News of the Weird

-- According to a report in The People newspaper in London in July, British spies who set up high-tech clandestine cameras to gain intelligence on the Irish Republican Army discovered that the cameras also recorded much kinky sex. The newspaper said the British government is planning to use some sex scenes, including episodes in which IRA leaders have sex with the wives of their jailed comrades, in an upcoming propaganda campaign.

-- Kids Lacking "Quality Time": Brian Smith, 42, was charged in Cassville, Mo., in July with locking his three kids in 55-gallon drums during the day while he was at work. And Jeffrey Hoveland, 50, pleaded guilty in St. Paul, Minn., in July to using an electrified dog collar to punish his two sons, ages 9 and 11. And Jan and Joyce Duplantis were arrested in New Orleans in June and charged with forcing their two female wards, ages 8 and 9, to live outside in a crude playhouse so as not to mess up their apartment.

-- In June, the Houston Health and Human Services Department warned of a local diarrhea outbreak caused by cyclospora. The department said two clusters of cases had been reported, the first among a group of executives of the natural gas industry meeting at a local club.

-- In June, the Arkansas State Medical Board ordered Waldo, Ark., family physician Jewel Byron Grimmett Jr. to start keeping written records. At a hearing, Grimmett told board members that he has kept all patient histories, including prescription records, only in his head for the 35 years he has been practicing medicine. Grimmett avoided license revocation because he is Waldo's only doctor and because, according to him, he treats about half his patients for free.

-- In March, after the parents of Huang Pin-jen, 27, and Chang Shu-mei, 26, of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, refused to bless their wedding, the couple opted for suicide. They drove a car off a cliff (but survived), tried to hang themselves (but survived), and leaped from atop a 12-story building (but survived, landing on an adjacent roof, suffering multiple fractures). In April, the parents reconsidered.

-- On May 23, the bodies of two Dominican Republic nationals were discovered, one near JFK Airport in Long Beach, N.Y., and the other about 10 miles from Miami (Fla.) International Airport. Both had grease marks, and after investigations, police in both places said they believed the men had fallen from the wheel wells of airliners, where they had stowed away hoping for illegal entry into the United States.

-- Fifteen New York City police officers were indicted in July and as many as 700 other city employees are under investigation for not paying federal taxes. The cops had bought fake-legal-gibberish documents (for $900 to $2,000 each) from scam artists who had convinced them that, despite the fact that they were police officers, they could legally claim not to be subject to government jurisdiction. (In the document, the officers were "nonimmigrant nonresidents" who are "alien to the United States.") In each case, the city payroll office unquestioningly accepted the form and did not withhold federal tax, in some cases for up to four years.

-- Oslo, Norway, police inspector Leif Ole Topnes admitted in July that "our body-search techniques aren't good enough." He was commenting on a male prisoner's having been locked up for two weeks in the women's jail despite having been "body-searched" at the Sola Airport and then "strip-searched" at the jail. The man was wearing female makeup and had hormone-treatment breasts, but Topnes admitted that otherwise he was obviously a man and should have been detected as such.

-- Jeffrey J. Pyrcioch, 19, and an alleged accomplice were arrested in West Lafayette, Ind., in May on theft and fraud charges. Pyrcioch allegedly cashed checks that he had written with disappearing ink, apparently believing the checks would be blank by the time they were presented to the bank for collection. However, traces of ink remained, and police said Pyrcioch would have a better chance of getting away with it if he had not used checks pre-printed with his name and account number on them.

-- In April, Edward Lopez, 19, and Eric Harb, 18, were arrested in Lincolnwood, Ill., after police were called to a Summit department store. According to a clerk, the two men had approached him and asked politely if he would permit them to pay for clothes with a stolen credit card.

-- Columbus, Ohio, police arrested Timothy E. Lebo, 39, and Charles J. Kinser, 32, around 5 a.m. on June 5 and charged them with ripping an ATM out of a bank's wall and attempting to carry it away in the trunk of their car. When questioned by police, the pair tried to convince officers that the ATM was a washing machine.

-- In March, in Clawson, Mich., and in January, in Federal Way, Wash., parents mistakenly packed cans of Bud Ice beer in their elementary schoolchildren's lunchboxes. They said they confused the Bud Ice with a Hawaiian Punch can (Clawson) and a holiday can of Pepsi (Federal Way).

