News of the Weird

-- The University of Minnesota was seeking more "specialists" to work on its three-year, $390,000 program to set an "odor emissions rating system" for regulating the state's 35,000 animal feedlots, according to an August Minneapolis Star Tribune story. Having judges, or government officials, go sniff the feedlots apparently would give insufficient due process of law; rather, a panel of sniffers will develop objective standards on the types of odors and their strength. Already 35 people are employed and have begun sniffing the nearly 200 chemical components of cow and pig manure in order to categorize them for the formal state stench test.

-- In a study released in September and using United Nations statistics, University of Pennsylvania professor Richard J. Estes concluded that the United States enjoys only the 27th most favorable social conditions among 160 nations of the world, ranking behind such paradises as Bulgaria. According to Estes, the social situation in Bulgaria is "miserable," but the country responds to basic human needs (literacy, basic health care, housing, retirement income) better than the United States. (In the U.N.'s own data analysis, the U.S. is fourth in the world.)

-- Bathroom Rights in Alabama: In January, the U.S. Supreme Court put to rest Luverne High School student Jerry Boyett's 1993 lawsuit over whether a public-school student has a right, if he needs it, to a restroom break during class. Answer: No. And in April, a jury in Columbiana, Ala., told Clara Kizer the same thing about her dog. She had filed a lawsuit against her neighbors for complaining about her dogs' poop. She said dogs should have the right to poop within 11 feet of a street because that is public land even if it appears to be private property.

-- In August, Scott and Sonya Rutherford filed a $40,000 lawsuit against a Houston school district because the baseball coaches at Cypress Falls High School failed to use their son enough as a pitcher to give him a chance at a college athletic scholarship. The Rutherfords say, also, that they have been humiliated around town by the coaches' failure to play their son. According to the Rutherfords' lawyer, the coaches' decision violates the U.S. Constitution.

-- "Civilized gentlemen do not wear short-sleeve dress shirts," said Derrill Osborn, director of men's clothing for Neiman Marcus, apparently speaking for many managers in a July Wall Street Journal article. The few who spoke up for the comfort of those shirts, especially in the summer, accused Osborn and others of a brand-new political incorrectness: "sleevism."

-- In February, members of the West Palm Beach, Fla., Pit Bull Terrier Club received notices that some insurance companies would not renew their homeowner policies because that breed of dog was responsible for an increasing number of liability claims. Club officer Linda Kender termed such insurance company stereotyping "dog racism."

-- The Dutch Federation for Military Personnel union (which 20 years ago won the right for soldiers to wear their hair long) announced in April it would back a female recruit's desire to wear a tongue ring. The code of conduct, the union said, bans jewelry "on the head," not "in the head."

-- In May, Kent, Wash., elementary school teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, 35, gave birth to a baby girl, the father of whom is one of her sixth-graders. LeTourneau is the daughter of ex-U.S. Rep. John Schmitz, an intense right-wing Republican who was so notoriously opposed to sex education in schools that he would move little Mary out of any school contemplating such a program. In August, she pleaded guilty to child rape. (Unofficially, though, she admires the boy: "There was a respect, an insight, a spirit, an understanding between us that grew over time." They met when he was in second grade.)

-- Reasons College Men Fight in 1997: In Ithaca, N.Y., in May, a 21-year-old college student was arrested for beating up a guy in a bar fight over who had the better-looking goatee.

-- Life Imitates TV: (1) A Bangkok hotel worker was convicted in July of stealing from guests' safe-deposit boxes by rubbing his nose oil onto the buttons so he could check later to see which buttons had been pushed by the guest to open the safe. He said he learned the trick from watching the TV show "MacGyver." (2) A 27-year-old man driving a stolen truck was caught by sheriff's deputies in Salt Lake City in August but not before he eluded one deputy by vaulting over a backyard swimming pool while the squad car went straight in, lights flashing, reminiscent of "The Dukes of Hazzard."

