News of the Weird

-- Speed Bumps in the News: In July, one or more residents of Wabash Avenue in Medford, Ore., installed their own professional-looking (but illegal) speed bump on a street where residents had long complained unsuccessfully to the government about speeding. And a city official in Culemborg, Netherlands, bought six sheep in July and stationed them on a busy road at rush hour in order to slow down commuter traffic. And in August, a Pennsylvania highway road crew inexplicably repaved state road 895 directly over a dead deer near the town of Andreas.

-- Guns 'n' Genitals: Sterling Heights, Mich., police said in August that a 24-year-old man needed 16 stitches after accidentally shooting himself in the penis while asleep in bed. And in Cincinnati in August, Carolyn Hutchinson, 35, was shot in the leg in a restroom when her gun fell out of her underpants and discharged when hitting the floor. She said she had forgotten that it was there.

-- The Washington Post reported in July that official statistics apparently show that about 5 percent of women in the Army are pregnant at any given time, and that that number held up among women stationed in the Persian Gulf during the war and stationed in Bosnia over the last year.

-- The Associated Press reported in August on the frequent journeys of German graffiti-sprayers ("taggers") to practice their art in New York City. Said "Neon," a 25-year-old man from Cologne, "It's like a pilgrimage to the birthplace. We want to know our roots." And on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, on Aug. 18, a "Pump Up the Volume" battle of car stereos was held.

-- According to St. Paul, Minn., law student Michael Ravnitsky, who began requesting FBI files on famous dead people in 1991, the bureau kept files on Clark Gable, Babe Ruth, Norman Rockwell, Wyatt Earp, the deaf and blind Helen Keller (118 pages -- of which 74 are still protected 28 years after her death) and entertainer Arthur Godfrey, whose divorce Ravnitsky said was intriguing to the bureau: "Mrs. Godfrey was very quiet, shy and reserved," wrote an agent, "whereas [Godfrey] had been an extrovert."

-- In July, a senior surgeon at Bangkok's Siriraj Hospital told reporters that Thailand was probably the pre-eminent country in the world for penis-reattachment surgery. Said Dr. Surasak Maungsombat, whose team has performed 30 such surgeries since 1978, "It seems that some Thai women just can't tolerate extramarital affairs and do this, which is different from women elsewhere who would just divorce their unfaithful husbands."

-- In August, New York City's Village Voice reported that police had identified J. Michael Payte, a senior managing director of the Wall Street firm Bear, Stearns, as the man suspected in dozens of episodes of consensual sex play that he turned into sadistic torture. Victims complained that they were beaten, suffocated, mummified in duct tape, forced to inhale drugs, forcibly given alcohol enemas, suspended on a rack for days, and burned and scarred with candle wax. One victim said Payte told him, "This

is fucked up, but I can't control it" and "I can't believe I'm doing this to you." Payte resigned from the company shortly before he was identified.

-- In July, Jason Harte pleaded guilty to smashing glass doors in a New York City building with a slingshot. He is a principal in the Adam Glass Co. of Yonkers, N.Y., and is suspected by police of breaking hundreds of other windows in order to solicit business. And in August in Miami, Al Rubin and his son Steven were sentenced to prison for arranging the swastika-painting and vandalizing of buses at a Jewish school in order to get business for their repair shop.

-- In 1987 in Newark, N.J., Eastern Air Lines baggage handler James Henry Lisk was accused in a theft of $650,000 from an airliner but drew sympathy by claiming that an accident just before his arraignment left him mute and unable to care for himself. Local prosecutors wanted to drop the case out of compassion, but the FBI persisted. In April 1996, a jury rejected Lisk's hoax and convicted him, rendering useless the nine electroshock treatments he had voluntarily endured to further his ruse.

