News of the Weird

-- Tough Times for Nike: The winner of November's New York City Marathon, John Kagawe, said he might have broken the race record except that his Nike shoes kept coming untied. And two weeks earlier, Nike cooperated with authorities in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in the arrest of five employees at a Nike-contracted factory; the five manufactured 51 rubber dildos on the premises and then allegedly tried to extort about $30,000 from Nike in exchange for not revealing that embarrassing information.

-- People Who Don't Keep Up With the News Very Much: In July, four adult employees of a Chicago day-care center decided to make a video of themselves that contained some nudity and sexual horseplay, and of all the places at which they could have shot it, they chose a room at the center where 20 kids were taking naps. (The four were fired.) And in November in Columbus, Wis., four adults were arrested and charged with dealing drugs over a several-year period out of a day-care center.

-- Tickets to Prosperity: According to the Malaysian minister for culture and tourism, speaking to a reporter in December, the country should exploit as a tourist attraction its frequent, potentially lucrative mass-circumcision events. And in October, a prominent Thai surgeon told a Bangkok seminar that his country could become the sex-change-operation capital of the world and boost the country's ailing economy. (He pointed to Thailand's price-friendliness: about $5,000 to change biological males and $10,000 to change biological females.)

-- In August, The New York Times reported on a movement in Montana to declare as a national historical park the decaying city of Butte (described as "one of the worst industrial crimes against nature" in history). In the center of Butte is the Berkeley Pit, "a Grand Canyon of open-pit mining," wrote the Times, "an 874-foot-deep chasm filled with 26 billion gallons" of "toxic stew" that grows by 3 million gallons a day. In 1995, 300 snow geese landed by mistake in The Pit, believing at night that it was a normal lake, and were killed when their stomachs corroded. On the plus side, the surrounding area is picturesque, and the city has some of the oldest brothel edifices in the West.

-- According to the Times of London in a July report, 85-year-old Giovanni Beghini is organizing Italy's elderly who want to avoid the country's often-frightening old-folks' homes by allowing themselves to be adopted by strangers. In exchange for part of their pensions and for mentions in their wills, families will care for seniors as honorary grandparents.

-- New York City's Village Voice reported in June that, based on United Nations internal investigations, recent UN peacekeeping missions in several countries have allowed their soldiers to commit atrocities against the host country with little or no subsequent punishment. The Voice published photos of Belgian UN troops "roasting" one live Somalian child over an open fire in 1993 and force-feeding vomit and worms to another. Soldiers from Canada and Italy were also accused, and incidents were reported in Mozambique, Cambodia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

-- The government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu announced in August that it would offer stepped-up welfare benefits to poor women who give birth to female babies, in exchange for the mother's promise not to kill the baby, which is an increasing problem as males are more economically valuable. Also, the government will require 30-day hospital stays for mothers with baby girls, to increase the bonding, which it believes will decrease the murders.

-- According to a 1996 FBI surveillance tape of suspected U.S. spy James M. Clark, 49, who was arrested in October 1997 with two other 1970s radical leftists, Clark says, while alone in his apartment, "Oh, yes, I think we should. Let's have another"; "I was an agent for a long time for the communists"; and "FBI! You're under arrest."

-- In July, Roy Bruce Smith, 50, was executed in Virginia for killing a police officer in 1988, but he was a busy man in the years before his death, promoting the obsession that he acquired behind bars: that, in the words of his lawyer, "the whole world is being poisoned" by soy products (which cause, for example, diabetes and Parkinson's disease) and that magnesium is the remedy. Accordingly, he ate Rolaids incessantly and requested Epsom salts with his last meal. His lawyer said Smith would also have liked to "disseminate his ideas on cold fusion" for nuclear energy because "he (thought) he (had) found a way to make it happen."

-- Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi celebrated his 28th year of power in September by once again warning his subjects that Western nations would soon invade their country because of those nations' acute need for Libya's sunshine (for Western solar-energy products), watermelons, camels and camels' milk.

-- In August, beleaguered Thai prime minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, acting on advice from his new fortune-teller, shuffled his cabinet to make it more "5"-friendly. According to Bangkok's The Nation newspaper, Chavalit began to schedule events at 15 minutes past the hour, changed to jersey number 45 on his soccer team, and moved into a new house whose street address is 555. (Also during the summer, the leading drafter of Thailand's new constitution announced himself to be a "6" man who artificially split one of the 335 proposed articles so there would be 336, and who formerly said he was a "9" man, having set up the drafting committee with 99 members.) Chavalit resigned in November.

