News of the Weird

-- In Miami, Fla., on Dec. 4 at 10:30 p.m., Edna Benson, in curlers and ready for bed, grabbed her Taurus 85 handgun and prepared to see who was knocking on her door at that hour. To her great surprise, it was Mayor Xavier Suarez, who "looked mad, really, really mad," said Benson, and was clutching the four-page letter she had written criticizing the mayor for firing the police chief. After she turned out the lights and shouted at him, Suarez finally walked away. Later, Suarez said he tries to call everyone who writes him but that he didn't have Benson's phone number.

-- In November in Waukesha, Wis., Kenneth J. Nowicki, 34, was formally charged with disorderly conduct following his arrest in August. According to the police complaint, Nowicki targeted three kids in a park, left them candy and a cup, and via typewritten instructions asked them to spit into the cup after consuming the candy. He told police he is preoccupied with saliva and uses it for sexual gratification.

-- In October, the Hotel Nagoya Castle, 170 miles west of Tokyo, began calling its rates "suggested" and allowing customers to pay whatever they thought the rooms were worth (but at least 38 percent of the suggested rate). In trial runs, the hotel found the average discount to be only 10 percent, which management expected to be overcome by higher volume.

-- The Rocky Mountain News disclosed in June that business was brisk for the Denver company DDx Inc., in sales of its HeatWatch system, which detects when one cow attempts to mount another cow (which, though it has no procreation significance, is still a good indication that one or both are in heat) and alerts ranchers and dairy farmers of optimum time for artificial insemination.

-- In September in Hackensack, N.J., pharmaceutical chemist Puzant Torigian introduced the latest "safe" cigarette, Bravo, made of enzyme-treated lettuce leaves. They are sold mostly in health-food stores, at about $3.50 a pack. (Bravos actually appeared on the market briefly 28 years ago, but safe-smoking was not as important then, and they failed to sell.)

-- The German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported the introduction of a "Letter Bomb" toy in stores in the Philippines in October, selling quickly by urging kids to "have fun and become a terrorist." The toy resembles an airmail envelope, and instructions say to write the target's name on it, clap on it heavily, and then present it to the victim within seven seconds so it will "explode" in his hand.

-- A July New York Post article described the rapidly expanding retail market for bullet-resistant clothing (leather jackets, sneakers, mink coats, bras), including denim jeans with 25 percent Kevlar, which the manufacturer believes will sell because of their unique appearance rather than their bullet-retarding properties. And the Village Voice reported in November that a New York City security gadget store sells an ordinary-looking chair with electric plates on the seat and on a shelf extending from an arm; it can detect when someone is hiding a metal object in his rectum or mouth.

-- In June, Netherlands native Imre Somogyi told an audience at a book festival in Chicago that he was the world's first toe reader. In the course of promoting his book, "Reading Toes: Your Feet as Reflections of Your Personality," Somogyi told one New York woman that the inward turn of her right small toe indicated she was likely "to turn away from the subject," according to a Reuters news report. Somogyi said 70 percent of his clients are women: "Women are very open. Men hide their toes."

-- State University College at New Paltz, N.Y., hosted controversial, sex-related academic conferences on the weekends of Oct. 31 and Nov. 7. The first included tips on sadomasochism and the use of sex toys, and the second, on women's bodies in art, featured such exhibits as a female graduate student in a body suit, suspended from a ceiling, being hosed down with water by two men while a woman lying underneath her and wearing only a G-string has hot wax dripped on her body.

-- In November, the Dayton Daily News reported that a vandal operating in local libraries is still on the loose after two years of incidents. The vandal targets books that, as he once wrote, are "an affront to public decency (and that) corrupt young children," such as those on homosexuality or the United Nations, and smears them with human feces.

-- In June trial testimony in Providence, R.I., against retired Roman Catholic Monsignor Louis Ward Dunn, a woman who claimed to have been raped by him in 1965 when she was 18 said she initially did not believe Father Dunn's advances were sexual. She said Father Dunn had asked her to remove her blouse, which she did, and that he had spread talcum powder over her breasts, and that the two of them then killed a bottle of wine, but, she said, "I did not consider that sexual in any way." (Dunn was acquitted of that rape charge. However, the next week, he was found guilty of raping another woman and called by the judge "a sexual predator," but in August the judge granted him a new trial in that case.)