-- In a federal court in Boston in July, Phillip W. Cappella, 34, was sentenced to two years' probation for tax fraud. After winning the Massachusetts Megabucks lottery, Cappella attempted to evade income tax on the first of his $135,000 annual payments by falsely claiming gambling losses of $65,000 to offset much of the income. When faced with an IRS audit, Cappella paid a lottery-ticket collector $500 to rent him a pickup-truckload of 200,000 old, losing tickets that he tried to pass off as his own.

-- The Los Angeles Times reported in April on a pioneering class project at the Claremont, Calif., Harvey Mudd College, in which students aimed to develop an alternative, manure-based fuel supply for peasants in a Guatemalan village where firewood is scarce. In order to produce realistic, village-based waste, one student was designated to eat only beans, rice and tortillas for a week. However, the diet made him constipated, and the project was scrapped when it could not be completed by the due date.

A 32-year-old man was buried under several tons of sand after falling into a sand-washing machine in Volant, Pa., in June. And a 50-year-old construction worker died after being hit on the head by a three-ton jackhammer in the Bronx, N.Y., in July. And a recycling center worker was crushed to death in the aluminum can crushing machine in Sewanee, Tenn., in August.

In July Robert Meier, 55, was arrested for fraud and theft in Tampa, Fla., for a sham marriage to a comatose woman and for his subsequent purchases of almost $20,000 on her credit cards. According to a sheriff's detective, Meier said the woman's dog told him that the woman would want him to use her credit cards to live a better life after she died.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (5) The bank robber making his getaway who hails a passing car, only to discover that the driver is a plainclothes police officer, who arrests him, as happened to a bank robber in Etobicoke, Ontario, in July; and (6) The political candidate who dies during the campaign but still wins, as did the late Don Gnirk, who turned back challenger Bert Olson in a South Dakota state senate primary in June.

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

-- Pushing the Envelope in Police Sex Stings: In April, a sheriff's spokesman in Fort Collins, Colo., admitted that police officers actually engaged in sex with prostitutes during a January sting instead of making the arrest at the point at which the women agreed to have sex for money. Said the spokesman, "[T]he officers thought they needed to do what they did to make the case." And in June, North Carolina's Alcohol Law Enforcement agents in Jacksonville made similar admissions. One agent testified that he put his fingers on a woman's genitals in order to "feel it occurring." Said ALE's lawyer, "If this wasn't the proper role of law enforcement, I don't know what is."

-- Contest Mania: In July, Pepsi Cola was sued by a Lynnwood, Wash., man who took seriously the company's light-hearted offer to redeem 7 million premium points for a Harrier fighter jet in a "Pepsi Stuff" promotion. And in August, a federal appeals court in St. Louis forced Nationwide Insurance Co. to award a slogan-contest-winning ex-employee "his-and-hers" Mercedes-Benzes despite the company's claim that it was just kidding. And in July, David Lee filed a lawsuit against the Cafe Santa Fe in Rogers, Ark., after it denied him a Kawasaki Jet Ski because he failed to write a reason why he liked a certain menu item on his prize-winning entry form. Lee contends that the required "25 words or less" includes "zero words."

-- Amid howls of protest, John Crutchley, 49, Florida's "vampire rapist" and a beneficiary of the state's early-release prison program, was let out on 50 years' probation in August after serving only 10 years in prison for a heinous, blood-drinking rape in 1985. However, Crutchley violated probation by testing positive for marijuana use on the day of his release. Thus, he lost the benefit of early release, and for drug use during probation, he was returned to serve the 50 years behind bars.

-- In Ottawa, Ohio, in May, church secretary Linda Siefer was sentenced to two years in prison for a scheme in which she systematically removed all $20 bills from the collection plates at St. Michael's Catholic Church in Kalida, Ohio, over a four-year period. Ms. Siefer and her husband lived well above their combined $32,000 income, but the scheme did not come to light until a bank employee thought it odd that there were never any $20 bills in the church's deposits.

-- In April in Bedford, Va., John M. Kirby decided to show off to his passengers as he drove by a group of police officers demonstrating drug bust techniques to reporters. Kirby yelled some trash talk, and the officers, seeing Kirby's faulty taillight, chased him. According to police, Kirby had marijuana in the truck and a suspended driver's license.

