News of the Weird

-- People Getting Too Much Sleep: Michele G. Phebus, 27, and Tony A. Phebus, 29, were arrested in Lafayette, Ind., in August after they fell asleep in their car between the microphone and pick-up window at a White Castle drive-thru; police found numerous marijuana butts in the car and a brick of it in the trunk. And Brian K. Costa, 27, was found asleep in his car in the middle of an on-ramp to the Henderson Bridge in East Providence, R.I., in September, with five bags of cocaine in his lap.

-- Nude Gardeners: In August Robert Norton, 73, was arrested for at least the 13th time since 1981 on public nudity charges while out working in his yard in Pekin, Ill. And in Brooksville, Fla., in August, Carolyn Sparks, 48, received a citation for raking topless in her front yard. (In November, a jury said her behavior did not amount to disorderly conduct.)

-- An October Associated Press story reported on the formaldehyde-saturated museum housing works of Mr. Honore Fragonard, an 18th-century French anatomist who sculpted in cadavers, carefully skinned, preserved and posed. Visitors to the Maisons-Alfort, France, structure (just down the river from the Charenton insane asylum, which is where some say Fragonard belonged) nowadays are struck by how much his works resemble the "Alien" and other creatures from modern horror films.

-- Fred Sandback's works at the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis in April consisted only of string or wire laid out to the walls and floors of the gallery. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch critic, Sandback's tying string in a triangle shape "brings with it the illusion of weight" and is the "most dramatic" of four new pieces done specially for the show. Finishing a close second in the critic's mind was tying two parallel lengths of string from the floor to the ceiling, a "work" "that can be experienced as columns or as a restatement, in the air, of notions [of canvas-based artists]" and which provided "succor."

-- A show by the feminist sculptor Louise Bourgeois in Toronto in May included a retrospective of her works featuring bizarre, severed penises and huge testicles hanging singly or in pairs or in bunches, including "No Exit" (a stairway with two huge testicles restricting egress at the bottom) and "Untitled (With Foot)," in which an innocent baby is crushed by a large, pink testicle.

-- In August, Boyd and Barbara Miller, working for 30 hours with 1,500 pounds of colored gravel, completed a life-sized mosaic of the car of racer Dale Earnhardt in their yard, complete with all Earnhardt's various product endorsements legible on the body.

-- Among the works displayed at the premiere of the Hugo Boss Gallery at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in November was Janine Antoni's "Slumber," consisting of a bed, a loom and an electroencephalograph (EEG) unit. Antoni sleeps in the bed at night, hooked up to the EEG, and during the day weaves a blanket with patterns in the shapes of her EEG readings. The New York Times critic called it a "deft mix of public and private, dream and reality" with a "fine poetic spin."

-- Unknown painter Victor Ruiz Roizo, 39, obtained space in the famed Prado museum in Madrid, Spain, in October by sticking his canvas on the wall with super glue when no one was looking. It stayed for four days until a visitor inquired about it. Roizo said later that he just thought it would be good to show his work, called "Afterwards," featuring a human skull with worms, along "with Rembrandt and all those guys."

-- In August, Texas A&M graduate Michael Kelly filed a request under the state's Public Information Act for a copy of the 1996 confidential football playbook of the Aggies' arch-rival University of Texas. (The request was denied, and in November, of course, A&M lost to UT.)

-- From a paper delivered in August at the Second Annual International Conference on Elvis Presley by Professor Joel Williamson of the University of North Carolina, claiming that the screaming girls who tried to rip Elvis' clothes off in the 1950s were an early part of the women's movement: "[A]n Elvis performance provided a venue in which young women could publicly and all together claim ownership of their bodies, declare themselves loudly, clearly and explicitly to be sexual as well as spiritual characters."

-- Two New York dermatologists told The Wall Street Journal in September that five to 10 of their face-lift patients a month opt also to tighten what they believe are their droopy ear lobes, at about $750 a pair. Said Dr. Bruce Katz, some patients tell him they want lobes similar to those of Demi Moore, Kathie Lee Gifford and Sting. Said one extremely satisfied, 52-year-old Katz patient, "I have the ear lobes of a teen-ager."

-- According to a New York Times article in August, the student handbook at The Citadel requires first-year cadets to memorize standard, quirky responses to traditional questions posed during shakedowns by upperclassmen. For instance, the answer to the question, how much milk is left in the carton (which is expressed by the upperclassman as "How is the cow?"), must be answered, "Sir, she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk, the lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the X degree, sir! (with X representing the number of glassfuls left)." (Any other answer by a cadet would be punishable.)

