in July, the Food and Drug
Administration appproved the first prescription drug to treat impotence,
Caverject, which is injected directly into the penis before intercourse. An
FDA warning issued with the approval advised patients to contact their
doctors immediately if the erection had not subsided within six hours.
[Boston Globe, 10-16-95] [New York Times, 7-8-95]

WEIRDNUZ.419 (News of the Weird, February 16, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

* Heidi Beltzman, 29, filed a lawsuit in October against Davis Supermarket
in a Pittsburgh, Pa., suburb for injuries she suffered while shopping.
Beltzman was in a checkout line when a clerk in an adjacent lane attempted
to put a 4-lb. frozen chicken into a bag, but the fryer rolled off the
counter and hit Beltzman on the foot, causing a bruise and swelling on the
foot, which was still bandaged from surgery three months before. [Pittsburgh
Post- Gazette, 10-26-95]

* In Albuquerque, N. Mex., in December, George Thomas Diesel and his wife
filed a lawsuit against Foley's department store and the Levi Strauss
Company over a defective pair of 501 jeans. According to Diesel, a rivet in
one of the fly buttons was not completely fused, causing a piece of metal to
protrude, which severely lacerated his penis the first time he put the jeans
on. Diesel's wife wants money for the loss of her husband's services.
[Albuquerque Journal, 12-22-95]

* A court in Ontario ruled in favor of Carleton University football punt
returner Rob Dunn in September in his lawsuit against University of Ottawa
linebacker Mike Lussler for a tackle that resulted in Dunn's broken jaw and
concussion. The judge found that Lussler, in a 1992 game, intended to tackle
Dunn with a "complete disregard" for Dunn's safety. [Barrie Examiner-CP,
9-30-95]

WELL-PUT

* Morristown, N. J., Town Council candidate Donald Cresitello, lamenting in
October his tight race with George E. Burke, despite the fact that Burke had
just died: "Now he's liable to get the sympathy vote." [New York Times,
10-13-95]

* An October decision of the U. S. Court of Appeals said the trial court was
right to dismiss a slander lawsuit against the Franklin County (Ohio) Board
of Elections chairman Terry Casey. Casey had called Federal Elections
Commission official Gary Greenhalgh a "lying asshole," but the Court said
that phrase is merely rhetorical hyperbole. Casey could not have meant, said
the Court, that someone's "anus was making an untruthful statement."
[National Law Journal, 10-30-95]

WEIRDNUZ.420 (News of the Weird, February 23, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

QUESTIONABLE JUDGMENTS

* In September, a 13-year-old girl identified only as Charlotte was in New
York City with her mother to appear on a "Sally Jessy Raphael" show with the
theme of adolescent girls who dress like sluts. Charlotte's mother gave her
permission to leave their hotel room for a few minutes, and during that
time, Charlotte was picked up by a 22-year-old man, had sex with him, and
later was allegedly imprisoned by him against her will for days before being
found by police. [New York Post, 9-29-95]

WEIRDNUZ.421 (News of the Weird, March 1, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

THE CONTINUING CRISIS

* In September, the founders of the Norway Losers Rights Union met with King
Harald to explain the organization's agenda of offering support for those
Norwegians who feel doomed to failure. Since its inception in 1993, the
Union has attracted 728 active members and another 7,000 sympathizer-losers
(out of a population of 4.3 million). [Edmonton Sun, 9-19-95]

* In November, Sam Walker, member of the board of education for Currituck
County, N. C., explained to the Elizabeth City Daily Advance newspaper the
reason he owes nearly $10,000 in back taxes to the state: "I'm an elected
official. I didn't know you had to pay taxes." Asked if he were joking,
Walker said, "Hell, no. They owe me for serving." [Durham Herald-Sun-AP,
11-20-95]

WEIRDNUZ.422 (News of the Weird, March 8, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

PEOPLE WITH TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS

* A study of 12,000 people by University of North Carolina researchers,
released in December, revealed that people who drink lots of beer have large
bellies but most people who drink lots of wine don't. [Milwaukee
Journal-Sentinel, 12-11-95]

* In December, the Arizona Republic profiled animal psychologist Krista
Cantrell, who says her success is because she can communicate telepathically
with dogs and therefore get to the bottom of most master-dog relationship
problems. Several satisfied clients sang praises for Cantrell's work,
including even the owner of a horse that was on the verge of being put to
sleep but was able to tell Cantrell that he was simply overmedicated. (Five
weeks later, the horse won a race.) [Washington Times- Arizona Republic,
12-12-95]

POLICE BLOTTER

* Police in Mineola, N. Y., filed child endangerment charges against school
bus driver Robert Horton, 22, and his friend in September. Their only
offense was telling scary stories to their the 5- and 6-year-old passengers.
[Washington Times, 9-25-95] * A judge in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, jailed
Frank Edward Gould, 48, in November for 45 days on a DUI charge. A police
officer spotted Gould's truck weaving on the highway, and as Gould pulled
into a gas station, the officer drove in behind him. According to the
officer, Gould got out, became disoriented, walked back to the patrol car,
leaned in, and told the officer, "Fill 'er up." [Welland Tribune-CP, Nov95]

* Two men and a woman were arrested in Bentonville, Ark., in December and
charged with kidnapping Jason Stanley for a ransom from his stepfather of
either $200,000 or 50 pounds of marijuana. During his four days of
captivity, Stanley, 6-feet and 155 pounds, was bound in plastic tape and
stored completely within a soft-sided, zippered suitcase which the three
toted around with them in their car. He finally convinced the kidnappers he
would help them commit crimes if only they would unpack him; once free, he
broke away and notified police. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 12-21-95] * In
Peterborough, Ontario, Gerald Dixon, 26, was sentenced to six years in
prison in February for robbing a Bank of Montreal branch. He was arrested a
few hours after the robbery as he attempted to deposit his loot into his
account at the same bank. [Toronto Star-CP, 2-9-96]

