News of the Weird

-- Protestant minister Hans Visser announced in August that he had lined up doctors, social workers and drug dealers to begin a social program of supplying heroin at discount to hopeless addicts in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to help keep them away from crime and life-threatening cheap drugs. Said Visser, "I expect I will (soon) be having a chat with justice officials."

-- Letter carrier Martha Cherry, 49, was fired by the Postal Service in White Plains, N.Y., in August after 18 years of apparently walking her rounds too slowly (66 paces per minute, with a stride of less than one foot). Wrote a supervisor of the 5-foot-4 Cherry: "At each step, the heel of your leading foot did not pass the toe of the trailing foot by more than one inch. As a result, you required 13 minutes longer than your demonstrated ability to deliver mail to this section of your route." Cherry has appealed to those on her route to help save her job.

-- The New York Times reported in August that more than a third of all bottled water sold in the United States is merely filtered tap water and that several cities soon will put their municipal water on store shelves. "What comes out of the tap is truly excellent water," said the public works director of Houston. Wrote the Times: "Thus, the marketing plans dare consumers to pay as much as $1 or more for a quart of water in a bottle that could be drawn from their own taps and placed in a refrigerator for less than 1/10 of a cent." (The Times reporter, tasting Houston's water, wrote, apparently without irony: "Bold, full-bodied, provocative.")

-- In August, Bausch & Lomb Inc. agreed to pay $1.7 million to settle a multistate investigation in which attorneys general accused it of fraud. According to the states, the company sold the very same disposable contact lenses under three different model names, purporting to have different characteristics, for prices varying from $2.50 to $23 a pair. Said a New York investigator, "The lenses are the exact same physically -- the only difference was their instructions for use."

-- Quorum International Ltd. announced plans in July for a $1.6 billion Holy Land theme park in Mesquite, Nev., along Interstate 15 about 75 miles from Las Vegas, including a 33-story statue of Jesus and large models of Noah's Ark and the parting of the Red Sea.

-- The Lundarelli family in Udine, Italy, said in July that it would not bow to pressure and would thus leave its Fuehrer wine on the market (joining its Guevara, Lenin and Marx brands). Fuehrer's label has a photo of Adolf Hitler and comes in two varieties, Zieg Heil and Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer ("One People, One Empire, One Ruler"). And in June the Liquor Control Board of Ontario cleared local shelves of a smuggled Chinese wine that purportedly enhances libido. Three-Penis Wine (deer, dolphin and dog) has such foul ingredients that authorities wouldn't even dump it in sewers.

-- The Economist magazine, reporting in April on how Cuba's economy has driven professionals into the retail market, wrote of Norberto, a Moscow-trained engineer who sells pork sandwiches from a stand in front of his home. Norberto's higher-earning job, however, is to illegally show bootleg porno tapes smuggled in from Miami to farmers in the countryside on his VCR, powered by a car battery. According to The Economist, "From miles around they come, on horseback, with their wives and girlfriends, to see Norberto's blue movies. He charges five pesos a head. When, at the end, they all clamor to see it again, he charges another five."

-- In August, real estate firm Cornish & Carey, with offices in California's Silicon Valley, added a bridal registry to the services it offers, even though the area has the highest median house prices in the country. Said the company president, "It's something for the generous gift giver." And the QVC network's new "Extreme Shopping" show debuted in September offering mansions for sale to call-in TV viewers. First up was the home of Engelbert Humperdink, offered for $3.95 million.

-- Well-to-do Frederick, Md., plastic surgeon Lorin F. Busselberg, 54, slumped rapidly after a 1995 divorce ended his 20-year marriage. He has been jailed since May for failing to pay $25,000 in child support, and according to a July Washington Post story, he now denies ever being married to the wife, and in fact constantly corrects officials that he is a different man, "Lorin Fred Busselberg." His employees quietly shut down his office after he failed to contact them from jail, and he told a judge in July that he had sold the practice for a million yen to a Japanese man, but no record exists of the sale.

-- In August, a judge in Morris County, N.J., ordered Joseph Petracca, 61, to shut down his unlicensed Riverdale "kennel," in which he housed the 100 German shepherds to which he admitted he had become "addicted." The court order will probably end Petracca's work of trying to breed the "perfect dog." Said the judge, "When you are addicted to dogs, alcohol or drugs, you seek treatment."