-- In August in Sharnbrook, England, Emma Webster, 15, revealed she was pregnant, due in January, and that the father was Sean Stewart, age 11, whom she had met in school and whom she thought was at least 15. Said Emma to London's Daily Mail, "I think he will be a good father. He may only be 11, but he is quite mature and responsible for his age."

-- A 38-year-old man passed away in Jenkins Township, Pa., in November, a couple of hours after going to the home of a friend to see his snakes. According to the friend, the man had playfully reached into a cobra's tank and picked up the snake, and was bitten. Refusing a ride to the hospital, the man said "I'm a man, I can handle it," and instead went to a bar, where he had three drinks and bragged to patrons that he had just been bitten by a cobra. An hour later, he was dead.

-- On the morning of Nov. 11, two best friends, ages 27 and 41, residents of Whitney, Texas, about 25 miles north of Waco, did what they often did when they encountered each other on the empty farm roads: They drove their pickups directly at each other in a game of chicken. That morning, they collided at about 60 miles an hour. The younger man was saved by his seat belt; the older man was unbelted and died at the scene.

(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.)

ALREADY THEY CAN SURVIVE NUCLEAR WAR. NOW, WE GIVE THEM COMPUTER ENHANCEMENTS

In January, Japanese researchers began testing microprocessors and microcameras surgically implanted into American cockroaches for a variety of missions including espionage surveillance. The equipment, weighing a 10th of an ounce, uses remote-control signals to command the cockroach's movements.

One aspect of Israeli-Palestinian relations is running smoothly, according to a May Boston Globe story. Israel has the highest per capita car theft in the world, and police say several cooperative Israeli-Palestinian car-theft rings operate almost effortlessly, fencing cars and parts to dealers on both sides of the border.

According to research commissioned by The Weather Channel, disclosed in April, one in five viewers watches for at least three hours at a sitting. The company calls these people "weather-involved."

A March New York Times story described what it called really bad Japanese TV shows, among them one in which bikini-clad young women crush aluminum cans by squeezing them between their breasts, and another in which a young child was brought on stage and told that his mother had just been shot to death -- for the purpose of seeing how many seconds would elapse before he started crying.

Brothers Geoffrey and Aaron Kuffner were arrested in New Orleans in June and charged with terrorism as the ones who had recently mailed or hand-delivered suspicious packages to local government and news media offices. The packages were harmless (but nonetheless frightening enough that two offices had to be evacuated), and each contained a four-page manifesto, "Violent Acts of Consciousness Have Only Begun." According to police, the men's goal was to call attention to public ignorance of poetry and that among their demands was that all state inaugural speeches be written in iambic pentameter.

In December 1996, Phillip Johnson, then 32, was hospitalized in Prestonburg, Ky., after shooting himself in the left shoulder with his .22-caliber rifle "to see how it felt," he told ambulance personnel. The sheriff described him as "screaming about the pain, over and over." On Oct. 2, 1997, an ambulance crew was again called to Johnson's home, where he was bleeding from another left-shoulder gunshot. According to the Inez Mountain Citizen newspaper, Johnson said the earlier shooting "felt so good," he had to do it again.

In January, Jack Petelui, 43, climbed the ornate facade of the Ansonia Hotel in New York City and was poised for suicide for more than an hour. According to several newspaper reports, dozens of New Yorkers on the street below were actually yelling "DON'T jump!" (He did anyway, but landed on a police department rescue airbag.)

Lavelle Davis, 23, was convicted of murder in Geneva, Ill., in February. Prosecutors showed how Davis and an accomplice rehearsed the murder, including how the accomplice placed duct tape over Davis' mouth just as they would later do to the victim. At trial, Davis was linked to the crime scene by what prosecutors said were his lip prints on the practice tape.

In February, the Palm Springs (Calif.) Regional Airport Commission issued hygiene rules for cab drivers serving the airport, including requirements that drivers shower daily with soap, brush with toothpaste and eat breath mints.

In March the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that a local woman, 66, and her husband were searching for a surrogate mother for their deceased son's sperm so that they could fulfill their longing to be grandparents. And three days earlier, a Milan, Italy, newspaper reported that a 35-year-old woman was three months pregnant with the fetuses of two couples, whose children she agreed to bear simultaneously because of a shortage of surrogate mothers. (She said blood tests after birth would determine which baby was which.)