* Nashville, Tenn., police were called to a laundromat in January after a
customer reported that a man had come in from the rain, soaking wet, put a
few coins in a dryer, climbed in, and was getting tumble-dried. [The
Tennessean, 1-19-96]

* In October, a Redondo Beach, Calif., police officer arrested a driver
after a short chase and charged him with drunk driving. Officer Joseph
Fonteno's suspicions were aroused when he saw the white Mazda MX-7 rolling
down Pacific Coast Highway with half of a traffic-light pole, including the
lights, lying across its hood. The driver had hit the pole on a median strip
and simply kept driving. According to Fonteno, when the driver was asked
about the pole, he said, "It came with the car when I bought it." [Torrance
Daily Breeze, 10-24-95]

* Among recent drug and booze arrests: Ms. Collie Brown, 86, in Grayson
County, Tex., in December, for bootlegging; Hazel Helen Gessler, 70, in
Ashland, Ore., in August for growing and selling marijuana; and Laurie
Wilder Maschek, 32, St. Tammany Parish (La.) teacher of the year in 1992, in
October for growing marijuana. [Athens Messenger-AP, 12-1-95; USA Today,
8-14- 95; The Oregonian, 10-13-95]

* Donuts in the News: The Los Angeles International Airport police
department opened an investigation over a January incident in which one of
its officers allegedly passed a fatal freeway accident scene, at which no
officer was yet present, in order to continue on his way to the Dough Boy
donut shop for a cup of coffee. And in December, the police chief of Quebec
City, Quebec, ordered his officers to stay away from donut shops during
their breaks so as to improve the department's image. Such was the outcry in
protest that he rescinded the order the first week in January and apologized
to the Dunkin' Donuts chain for using its name generically for "donut shop."
[Torrance Daily Breeze, Feb96] [Globe and Mail, 1-6-96]

WEIRDNUZ.424 (News of the Weird, March 22, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* Former prostitute Jessi Winchester, 53, announced in February that she
would soon file papers declaring her candidacy for Congress from Nevada's
2nd district. (According to the Reno Gazette-Journal, the highest-ranking
elected ex-prostitute was Sausalito, Calif., mayor Sally Stanford in 1972.)
And Mistress Madison, 32, a San Diego dominatrix who operates the Slave Cave
and runs a phone-sex service, is running for Congress in this month's
primary under the banner of Ross Perot's Reform Party. And dominatrix and
former stripper Madame Lash, 50, has campaigned vigorously around Sydney in
her quest for an Australian Senate seat in this month's elections. [Reno
Gazette- Journal, 2-24-96] [San Jose Mercury News-AP, Dec95] [Columbus
Dispatch-AP, 2-7-96]

GREAT ART

* Society of Smoking Artists in San Francisco announced in January a "Butts
for Jesse" campaign to encourage artists with cigarette butts lying around
to send them weekly to anti-arts, pro- tobacco U. S. Sen. Jesse Helms, to
let him know that artists are his friends because they consume higher than
average levels of cigarettes. [San Francisco Chronicle, Feb96]

* British artist Tony Kaye, 43, brought his "Roger" show to San Francisco's
Museum of Modern Art in November. "Roger" consists of a live, homeless man
sitting in a transparent cube so patrons can question him about being
homeless. Kaye plans to sell Roger later as a work of art--which Roger
agreed to in writing before the exhibit opened. Said Roger, "I know that
Tony wouldn't sell me unless he knew I had a good home." [San Francisco
Examiner, 11-19-95]

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT

* In December, officials at the Wellington (New Zealand) City Art Gallery
denied entry to a 9-day-old baby when his mother sought to buy a ticket.
Director Paula Savage said the gallery's policy of not permitting minors
during the exhibit of controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe would
be strictly enforced. [Barrie Examiner-AP, 12-20-95]

* Rudy Terrenal, 58, was convicted of the murder of his Mobil Oil refinery
supervisor David Dawkins in Torrance, Calif., in December and sentenced to
39 years to life. Terrenal claimed he was innocent, that he had gone to
Dawkins to protest being fired, taking a gun but only to commit suicide if
his protest failed. Terrenal testified that he suddenly remembered that he
was Catholic and thus had to set aside his suicide plans, but he remembers
nothing after that. [Daily Breeze, 12-9-95]

                            This country is Nuts!

WEIRDNUZ.425 (News of the Weird, March 29, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* Two notorious prisoners have been productive behind bars recently. The
film "Child, This Is Just a Test by God" opened successfully in the
Philippines starring the popular Robin "Bad Boy" Padilla. The movie was shot
on location in prison because Padilla couldn't get work-release from his
21-year sentence on weapons charges; producers got cooperation by handing
out on- camera roles to prison administrators and guards. And rap singer X
Raided, who has been in jail for four years awaiting trial for murder,
released a new album "Xorcist," which he recorded over a Sacramento, Calif.,
county jail pay phone while listening to music tracks on an adjacent pay
phone. [Sacramento Bee-AP, 1- 13-96] [Option, March-April 1996]

LATEST SURGES OF TESTOSTERONE

* Francis J. Pezzuto, 29, was arrested in February in Sayville, N. Y., on
sexual abuse charges. According to police, Pezzuto showed pictures of
himself nude to several adolescent boys and paid some $20 to $30 to write
their initials on his buttocks with a felt marker and take Polaroid
snapshots of their work. [Columbus Dispatch-AP, 2-21-96]

* Police in Urbandale, Iowa, arrested one of their own in January: Cop,
part-time anti-drug crusader, and part-time girls' basketball coach James R.
Trimble, 43, was charged with trafficking in marijuana and methamphetamine.
According to the Des Moines Register, Trimble was driving around with
"scores" of sex videotapes in his car and had a "sexual device inserted into
his body"--a device that "was connected to a battery pack." (No other
details were revealed.) [Des Moines Register, 1-3-96]

