News of the Weird

-- Through what a company spokesman later called "human error," the front door of the CoreStates Bank in Robesonia, Pa. (10 miles from Reading), remained unlocked through the Veterans Day weekend, and no one knew until a customer, who had forgotten it was a holiday, innocently walked in at 9 a.m. Monday, setting off a silent alarm that alerted the police. The customer said his first thought on seeing the bank empty was that robbers had locked the tellers and customers in the vault.

-- The Wise Judiciary: In December, a Bloomfield, Iowa, judge sentenced two men, who had clubbed 23 cats with baseball bats (killing 16), to one day in jail per cat, but then he suspended even that sentence. Also in December, a judge in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, sentenced the men who beat a man to death on the eve of his wedding to 16 months each in prison. (In reaction, a Dutch inmate serving eight years in a stomping death asked Queen Beatrix for a pardon, claiming his own sentence was thus way too severe.) And in January, a judge in Mexico City freed confessed killer-bandit Alonso Gonzalez, calling him "a modern Robin Hood, who not only shares what he earns from robberies, but gives his companions more money (than he keeps)."

-- In September, a federal judge in West Palm Beach, Fla., dismissed the disability lawsuit filed by police Lt. Ed Wagner against the department, ruling that Wagner was not really penalized for having the disability in that he was merely denied a special assignment. Wagner was removed from the SWAT team for having a sensitive neck, a condition which came to light when he complained that an old neck injury flared up after a colleague got him in a headlock and gave him "noogies."

-- Hours before the Dec. 5 inaugural address of Mexico City's new mayor, who was expected to announce stern measures to deal with rampant crime and police corruption, the mayor's top assistant was mugged in a taxicab, giving up his wallet and briefcase, which contained the mayor's speech. And in June, an armed robber took the purse of the executive director of Crimestoppers of New Orleans outside her office.

-- Recent Dangerous Weapons: roast beef sandwich (pedestrian, angry at a motorist, Matteson, Ill., November); burrito (motorist, angry at another, Longview, Ore., September); carrot (reaction to spouse's demand for divorce, East Hanover, N.J., August); Etch-A-Sketch toy (two teen-age boys, overpowering a jailer and escaping, Clinton, Tenn., November); cordless drill (mother hit stepdaughter because her dog was barking too loud, and the daughter struck back with a "fish whacker" tool, Wasilla, Alaska, August).

-- In October, a man robbed the Capital Bank of North County in San Diego, Calif., and escaped in a pickup truck. According to a teller, the man never claimed to have a gun, but demonstrated his impatience at the teller's dawdling by showing her a photograph of another man holding a gun.

-- In September, workers delivering crates to the Museon museum in The Hague, Netherlands, accidentally dropped one containing a 75 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton made from bones recovered in Montana, breaking it into 188 pieces. And in January during a break-in at the Yammonoki Museum in Ito, Japan, a thief being chased by a guard dropped a 600-year-old Ming Dynasty platter worth about $400,000, shattering it.

-- In November, an adviser to Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu conceded that, due to a bureaucratic oversight, the Western Wall in Jerusalem is not owned by the government but by an organization called the Islamic Trust, which administers various Muslim holy sites. After capturing Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, Israel apparently formally appropriated the land beside the Wall, but not the Wall itself.

-- The Nov. 7 edition of the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano contained statements declaring that homosexuals "do have the right" to adopt children and to live together as couples, attributed to staunch moralist Father Gino Concetti. After several days of panic at the Vatican, editor Gianfranco Grieco located the problem: a computer glitch that removed only the word "not" several times from the story.

-- In October, Harwinton, Conn., local official Marie Knudsen told the Waterbury Republican-American that the first person snared in a radar trap she intervened with the state police to have set up was the husband of the constituent who complained the loudest to her about speeders ruining her neighborhood.

-- In August, British mountain climber Alan Hinkes, who had already conquered nine of the world's 14 highest peaks, had to postpone his ambitious quest to climb the other five in one year when number 10 failed. He was at the base camp of the 26,600-foot-high Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, ready to eat a piece of local bread when the wind blew the flour topping in his face, causing him to sneeze, which resulted in a slipped disc.