-- In June, after an investigation, Montreal, Quebec, coroner Teresa Sourour criticized the Fleury Hospital for its judgment in January not to come immediately to the aid of a 75-year-old man who had suffered a heart attack just outside the building. Hospital employees reportedly discussed whether to go out in the minus-20-degree weather to help the man but finally decided just to call an ambulance. The man died a few minutes later.

-- William Keith Fortner, 35, whom a judge put on probation last year for sending three nude photos of himself to a nurse, pleaded guilty in St. Louis in July to sending another one -- to the judge who gave him the probation. After the probation ended in February, Fortner left a message on the female judge's voice mail that said: "I really like you. I hope you don't get upset with the picture I [am sending]. I hope you remember me."

-- After a major riot in April at the Winnipeg, Manitoba, jail, supervisors hired many temporary workers to clean up, and among those who applied and was hired, according to the Winnipeg Sun, was Stephen Lee Gressman, 30, who was at the time on Manitoba's 10 Most Wanted list for extortion and assault. He worked a few days and left town just before being identified.

-- In July, Richard Gallagher was arrested in Mineola, N.Y., and charged with aggravated harassment after making a telephone call to get help in blowing up the high school where he had just lost his job as custodian. The call he made was to a "Peter King," whose number Gallagher had obtained from a friend. Unknown to Gallagher, Peter King is a U.S. congressman. Said Gallagher to police, "I thought he was one of the boys."

-- Albuquerque, N.M., schoolteacher Scott Glasrud failed by two votes (1,170 to 1,168) in the Republican primary for a state senate seat in June, and the next month realized that his father-in-law's and mother-in-law's votes for him had not been counted because a death in the family had delayed their mailing in their write-in ballots.

-- In August, Julian Carlo Fagotti, 30, kicked off his TV ad campaign for a seat on the city council of Curitiba, Brazil, by standing before the camera nude except for one of his brochures held in a strategic spot. Said Fagotti, "[My opponents] are the ones to be ashamed [for how they treat the voters]."

-- In June, the Los Angeles Times profiled California chiropractor and state assemblyman Martin Gallegos, who said he cheerfully offers free chiropractic adjustments to his legislative colleagues and staff members in his office and has treated at least a dozen assembly members of both parties.

News of the Weird reported in 1991 that the Avon, Colo., town council had resorted to a contest to name the new bridge over Eagle River linking I-70 with U.S. Highway 6. Sifting through 84 suggestions (such as "Eagle Crossing"), the council voted, 4-2, to give it the official name "Bob." In August 1996, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported that "Bob" is running in second place in an official contest to rename Canada's Northwest Territories province after Nunavut becomes a separate jurisdiction in 1999.

In July, 58 worshipers, seeking divine protection on an astrologically unlucky day, were crushed to death by other stampeding worshipers at two Hindu shrines in the cities of Haridwar and Ujjain, India. And in August, a 9-year-old boy was crushed to death when a granite tombstone fell over on him at a Bible school in Summerville, Ga. Also in August, according to police in New Orleans, Melvin Hitchens, 66, who had been reading the Bible on his front porch, put it down, fetched his gun, and shot to death a neighbor woman with whom he had been feuding about the cleanliness of their yards.

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

-- Monika and Mark Skinner filed a $35 million lawsuit in July in Newport News, Va., in connection with the 1994 death of their son, age 16, who was riding in a car that drove off a road and plunged into a lake. Among the defendants: Kmart, which sold a computer cleaning product to the car's driver, which he and the Skinner boy used to get high by "huffing"; two engineering consulting firms that designed the lake that the car fell into; and the company that designed the road the car was traveling on because it should have been farther away from the lake.