-- Psychologist Sandy Wolfson told The Times of London in June that her research on fans of "Star Trek" reveals as many as 10 percent meet the clinical definition of addicts, especially when they go through physical withdrawal during their show's absence. Further, like classic drug addicts, they seem to require ever-increasing doses to overcome their tolerance levels.

-- News of the Weird reported in 1994 on the controversy over who owned the world's largest cow hairball, but it now appears that an also-ran at that time, Mike Canchola of Sterling, Colo., is now No. 1. In 1994 a Garden City, Kan., historical society had a 37-incher, but Canchola has since come across one measuring 43.3 inches around. In the course of his work at a local beef plant, Canchola plucks out the non-championship hairballs, dries them, has colleague Frank Alcala paint faces or scenery on them, and sells them for $50 each.

-- United Hospital in St. Paul, Minn., announced in May that it was looking for someone to take over curating its collection of more than 14,000 human hearts, each stored in a plastic bag and the collection featuring specimens of nearly every kind of heart disease. Dr. Jesse Edwards, who started the collection and is now 85 years old, is retiring, and says maintenance of the hearts by a staff of five costs $650,000 a year.

-- In a June Associated Press feature, Dr. Charles Emerick, 67, a retired ear, nose and throat specialist in Portland, Ore., described his 450-item collection of things that he has personally removed from patients. Among the most prominent: a bag of decomposed bees (a kid ran into a swarm of them); an eraser that a kid put up his nose that stayed for 15 years until the boy, then in the Navy, had trouble breathing; and a plastic whistle from a boy ("His parents said he whistled every time he took a breath"). And Dr. James A. Downing's collection of 300 similarly gathered items remains on exhibit through Oct. 27 in Des Moines, Iowa.

-- Among the many varieties of Tamagotchi toys (egglike, electronic "virtual pets" that must be fed and cared for lest they die) is "My Baby Dinosaur" manufactured by a company in China. An Associated Press story in August reported a complaint of Ms. Dale Brooks when she bought one at the Meriden (Conn.) Square Mall. The user's manual apparently was written by someone for whom English is not the primary language. In several places, instructions on how to deal with the dinosaur's virtual defecation freely and matter-of-factly use the s-word.

-- In June, the Court of Appeal in London, England, turned down Thomas Moringiello's challenge to his fraud conviction and 18-month prison sentence. Although Moringiello was able to prove that Judge Richard Hamilton had slept through portions of the testimony at trial the year before, the higher court said Moringiello was not harmed because Hamilton still was able to give a summary of the case for the jury's deliberation.

-- In August, a judge in Des Moines, Iowa, turned down two inmates' petitions for Jewish ceremonies, citing the facts that the men were not Jews when they came to prison and don't know much about Jewish traditions, and the suspicion that the men were only interested in Jewish ceremonial fruits and shawls, which are helpful to inmates in, respectively, making wine and strangling people.

-- Bad Pick-up Routines: Arlington, Va., produce clerk Salvador Rodriguez, 38, was charged with trying to fondle a female customer at a Giant Food store in August. According to the woman, Rodriguez approached her at the spinach bin and told her he knew where she could get some even fresher spinach, and she followed him to a back room. And in July, Jeffrey Maurice Young, 19, was arrested in Gastonia, N.C., and charged with assault. Police said Young had hidden under a table at the Outback Steakhouse and had begun to touch the legs of two women who had sat down to eat (and who at first thought there was a loose thread on the tablecloth). When discovered, he fled the restaurant but was captured nearby.

-- Though the Fiesta de San Isidro in Madrid, Spain, in June is reputed to be the world's major bullfighting event, organizers this year had economized by buying cheaper, docile bulls. An ordinary card would feature six bulls with three alternates. One night, the main bulls were booed and the three substitutes quickly used up, so one of the rejected bulls was painted with white splotches and returned to the ring masquerading as a fresh one. However, the crowd got wise, and rioted, when the toreador's red pants turned whiter and whiter with each pass.