The Times of London reported in March that when an employee of the James Beauchamp law firm in Edgbaston, England, recently killed himself, the firm billed his mother about $20,000 for the expense of settling his officework. Included was a bill for about $2,300 to go to his home to find out why he didn't show up at work (thus finding his body), plus about $250 to go to his mother's home, knock on her door, and tell her that her son was dead. (After unfavorable publicity, the firm withdrew the bill.)

The New York Observer reported in May that some New York City dermatologists who have been eliminating patients' facial wrinkles by deadening the skin with tiny injections of the bacteria that causes botulism are touting a new use for the $800 procedure: that it so deadens the forehead that it prevents scowling, which some patients say is a benefit to keeping a "poker face" during business negotiations.

In April, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine announced they had created a strain of mice twice the usual size, with broad shoulders and massive hips. The researchers said they believe they can do the same thing for chickens and cattle.

Ms. Courtney Mann, the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, who works as a tax preparer and is a single mother, was rebuffed in an attempt to join a Ku Klux Klan-sponsored march in Pittsburgh in April. Though she has been in the NAAWP for at least four years, the Klan turned her down -- because she is black. Said the Grand Dragon, "She wanted to stay at my house (during rally weekend). She's all confused, man. I don't think she knows she's a black."

Marsha Watt, a 1990 graduate of Northwestern University School of Law and formerly an associate at the prestigious Winston & Strawn law firm in Chicago, had charges filed against her in February by the Illinois Bar over her most recent conviction for prostitution (i.e., the kind involving sex, for which her published rate, according to a personals ad, was roughly three times what the law firm billed for her).

When Maria DiGiulio was booked in July for robbing the Everett (Mass.) Co-op Bank, she answered police Lt. Robert Bontempo forthrightly. "Occupation?" he asked. "Bank robber," she said. And Mohamed Sead, 47, who was convicted of fraud in July, answered similarly at his original booking in Toronto, Ontario. Occupation? "Con artist," he said. (Sead's scheme was to deceive girlfriends that he was the then-living Dodi Fayed.)

John H. Bergantini, a candidate for tax assessor in Exeter, R.I., commenting in March on the government's suing him for $2,678 in back property taxes: "My ability to write a check for a certain amount of money has nothing to do with (my ability to judge) how much a piece of property is worth."

New York Assemblywoman Susan John of Rochester, who is the chair of the Assembly's Alcohol and Drug Abuse committee, upon her guilty plea in March for driving while alcohol-impaired: "This will give me additional insights into the problem of drinking and driving, and I believe, will allow me to do my job even more effectively."

According to an October communique from the North Korean Communist Party, "dear leader" Kim Jong Il, 55, was promoted to "great leader," which, said the government, was cause for "jubilation" even in the midst of national famine. The government added that fantastic natural phenomena were occurring to mark the occasion, including the landing of a 4-inch-long white sea cucumber by one angler and the spontaneous, prolific blossoming of numerous pear trees and apricot trees.

Minneapolis firefighter Gerald Brown, 55, who was fired in 1995 for abuse of sick leave but who won a grievance hearing and was reinstated with 18 months' back pay, was scheduled to return to work on June 2. He called in sick.

Bennie Casson filed a $100,000 lawsuit in Belleville, Ill., in July against PT's Show Club for its negligence in allowing a stripper to "slam" her breasts into his "neck and head region" as he watched her, a little too close to the stage. Dancer Susan Sykes (aka "Busty Heart") claims show business's biggest chest (88 inches), which Casson said gave him a "bruised, contused, lacerated" neck.

Continuing the annual roundup in this space: In Alabama, murderer Billy Wayne Waldrop was executed in January, and the next month, murderer Dudley Wayne Kyzer was turned down for parole. Two weeks after that, murderer Coleman Wayne Gray was executed in Virginia. In May, murderer Larry Wayne White was executed in Texas. In July, Maryland inmate Richard Wayne Willoughby was sentenced to life in prison for murdering another inmate.

Steven Richard King, 22, was arrested in April for trying to hold up a Bank of America branch in Modesto, Calif., without a weapon. He used his thumb and finger to simulate a gun, but unlike most robbers who use this tactic, he did not have his hand in his pocket.

