News of the Weird

-- In November, ecology activists in Chile issued an alert that 2-foot-long mutant rats were attacking livestock in Santiago. At about the same time, residents of Brooksville, Fla., were complaining about the sudden public appearances of 3-foot-long, 14-pound nutria rats (vegetarian rodents once imported from South America for their fur). And two weeks later, The New York Times reported on the recent work of Louisiana professor Robert A. Thomas, hired with a $2 million federal grant to contain that state's nutria rat population, largely by trying to convince the public that nutrias are tasty.

-- Bobbittization News: In December, Alan Hall, 48, reported to police in Fairfield, Calif., that he had been Bobbittized by a woman in revenge for Hall's having killed a friend of hers 14 years ago. (Hall served time for voluntary manslaughter.) Then, two days later, Hall admitted that there was no other woman and that he had done it himself for unstated reasons. The incident took place only three weeks after Danish surgeon Joern Ege Siana reported outfitting a world-record 5.7-inch penis extension on a 42-year-old man, and only two days after the former Lorena Bobbitt, herself, was charged in Manassas, Va., with punching her mother in a family squabble.

-- In November, dentist W. Stephen Randall, 41, was charged with 26 drug-related counts in Bristol, Conn. According to the prosecutor, Randall had a drug habit and in various ways managed to appropriate patients' prescriptions. In one instance he made a rare house call on a patient, but while in the house, he raided the patient's medicine chest of valium and other drugs, and in another case, he copped a root-canal patient's painkiller and left her instead over-the-counter acetaminophen.

-- In June, Lake Zurich High School teacher Douglas Petrovitch, 28, was indicted in Waukegan, Ill., on six counts related to a scheme of awarding some students good grades if they would allow him to shoplift at stores in which they worked after school. In two instances, said the grand jury, Petrovitch arranged with students to pay about $100 for merchandise worth about $1,000.

-- Police in Edmond, Okla., issued an arrest warrant in July for Edward M. Jennings, 37, as the man who toured flea markets, pawn shops and swap meets over the last two years attempting to sell his homemade box, rigged with computer parts, as an "atomic bomb" for $1 million. Because Jennings was on the lam, he was unavailable to tell why he thought someone at a flea market might have $1 million to spend on an atomic bomb.

-- In December, an industrial tribunal in Bristol, England, took under consideration the case of whether the 1996 firing of Gavin Rogers-Ball, 30, a member of the Wells Cathedral Choir, was justified. The chief complaint against him was that he had bribed a schoolboy in the choir to feign illness on a long bus ride during a tour of Germany -- so that the driver would have to stop, which would enable Rogers-Ball to take a cigarette break. A 10-year-old boy induced himself to vomit in the back of the bus and thus collected the award, and his mother says she does not want the boy to grow up thinking this behavior is acceptable.

-- Thomas Tillman pleaded guilty in September in Tampa, Fla., for whipping his son and stepson with a water-soaked leather strap and videotaping the beating. Tillman said he made the tape so that the boys could one day show it to their own kids as an aid in disciplining them.

-- Brian Cook, 29, was charged with aggravated burglary in Springfield, Tenn., in November after trying to rob his grandmother, Sue Denning, 64. Denning grabbed an antique clothes iron and hit Cook in the head, sending him staggering from the home.

-- The New York Times reported in October on the secret life of a 25-year-old British-born daughter of Pakistani immigrants living in Bradford, England, who has changed residences 19 times in the last five years just to avoid death threats from her own father and brother, who are angry that she refused at age 16 to accept a family-arranged marriage. The woman said that in her last conversation with her brother, he had promised to track her down and kill her "slowly."

-- In November, John Michael Harris, 17, escaped from a Wetherby, England, correctional institution, and police warned he might be dangerous, though his mother, June, called him a "good boy" and blamed "the system (for letting) him down." Harris is known in the press as "Blip Boy," because his 17-page criminal record, with 103 convictions since age 9, has by itself noticeably increased the juvenile crime rate.

-- In September in Cormierville, New Brunswick, Kevin Bastarache peeled an orange and saw an inch-long, orange-colored Pacific tree frog leap out at him. A local zoo official, familiar with the species, said the frog must have entered the orange through a tiny hole and then survived on the juices. The frogs are found from California to Canada and are harmless, and in fact are sometimes kept as pets.

-- The Times of London reported in July that a telephone had gone on sale in England with a built-in stress-linked lie detector and a retail price of about $4,500. The manufacturer said the most promising sales market is executives, who would use the device to gather business information. In a test, a Times reporter called a used-car dealer, who consistently registered a high (probably lying) reading but also phoned a notorious London nightclub owner to talk about his public claim that he had had sex with more than 2,000 woman -- and found the man scored low (probably truthful).

-- In November, two professors from Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., announced that, based on their study of 10 journalists at the local Times Leader newspaper, having Muzak on in the background at work not only reduced stress but slightly improved the journalists' immune systems.

-- In August, just after a Hudson Foods processing plant in Nebraska was closed down based on a highly publicized federal investigation that found e-coli bacteria contamination in ground beef, the company suffered another crisis. Hudson's Noel, Mo., poultry-processing plant became the first U.S. firm to be fined ($300,000) by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for causing workers anxiety by providing insufficient restroom breaks.

(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.)

-- 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.)