-- In Topeka, Kan., in August, a radical patriot "common-law jury," permitted by state officials to convene in a room in the Capitol, impeached U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten of Wichita. Among his "crimes": By jailing a couple for nonpayment of taxes, he was guilty of kidnapping; he enforced land-regulation laws when everyone knows that land-owning is a God-given right; he defended the IRS, which the jury believed is an "off-shore entity" and a racketeering conspiracy; he issued court documents that did not contain a "seal"; he issued some orders as "Thomas Marten," without the "J."; he did not have a flag in his courtroom; and he allowed a clerk to make people sign documents in the middle of the signature line rather than flush left.

-- Ever since last year's court decision in Ontario permitting women to go shirtless (as long as not for sexual or commercial purposes), critics have been waiting for social turmoil. In one of the few reported incidents, former best friends Heather Genereaux, 24, and Jennifer Fitzgibbon, 23, brawled in Kingston in June when Fitzgibbon decided to sunbathe topless in her back yard, in view of Genereaux's 10-year-old son. Genereaux suffered a black eye; Fitzgibbon lost her bikini bottom.

-- In the summer, in the midst of the training-instructor sex scandals, a pair of two-star generals at the Pentagon headed a quiet attempt to quash a major jurisdictional battle. Military commissaries (which sell mostly food) started to sell flowers for gardens, and post or base exchanges (department stores), which thought they had the exclusive right to sell bedding flowers, upped their sales of food items. "This is war," said one official who was sympathetic to the exchanges.

-- In August, on Interstate 40 in Winston-Salem, N.C., Shakeitha Hardee, 17 and five months pregnant by a guy named Keevin, spotted Keevin in the passenger seat of a car driven by Melody Carroll, 21 and also five months pregnant by Keevin. The two women shouted at each other side by side at 55 mph until the road narrowed to one lane because of construction, at which point neither would yield, and both banged their cars against the other for about 500 yards. Carroll's car finally hit the end of a guard rail and was totaled. Said Hardee's mother, "If (Keevin) would just let them know which one he wanted, you know?"

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

-- The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the Environmental Protection Agency has ordered 71 mining companies in Idaho to submit copies of all of the paperwork they have produced in the last 117 years. EPA says it needs the information to help determine who is responsible for lead pollution in Idaho's Silver Valley. According to the president of one firm, the order was so crazy that the EPA investigators "must not live on this planet." Another pointed out that there are not enough copy machines in the region to handle the work.

-- A confidential report, prepared for the Australian Foreign Ministry and with uninhibited appraisals of many South Pacific leaders, was accidentally left on a table at a regional economic ministers meeting in Cairns, Australia, in July, and reported in the press. While the Australian delegation was outwardly friendly toward its smaller, island-nation neighbors, the report described by name many of the nations' leaders as inept or corrupt. And two weeks earlier, Austria's foreign minister came under fire for his name-calling at a breakfast meeting in the Netherlands. Minister Wolfgang Schuessel reportedly called one German official "a real pig," the Belarus president a "smelly Turk," and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright "an aging Bette Davis."

-- Four young men were arrested for trespassing and attempting to remove tires from a vehicle at a car-auction lot in Des Moines, Iowa, in May. Owner Dan Carney had seen the men enter the lot late at night on his security camera and hopped on his forklift. He picked up the men's getaway car and hid it inside a building. While the men were next door inquiring whether anyone had seen their car, police arrived to arrest them.

-- In March, nighttime thieves stole the two 300-pound, $30,000 solid brass doors from a side entrance of the Baltimore court house at Calvert and Lexington streets.

-- In June, supersleuth detectives in Loudon County, Tenn., and Lexington, Ill., cracked messy burglary cases. Loudon County sheriff's deputies arrested Frederick Downing, 31, after he pawned a VCR with bird droppings on it; deputies were waiting for that because it appeared that a bird in the burglarized home regularly perched above the VCR. In Lexington, James D. Kennedy, 32, pleaded guilty after being linked to a piece of stolen railroad machinery by freshly vomited spaghetti on the casing; the Lexington police chief inquired at a local restaurant that had run a spaghetti special on the night of the burglary and received a description of Kennedy from workers.

-- Dallas police officer Raymond Dethloff Jr., 34, was suspended for 15 days in March for eating a McDonald's chicken sandwich he took from a crashed car at an accident scene he was working. The 16-year-old girl to whom it belonged had been taken away in an ambulance with minor injuries.

-- A Chicago Tribune correspondent, writing from Caracas, Venezuela, in April, reported on the recent carjacking of Rosa Clemente, who was en route with her grandmother to visit her ailing grandfather. The grandmother pleaded with the two robbers to forget about the car (they could not, they explained; they needed it for the weekend) or at least to swing by the hospital and drop the two women off (which they reluctantly did). The grandmother also got them to promise to return the car by Monday because the women needed it for continuing transportation to the hospital. The men actually returned the car, but the women couldn't use it for three months because the police were holding it as evidence.