-- The Sacramento Bee reported in November that a group of young people from the East Valley Foursquare Church in Orangevale, Calif., were recently observed playing what they called "Bambi Baseball," supervised by youth minister Robin Gattis. The name came from what was used as a bat: the frozen leg of a deer. (A frozen cow tongue was the ball.) It was also reported that an earlier version of the game was played by swinging a frozen trout to hit a frozen squid.

-- In 1987 a leaky tank car containing the volatile chemical butadiene exploded in a New Orleans rail yard. No one was hurt, but 8,000 nearby residents were evacuated and later filed lawsuits for their injuries, which consisted of 36 hours of displacement and a general fear of future illnesses, which have so far not materialized. About 20 so far have won an average of $100,000 each in compensatory damages. In addition, in September 1997, the entire class of potential plaintiffs won a jury trial for punitive damages against the CSX railroad and four other companies for a total of $3.4 billion. CSX was ordered to kick in three-fourths of the total even though the National Transportation Safety Board had ruled it blameless in the explosion.

-- Peter Sansom began work on Jan. 19 at his new, two-day-a-week job with the big Marks & Spencer department store in London. For the next six months under a government grant program run by the Poetry Society, he will work for about $1,500 per month as the store's poet in residence. He said he hopes generally to raise employees' and customers' level of awareness of poetry. A lesser-known poet in residence, at London's Botanical Gardens, said she has already had an impact on that organization, as witnessed by her telephone message recording: "Sarah Maguire can't get to the phone/So please leave a message after the tone."

(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.)

-- What Goes Around, Comes Around: Since taking control of most of Afghanistan in September 1996, the religious Taliban army has enforced strict, conservative Islamic rule, especially regarding the work, recreation and dress of women. Now, according to a report in the London Daily Telegraph in November, a splinter Muslim group about 200 miles north of Kabul has begun to train a women-only battalion to fight the Taliban. Females from the Hazaras, a Turkic Mongol ethnic group, have been training at a secret location and will soon begin a major recruiting campaign.

-- Tough Guys: In Paris in December, just before being convicted of the murders of two counterespionage agents, international terrorist Carlos the Jackal was sentenced to 10 days' solitary confinement for calling a prison guard a "gnu." Two weeks later, Montreal Canadiens' defenseman Dave Manson underwent surgery to remove a Christmas tree needle that had gotten stuck in his ear.

-- David S. Marion, 36, and Michael C. Ahorn, 35, were found naked in a car in a public parking lot in East St. Louis, Ill., in November, having sex, and were charged with public indecency. According to the arresting officer, Marion said, "I know it was wrong, but I just couldn't wait."

-- William Garland, the father of the late rap singer Tupac Shakur, fighting for part of Shakur's multimillion-dollar estate in Los Angeles in August, despite his having had no contact with his son after age 5, pointed out at a hearing how he was a good father. For example, he said he would often tuck in little Tupac, a bed-wetter, with another Garland son, also a bed-wetter: "They could pee with each other."

-- In July, Toronto courier Alan Wayne Scott, 47, lost a three-year battle when the Ontario Tax Court ruled that he took improper business deductions. Scott, who makes deliveries on foot and by bicycle, had claimed that his body is a professional vehicle and that operating expenses (shoes, knapsack, the $13 a day in extra high-caloric food he must consume to do his grueling work) should be tax-deductible just like an automobile's expenses are. (And, as Scott pointed out, his machine is environmentally friendly: On the day of the court's decision, a NAFTA report named Ontario the third biggest polluting jurisdiction in North America.)

-- In November in Wasilla, Alaska, Duane Carr was sentenced to 28 months in prison for sexually molesting his 15-year-old baby sitter. Carr maintained that he did not know the girl was under the legal age of 16 because he and the girl are Jehovah's Witnesses, whose members do not celebrate birthdays.