* In Redondo Beach, Calif., hairdresser Joseph R. "Jay" Middleton, 56, was
sentenced to 60 days' community service in February on a charge that he
masturbated while doing a female customer's hair. Middleton had removed his
pants and worked on her hair with his free hand, completing the job because
the customer was too frightened to object. Middleton apparently talked to
himself during the episode, saying, "This is so bad, I can't believe I'm
doing this" and "Bad Jay, bad Jay," while slapping himself on the wrist as
punishment. [The Daily Breeze (Torrance, Calif.), 3-5-96]

* In Burbank, Calif., in February, a 55-year-old man who had placed an ad in
a local bondage and discipline magazine arranged a liaison in his home with
another man. When the man answered his door, the date forced him to crawl
through his house to his bondage room, where the man was tied, nude, to a
"proctologist table." According to police, the date and his accomplice,
waiting outside, then stole the man's sofa, leather chair, TV set, and other
items. [Burbank Leader, 2-25-96]

COURTROOM ANTICS

* Kevin C. Maben, 28, filed a $2 million lawsuit in February against Ripley,
Tenn., county judge Billy Wayne Williams, who is a retired highway patrolman
without legal training, elected to the bench in 1990. Maben said Judge
Williams summarily jailed him for missing car payments despite Tennessee law
that clearly gives Maben the right to a jury trial. Said Judge Williams,
"No, I do not pull [out] the [statute] book on every case that comes up. I'd
be sitting over there [in the law library] 24 hours a day." [The
Tennessean-AP, 2-23-96]

* In January Judge Joel Gehrke found Stewart Marshall guilty in Stanton,
Mich., of throwing his wife to the floor in a domestic quarrel. As
punishment, Gehrke ordered Marshall to hold out his arm, and Gehrke slapped
him on the wrist, saying, "Don't do that." (Judge Gehrke thought the
punishment was appropriate because the fight was in response to Mrs.
Marshall's having had an affair with Marshall's brother and having borne
their son.) [Tampa Tribune-AP, 1-18-96]

* Valdamair Morelos, 35, confessed to murder in 1994 in San Jose, Calif.,
and told the judge he wanted the death penalty, but he was forced to trial
because California law requires one in capital cases. Consequently, at the
trial in January, Morelos occasionally tried to help the prosecution. For
instance, after the prosecutor described the killing to the judge, Morelos
added, "I blindfolded him, too." [San Francisco Examiner-AP, Jan96]

* The U. S. Supreme Court in January rejected the appeal of a convicted drug
possessor in Arizona who had claimed he did not receive a fair trial because
there were no fat people on the jury. [Mesa Tribune-AP, 1-9-96]

WEIRDNUZ.426 (News of the Weird, April 5, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In February, the British Columbia Supreme Court acquitted a 26-year-old
man with a sleep disorder of sexually assaulting a 4- year-old girl because
the assault occurred while he was allegedly asleep. In 1995, a man in
Calgary was acquitted of sexual assault using the same defense, and in 1987,
an Ontario man who stabbed his mother-in-law to death after having driven 20
kilometers on a busy highway to get to her house also proved he had a sleep
disorder and was acquitted on the same ground. [Sault Star-CP, 2-3-96]
Kirchmeir

GOVERNMENT IN ACTION

* A Houston Chronicle investigation published in February revealed that only
rarely does a complaint to the state Board of Examiners of Psychologists
result in suspension or revocation of a license. One Temple, Tex.,
psychologist admitted pointing a gun to his head in a suicide threat,
shooting a gun inside his home, seducing a patient, and carving a pentagram
into his arm with a knife; he's still practicing. While the Board is not
quick to pull licenses, it often requires that troubled psychologists get
psychological counseling. [Dallas Morning News-Houston Chronicle, 2-5-96]

* The Washington Post reported in March that the Department of Agriculture
required Iowa's Oink-Oink, Inc., last year to begin dying green its
best-selling dog treat, Pork Tenderloin (which is made from the penises of
hogs). Oink-Oink thought the green dye would make the product unappealing
and took a $100,000 loss killing the product and enraging dog owners who
loved the treat. The Department's only reason for requiring the dye was so
the treats would be more obviously identified as not for human consumption.
[Washington Post, 3-1-96]

* In October, Pennsylvania Rep. Alan Butkovitz introduced legislation to end
a disparity in state law. Under the unsatisfactory law, a drunk driver who
causes an accident and fails his blood-alcohol test is subject to a felony
charge, but one who manages to flee the scene before the cops get there,
sober up, and turn himself in later is subject only to a misdemeanor.
[Philadelphia Inquirer, 10-3-95]

                           Well, that explains it!

* Former Orange County (Calif.) Treasurer Robert L. Citron, who is awaiting
sentencing for fraud in mishandling the county's finances, said in December
that the reason his investment decisions plunged the county into the biggest
local- government bankruptcy in history in 1994 was the bad advice he had
received on interest rates from a mail-order psychic. The good news for
Citron, according to Anaheim, Calif., channeler Barbara Connor, is that
Citron told her that he learned during two trances last year that he would
receive community service but no jail time for his conviction. [Las Vegas
Review-Journal, 3-13-96]

* Program analysts hired by the CIA to evaluate its $20 million project to
use psychics to gather intelligence concluded in November that the psychics
were accurate about 15% of the time. Among the psychics' tasks were to track
down Moammar Gadhafi so that he could be hit in the 1986 bombing of Libya
and to locate the plutonium squirreled away in North Korea. According to
columnist Jack Anderson, the Pentagon adopted the program in the early 1970s
because the Soviet Union was making extensive use of psychics. [St. Louis
Post-Dispatch-AP, 11-30- 95] Washington Post, Oct95]

* In December, less than three months after he had sold federal land worth
$1 billion in mining rights to a Danish company for $275, Secretary of the
Interior Bruce Babbitt was forced to sell another $2.9 billion piece of land
in Arizona for $1,745. Babbitt is required to make these sales under an 1872
federal law, which Western Senators refuse to change. [Tampa Tribune-AP,
12-2- 95]

OOPS!