-- Fleeing on foot just ahead of cops in hot pursuit near Collinsville, Ill., in June, murder suspect Ronald Hardwick, 24, ran into a field and attempted to hide. However, alert Texas County sheriff's deputies noticed that a few cows, rather than idly grazing, had seemed to congregate in a certain area and were staring at a particular place where the field turns into woods. Deputies headed that way and soon ran across Hardwick.

-- Irene Luby, 75, was arrested in Barrington, Ill., in April and charged with felony shoplifting. It was her 145th arrest since 1989 (under as many as 60 aliases). This time, according to police, she had lifted a whole salami, two rolls of film, and several packages of medicine from a Jewel/Osco supermarket. In the police holding room, an officer said he heard a thump on the floor at Luby's feet and looked down to see a package. "What was that?" he asked her. Luby responded, "Would you like some cheese?" The officer then added a package of cheese to the charge.

-- Robert Hayden, 30, was arrested in East Moline, Ill., in February and charged with attempted robbery of the Esquire Lodge East. According to police, Hayden walked into the lobby with a hood over his head, and simulating a weapon in his hand, and demanded money. Hayden, who is black, then sheepishly aborted the robbery when he realized that the Esquire Lodge East was black-owned and -operated. He fled, but police caught him nearby.

-- At a celebrity auction in May, Debbie Dacoba of Paw Paw, Mich., bid $8,625 for a pair of Mr. Ed's horseshoes and was so overcome with joy when she won that she had to retreat to the ladies' room for 20 minutes until she stopped crying. Later she told a reporter that she would keep the horseshoes in plastic because specks of brown residue in the nail holes "could be manure, which I hope it is because then I have a piece of him."

-- A June Associated Press profile of Bernard Williams, 77, of Hannibal, Mo., described his work over the last 13 years: He has rewritten both the Old and New Testament of the Bible into rhyme in two books published by a local man, Jim Hefley, doing business as Hannibal Books. Williams' goal was to make the scriptures more accessible to readers.

News of the Weird reported in 1996 on hard-luck Oklahoma rapist Darron Bennalford Anderson, who had received a 2,200-year sentence in 1994 but appealed and won a new trial. Unfortunately for him, he was convicted again and this time given more than 90 additional centuries behind bars, a total of 11,250 years, including 40 centuries each for rape and sodomy, 17 1/2 centuries for kidnapping, 10 centuries for burglary and robbery, and five centuries for grand larceny. In July 1997, the state Court of Criminal Appeals held that the grand larceny charge was double jeopardy on the robbery conviction and dismissed it, speeding Anderson's release date up five centuries to the year A.D. 12,744.

Jimmy Robert Jewell, 33, was arrested in May in Redondo Beach, Calif., and charged with indecent exposure. He had opened the door of his van to flash a female passerby, who just happened to be carrying a camera in order to take pictures of a house she had had her eye on. She snapped several photos, of Jewell and of his license plate, and police tracked him down a short time later.

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

-- Murderer Joe Labriola, serving a life sentence at Massachusetts' Norfolk prison, told the Boston Globe in August that he would very soon legally register an inmates' political action committee to dispense money to candidates and give the incarcerated a stronger voice in state elections. (Prisoners can vote in Massachusetts.) Said Labriola, "In the '70s, we thought we could make change (on prisoner issues) with violence," but now "we can make changes by using the vote."

-- An August Associated Press retrospective on legendary Liberian Joshua Milton Blahyi, 25, caught him roaming Monrovia in a suit and tie, preaching for his Soul-Winning Evangelistic Ministry. However, for the previous several years, he was the country's most famous, fearless and vicious warrior, widely known because he and the battalion he headed waged war in the nude, and hence his moniker, Gen. Butt Naked. He says his transformation occurred one day in 1996 when he was standing nude on the front lines waiting to kill some people, and God told him to stop. (However, putting on clothes was Blahyi's own idea, he said.)

-- Recent Adulterated-Food Lawsuits: For a spider in a breakfast at a Belle Vernon, Pa., Denny's restaurant (April), the customer received a $1,500 settlement; for a human fingertip in deli ham at a Tampa, Fla., Publix supermarket (May), a jury awarded $13,000; for a cockroach in the collard greens at an Orangeburg, S.C., KFC (June), a jury awarded $607,500. On the other hand, a judge in San Luis Obispo, Calif., ruled in March that the mouse in Richard Lang's McDonald's hot apple pie had been inserted after the sale, and also in March, highly regarded scientist Michael Zanakis, 43, was indicted in Brooklyn, N.Y., for extortion for allegedly planting a rat's tail in his son's McDonald's Happy Meal and demanding $5 million.

