News of the Weird

-- Productive Lunch Hours: Ollie King, 38, was arrested as he allegedly sought to buy drugs in a suburb of Atlanta in June during his lunch-hour break from serving on a jury. And in July, Li Baolun, 33, was arrested in Beijing, China, and charged with being the thief who, during his lunch hours over a four-year period, walked into more than 1,000 government offices and stole money from unattended workers' desks and belongings.

-- Dole Mania: Just before the Republican convention in August, a man carrying three suitcases climbed a 400-foot radio tower in Miami and told onlookers he would stay there until he was selected as Bob Dole's running mate. His political platform: more horses and bicycles, less asphalt and pornography. And in Dallas, after becoming enraged at Dole's nomination on Aug. 14, Ernest Comegys, 70, went to his bedroom, grabbed a handgun, fired several shots at his cousin and stepdaughter, and then shot himself to death.

-- The government of Zimbabwe announced in June that it was pessimistic that it could fill the vacant position of hangman after the resignation of Tommy Griffiths, 72, an Englishman who had held the part-time post since the 1950s. Though dozens of men are on death row, no local person will take the job because of a national superstition about taking someone's life without personal motive.

-- The New York Times reported in April that entomologist P. Kirk Visscher and two colleagues set out to challenge the conventional wisdom that a human should only very carefully attempt to extract the stinger after a honeybee attack. Their thesis is that speed of removal, not style, is more important, and they tested it the only way they knew how: Dr. Visscher took about 50 honeybees over several days, methodically rubbed each against his skin until it stung, extracted the stinger, and measured the welt. Said Visscher, "That's the price of fame and fortune."

-- A San Francisco Chronicle Labor Day story described several local jobs that might make its readers appreciate their own. University of California at Davis scientist Francine Bradley was interviewed because she trains workers to perform the manual insemination of turkeys, from drawing the semen to implanting it. (Turkeys genetically bred for massive breast-meat sections cannot comfortably mate on their own.) Recommended Bradley, "You have to develop a relationship with your tom."

-- Also in that issue of the San Francisco Chronicle was a report on Martha Huerta, who pulls an eight-hour shift at ABC Diaper Service in Berkeley, Calif., where she feeds soiled diapers through an electronic counting machine and on to the washer. Her tools are gloves and an electric fan, although, said her supervisor, "It helps that her sense of smell isn't very good."

-- The weekly Brazilian newsmagazine Veja reported in April that 72 of the nation's 75 baby-chick gender-inspectors are of Japanese origin and that Brazilians cannot seem to master the craft. A baby chick "sexer" spends the day in a dark room with a single spotlight as he picks up and checks 16 baby chicks per minute with 99 percent accuracy. Newly-hatched chicks have no external sex organs but just tiny appendages concealed by their feathers.

-- Fishing on Junior Lake in July, Phil Cram, police chief of Medway, Maine, lost part of his hand when an explosive tube he was using illegally to stun fish blew up prematurely.

-- In April, a devoutly Christian abstinence counselor and high school senior, Danyale Andersen, 18, of Redmond, Ore., gave birth to the baby of a former, short-term boyfriend. She said she felt guilty about it but still believes in abstinence.

-- In Tampa, Fla., in April, Antonio Valiente Valdez Jr., on his way to court to answer a traffic citation for driving without his prescription glasses, accidentally hit a car that had already crashed on the side of the road. According to police, he wasn't wearing his glasses then, either.

-- In April, Christopher J. Kerins, a Trenton, N.J., undercover police officer, was arrested and charged with robbing the Kenwood Savings Bank in Cincinnati during a break while attending the Middle Atlantic Law Enforcement convention. (Kerins, unfamiliar with the city, reportedly paused after collecting the money from the teller to ask directions out to Interstate 71, and he was spotted on his way there by a local police officer.)

-- In July, according to a fire department official in Pullman, Wash., the cause of a fire in a parked truck was the magnification of the sun, through a plastic prism hanging from the truck's ceiling, onto a stack of papers. The truck's owner said the prism was a gift from his insurance company. And residents of Santa Rosa, Texas, were temporarily in jeopardy in June when a fire broke out in the town's only fire truck, disabling it.

-- In 1992, News of the Weird reported on Navy Department secretary Bea Perry, who had made a daily, 340-mile round-trip commute from her home in Trenton, N.J., to various jobs in Washington, D.C., for 25 years. An August 1996 Associated Press story touted Geraldine Howell, 66, who for 39 years has maintained a six-day-a-week, nine-hour- (and 200-mile-) a-day newspaper route over mountainous terrain delivering the Clarksburg (W.Va.) Exponent.

-- A 63-year-old man died in May in West Plains, Mo.; he had set himself on fire in a suicide attempt, but the pain was so great that he ran into a pond to douse the flames and drowned. Also in May, seven losing candidates in state and parliamentary elections in India committed suicide after their party was trounced. And in June in Exkilstuna, Sweden, Leif Borg, 50, mired in a divorce proceeding, blew himself up with dynamite in the courtroom and injured four others.