-- Ms. Terry Klemann, 42, received several traffic citations and was ticketed for filing a false report after her car rammed two pickup trucks in Belleville, Ill., in July. An apparently serious Klemann steadfastly maintained that her cocker spaniel, Mutzie 2, had gotten behind the wheel and maneuvered the car into the trucks. Later, she told the Belleville News-Democrat that several years ago the original Mutzie had driven Klemann's friend's car into a tree in New York City.

-- Although Los Angeles police-beating victim Rodney King was convicted in Alhambra, Calif., in July of misdemeanor hit-and-run for injuring his estranged wife by driving away while her arm was still reaching into his car, he was acquitted of more serious charges, including assault with a deadly weapon. Outside the courtroom, a triumphant King told reporters, "I'm going to Disneyland."

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com.)

-- In June, radio station WWAX-FM in the Duluth, Minn., suburb of Hermantown began an all-commercials format. Said general manager J. Thomas Lijewski, commercials are an "art form that deserves to be respected." The station will air vintage ads, odd local and national ads, and bloopers, in addition to revenue-producing commercials.

-- In July in Dadeville, Ala., Mr. Gabel Taylor, 38, who had just prevailed in an informal Bible-quoting contest, was shot to death by the loser. �

-- In an April Associated Press story, Levent Yueksel's and wife Sherri Kane's 32-seat Dardanelles restaurant in Philadelphia was profiled, not for its food but for its attitude: According to a sign in the window, the restaurant refuses to serve "negative people" (who are also referred to in the sign as "assholes"). Say Yueksel and Kane, that includes people who smoke, who are rude, who demand their food in a hurry, or who want the music turned down. The owners say they insist on respect "for the people who feed you."

-- The magazine Tokyo Weekender, reporting in late 1995 on the specialty-bra rage in Japan, cited The Triumph Co.'s "Body-Warmth Bra Two-Cup Ozeki." As padding, the bra contains a waterproof pocket sealed with a cork stopper and which comes with about 40 cc's of sake, which will warm to body temperature in about an hour.

-- Malaysian Gurcharan Singh announced in April that he was marketing a breakthrough, $40 "disposable circumcision device" approved by Muslim religious authorities. It is described as resembling a corkscrew and is called the Tara Klamp.

-- Recently, Budapest, Hungary, novelty shopkeeper Ferenc Kovacs, 45, introduced condoms that, when unrolled, play one of two tunes ("Arise, Ye Worker" or "You Sweet Little Dumbbell").� And Marc Snyder of Oakland, Calif., has marketed a $3.95 talking condom using similar technology but with message options ("You turn me on" or "I love you" or "Thank you for your business"). And a food company executive in Poland, Dariusz Napierala, announced in May that he will soon offer a "tourist survival kit" of canned meat, plastic utensils, tea and a condom.

-- Frank Fradella of Boynton Beach, Fla., charges $50 for custom-made, two-page love letters and poetry ("My words ... on your lips"). In February, a Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reporter found several male customers who praised Fradella's work even though their women had left them.

-- In June, federal inmate Arthur Morrison, who had served 46 months of his 51-month sentence for threatening former girlfriends, finally got his wish to withdraw his guilty plea to those charges, to go to trial, and to be his own lawyer. New York City prosecutors said their evidence (including audiotapes) is still overwhelming and that they would seek a sentence of at least 15 years. Morrison acknowledged that his chances of prevailing at trial were slim.

-- Earlier this year, Michael J. Lewis Sr., serving time in Missouri for a gas station robbery, called the county attorney's office just out of curiosity, to find out why he had never been prosecuted for a 1993 bank robbery with which he had been charged. The prosecutor discovered that the file had been misplaced and that only a few months remained to bring Lewis to trial before the statute of limitations would run out. In June, Lewis, already serving 10 years, plea-bargained to another 10.

-- Last year, at a reception for the African/African-American Summit Inc. conference in Senegal (a conference attended by Jesse Jackson and the late Ron Brown), the Club Med Senegal resort staged a skit in which two white staff members appeared in blackface, with white lips, garish clothes and white gloves to perform a musical number, and a riot nearly ensued. (In May 1996, offended organizations and individuals filed a $5 million lawsuit against Club Med in New York City.)

-- In March in North Adams, Mass., on a public-access cable TV program about papier-mache masks, Ms. Royce Patton, 28, abruptly changed the subject and accused a former neighbor of allowing two of her kids to have sex. Patton named the family, ran a video of all of the woman's seven children, and used obscenities in describing them. The former neighbor said the dispute with Patton was really over loans of money and a bottle of suntan lotion.