* Lowell Altvater, 80, was charged with negligent assault in Sandusky, Ohio,
in November after he thought he saw a rat in his barn and fired his shotgun
at it. It turned out to be his wife's hat, which she was wearing. Mrs.
Altvater begged police not to file charges, but they did, in part because
Lowell had shot himself in the leg in 1992 in the same barn after thinking
then, too, that he had spotted a rat. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel- Toledo
Blade, 12-20-95; Columbus Dispatch, Nov95]

                                   Morons!

* Reading, Pa., county controller Judith Kraines complained at a
commissioners' meeting in January about having to type letters and do other
business on a typewriter because her computer was old and no one had been
able to get it to work for two years. "If we had a computer," she said,
"letters would go out faster." Three days later, she announced that the
computer she was complaining about in fact had not been plugged in to any
electrical outlet and that when the plug was inserted and the computer was
turned on, it worked fine. [Reading Eagle-Times, 1-21-96]

WEIRDNUZ.427 (News of the Weird, April 12, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* Nudity in the news in February: Richmond, Tex., police charged two
teenagers with aggravated robbery; as a ruse to keep from being identified,
they had removed their clothes and walked around the neighborhood pretending
to be carjacking victims who had been robbed and stripped. And Virginia
legislator Robert E. Nelms was arrested for indecent exposure in a Richmond
park; he explained only that "the rushing river had its effect on my
bladder." And 40 people attended the first Christian Nudist Conference in
Longwood, N. C., where both robed and unrobed ministers distributed
communion and naked karaoke was the featured distraction. [Houston
Chronicle, 2-27-96] [Washington Post & .208, 2-23-96] [L. A. Times-AP,
3-3-96]

THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

* Noted championship eater Mort Hurst, who once ate 16 double- deck Moon
Pies in 10 minutes and 38 eggs in 29 seconds (which resulted in a stroke, in
1991), announced in January that he would run for secretary of state of
North Carolina, against race- car legend Richard Petty. Asked if he was
intimidated by Petty's name, Hurst said no: "I been on Paul Harvey's [radio]
show; I don't think Petty has." [Durham Herald-Sun-AP, 1-21-96]

* Noted championship eater Mort Hurst, who once ate 16 double- deck Moon
Pies in 10 minutes and 38 eggs in 29 seconds (which resulted in a stroke, in
1991), announced in January that he would run for secretary of state of
North Carolina, against race- car legend Richard Petty. Asked if he was
intimidated by Petty's name, Hurst said no: "I been on Paul Harvey's [radio]
show; I don't think Petty has." [Durham Herald-Sun-AP, 1-21-96]

* Not a single person voted in the 25th Precinct in Tulsa, Okla., in the
city council primary in February. The county believes no one has lived in
the precinct for 20 years but operates the polling place for 12 hours every
election day because if someone does want to vote and can't, the entire
election could be negated. [Daily Oklahoman-AP, 2-7-96]

* Florida state Rep. Marvin Couch (R Oviedo) resigned in February, a week
after he was arrested on three misdemeanor sex charges. He was caught by
police in his car in a shopping center parking lot at noontime receiving
oral sex from a prostitute. Rep. Couch was a member of a legislators'
prayer-meeting group that called itself the God Squad. [AP wirecopy, 3-1-96]

SEEDS OF OUR DESTRUCTION

* Less noticed than his highly-touted intervention in Bosnia was Assistant
Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke's help in February in defusing an
imminent war between Greece and Turkey. The two nations had amassed troops
and warships for full-scale battle over the isle of Imia, a 10-acre rock in
the Aegean Sea, completely uninhabitable except for a few goats. [Rocky
Mountain News-AP, 1-31-96; Greensboro News & Record-AP, 1-31-96]

* In sociologist Reginald Bibby's 1995 poll of a cross-section of Canadians,
76% of those asked to name Canada's greatest living person either responded
"no one comes to mind" or declined to answer. More recently, Toronto's
Maclean's magazine concluded that Canada's most famous person is Pamela
Anderson of "Baywatch." [Globe and Mail, 1-31-96] [World Press Review,
February 1996]

* The village council of Bruntingthorpe, England, began consideration in
February of an elaborate plan to reduce the amount of dog poop in the town
of 200 people (and 30 dogs): The village would DNA-test the dogs and keep
the results on file for the purpose of matching the DNA to that on any
unscooped dog poop lying around the village, so as to punish scofflaws. [The
Barrie Examiner-CP, 2-26-96]

WEIRDNUZ.430 (News of the Weird, May 3, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

* According to a Reuters News Service report in February, sales are booming
for such businesses as the Baltimore, Md., firm Stocks & Bonds Ltd., which
makes special furniture for people who engage in erotic restraint,
discipline, sadism, and masochism. A primary reason for the upsurge is the
influx of mainstream couples, some of whom even shop while pushing their
kids in strollers. Said another erotic furniture maker, "Some people get
excited about the fact that they might serve coffee to their parents on a
table they used to tie each other to the night before." [Reuter wirecopy,
2-14-96; Paper-San Francisco Chronicle, 4-10-96]

FAMILY VALUES

* William Harasymow, 25, and his brother James, 22, were sentenced to 90
days in jail in Edmonton, Alberta, in January for cultivating marijuana in
their home. According to the brothers, who had never been in trouble with
the law before, the elaborate setup of plants in their basement had been
their father's all- consuming passion until he died two months before, and
the brothers had not yet decided what to do with them. Said William, "You
love your dad. But it sucks. He didn't leave us with much." [Edmonton
Journal, 1-30-96]