-- Crisis at Nike: The winner of September's annual Angeles Crest ultramarathon, which started at the Wrightwood Resort in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles and finished in Pasadena, was Mexican Tarahumara Indian Cirildo Chacarito, 52, in a time of 19 hours and 34 minutes. Incredibly (if one believes shoe ads), Chacarito beat all the guys in $200 running shoes; he ran the race in sandals made from old automobile tires.

-- Robert Kong, 13, was arrested and charged with manufacturing a destructive device, namely a 5 1/2-inch pipe bomb that he had made, gift-wrapped, and presented to a female classmate in Corvallis, Ore., for her birthday. He said he followed the instructions he had seen on an Internet site.

-- In September, officials at the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration changed their minds and decided it was OK for employee �Mr. Dale Robb, hired as a counselor in 1996 after 20 years in the military, to report for work every day dressed as a woman named Sabrina. And in an August story, The Washington Post featured a recent tourist, the very masculine Larry Goodwin, 51, of Douglas, Wyo., who took in the sites around town clothed as he usually is, in a dress. Said Goodwin, "I really love the feel of women's clothing."

-- According to a police report in Colerain Township, Ohio, in June, a restaurant manager trying to rid his property of drug paraphernalia turned over a homemade bong pipe that he found in a rear corridor of his building. The bong was actually a hollowed-out potato rigged with masking tape and aluminum foil, with marijuana residue inside, and had to be destroyed by the police, rather than kept as evidence, in that it was perishable food.

-- City Council member Ed Walker of Brier, Wash., was charged in September with spitting on a neighbor who had put up a yard sign touting Walker's opponent in the upcoming election. Said the neighbor to a reporter, "We've got him dead to rights. All we need is a sample of his spit (for DNA testing)."

-- In September, a basketball player for Southeastern Oklahoma State University was killed near Paris, Texas, when a flying cow hit the car in which he was riding, causing the driver to lose control and crash. The cow had been sent airborne when it was hit by another car.

-- In October, a court in Darwin, Australia, sentenced Christopher Sean Payne, 34, to 54 months in prison for causing the drowning of a 25-year-old woman at a local beach. Justice Sir William Kearney found that, though the intoxicated woman (0.287 blood-alcohol reading) had voluntarily gone underwater to perform fellatio on Payne, he deliberately held the victim's head too long in a "selfish" desire to "gratify yourself, to prolong your pleasure" and showed a lack of remorse in the aftermath.

Latest Attempts by Women to Use the Law to Enforce Prostitution Contracts: In November, three teen-age girls were arrested after they called police in Oneida, N.Y., to ask for help because a man who had just had sex with them and paid them with a check for $1,500 wrote it on an out-of-state bank that the girls couldn't get cashed. And in June, a judge in Salt Lake City dismissed Kathleen Ferguson's lawsuit against Zions First National Bank for repossessing her truck. She had sued, believing she could keep the truck because she worked out a deal by having sex with the repo man.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- The show business newspaper Daily Variety reported in December that John Kricfalusi, creator of TV's "The Ren & Stimpy Show," was threatening legal action against the producers of the Comedy Central show "South Park" for ripping off a cartoon character. According to Kricfalusi, his character "Nutty the Friendly Dump," an animated piece of excrement, must have been the basis for "South Park's" "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo," a holiday-dressed, singing, dancing piece of excrement.

-- A December New York Times story profiled 55-year-old bank vice president Rosemary Dunne, who has for 13 years been what might be described as a groupie for prominent opera tenor Richard Leech. She has sat on the front row of each of his 74 Metropolitan Opera performances since 1992 and traveled to most of his out-of-town and international engagements, all at her own expense. She has given him many gifts, including scrapbooks of his appearances, but is not romantically interested in him. She calls her obsession "my Valium. I save on therapy."

-- Dallas Monsignor Robert Rehkemper resigned in August in the wake of a $120 million jury award against the diocese for the apparently serial pedophilia committed by one of its priests. Still, Rehkemper thought the incidents weren't entirely the fault of the priest or the diocese: "I don't want to judge (the kids' parents) one way or another, but it doesn't appear they were very concerned about their kids." He also opined that once a kid reached age 6 or 7, he should have known that sex with the priest was wrong and reported it.