In July, in Doncaster, England, police put suspect Martin Kamara, 43, a black man, in a lineup for identification, but because of recent racial incidents, they couldn't find any black men willing to stand alongside him, so police hired a makeup artist to put black faces on seven white men for the lineup. A judge released Kamara because of the foolishness. (In addition to the inherent problem, the artist neglected to make up the men's hands.)

In this space last year appeared hard-luck Oklahoma rapist Darron Bennalford Anderson, who in 1994 had received a 2,200-year sentence but had appealed and won a new trial, only to be convicted again and resentenced to more than 90 additional centuries behind bars, including 4,000 years each for rape and sodomy, 1,750 years for kidnapping, 1,000 years for burglary and robbery, and 500 years for grand larceny. But Anderson was not to be denied; 1997 was his year. In July, the state Court of Criminal Appeals held that the grand larceny charge was double jeopardy on the robbery conviction and thus dismissed it. Just like that, the court cut Anderson's sentence by 500 years, speeding up his release date to the year A.D. 12,744.

In May, Scripps Howard News Service profiled former lawyer James Kelley of Washington, D.C., one of a small group at his local church who are enthusiastic Episcopalians but who do not believe in God. Said Kelley, "We all love the incense, the stained glass windows, the organ music, the vestments, and all of that. It's drama. It's aesthetics. It's the ritual. That's neat stuff. I don't want to give all that up, just because I don't believe in God."

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. 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."

In October in Milwaukee, Gary Arthur Medrow, 53, was charged with 24 counts of impersonating a police officer in connection with his unique obsession. What Medrow does, according to the police (who have arrested him various times over the last 30 years for the same thing), is telephone a woman and try to convince her to lift another woman in the room and carry her a short distance, sometimes telling the woman that he's a police officer and that it's an official request.

At the Eugene, Ore., city council meeting on Aug. 6, an unidentified man who had been sitting in the audience walked up to the controversial Mayor Jim Torrey, leaned over, and vomited on his shoulder. He left but was not pursued by the stunned attendees.

A California pro-prostitution organization, the National Sexual Rights Council, made a fund-raising appeal in April for its benevolent campaign to get teen-age hookers off the streets. For a $250 donation, the Council's Pretty Woman Committee of adult prostitutes would give the donor a T-shirt and a membership card, but for $150,000 -- the price of a Lincoln Bedroom sleepover -- one Pretty Woman would supply a real sleepover, in Nevada.

In 1993 India Scott of Detroit dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon Ventimeglia and in 1994 gave birth to a boy. Neither man knew about the other, and she told each he was the father. For two years, Scott managed to juggle the men's visitation rights, but in March 1997 when she announced she was marrying another man and leaving the area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of "his" son. Only then did the men find out about each other. In May, they took blood tests to settle the paternity once and for all. Result: Neither is the father.

-- In September in Columbus, Ohio, Peter "Commander Pedro" Langan was convicted on gun charges for a 1996 shootout with police. Langan also has been convicted of two bank robberies and faces trial in four others as leader of a neo-Nazi, white-supremacist gang that used the robberies to fund its activities. At his September trial, Langan's lawyer brought in two character witnesses (one male, one female) to describe their loving romances with him. Both witnesses were pre-operation transsexuals; around the time of the robberies, Langan was dating both while dressing exclusively as a woman. The lovers were known as Langan's "business partners" because neo-Nazis are not known to be supportive of transsexuals.

-- Restaurant Openings: La Nouvelle Justine, an S&M-themed restaurant that offers diners mild spankings, food served in dog bowls, and the opportunity to command and be commanded as they eat, opened in May in New York City. And in Beijing, a restaurant noted for serving the food of the cultural revolution (whose name roughly translates to Compare Past Misery With Present Happiness) achieved prominence. It serves mostly peasant food (ant soup, fried crickets); one customer eating corn cake chewed on it for a few moments, then pushed it away, saying, "It tastes the same, not any better than what I remember."

-- In the summer, in the midst of the Army 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. Said one official, quoted by The New York Times, "This is war."

-- In July, the Centers for Disease Control reported the first instance of HIV transmitted not through sex or drugs but through deep kissing. 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.

-- An April issue of New Scientist magazine reported that an Australian research group had already made three sales of its "phalloblaster" device (at about $3,500 (U.S.)), whose function is to inflate the genitalia of dead insects in order to make it easier to classify them. It will work on genitalia as small as those of moths with wingspans of 2 millimeters.

(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.)

-- 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.)