In September 1996, News of the Weird listed an array of vicious criminals who happened to have the middle name Wayne. More: In November, Georgia executed Ellis Wayne Felker for the 1981 murder of a college student. Also in November, the suspected rapist of a 12-year-old girl in Petaluma, Calif. (two miles from where Polly Klaas was abducted in 1993), Larry Wayne Cole, apparently died of natural causes while on the lam. And in October, the Oregon Parole Board turned down the latest bid by Richard Wayne Godwin, serving a life sentence for the 1979 rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (11) Parents who run afoul of laws even in modern democracies that prohibit their giving their children certain names, such as the Guillot family, who lost a 13-year court battle in October in France to name their daughter "Fleur de Marie" (Flower of Mary) because it did not appear on the list of Roman Catholic saints' names and also because forenames cannot have prepositions. And (12) the needy drug user so oblivious of reality that when he comes upon a large-scale, loud, chaotic police raid in progress at his dealer's home, he nonetheless insists on purchasing from one of the officers, as Tomano Summa, 36, was accused of doing in Boston in July.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or 74777.3206@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- Incriminating Fingers: In Amsterdam in August and Miami in June, men were arrested based on fingerprints from their own severed (bitten off and shot off, respectively) fingers that they abandoned at crime scenes. And Victor Arreola, 23, was arrested at the Scripps Hospital in Chula Vista, Calif., in November, where he had gone after losing his finger in a slammed door in what police say was a carjacking. (According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the police asked Arreola if the finger they had was his. When he said yes, they arrested him. Arreola then asked to take another look at the finger and decided, no, come to think of it, it does not look like his finger -- thus allowing the time to expire when the finger could have been grafted back onto his hand.)

-- Los Angeles County authorities decided not to charge Texan Robert Salazar in the death of his employee Sandra Orellana, who fell from the eighth floor balcony at the Industry Hills Sheraton, where the two were staying during a business conference. Salazar said Orellana fell accidentally as the two were having sex braced on a handrail and she changed positions.

-- In October, U.S. Customs agents stopped a Somerton, Ariz., man coming from Mexico at the border town of San Luis, Ariz., because he had an ice chest containing 12,700 dead scorpions. Customs didn't know immediately whether importing dead scorpions was illegal and so turned over the cache to another agency.

-- In August, 12 men were arrested near Szczecin in northern Poland as they were digging up a road because they had heard a rumor that it was built with a large stockpile of police-confiscated hashish. The hashish had been sold to a chemical plant to be incinerated into ash for road construction.

-- In August, three teen-age boys were arrested for allegedly writing vulgar graffiti on several buildings in Hallsville, Mo. Police chief Pete Herring said the crimes were particularly serious because they frightened the elderly, and city attorney John Whiteside agreed, saying that the slurs were "mean-spirited" because one of the targets, Casey's convenience store, was the "psychic center" of Hallsville.

-- In August, Pembroke Pines, Fla., police Det. Earl Feugill foiled a robbery at a fast-food restaurant by disguising himself and his shotgun as a tree (using a camouflage outfit, strips of burlap, and black face paint) alongside the drive-thru window. He had staked out the restaurant because of a string of similar robberies.

-- If Only They Put Their Minds to It: In the 10-week period before the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, federal, state and local police arrested 765 career criminals (including 14 wanted for murder and 57 for bail violations in violent felonies) in that city and the Olympic venues of Macon, Ga., and Birmingham, Ala., and thus created one of the most drastic short-term reductions in crime rate ever reported for major cities.

-- In July, police in Dayton, Ohio, said Janet Denise Hailey, 40, was the one who climbed into a Wells Fargo Armored Services truck and had such excellent sex with driver Aaron McKie that he did not immediately notice that she left clutching a bag containing $80,000.

-- Police in Sanger, Texas, said four kids, including the police chief's son, broke into a funeral home in September intending to steal embalming fluid so they could smoke cigarettes dipped in it, but when they couldn't find any, they cut off the finger of a corpse and took turns trying to smoke that to draw out the absorbed fluid.

-- Paul Carthy, 25, pleaded guilty in Exeter, England, in September to theft subsequent to his original charge of shoplifting from a liquor store. In the second theft, he had stolen the magnetic letters off the name board that was held up to his face when his mug shot was taken.

-- In October, police in Tokyo arrested Ms. Teruko Hamakawa, 52, for illegal interference with a man's business, charging her with calling him on the phone at work and then hanging up -- 16,000 times in a one-year period. She was angry that, after they had exchanged photos seeking a romantic introduction, he failed to call, which she thought was "impolite."

-- In September, according to police in Junction City, Kan., David Bell, 30, just released from jail for car theft, walked out the door and stole another car to get home. And in October, William B. Singleton, 24, just released from jail in Belton, Mo., on a larceny charge, allegedly broke into a vending machine in the lobby of the police station and stole a 60-cent Strawberry Twisteroo while he waited for his ride to arrive.

News of the Weird previously reported in March 1994 and July 1995 on unlucky men who were ordered to continue child-support payments despite DNA tests that revealed the kids were other men's responsibilities. In the latest case, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in July 1996 that because Darryl Littles failed to get a court-ordered blood test in 1982 (he said he was indigent and not represented by a lawyer), he would be permanently regarded as the father of 15-year-old Brandi even though a 1994 test showed he could not be.

