News of the Weird

-- Wayward Principals: On Sept. 3, the principal of Sylvia Elementary School in Beckley, W.Va., George S. Meadows, 55, was suspended after being arrested for prostitution. (He was wearing a wig and dressed as a woman at the time.) On Sept. 4, the principal of Charles Brush High School in Lyndhurst, Ohio, Walter Conte, 50, was arrested and charged with clandestinely videotaping 16 cheerleaders as they changed into swimsuits for a party at his lakefront home.

-- In August, the Copenhagen (Denmark) Zoo added an exhibit to its primate collection, amid the baboons and chimpanzees: a Homo sapiens couple who will go about their daily business in a Plexiglas-walled natural habitat consisting of kitchen, living room, bedroom and workshop, as well as a computer, television, telephone, stereo and fax machine. Said a Zoo official, "We are all ... monkeys in a way, but some people find that hard to accept."

-- The Lazarus Society in Cologne, Germany, recently released a "Confession by Computer" CD, with a menu of the 200 most-frequent sins and a separate program to allow the particularly iniquitous to customize the sins to which they will confess. Appropriate penances are prescribed, as well as a link to priests via the Internet. The German Conference of Bishops quickly denounced the disk. And in June, Rev. David E. Courter of the Independent Catholic Church International told an Associated Press reporter he would soon celebrate Mass on-line and allow people to take communion via computer by placing unleavened bread in front of their monitors.

-- In April, Eastern Orthodox monks in the former Soviet republic of Moldova signed a contract with the Exiton corporation, one of the leading builders of the severely depressed Moldovan economy. Under the contract, Exiton would help support a monastery and assist the monks in recovering lost icons, and the monks would pray for Exiton's bottom line.

-- Completely separate police investigations began in August in Lake Helen, Fla., and Woburn, Mass., after parents complained that their children had been baptized without permission at local churches (Central Fellowship Baptist in Florida and Anchor Baptist in Massachusetts). Anchor allegedly lured housing-project kids with a promise of pizza, which the kids say they never received.

-- In May, Social Security Commissioner Shirley Chater went against an agency policy by reassigning a Social Security number based on a religious complaint. Eric and Maria Bessem's toddler had been assigned a number containing 666 (the biblical "mark of the beast") and protested by refusing to claim the child on income tax forms. A Pentecostal pastor near the Bessems' home in Orange County, Calif., has a zip code of 92666 but says he accepts it because it is not a personal identifier like the Social Security number.

-- Recently, the All-Merciful Saviour Russian Orthodox Monastery realized it needed to raise money through an entrepreneurial venture. Since the order is located on Vashon Island near Seattle, it decided to make and market four blends of gourmet coffee, at $20 to $30 a pound, including its signature blend, Abbot's Choice.

-- At a preliminary hearing in July in Guthrie, Okla., a woman said Jimmy Don Branun assaulted her in his mobile home and then changed into black pantyhose, a garter belt, women's underpants, a training bra, and white, high-heeled shoes. The victim ran out the door and escaped when Branun was not able to keep up with her in his high heels.

-- Tom Murphy of Pittsburgh sold his 30 homing pigeons last year after an injury left him unable to care for them. Two were sold to buyers in Amarillo and Austin, Texas. In August, the two escaped and flew back to Murphy, making the 1,500 miles in about five days.

-- In August at the Loyal, Wis., Corn Fest, Steven Schiller, 24, and Kevin Froba, 25, won prizes at the familiar strength game in which a contestant slams a mallet onto a device that causes a weight to ascend and ring a bell. However, they later complained to the game operator about the quality of their prizes, and an altercation ensued. Schiller and Froba were hospitalized after the operator hit each of them in the head with the mallet.

-- In May, Karen Watson, 20, gave birth to a baby boy in Albany, Ore., which she said took her completely by surprise, though she said she had been suffering from anemia. Of course, this was not the first case of a woman's unexpectedly giving birth, but Watson is a pre-med biology major at the University of California, Davis, with plans to go into family practice.

-- Latest Postal Service-Firearms News: In August in New Egypt, N.J., letter-sorter Rodger Johnson, 44, was arrested after a search of his booby-trapped home revealed explosives, gas grenades, 85 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. And in Paterson, N.J., two days later, Postal Service mechanic Danny Isku was arrested for shooting his supervisor in the hand, and news reports indicated Isku was a member of a Paterson postal workers' gun club.

-- In May, an unidentified co-pilot on a Danish Maersk airlines flight from Birmingham, England, to Milan, Italy, with 49 passengers aboard had an anxiety attack over France because he was afraid of heights. He later resigned.

-- In September, a man was crushed to death on a stairway at the Sammis Real Estate and Insurance office in Huntington, N.Y., in the process of stealing the office's 600-pound safe; he apparently violated the cardinal rule of stairway-safe-hauling by standing on a step lower than the one the safe is on. (And it turned out the safe was empty.) And in Tucson, Ariz., a man intending to commit suicide in September is still alive. He turned on the gas in his trailer home and sat down to go in peace, but then decided to smoke a last cigarette. An explosion followed, and he was hospitalized with first- and second-degree burns.

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

-- 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.)