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT

* In the last statement given before his February execution in California
for the 1979 sexual mutilation-murders of 14 teenage boys, William George
Bonin said the death penalty "sends the wrong message" to America's youth.
[Greensboro News Record- AP, 2-24-96]

* In February, John Howard opened a Ku Klux Klan museum and apparel store,
called The Redneck Shop, in Laurens, S. Car. Asked by a reporter what the
reaction was by townspeople, Howard said, "The only people I've had a
problem with, who took it as an insult and a racial situation, have been
blacks. I didn't know blacks here were so prejudiced." (Shortly after it
opened, a man in a pickup truck rammed the storefront, shutting Howard
down.) [Louisville Courier-Journal-AP, 3-7-96]

* In March, Judge Philip Mangones in Keene, N. H., declared unconstitutional
a drug-producing search of the dormitory rooms of two Keene State College
students. The students consented to the search, and more than six ounces of
marijuana was found, but the judge said that the men were too stoned to know
what they were doing when they consented. [Exeter News-Letter, 3-5-96]

* According to a March Associated Press story, Multimedia Entertainment,
Inc., producer of the "Jerry Springer" show, recently filed a lawsuit
against four Toronto, Ontario, comedians who had fooled the show's staff and
posed as a couple and their baby-sitter (and her boyfriend) on a show themed
around men who sleep with their children's baby-sitter. Multimedia says such
hoaxes threaten the integrity of daytime talk shows like Springer's. [San
Francisco Chronicle-AP, 4-1-96]

WEIRDNUZ.431 (News of the Weird, May 10, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In April, a judge in Milwaukee threw out the lawsuit of Mary Verdev, 73,
who said she incurred about $90,000 in injuries in 1990 when a Catholic
Church's large bingo board fell over on her. According to Verdev, side
effects of the injuries were that, for the first time, she found herself
attracted to women, and that she subsequently "suffered" spontaneous
orgasms. (Instead of seeking credit for the side effects, the church denied
all responsibility.) [New Haven Register-AP, 4-20-96]

WEIRDNUZ.431 (News of the Weird, May 10, 1996) by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORIES

* In April, a judge in Milwaukee threw out the lawsuit of Mary Verdev, 73,
who said she incurred about $90,000 in injuries in 1990 when a Catholic
Church's large bingo board fell over on her. According to Verdev, side
effects of the injuries were that, for the first time, she found herself
attracted to women, and that she subsequently "suffered" spontaneous
orgasms. (Instead of seeking credit for the side effects, the church denied
all responsibility.) [New Haven Register-AP, 4-20-96]

LEAST COMPETENT PEOPLE

* In April bailiffs at the Brownsville, Tex., jail mistakenly placed a
government witness in a double murder case in the same holding cell with
Jesus Ledesma Aguilar, 32, the man accused of the crimes. Bailiffs then had
to rescue the witness, who was screaming from a beating administered by a
third cellmate, who was allegedly acting on Aguilar's behalf. [Valley
Morning Star, 4-13-96]

WEIRDNUZ.433 (News of the Weird, May 24, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

CLICHES COME TO LIFE

* The Sex Pistols' 1996 reunion tour was delayed in January for a month so
the band members could "rehearse." According to a Virgin Records spokesman,
the members have become such accomplished musicians in the 20 years since
the band folded that they needed practice to get down to their old sound.
[Columbia Tribune-AP, 1-12-96]

WEIRDNUZ.434 (News of the Weird, May 31, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

CAN'T POSSIBLY BE TRUE

* The Italian Justice Ministry admitted in March that a notorious prisoner
had escaped: Palestinian terrorist Youssef Magied al- Molqi, 34, who was
convicted in 1986 for one of the most heinous crimes of the decade--the
Achille Lauro hijacking, during which he shot American Leon Klinghoffer and
pushed him overboard in his wheelchair. Al-Molqi was free on a 12-day leave
for good behavior and failed to return. [Dallas Morning News, 3-3-96]

* In March, The Sunday Oklahoman profiled Oklahoma City homemaker Mary
Clamser, 44, whose deterioration with multiple sclerosis had been abruptly
halted in 1994 when lightning struck her house while she was grasping metal
objects with each hand and wearing her metal leg brace brought on by the
disease. Suddenly, she began walking easily, and though doctors told her the
condition was probably only temporary, she still walks easily today. As if
that weren't enough good luck, Clamser, in order to fly to California for a
TV interview in April 1995, was forced to cancel a local appointment she had
made at the Oklahoma City federal building for 9 a.m. on April 19. [The
Sunday Oklahoman, 3-17-96]

IMPATIENT SPOUSES

* In a Calgary, Alberta, courtroom in April, business executive Earl Joudrie
testified that his wife Dorothy had shot him six times and then ridiculed
his failure to die immediately. After Earl, who was bleeding badly, asked
Dorothy to come sit by him, she replied, "Well, how long is it going to take
you to die?" and "You haven't changed your will, so I'll get everything."
Joudrie said that a few minutes later, Dorothy changed her mind and called
an ambulance. [Globe and Mail, 4-24-96]

* According to a 911 tape played at his preliminary hearing in Las Vegas,
Nev., in March, Roy Holloway called the emergency number because he was
frustrated at his inability to kill his wife. Said he, to the operator,
"I've tried to strangle her about four different ways. She won't die." Asked
the operator, Why are you trying to kill her? "Because I don't like her,"
said Holloway on the tape. Why not just divorce her? "Isn't it a lot easier
just to kill her? But she won't die. [G]od, she keeps breathing." [Las Vegas
Sun, 3-20-96]