-- TV personality Jenny McCarthy, on how those unfortunate nude photos as a Playboy Playmate ever got made: She was walking around Chicago, she told reporters in August, intending to be a model, "And I went, 'Jenny, no, no.' All of a sudden my body started walking there (to Playboy). That's exactly what happened. A larger force, and I call it destiny, brought me in the door, moved my mouth, took the robe off, and did it."

-- In November, the city of Pittsburgh agreed to forgo an appeal and thus to pay a $1.5 million judgment to motorcyclist Henry F. Jodzis Jr. for injuries suffered in 1979 when, fleeing police after running a stop sign, he smashed into a police car being used as a roadblock. The original jury verdict in 1987 was for $60,000, but the city council insisted on an appeal, and a second trial in 1995 awarded the higher amount. The juries found the Pittsburgh police violated its own rules on roadblocks.

-- In November, the High Court in London, England, awarded Peter Lawrence, 39, about $1.6 million for injuries he suffered in a 1991 motorcycle accident. Several broken bones mended quickly, but not the damage to the part of his brain that governs emotion and control. Before the accident, the court found, Lawrence was an easygoing man with a stable marriage and a good job, but now, after having lost his job and marriage, he cannot stop making impulsive, offensive sexual advances, and several women testified that he has sexually harassed them.

-- According to a report in The Washington Post in November, armed robbers in the large Nigerian trading city of Onitsha are so bold, and the police so outmanned, that they often notify the victims in advance that they will be coming to rob them, to encourage the residents to be away from the house at the time. A few days after the police announced a crackdown, one gang of 50 armed robbers cordoned off a street and looted every apartment building on the block.

-- To help the government's case against him, accused bus fire-bomber Saber Abu el-Ulla played himself in a prosecutors' video re-enactment of the crime in Cairo, Egypt, in September. A jovial el-Ulla acted out all the sequences, including firing at the tourist passengers and hurling three Molotov cocktails down the aisle of the bus. Said a clearly pleased el-Ulla, "I have always wanted to be an actor."

-- Outlaw Koose Munusamy Veerappan, 47, wanted in connection with more than 130 murders and 200 elephant-killings in the southern India states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, announced in August that he would surrender to authorities in Madras only on the condition that he be given a subsidy of about $143,000 and an immediate presidential pardon.

-- Welsh welfare couple Shaun and Julie Doran complained to reporters in November that the free house built for them by the government was "too white" and therefore too difficult to keep clean. The Dorans and their nine children were given the $200,000 house near Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire, plus about $450 a week in welfare benefits. Complained Julie, 34, about the fact that all rooms are white: "White everything. It is driving me mad."

-- Government education officials confirmed a report in Malacca, Malaysia, in September that a fifth-grade boy, the son of a man named K. Ramiah, 38, who was shirking his homework assignments, was held by the teacher, who ordered the 21 girls in the class to slap him on both cheeks, resulting in a swollen face.

-- In July, two volunteer firefighters in The Plains, Ohio, playing hide-and-seek with neighborhood kids, got stuck in a tree 15 feet up at about 10:30 p.m. Ten of their colleagues, with an extension ladder truck, responded to the 911 call.

Recently declared as drug contraband in schools, earning suspensions for the students in possession: cough drops (Belle, W.Va., November); health-food lemon drops (Colorado Springs, Colo., November); Certs Concentrated Mints (Manassas, Va., September); gift-wrapped bottle of Bordeaux wine as a Christmas gift for an eighth-grader's French teacher (Cobb County, Ga.).

Adding to the stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (23) The emphysema patient who just can't stop smoking even though hooked up to an oxygen tank, with predictable results, as happened to Robert Auger of Bridgeport, Conn., in November. And (24) the gasoline thieves working in the dark who believe the best way to illuminate an area is with a match or lighter, to similarly predictable results, as happened to Timothy D. Compton, 18, in Glenoma, Wash., in November.

(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.)