-- In April, a 17-year-old boy drowned in the indoor pool at the Henry VIII Hotel in a suburb of St. Louis, Mo. The boy had jumped in with several others, but no one noticed that he had gone under because the pool's water was so murky that visibility was only three to four feet.

A senior aide to Liberian factional leader Charles Taylor, explaining to The New York Times in April why this year's civil war is more civil than earlier ones: "In the past, fighters would rip out people's intestines and use them to string up roadblocks. This time there has been none of that."

When News of the Weird first mentioned Corky Ra's Summum Inc. in 1988, the Salt Lake City company had just begun the business of mummifying dead pets and had only the dream of someday mummifying dead people, which Ra figured he could do for $7,000 ($18,000 for a mummified bronzed statue). According to a June 1996 story in the San Jose Mercury News, Ra has so far serviced three dozen dogs, cats and birds, and has a customer list of 137 humans (the oldest of which is 54) who want someday to be mummified. His chief associate supposedly has practiced on more than 2,000 roadkill animals and on 30 cadavers purchased from a medical school. The price for humans now starts at $30,000, and bronzing could run into six figures.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com.)

-- 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 convenience store to get a beer and had to be rescued by firefighters before police could arrest him.

-- 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 teen-age 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.

-- 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."

-- In May, Domenico Germano, 32, was sentenced to four years probation and ordered to reimburse a bank more than $5,000 in repairs. Six months earlier, after becoming frustrated that the bank's ATM would not give him any money, he pulled a gun and put four shots into it.

-- In June a judge in Anderson, Ind., first set bail at $10,000 for Virldeen Redmon, 67, who had been arrested for public intoxication and driving with a suspended license. However, he raised the bail to $100,000 when he saw Redmon's record: He has been arrested nearly 400 times on alcohol charges since 1947, had his driver's license suspended 33 times between 1947 and 1976, and had his license suspended "for life" in 1977.

-- 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.

-- 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.

-- In May, Stanford University won the right, over the University of California at Berkeley, to house the literary legacy of the late Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning writer William Saroyan, apparently because it also agreed to take custody of Saroyan's nonliterary property. Because Saroyan was a compulsive collector, his nonliterary archives include, among other things, hundreds of boxes of rocks, matchbook covers, old newspapers (numbering in the thousands), labels peeled off cans, and a plastic bag filled with about 10,000 rubber bands.

-- 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."

-- In June, the man who has stalked singer Barbara Mandrell for 15 years, Ed Carlson, was convicted of trespassing at Mandrell's home in Nashville, Tenn., and was given a suspended sentence provided he returns home to Minnesota. According to Mandrell's husband, Carlson has sent the singer such things over the years as a case of corn flakes, dirty clothes, four bicycles and a rusty wrench.

-- In his recent book, "Cosmic Voyage," Courtney Brown, a young, tenured political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, claims he has used the technique of "remote viewing" to travel visually through space and time, to observe another galaxy, and to talk with Jesus. Brown, pointing to his impressive resume (which includes a stint at the Jimmy Carter Center), defends his work against skeptics: "I'd be crazy if I went public with something like this without being certain about what's going on." Since he believes there is a Martian civilization in New Mexico, he admits that if NASA's probe of Mars next year contradicts him, "I'd be dead as an academic."

-- In May, a Portuguese-American, Dr. Manuel Luciano da Silva, spoke at the Newport (R.I.) Public Library, delivering his 327th largely unpersuasive lecture on the reasons why he believes Portugal discovered America even before Columbus was born.

-- In June a judge in Burbank, Calif., ordered Vincent Paul Fanelli II to stand trial for raping six prostitutes. According to the police, each attack began with Fanelli scolding the woman for being a prostitute and then spanking her.

Recent Afghanistan immigrant Mohammad Kargar made News of the Weird in November 1994 when he was charged in Portland, Maine, with sexual abuse for kissing the penis of his 18-month-old son, an event that was reported to authorities by neighborhood kids. Kargar and many Afghani-Americans testified that such affection is common in Afghanistan until the boy is 3 or 4 years old, but Kargar was convicted, anyway. In June 1996, the Maine Supreme Court accepted the cultural argument and overturned the conviction.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com.)