THE CONTINUING CRISIS

* In December, a Wall Street Journal report described the "Polish method"
for destroying the 48,000 tanks (that weigh up to 34 tons each) left in
Eastern Europe that must be turned to scrap under a 1990 treaty. Since it is
impractical to blow them up or to melt them, Poland manufactures nine-ton
balls, lifts them with hoists containing electromagnets, and drops them onto
the tanks, flattening them. Said an American diplomat, after the process was
described to him, "Wow, that must be really satisfying." [Wall Street
Journal, 12-26-95]

* In February, three Army recruiters in Leesburg, Fla., were jailed after
they trashed the adjacent Navy recruiting office with a crowbar, injuring
two Marines, because a female potential Army recruit had been given a better
deal by the Navy. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution-AP, 2-23-96]

UPDATE

* In May, Minneapolis artist Judy Olausen's hardcover photographic essay,
Mother, finally hit the bookstores. Olausen's project made News of the Weird
in June 1993 as a work-in-progress, after she took her initial photos,
featuring her mother, then 70, portrayed in a series of a passive,
subordinate characters. Included were her mother kneeling on all fours with
a pane of glass on her back ("Mother as Coffee Table") and lying alongside a
highway ("Mother as Road Kill"). Said Olausen in 1992, "My brothers think
I'm torturing my mother," but actually, "I'm immortalizing her." [U. S. News
& World Report, 5-6-96; Advertising Age Creativity (supplement), 7-6-92]

WEIRDNUZ.435 (News of the Weird, June 7, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORIES

* In May, a federal judge in Beaumont, Tex., issued a permanent injunction
against the Quadro Corp. of Harleyville, S. Car., which had been selling a
plastic box with an antenna on it to government agencies and schools for up
to $8,000 each as an illegal-drug finder. FBI tests had found the devise
merely a piece of plastic, utterly incapable of detecting drugs or anything
else. However, several law enforcement officers and school principals swore
to the judge that the Quadro Tracker worked for them. [Dallas Morning
News-AP, May96]

UH-OH

* After a four-day trial in Greensburg, Pa., in March, Sarah M. Milliken,
48, lost her lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation
for alleged, lingering back injuries she suffered in 1991 when her car
skidded out of control on an icy spot in the road. She was done in by a
videotape supplied by her now-estranged husband, showing her a year after
the accident in a bathing suit wrestling with another woman in a vat of
coleslaw during Biker Week in Daytona Beach, Fla. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
3-22-96]

CULTURAL DIVERSITY: IRAN

* In May militant Muslims attacked the director of the Chitgar sports center
outside Tehran and ransacked the grounds in protest of the center's policy
of allowing women to ride bicycles on the premises. The militants believe
women should not cycle at all in public because it is "provocative." [Globe
and Mail-AP, 5-3-96]

* Two days later, about 60 Muslim activists wrecked a Tehran theater that
was showing an Iranian film, "Indian Souvenir," that featured a four-minute
scene of little girls dancing at a wedding. (The militants believe females
should dance only in the company of females.) [Edmonton Journal-AP, 5-7-96]

WELL-PUT

* In January, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal rejected the argument of a
defendant that a particular piece of evidence against him at trial should
not have been admitted. In the case of State vs. Marles, the trial court had
permitted testimony from a police officer that the defendant, immediately
upon his arrest for sexual assault, defecated in his pants; the prosecutor
had argued that that information was properly admitted under the traditional
doctrine of admitting a defendant's "excited utterance[s]." [Marles v.
State, 04-94-00629-CR (San Antonio), in Texas Lawyer Weekly Case Summaries,
1-29-96]

UPDATE

* Mikey Sproul, age 3, made News of the Weird in 1993 when, in the space of
six weeks, he smashed up the family car (and two others) with a late-night
drive near Tampa, Fla., and accidentally burned down the family home. (He
was a reporter's delight, as well, with his easy quotability: "I go zoom"
and "Now I have no more house.") In April 1996, Mikey (now age 6)
accidentally burned his mother's current house in Tampa--resulting in
$45,000 in damages--but this time had no statement for the press. [Tampa
Tribune, 4-16-96]

WEIRDNUZ.436 (News of the Weird, June 14, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORIES

* Woe unto the Perfectionist: U. S. Attorney Kendall Coffey of Miami, Fla.,
resigned in May. He reportedly bit a topless dancer on the arm at a
nightclub to which he had gone to drown his sorrows after losing the big
"Los Muchachos" cocaine-smuggling case. And in May in North Brunswick, N.
J., police charged Rutgers Univ. math professor Walter Petryshyn, 67, with
bludgeoning his wife to death. A friend said Petryshyn had become despondent
recently because he feared his career had been ruined by an error in his
latest textbook, Generalized Topological Degree and Semilinear Equations.
[St. Petersburg Times, 5-18-96] [New York Daily News, 5-8-96]

* The Bjorer Kagoj newspaper in Bangladesh reported that about 100 criminals
attended the nation's first conference of muggers on April 23. The
association decided that the city of Dhaka was prosperous enough to support
a doubling of their daily ripoffs, from 60 to 120. The leader, Mohammad
Rippon, was acclaimed "Master Hijacker" by the group for his record of 21
muggings in a two-hour period. [San Francisco Chronicle-Reuters, 4-24-96]

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

* The Floyd County (Ky.) coroner complained in February that ambulance
drivers were taking obviously-dead people to the hospital just so they could
bill the county for rides. One man was rushed to the hospital even though
his suicide shotgun blast was so powerful that it blew both eyeballs out of
their sockets. Another had been dead so long that rigor mortis had
commenced, leaving the body bent at the waist so that it would not fit on a
stretcher, but the driver said he thought he felt a pulse. [Lexington
Herald-Ledger, 2-15-96]

* In January, the New York City Parks Department, which controls permits for
vendors on park land, doubled the annual fee for the hot dog pushcart that
had the exclusive license for the spot just south of the steps of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art--to $288,200 a year. [ARTnews, April 1996]