-- Arab-born Israeli mechanic Azzam Azzam, who has been in jail in Egypt since November, charged with industrial espionage, was again turned down for release in August, despite flimsy evidence against him, and faces life in prison. Azzam, working in Egypt on an Israeli joint venture, was accused of writing Egyptian factory secrets in invisible ink on Calvin Klein women's underwear and passing them along to a cohort, who allegedly sent them on to Israel. Egyptian authorities say the cohort has confessed, even though no one knows what Azzam could possibly have learned that could be of use to Israeli intelligence.

-- After Calle, 30, a San Francisco Zoo elephant, had many times rejected her tuberculosis medicine, the curator and a local pharmacist finally devised a drug-delivery system in August: Calle was fitted with special 10-inch-long, two-pound, cocoa-butter suppositories containing the medicines, which she'll have to take daily for 10 months. A team of four is required to administer each one, and, said associate curator Michele Rudovsky, "It's not a pretty sight."

-- Surprises: In July, Charmaine Josiah, 24, awakened in the middle of the night in Pompano Beach, Fla., to an unfamiliar touch in her bed. When she turned on the light, there on her pillow was Theodore, a 5-foot-long boa constrictor that had escaped from a neighbor's house weeks earlier. And in August in Copenhagen, Denmark, Thor Skule lifted his toilet seat first thing one morning and saw the head of a 3-foot-long python peeking up through the bowl; it had been hiding in the plumbing since the previous occupant of Skule's apartment moved out in April.

-- In April, San Diego plastic surgeon Joseph Graves was found negligent by a jury in breast-implant surgery on a 30-year-old former beauty queen. According to the woman, Graves was assisted in surgery by a friend of his, a waiter, who may actually have been the one who inserted the implants. More than 20 lawsuits against Graves are still pending.

-- The Syracuse (N.Y.) Post-Standard reported in July that a driver fired two years earlier by Greyhound for drunk-driving was now employed in Liverpool, N.Y., as a driving instructor at the National Tractor Trailer School. The driver had challenged her firing, claiming she had never driven a bus drunk, despite the company's contention that one time on the job she was so drunk that she urinated in her pants twice.

-- In July, the Centers for Disease Control reported the first instance of HIV transmitted not through sex or drugs but through deep kissing. However, doctors insisted the transmitting agent was not saliva but blood. Doctors said that the man had gum disease, canker sores and "hairlike growths on his tongue," and the woman had bleeding gums, but that the couple nonetheless were very affectionate.

-- In August, it took a recovery team two days finally to pull out the body of a 23-year-old tourist who slipped and fell over a scenic waterfall at Waterton National Park in Alberta, Canada. During the two days, visitors expecting to take in a remarkably beautiful site were forced to gaze also at the dead body lodged in the rocks at the bottom of the waterfall.

-- Maria Garza filed a $50,000 lawsuit against her landlord in Moorhead, Minn., in July because bugs had so thoroughly infested her apartment in 1994 that allegedly one crawled in her ear while she was sleeping and stayed for a week before a doctor extracted it. The landlord's lawyer said the lawsuit is frivolous since Garza is a migrant worker and probably brought bugs with her to Minnesota.

-- Latest escape through a narrow jail opening by a soaped-up prisoner (Walterboro, N.C., August, William Evans, 18, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 9-inch passage between two walls); latest overdone robbery (East Knoxville, Tenn., July, three men with a 9mm handgun took four bags of potato chips from a Subway sandwich shop); latest fortuitous discovery of treatable brain tumor (Sacramento, Calif., August, revealed when a woman had an MRI after being hit by train); latest wealthy dog (New York City, August, mixed-breed shepherd belonging to the late tobacco heir Doris Duke, had a $100,000 trust fund approved by a judge).

(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.)

-- 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.)