-- Last week, News of the Weird reported that in October an Australian judge had decided to impose national law instead of tribal punishment for an Aborigine who had killed a nephew. In November, the judge changed his mind, let the man off with time already served, and released him to his community, where he was immediately taken and speared nine times in the left thigh and six in the right by various family members, and hit three times in the head with a club by his sisters. From his hospital bed in the town of Katherine, where he was recovering from the spear wounds, Stephen Barnes said he was "really happy" to have been let back into the community.

-- Junius Wilson, written up in News of the Weird in 1993 as the state of North Carolina was apologizing for having wrongly accused him of rape, wrongly castrated him, and then institutionalized him for 67 years as incompetent when the only thing amiss was his inability to speak and hear, reached a settlement with the state in November. Wilson, whose age is somewhere between 89 and 100, will get free medical care, free housing in a cottage and $114,000.

-- In September, renowned diet doctor Walter Kempner died at age 94. He made News of the Weird in 1993 when a former patient and employee, Sharon Ryan, filed a lawsuit against him in Durham, N.C., charging that the two had a long-time affair during which he abused her, including hitting her bare buttocks with a riding crop because she would not stay on her diet. Kempner had admitted to relationships with assistants and patients that Ryan called a sex cult and to incidents of spanking patients who strayed from his unique rice-and-fruit diet.

(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.)

-- Tax Protests: Voters of Castlewood, Va., fed up with a local tax increase, voted 749-622 in November to disband the town and return $88,000 in taxes to residents. And in October in Phoenix, Larry Naman was bound over for a psychiatric hearing after he shot and wounded County Supervisor Mary Wilcox, allegedly because she supported a tax to build a new ballpark.

-- In November, Mayor Elcio Berti of the southern Brazilian town of Bocaiuva do Sul banned the sale of condoms and birth-control pills, for the sole purpose, he said, of increasing the population so the town would qualify for more government-funded programs.

-- From an interview by a Russian weekly magazine in September with the chairman of Chechnya's Islamic Supreme Court, as reported in The Economist: Interviewer: "(Chechnya's president) has said that touching a woman is, for Chechens, the worst crime of all. Even when doing traditional dancing, the Chechen male must not touch his female partner. But under sharia (Muslim) law, (as punishment) you beat young girls and cut their hair off." Supreme Court chairman: "We don't beat them with our bare hands. We use sticks."

-- In October, on the tourist-haven island of Phuket, Thailand, the puzzlingly named Vegetarian Festival is held each year as the scene of spectacular demonstrations of self-mutilation as tributes to Chinese gods and spirits. This year, the typical piercer took a quarter-inch steel rod through one cheek; others were pierced through the cheek and other parts of the body with such objects as a samurai sword, an umbrella and a lamp. Participants usually abstain from meat, alcohol and sex for nine days before the piercing, then try to put themselves into trances to block out the pain.

-- In October, a justice of the Northern Territory (Australia) Supreme Court refused to release Aborigine Steven Barnes, 28, for tribal justice, instead holding him under Australian law for the murder of a 23-year-old nephew. Tribal elders had secured Barnes' consent to the traditional punishment for his crime, including having members of his own family punch him in the face, then club him with heavy hunting boomerangs, then sling the boomerangs at him, and finally spear him in both thighs four or five times.

-- A celebration of Saint Efigenica in the small town of Canete, Peru, in September was to include the "Great Gastronomic Kitty Festival" (a cat-tasting event), but animal-lover organizations won a successful last-minute appeal. Cats remain a delicacy in town, though; as one citizen told a reporter, "The street cats are the best. They have more flavor."

-- According to a survey published in an Italian psychology journal in July, 70 percent of people in that country admitted telling between five and 10 lies a day. The most common lie was, "Don't worry; it's all been taken care of," but the traditional, "I'll always love you," and "How nice to see you," ran close behind.

-- In a feature article in June, Bangkok's largest English-language newspaper, The Nation, lamented how far Thailand is behind the West in performance art, owing to Thais' cultural inhibitions. Nonetheless, given brief mentions in the article were a woman named Mink who coats the floor with toothpaste and wallows in it, to signify, she said, that we all have to wriggle out of difficult situations in order to survive, and the father of Thai performance art, Inson Wongsam, who in the 1960s sculpted an elephant out of a block of ice by precision urination.