I DON'T THINK SO

* A Hong Kong woman, So Lai-kan, said she would appeal a shoplifting
conviction (which means taking her case to the Privy Council in England)
because a Hong Kong judge did not believe her claim that the reason she
walked out of a department store in March wearing two bras was because it
was cold. [Bangkok Post, 3-4-96]

UPDATE

* Urbandale, Iowa, police officer James R. Trimble made News of the Weird
after his arrest in January, when he was caught driving around in his car
with a battery-operated "sexual device inserted into his body." Police said
Trimble took $20,000 worth of methamphetamine from the department's evidence
locker and also had marijuana, cocaine, and LSD in his car when he was
arrested, along with "scores" of sexually-explicit videotapes and photos. In
May, Trimble was "sentenced" to probation, a $1,000 fine, and 100 hours'
community service. Though the police department fired him, his community
service will consist of what he used to do as an officer--give anti-drug
motivational speeches in local schools. [Des Moines Register, 5-17-96]

WEIRDNUZ.437 (News of the Weird, June 21, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORIES * In May, Valentin Grimaldo, 40, who was bitten by a poisonous
coral snake near Encino, Tex., survived by biting the snake's head off,
slitting its body lengthwise, and using the skin for a tourniquet until help
arrived. [McAllen Monitor, 5-11-96]

WEIRDNUZ.439 (News of the Weird, July 5, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORIES

* Middle East Obsessions: According to the new Judith Miller book, God Has
Ninety-Nine Names, Muammar Qaddafi seriously pined for Bush Administration
State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutweiler. And London's Sunday
Telegraph reported in December that Syria's defense minister, Lt. Gen.
Mustafa Tlass, continues to bombard Princess Diana with love letters. His
library is said to be decorated with her pictures and to contain the world's
largest collection of books about her. [Wall Street Journal, May96]
[Edmonton Sun-AP, 12-17-95]

* Among the grossest problems created by the District of Columbia's
financial crisis is the condition of the city's morgue. The Washington Post
reported in May that 74 bodies were stockpiled because the crematorium (the
only affordable disposal method) is broken and that the city is backlogged
with more than 200 autopsies and 400 toxicology analyses. Furthermore,
reported the Post, in the autopsy rooms, the air conditioning is broken,
cockroaches run free on autopsy tables, the floor is sticky with blood and
other bodily fluids because drains are clogged, and corpses are exposed in
torn bodybags. (And, of course, there's the stench.) [Washington Post,
5-25-96]

GREAT ART

* The Wall Street Journal reported in March that New York City photographer
(and former Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman) Eugene Calamari Jr. is a
part-time performance artist who lies on the floor and lets people vacuum
him with an upright cleaner, after which he asks the vacuumers to write down
their feelings. Calamari says, "A lot of people use each other and step on
each other's rights," and says his theme is "I won't let anyone do this to
me." [Wall Street Journal, 3-27-96]

THE WEIRDO AMERICAN COMMUNITY

* In April the Foothill Leader newspaper (La Crescenta, Calif.) profiled
local man Ludovit "Fanman" Salka, 77, prominent for having waged a 28-year
war against his neighbors, who he says manufacture drugs in their houses. In
the beginning, he would call the police, but after they repeatedly found no
evidence of drugs in any of the homes, they started arresting Salka.
Nowadays, Salka is on his own, screeching at neighbors at all hours of the
day and night; he must yell to be heard over the roar of a dozen industrial
fans on his property, which he says are necessary to blow away the drug
fumes. [Foothill Leader, 4-3- 96]

WEIRDNUZ.440 (News of the Weird, July 12, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATES

* Mark Steele, a Massachusetts candidate for the U. S. House, is on
probation for setting a business afire to collect insurance payments (and as
part of his platform lectures voters to take greater personal
responsibility). [Boston Globe-AP, 6-5-96]

* Bill Yellowtail, running for the U. S. House from Montana, was revealed to
have had his Montana state senate pay docked in the 1980s for child-support
payments and to have kept secret his expulsion from Dartmouth College for
burglary convictions. [Rocky Mountain News-AP, 6-1-96]

* State Sen. Charles Davidson, who had announced for a U. S. House seat in
Alabama, dropped out after flak from a floor speech in May in which he
defended slavery as ordained by God. [Northwest Florida Daily News, 5-10-96]

* Bill Levinger, challenging Idaho's militia-defending U. S. Rep. Helen
Chenoweth in the primary, appeared on a public-affairs show TV show in
April, stripped down to his underwear, offered the host $5,000 for a kiss,
and played with a toy elephant and rolls of $100 bills. [Washington Post,
4-22-96]

WON'T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER

* Engineering professor Valery Fabrikant, serving a life sentence for
shooting to death four colleagues at Concordia University in Canada in 1992,
continues his professional publishing career from prison. His latest
article, "Complete Solution to the Problem of an External Circular Crack in
a Transversely Isotropic Body Subjected to Arbitrary Shear Loading,"
appeared in a recent issue of the International Journal of Solids and
Structures, and Fabrikant requested that comments be addressed to him in
prison. [Frank magazine (Canada), 4-10-96]

WEIRDNUZ.441 (News of the Weird, July 19, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* Two girls at the Mount St. Mary Academy in Little Rock, Ark., were not
permitted at their graduation ceremony in May because of a school ruling
barring pregnant students. Girls who have had abortions are not barred from
the ceremony. [USA Today, 5-29-96]

THE LITIGIOUS SOCIETY

*In January, Jacquelynne Stafford filed a $300,000 lawsuit against the White
Marsh (Md.) YMCA because a runner crashed into her at 2nd base during a
league softball game, breaking her collarbone, when league rules require the
runner to slide. In response to Stafford's lawsuit, the YMCA then sued the
runner, his manager, the umpire, and the company that paid for the team's
T-shirts for not assuring that the sliding rule was adhered to. [Washington
Times, 1-30-96]