-- Perennial Kentucky candidate Thurman Jerome Hamlin, 73, has lost races for governor and the U.S. Senate and House and several other offices without complaining of injustice. In May, however, he filed a federal class-action employment-discrimination lawsuit against the University of Kentucky because it failed to interview him recently when the position of men's basketball coach became available.

-- Misa Teresaka, 32, filed a lawsuit for about $130,000 in July against the Discovery Bay health club in Hong Kong and her personal trainer Li Ching for injuries she suffered in 1995. She said the trainer encouraged her to continue to lift weights despite severe back aches and that the pain is now so bad that her career prospects are diminished because she can no longer bow.

-- In February in Montreal, the Sisters of Our Lady of Good Counsel, an order of nuns in Chicoutimi, Quebec, filed a lawsuit against the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, an order of nuns in Quebec City, over a $30 million (Cdn) investment dispute about a shopping center.

-- Steven Weisblat of New City, N.Y., filed a lawsuit against a recently married Armenian-American couple in Hackensack, N.J., in April for various injuries incurred while he was a guest at their wedding. According to the lawsuit, as tradition, the groom was tossed into the air by dancers, but they were inebriated and tossed him too far, and he landed on Weisblat, who wasn't even on the dance floor at the time.

-- James Van Gorder, 31, filed a lawsuit in August against the Parkway Chiropractic Center in Detroit for negligence during his recent treatment for back pain. According to Van Gorder, the chiropractor had him take off his clothes and lie face down on the two-part examining table. The way he was lying, his genitals fell between the parts, and when the chiropractor adjusted the table, Van Gorder got caught. He claims extreme pain, suffering, disfigurement and loss of sexual desire.

-- In June, to publicize the fact that it would soon resume bulk trash pickups (suspended for several months because of budget problems), the District of Columbia Department of Public Works paid to make TV public service announcements demonstrating that its crews were at work. However, according to the Washington Business Journal, fresh bulk trash (appliances, sofas, etc.) was brought in, at additional cost, to give the ads the proper look, despite the fact that residents had a huge backlog of the same items that they were perfectly willing to put out on the curb for free.

-- In March, an abandoned, severely cannibalized 1974 Dodge Dart, which had been sitting on the side of U.S. 68 near Wilmore, Ky., since 1988, was finally removed. During that time, the state government and Jessamine County each relentlessly argued that removing it was the other's responsibility.

-- In July, the Nova Scotia Gaming Control Commission formally banned the popular charity fund-raiser "cow patty bingo," in which a promoter marks a field into squares, takes bets, and then releases a recently fed cow to "select" a winning square. The commission believed the game could be rigged by training a cow to use a particular spot in the field. The next day, incoming Nova Scotia Premier Russell MacLellan said the ban could be ignored. That same week, the district attorney's office in Santa Clara County, Calif., announced that a similar fund-raiser for the imminent Gilroy garlic festival, based on the famous Clydesdale horses' two-mile march through town, could not be held because it violated the state gambling law.

-- The San Jose Mercury News reported in March on some working models of the Defense Department's tiny flying machines ("micro air vehicles"), no larger than birds, including one helicopter that could fit inside a peanut shell, that are suited for tasks such as locating hostages in occupied buildings, sniffing out poisonous chemicals, and finding enemy snipers. Each micro air vehicle carries cameras, sensors, transmitters and antennas.

-- A February New York Daily News story detailed what NYPD procedures require when a squad car needs a new tire. The officer must fill out a Tire Replacement Request form and send it to the Tire Integrity Unit, go pick up a tire at a city vehicle maintenance facility, take it to a city-approved vendor to have it put on, take the old tire back to the police garage, and have the precinct commander sign the Tire Replacement Request form certifying that the new tire is actually on the car. In 1995, the last year for which figures were available, NYPD salaries during tire-changing was nearly $500,000.

-- News of the Weird Themes, Recently Updated: Latest incident of a dog stepping on a gun and causing it to discharge and shoot the dog's owner, in Tacoma, Wash., in July; latest emphysema patient to die when he lit a cigarette and accidentally ignited his oxygen supply, in La Habra, Calif., in July; latest arson charges to be brought against a firefighter allegedly just trying to get some overtime pay, in Weiser, Iowa, in July; latest fatal beatings in Africa of so-called sorcerers who are suspected of making men's penises shrink or vanish with a mere handshake, in Dakar, Senegal, in August.

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