In October, a 49-year-old San Francisco stockbroker, who "totally zoned when he ran," according to his wife, accidentally jogged off of a 200-foot-high cliff on his daily run. And in September in Detroit, a 41-year-old man got stuck and drowned in two feet of water after squeezing headfirst through an 18-inch-wide sewer grate to retrieve his car keys. And in September, a 7-year-old boy fell off a 100-foot-high bluff near Ozark, Ark., after he lost his grip swinging on a cross that marked the spot where another person had fallen to his death in 1990.

-- On Oct. 21, the "CBS Evening News" aired a confidential videotape of an Iraqi wedding reception in which members of a cult of Sunni Muslims performed a series of severe self-mutilations to demonstrate their devotion to Saddam Hussein. While Saddam's sons Odai and Qusai looked on approvingly, the men stabbed themselves in the abdomen with swords and impaled themselves on long skewers, and one man tore a hole in his stomach with a gunshot. CBS's Middle East experts said the footage was authentic.

-- Michael McLean began a 14- to 42-year prison sentence in New York in September for a string of 14 burglaries in posh neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Staten Island, including the homes of several crime family leaders. The daughter of the late Gambino family boss Paul Castellano was at one time so alarmed about the burglaries that she hosted a neighborhood crime-watch meeting in the Castellano home. McLean was arrested at about the time the families had pieced together his identity through informants and had notified him that they wanted their stuff back; McLean now claims not to be concerned about whether he will be killed in prison.

-- Republican Mark Althouse, 34, lost his bid for the state legislature from York, Pa., despite promising voters that he would regard a victory as a mandate to end his virginity and marry his girlfriend, Michelle Taylor. And Michael Gubash lost his state Senate bid in Minnesota, though he had had the foresight to create a fallback position in his campaign ads stating that, by the way, he was "also seeking a faithful, devoted, obedient, God-fearing woman to be my wife."

-- In September Frederico the Goat, who as a protest candidate had been leading in public opinion polls in the race for mayor of the northern Brazilian town of Pilar, was mysteriously poisoned, allegedly, according to his owner, by a political opponent.

-- In October in Stuttgart, Germany, shortly before a televised mayoral debate, candidate Udo Bausch, who had not been invited because he had no realistic chance of winning, walked into the debate auditorium and severed the television cable with an ax.

-- Voter apathy registered 100 percent in a ballot question in northern Florida to determine whether Dutton Island would be annexed to the city of Atlantic Beach: Only one person was eligible to vote, and he stayed home.

-- At least six women in the eastern Noakhali district of Bangladesh, who voted for winning candidates in the June 12 elections against the will of their husbands, reported a few days later that their husbands had sent them back to their parents' homes and had begun divorce proceedings.

-- In September, Mickey Kalinay, 43, was defeated in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Wyoming, despite his tantalizing proposal to make the space program more efficient by constructing a 22,000-mile-high tower so that space stations can be accessed by electromagnetic rail cars.

-- Colorado Senate candidate Laurie Bower, after weeks of bashing her opponent, incumbent Dave Wattenberg, abruptly changed her mind during a radio program on the Saturday before Election Day, quit the race, and endorsed Wattenberg, saying he would do a better job than she would.

-- Democrat Teresa Obermeyer lost a U.S. Senate race in Alaska to incumbent Ted Stevens with a campaign performance that some journalists likened more to stalking than to running for office. The bulk of Obermeyer's platform was the role Stevens allegedly played in keeping Obermeyer's husband from becoming a lawyer, for example blaming Stevens for Mr. Obermeyer's failing the bar exam 22 times.

-- In May, U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben ruled that lawyers would not be able to use nicknames in the presence of the jury in the Reno, Nev., case against Joseph Martin Bailie for attempting to blow up the Reno IRS building. Bailie is well-known locally as "Crazy Joe" and "Psycho Joe." He was convicted anyway.

-- Name Fits: In a Washington Post story in October on postnatal nursing programs, one of the local experts cited was "lactation consultant" Anna Utter. And explaining to reporters in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, in September how an International Nickel plant exploded was company spokeswoman Bambang Susanto. And Grundy, Va., prosecuting attorney Sheila Tolliver said in September she had come under surveillance once again by the man who pleaded guilty to stalking her in 1995, Mr. Dorsey Looney.

Mike Marcum, the Missouri guy who made News of the Weird in 1995 after he stole six power company transformers he said were necessary to make his time machine (so he could find out the winning lottery number and come back and buy a ticket), called a radio show from Nevada in October 1996 and said he was only 30 days away from finishing his invention. His Missouri landlord had evicted him for various electrical misadventures in his apartment.

Kathleen Chang, 46, bikini-favoring world-peace activist, died in Philadelphia of self-immolation on Oct. 22, hoping her death would spread her message to a larger audience. And Mr. Suresh Kumar, 25, died similarly on Nov. 14 in Madurai, India, protesting his country's hosting the Miss World beauty pageant later in the month. And Clinton Warner, 22, miscalculatedly shot himself to death in Fullerton, Calif., on Oct. 14 because he was despondent over a predicted lengthy prison term under the state's three-strikes law. (Actually, his was only a misdemeanor drug charge, and he didn't even have the required number of "serious felony" predicates for three strikes, anyway; he would most likely have received a short sentence.)