* Diana J. Nagy filed a lawsuit in Charleston, W. Va., against the
manufacturer of the golf cart from which her husband fell to his death after
he had been drinking during a tournament at the Berry Hills Country Club.
She claimed the cart ought to have had seat belts and doors. Mrs. Nagy's son
was driving the cart so she also sued him. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 6-13-96]

* In May, the U. S. Supreme Court rejected the claim made in 1992 by Ms.
Bobby June Griggs that South Carolina Electric and Gas Company owes her for
a nervous breakdown she suffered. Griggs entered a rice-recipe cook-off but
became stressed and had to seek psychiatric help when the company, against
her wishes, subsequently published the recipes of all contest entrants.
[Miami Herald, 5-23-96]

* In March, a woman filed a lawsuit against Israel's Channel 2 and its
weatherman Danny Rup for about $1,000 because of an erroneous forecast. Rup
had predicted sun, and the subsequent rainstorm, said the woman, caused her
flu and resulted in four days' missed work and $38 in medications.
[Arlington (Va.) Journal, 3-18-96]

* In January, Kevin McGuinness, who flunked out of the University of New
Mexico medical school, filed a lawsuit accusing the school of failing to
accommodate him under the Americans with Disabilities Act. McGuinness said
his disability is that he is very anxious when he takes exams and
consequently doesn't do very well on them. [Albuquerque Journal, 1-4-96]

AWESOME, DUDE!!!

* On May 6 in Escondido, Calif., a wrecking ball came loose from a crane
traveling on an overpass and rolled away and down to the freeway below as
the crane kept on going. A van drove over the cable connecting the ball with
the crane, and the cable wrapped itself around the van's rear axle. In a few
seconds, the cable was pulled taut, causing the van to spin around like a
top, then be hurled straight up into the bottom of the overpass. (The van's
driver was hospitalized.) [San Diego Union Tribune, 5-7- 96]

WEIRDNUZ.442 (News of the Weird, July 26, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORY

* In a June Washington Post story on infant actors in the TV industry,
children's advocate Paul Petersen said that in 1995, premature twins born
two months early were used in a live-birth scene on the program "ER" only
one month after their actual birth (and thus only eight months after
conception). They were smeared with cream cheese and jelly to simulate the
look of babies at birth. [Washington Post, 6-6-96]

OOPS!

* Latest Highway Truck Spills: 500 gallons of hydrochloric acid onto
Interstate 10 near Lake Charles, La., in June; 300 gallons of chicken fat on
U. S. 41 near Robards, Ky., in May; a ton and a half of chicken guts in
Dobson, N. C., in May; several barrels of flea powder in Hopkinsville, Ky.,
in April; 6,000 pounds of margarine on Interstate 35 in Oklahoma City in May
(as The Daily Oklahoman reported, "Margarine Clogs Major Artery"); and a
load of toilets in June near Silverthorne, Colo. [Tyler Morning
Telegraph-AP, 6-17-96][Louisville Courier-Journal, 5- 30-96] [Columbia
Tribune-AP, 5-2-96] [Kentucky New Era, 4- 16-96] [Daily Oklahoman, May96]
[Denver Post, 6-24-96]

WEIRDNUZ.443 (News of the Weird, August 2, 1996)
by Chuck Shepherd

LEAD STORIES

* In June, firefighters in El Cajon, Calif., had to rescue Heather Jaehn,
25, who had locked herself out of her house and then had gotten stuck in the
chimney trying to climb in. Four days later, Felix Rivera, 33, got stuck in
a rooftop vent while allegedly burglarizing a San Antonio, Tex., convenience
store to get a beer and had to be rescued by firefighters before police
could arrest him. [San Diego Union Tribune, 6-18-96] [San Antonio Express-
News, 6-22-96]

* Latest Dysfunctional Family: In May, the Tennessee Supreme Court ordered a
new trial for Hixson, Tenn., Baptist preacher Don McCary, who had been
sentenced to 72 years in prison for 13 sex offenses against four teenage
boys. His twin brother, Ron, had been serving time with him at the prison in
Pikeville, Tenn., for raping a 6-year-old boy, and their older brother,
Richard, a former pastor, is still wanted by authorities after pleading
guilty to molesting four boys in the 1980s. [AP wirecopy, 6-25-96]

POLICE BLOTTER

* From a May crime report in the Huntington, W. Va., Herald- Dispatch: A
17-year-old pizzeria employee was arrested for DUI at night after the store
closed, and his boss was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a
minor. According to the boss, "[I]t is hard to pay people and I let him
drink beer at [the pizzeria], so that he will work for free." [Huntington
Herald- Dispatch, 5-2-96]

* Life Imitates Magazine Ads: In March, David Lee Smith, 41, was charged
with burglary in North Knoxville, Tenn., after he broke into a home and
demanded milk to drink. The occupant complied with the request and then
discreetly called the police from another room. A few minutes later,
officers arrived and easily distinguished Smith from the occupant, they
later said, because of the ring of milk around Smith's mouth. [Knoxville
News-Sentinel, 3-25-96]

* In June, according to La Vergne, Tenn., police Sgt. Carl McMillen, a man
called 911 to summon officers to his home to stop his wife from pouring out
all of his beer following a domestic dispute. [Tennessean, Jun96]

THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

* In June, a grand jury on Long Island (N. Y.) returned indictments against
three men who allegedly plotted to poison Suffolk County officials with
radioactive substances in their food. The three men, John J. Ford, Joseph
Mazzuchelli, and Edward Zabo, believe that a UFO crashed on Long Island in
1995 and was being covered up by the government, and eliminating the
officials would make it easier for the three men to gain power and expose
the crash. Said district attorney James M. Catterson, "This all convinces me
that there is a side to humanity that defies definition." [New York Times,
6-22-96]

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[-------] jeremym@andrew.cmu.edu, last updated 27 Jul 1996.