-- According to Francine Patterson, president of the Gorilla Foundation, quoted in a November New York Times story, ape-painted art of the 1950s mostly resembled the Abstract Expressionist genre (e.g., bold splotches), but 1990s ape art, exemplified by the works of Woodside, Calif., apes Koko and Michael (also largely bold splotches), "represent things in the real world," such as birds or balls. Patterson says she knows this because the gorillas tell her in the modified sign language that they know. Said noted chimpanzee-art expert Roger Fouts, "It is part of ape nature to paint." (Koko's and Michael's work can be viewed at www.gorilla.org.)

-- In June, to dramatize the dwindling amount of middle-income housing on prestigious Cape Cod, Provincetown, Mass., artist Jay Critchley outfitted an old septic tank in his yard (six feet in diameter, five feet high) with carpeting, table, chair and television set, with entry through a narrow hole in the ground. His point was that this is just about the only kind of housing the non-rich can afford. According to a Boston Globe reporter, "Burning incense almost masked the telltale aroma."

-- George B. Rich and Gary L. Jewel, law partners for six years in Memphis, Tenn., ended their joint practice in 1996, but neither wanted to give up the offices. Since then, according to Rich, Jewel has been purposely annoying him in order to drive him out, and he filed a lawsuit in November to get Jewel to stop and to erect a soundproof partition. According to Rich, Jewel bounces a basketball, drums the walls with his hands, eats smelly lunches, barks like a dog, and oinks like a pig, in addition to making many other animal noises "which are unrecognizable." Said Jewel to a Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter, "I can see the headline now: 'Lawyer sues lawyer for oinking like a pig,'" a quote which indeed did appear the next day in the Commercial Appeal under the headline, "Lawyer sues lawyer for oinking like a pig."

-- In Singapore in October, Tan Ah-bah, 49, was sentenced to three months in jail for assaulting a 37-year-old man at a popular lover's lane. The men are both admitted peeping toms and had fought over control of the choicest spot to watch a certain couple making out in a car.

-- According to a September Boston Globe story, an intense bitterness has developed between two organizations that advocate different remedies to battle pervasive head lice. The National Pediculosis Association of Needham, Mass., argues for removal of lice by hand, along with pesticide shampoos. Sawyer Mac Productions of Weston, Mass., prefers smothering the lice with olive oil and says the NPA is beholden to pharmaceutical firms.

-- In June, a judge in Tulsa, Okla., ordered the Covey family and the Rosencutter family jointly to operate the 357-grave cemetery that bears both their names and to which both families have legitimate claims. The decision follows a May 25 fistfight and hair-pulling wrestling match engaged in by as many as 150 from both sides at the graveyard.

(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.)

-- Where's Barry Scheck When You Need Him? Malvin Marshall, 27, was finally released from jail in North Charleston, S.C., on Oct. 29 after being locked up for six weeks because a police field test had found that he had heroin in his pocket. The state lab had finally gotten around to analyzing the substance, which was determined to be vitamin pills that had gone through a wash cycle while in his pants pocket. Said a police lieutenant, "The field test (is) not foolproof."

-- The New York Daily News reported in November that 71-year-old twin sisters Ynette Sapp and Olvette Mahan had just gotten plastic surgery (mole and wrinkles removed) on their faces purely so they would continue to look exactly alike. Said the doctor, the situation is not that unusual; for example, another identical pair was scheduled the next day.

-- Recent European Unity Feuds: Farmers in Sweden are still upset, according to a report by the country's Bureau of Statistics in June, at their inability to sell straight cucumbers in Europe; EU regulations require prime cukes to bend 1 cm for every 20 cm in length. And Belgium and France were victorious in October in a European Parliament vote to require that chocolate be made only with cocoa butter and not with substitute vegetable fats; a British Parliament member complained that British chocolate has always been made with little or no cocoa butter.

-- In September, an official government wristwatch with the face of the prime minister of Malaysia went on sale at the main parliament building in Kuala Lumpur, retailing for about $470. And in June, in an announcement on the first year of operation, the state of Louisiana reported selling 100,000 of its own Royal brand condoms. State health officials claim that it is more economical to make their own than to subsidize higher-priced, brand-name condoms for high-disease-risk clients.