-- In August, the St. Louis Art Museum filed a $2.5 million lawsuit against the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and other parties, because a Whitney guard damaged a Roy Lichtenstein painting while it was on loan to the Whitney. According to the lawsuit, guard Reginald Walker, 21 at the time, drew a heart and "Reggie + Crystal 1/26/91" on the painting with a felt-tip marker and wrote, "I love you Tushee, Love, Buns."

-- The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman reported that writer-actor Stephen Grant, who starred in a film based on gunman Charles Whitman's 1966 assault from the University of Texas tower (and who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Whitman) was himself shot by a stray bullet on a street near the tower in March on his first visit to Austin.

-- According to a May report in The New York Times, one of Argentina's most popular radio programs is "Loony Radio," produced by and featuring patients at the Borda Psychiatric Hospital in Buenos Aires. One presents "The Bolivian Minute" show but usually giggles uncontrollably until the producer reminds him that he is on the air. Another man delivers philosophy lectures claiming to be "more schizophrenic than anyone" and says he is anxious with every incoming patient because he fears losing his title. One of Argentina's best-known talk radio hosts says the patients are often more insightful than his callers are.

-- In May, Harlan County (Ky.) prosecutor Alan Wagers said his office would help Denise Rush, 27, appeal a trial court's denial of her lawsuit to get the father of her child to pay support. The father was 14 at the time, making Rush apparently guilty of statutory rape, but she was never prosecuted.

-- The Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal reported in April that private security officer David Anderson Jones, 51, who is fully certified by the state to be capable of physical work such as breaking through barriers and crawling in confined spaces, among other physical tasks, was granted a handicapped parking permit by another state office because of a sinus problem.

-- The Broome, Australia, town council recently required that the camels that carry tourists on commercial nighttime rides along Cable Beach be outfitted with flashing, battery-operated taillights, according to a July Associated Press story.

-- An entire 86-member jury pool for a criminal case in Centerville, Tenn. (population 16,000), in July had to be dismissed because, according to prosecutor Ron Davis, too many members of the pool were related to each other.

-- Jim Baen, publisher of Newt Gingrich's novel "1945," told reporters in August that almost 100,000 copies are stockpiled in a warehouse in Bristol, Pa., and that if they are not bought soon, they will suffer the usual fate of surplus books -- to be converted to pulp and used for such things as toilet paper.

-- Davenport, Iowa, police arrested a 34-year-old man in April and charged him with indecent exposure along a busy city street. The police were alerted by two women in a car who said they first spotted the man, then drove by again to confirm what they had seen.

-- In the Journal of Abnormal Psychology released in August, a University of Georgia researcher concluded that a group of homophobic men (men who feared and hated homosexuals and dreaded being close to them) contained twice as many men who were sexually aroused by erotic photos of men as did an equal group of nonhomophobic men.

-- In Sri Lanka, where monogamy is the law, Mr. Pavulupitiyage Gunapala, 35, was jailed in May on the complaint of the latest of his 15 current wives. (Police also found love letters to another 54 women.) The basis of the complaint was that the man was not faithful.

In July, college president John Upton was arrested in Allegan, Mich., for murdering his wife, allegedly because, he said, "She was demanding a great number of things that weren't feasible." And in June, Ross Horton admitted at his trial in Honolulu that he killed his business partner in 1993 after the man criticized his ability to lay tile, which Horton takes seriously as "an art form." On the same day, according to police in Sauk Centre, Minn., Paul Crawford shot four neighbors and himself to death to culminate a feud over a 5-foot strip of land that separates their properties.

The virtually semi-annual student cheating riots in Bangladesh were first reported in News of the Weird in September 1988. Then, students so adamant and blatant about the right to receive outside help when taking national placement exams sparked a rampage in which more than 500 people were injured. This year, in March, in Kanpur, India, all high school final exams had to be taken barefoot to discourage students from carrying notes in their shoes. And in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in July, hundreds of children scaled walls to pass notes to their friends taking high school entrance exams despite the presence of more than 100 police officers who ringed the school in anticipation of the cheating.

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