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

-- The Des Moines Register reported in July that among the treasures turned up at the excavation site of the steamboat Bertrand, which sank on the Missouri River near Omaha, Neb., in 1865, were four pocketknives with glass rivets that contained explicit, pornographic photos. They are evidence, said conservator Jeanne Harold, that people have not changed much in 131 years.

-- A coroner's inquest in Bexley, England, in September revealed the dominance that the late Karen Morgan, 29, apparently held over her parents and younger brother. Morgan was long bedridden with a brain tumor and pneumonia but so comprehensively dictated the family's eating, bathing and television-viewing habits that the three survivors did not think they could function without her. Police found notes showing all three intended to kill themselves as soon as they had enough money to buy sleeping pills.

-- The California Style in Crime: According to police in Toronto, Ontario, in August, two men who had just executed a well-planned jewelry store robbery made a successful getaway but only after stealing a car in front of the store in order to drive to their getaway car, which was parked a half a block away.

-- Six Edmonton, Alberta, police cruisers chased and stopped a Loomis armored car in May after a report that it was weaving erratically on the road and that a guard appeared to be signaling by repeatedly swinging a door open. There was no holdup, according to police spokesman Kelly Gordon; rather, one of the guards had passed gas, and the other guard was attempting to air out the cab.

-- A burglar raided an impotence clinic in Melbourne, Australia, in June and made off with dozens of bottles of drugs, including some powerful enough to induce five-day erections. Police were not certain whether the burglary was a prank or was committed by someone with a serious need.

-- Steve Tsoukalis, 59, manager of the Raintree Super Foodtown in Freehold Township, N.J., was charged with a hunting law violation in March when he fired his .410-gauge shotgun at some sparrows, which were inside his store at the time. Foodtown employees said wild birds flying into the store had been a problem for a while and that this was Tsoukalis' preferred method for dealing with them.

-- According to police in Huntington Beach, Calif., in June, it was the incessant chatter of Karen Pedersen, 52, that caused the man who was stealing her truck to give up and flee. She had intercepted the man before he could drive it away, and despite his having a gun, she just began talking nonstop. Said Pedersen later, "He sounded irritated. He said, 'I can't believe how this is going. This is like something out of the movies.'" After she gave him a T-shirt to wipe his fingerprints off the truck, he fled.

-- In March, the police department in Nagasaki, Japan, began an investigation of several officers for allegedly helping a suspect get a gun while in custody. According to a witness, the police promised the man a lighter sentence if he would buy a gun from a friend over the phone, have it delivered to the police station, and then have it confiscated from him so that the arresting officers could claim a prized weapons-charge arrest for their records.

-- Marine Cpl. Corban Backstrand, 24, stationed near Hiroshima, Japan, won a dare in June while out with friends. He stuck his head in front of a moving cargo train and was knocked unconscious.

-- In July, according to Gardner, Kan., Sheriff's Lt. Bill Garrett, a woman was treated at Olathe Medical Center for a scalp wound after her husband shot her while the two were playing hide-and-seek in the woods. According to Garrett, the husband said the couple had played hide-and-seek with handguns before.

-- In July, Owensboro, Ky., Road Department driver Sam Holinde, driving his 20-ton dump truck across a bridge with a "limit 3-ton" sign, got about halfway across before the bridge collapsed. The fall was short, and Holinde suffered only minor injuries.

-- In March, "Slim Jim" James Schmedding was hospitalized in fair condition with a serious head injury after a stunt by deejays at radio station KQCC-FM of Rock Island, Ill. Schmedding had volunteered to be packed in a 55-gallon drum and rolled down a flight of stairs. When he did not fit inside initially, he agreed to remove all the padding from the barrel to make room.

-- In June, the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs ordered Harold P. Weingold to provide $500,000 in restitution to customers who knew him as the "lottery doctor." During 1992 and 1993, Weingold somehow persuaded 2,000 people to buy an average of $250 worth of good-luck key chains and baubles, and "cosmic protectors" that were merely solar-powered calculators, to guarantee them a "93 percent" chance of winning lotteries.

News of the Weird's first report on the art of butter-sculpting in 1993 covered works at state fairs in Pennsylvania and Minnesota and a Buddhist monk's Tibetan yak butter sculpture loaned to a Chicago museum. In August 1996, Norma "Duffy" Lyon sculpted a life-size butter cow for the 37th straight year at the Iowa State Fair and as her traditional second butter subject at this year's fair chose to portray the stoic "American Gothic" farmers. A few years ago, her second subject was singer Garth Brooks.

In May in Australia, identical twins John and William Bloomfield died of heart attacks minutes apart at age 61; in Madisonville, Ky., in June, twins Welbert and Wesley Cannon, 20, were both hit by a freight train just two miles from the spot where their father was fatally hit by a freight train in 1987; and in July in Los Angeles, Mr. Avi Gesundheit passed away.

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

-- 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.)