-- According to Chicago Sun-Times reports in June and November, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services since 1995 has doled out $22.5 million in cash and gifts to the most dysfunctional 1,370 families on their rolls, including almost $75,000 to one mother of six. DCFS's "wraparound plans" are designed to simulate middle-class environments so that children can be raised by a natural parent, but critics call the program a jackpot for precisely the worst parents in the city, in that many have been charged with abusing and neglecting their kids. Among the goods included in a typical wraparound plan are: electronic gear and "entertainment center," YMCA membership, and aikido, basketball and drama classes.

-- U.S. Rep. Sam Farr of California introduced a bill this year to end a loophole in the federal Unemployment Tax Act that made it possible for a Santa Cruz, Calif., voting monitor, who was a retired county worker, to grind out one grueling day at the polls in November, claim the next day that he was "laid off," and thereby collect about $12,000 in benefits over a two-year period.

-- According to an Associated Press dispatch in May, scientists at the Department of Agriculture's meat science research lab in Beltsville, Md., have developed an explosion system to tenderize meat by sending supersonic shock waves through it. The shock waves literally rip the muscle tissue apart on a microscopic scale, without any loss of taste. One researcher said the process could be used commercially within a year.

-- In their divorce hearing in September in Edwardsville, Ill., Karon Watt and Greg Watt were arguing over ownership of the couple's cellular phone. Suddenly, Greg's beeper went off, and he reached for the phone to return a call, which infuriated Karon, who snatched the phone out of his hand and fled the courtroom. Greg caught up with her outside, where a brief tussle ensued, which ended when Karon bit Greg's arm, and Judge Randall Bono threatened to jail both people for contempt of court. Bono awarded custody to Karon.

-- In September, murder defendant Hosie Grant, 72, seated on a bench in a courtroom in Little Rock, Ark., with other defendants at the daily arraignment hearing, fell into a sound sleep as he awaited his case to be announced. He was still asleep later when his two daughters and a public defender entered a not-guilty plea for him, but just then, a benchmate shook him awake. Aroused from his slumber but not yet aware of the proceedings, he impulsively arose and shouted, "I plead guilty." He is charged with stabbing a close friend to death, and the judge permitted the not-guilty plea to stand.

-- In October, Italy's highest appeal court, the Court of Cessation, ruled that the breakup of a marriage was not the wife's fault even though she abandoned the husband. The wife was able to demonstrate that after two years of battling, and a fistfight, she was no longer able to indulge her mother-in-law's presence in the home, and the judges agreed the constant interference was intolerable. Rome's largest newspaper, La Repubblica, sympathized, calling the typical Italian mother-in-law "unstoppable as a panzer, omnipresent, overbearing, meddlesome and mischief-making." And in August, a Tokyo district court, citing changing times, rejected a $38,000 claim by a man who said his ex-wife, who worked full-time outside the home, nonetheless had an obligation to do all the housework.

-- In July, Gary and Marlene Johnston pleaded guilty in Halton, Ontario, to cheating the government out of $11,000 (Canadian) in welfare benefits. They had posed in 1995 as a destitute couple with two kids and assets of only a 15-year-old car. However, in September 1996, they purchased a house in a well-to-do neighborhood and proceeded to park their two late-model cars and a boat in the driveway. The new house was just down the street from the house of their welfare caseworker, who spotted them in the yard.

-- In October, James T. Hilton, who police said had just carjacked a van in Bloomfield, N.J., was chased by police in West Orange into the neighborhood of Our Lady of the Valley Roman Catholic Church. Hilton slowed down and was captured after accidentally banging into two unmarked police cars driving slowly down the street and leading a 5,000-officer funeral procession for state trooper Scott M. Gonzalez.

-- In October, Tulsa, Okla., firefighters were called to a church during a birthday party for Mabel McCullough. The alarm had been triggered by smoke from the candles on the cake of the 95-year-old woman.

-- In July, Missouri's new vehicle safety law took effect, prohibiting people from riding in the open bed of a pickup truck. However, an exception was provided for a family transporting their kids where there are too many to ride in the cab and where the truck is the family's only vehicle. The sponsor called the exception "the Jed Clampett amendment."