News of the Weird

-- The Department of Energy announced in May, after reviewing project records from the 1950s, that some inspectors at a uranium processing plant near Cincinnati used the somewhat-unscientific method of measuring the substance's metallic strength by sprinkling some on their tongues to see if it tasted right. The inspectors feared that if they did not submit high-enough-grade samples, the government would regard their uranium as useless and shut down the plant.

-- In a May report, The New York Times revealed that the town of Aspen, Colo., apparently desperate for people other than millionaires to live there, offers public housing assistance even to those whose income is as much as $115,000 a year.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., in March, four Orthodox Jewish men charged that several local rabbis had arranged for them to be beaten up as threats to get them to agree to religious annulments of their marriages. According to the charges, which were being investigated by the district attorney, the rabbis collected fees from the men's ex-wives, who, though they are divorced under state law, still cannot remarry within the faith unless their ex-husbands agree to a "get," which is a religious divorce. (Some Orthodox Jewish men refuse to grant the "get" in order to obtain leverage in child custody disputes.)

Robert A. Milefski, 58, who was driving a car that killed a woman in 1996, avoided a DUI charge that day by smearing excrement all over himself before the Breathalyzer test. (He was immediately hospitalized for psychiatric observation, and the records surrounding his tests were not released until April 1998.) And in Lincoln, Neb., in March, James B. Johnson, 34, about to be breath-tested at the police station on suspicion of DUI, avoided the test when he emerged from the men's room with blue foam oozing from his mouth as a result of sucking on the sanitizer disc in the urinal. Johnson was later charged with DUI anyway, based on a blood test.

New York Supreme Court Justice Herman Cahn ruled in May that calling a woman a bitch is not necessarily defamatory. The term, Cahn wrote, is "too imprecise and open to speculation" to allow the plaintiff to win her slander lawsuit. But in January, a court in Cologne, Germany, imposed a four-month license suspension and an 1,800-mark fine on a 22-year-old man because, during a traffic altercation, he had insulted a 36-year-old female driver by yelling, "Typical woman!"

A few years ago, car rental firms violated Texas law in selling traditional collision damage coverage to rental customers, and the state recently ordered $13 million in refunds. In 1996, one customer, Alan Siebenmorgan, decided not to wait for the state to negotiate the refunds and did not even bother to ask Hertz to refund his $17.90 for one day's illegal insurance; he just filed a lawsuit and in the ensuing months, also declined to settle out of court. His case finally came to trial in February in Houston, and the jury agreed that the $17.90 was illegally collected. However, probably reacting to Siebenmorgan's litigiousness, the jury awarded him a refund of zero, punitive damages of zero, and compensation for his already-incurred legal fees ($450,000) of zero.

-- Scientific American magazine reported in March that a team of researchers at a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab is making great strides in manufacturing human growth hormone (HGH) by harvesting it in the urine of rats. Apparently, "uroplakin" genes, which are ideal for growing other genes, are produced only in bladders, and in fact the bladder may be the only place genes for HGH can be placed without causing the rat to grow very large. Previously, some mammals' milk has been used for harvesting, but urine is much more plentiful.

-- Apparently, Crabs Are Like Guys: Researchers at the University of Wales, Cardiff told the Times of London in February that, using the right sexual scent, they had induced a male crab to attempt to mate not only with a female crab but with a stone and a tennis ball. Researchers said also that crabs have well-developed vision but still approached the three bogus targets with great vigor.

-- Cliches Come to Life: According to a doctor's experience reported in the December 1997 journal Biological Therapies in Psychiatry, a 35-year-old female patient receiving a traditional anti-depressant was switched to bupropion, supposedly just as effective but without the traditional drug's side effect of inhibiting orgasm. "Within one week, her ability to achieve orgasm and her enjoyment of sex had returned to normal," the doctor wrote. "After six weeks, however, she experienced (spontaneously, without physical stimulation) a three-hour orgasm while shopping."

-- Psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp of Ohio's Bowling Green State University told the Associated Press in May that rats are among the most playful of animals and love to be tickled. Panksepp measures rats' joy by instruments that detect their high-pitched sounds that humans cannot hear and by the thousands of small nips they take at his fingers as he coochy-coos the napes of their necks.

-- In April, renowned Israeli surgeon Jacob Lavee said he would soon attempt the world's first heart transplant in which a human receives a pig's heart. Lavee said he was confident of overcoming the two big obstacles: (1) Though his likely heart recipient would be Jewish, several leading authorities said the ban on eating pig meat should not stop the use of a pig's heart to save a human life, and (2) the British firm Imutran has created a breed of genetically engineered pigs whose hearts can more easily adapt to the body of a human.

Tim Ekelman, 33, was hospitalized in Hamilton, Ontario, in March with a collapsed lung, a sliced throat and voice-box damage after he attempted to swallow a friend's 40-inch-long sword. (A professional sword swallower interviewed by the Hamilton Spectator said he would never stick a sword down his throat without first dulling the edges.) Said Ekelman's girlfriend, "I love him with all my heart, but what a jerk."

In 1993 News of the Weird reported on the French performance artist Orlan, who had just completed her fifth episode of plastic surgery, out of seven scheduled, in her attempt at art by personal body transformation. She was changing parts of her face and body to conform to Renaissance ideals of beauty. In February 1998, Baltimore artist and breast cancer survivor Laure Drogoul announced that she had begun soliciting other artists' suggestions for surgical and tattoo replacements for her areolae and nipples, which were lost to a double mastectomy (one suggestion: a tattoo of a faucet). After the transformation, she plans public shows of the art.

In March, three men, who for almost a year had been tunneling into a mountain, allegedly for the purpose of finding and stealing from an ancient Han Dynasty tomb in Shandong province, China, were killed by the tomb's noxious fumes.

(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.)

-- Clive Winter, 45, third-highest-ranking official at the Lothian, Scotland, provincial health board, was convicted in February of several assaults as part of a secret gang he had formed in order to violently attack people at random. Winter, said his boss, was "extremely intelligent, quiet and a placid man in the office," but according to testimony at his trial, he roamed streets at night purely, said a police detective, "to gratify his own lust for violence."

-- An April Associated Press story from Decatur, Ala., reported on the severely reclusive mother and daughter, Evelyn and Marilyn Arnold, who died of natural causes within a week of each other in December. According to neighbors and relatives, Evelyn, 85, controlled every aspect of Marilyn's life, which may have deprived the daughter of the ability to survive after Evelyn's death. Among the pair's idiosyncrasies: Marilyn's abject fear of the telephone; Evelyn's need to record in a notebook every wrong-number telephone call she ever got; their disregarding the bathtub because they feared the previous owner's germs; and their use of a bucket instead of the toilet, even though the plumbing worked fine.

The London Daily Telegraph reported in January that Syrian Gen. Mustafa Tlass told his men not to attack Italian peacekeeping soldiers during the 1983 chaos in Beirut only because he had a lifelong obsession with the Italian actress Gina Lollabrigida. Gen. Tlass said his men could "do whatever you want with the U.S., British and other forces, but ... I do not want a single tear falling from the eyes of Gina Lollabrigida."

Shirley Jean Shay, 41, was arrested near Salt Lake City in April after commandeering a 25-ton fire truck and leading police on a 50-mile chase at speeds up to 70 mph, including the last 20 miles after all six tires had been punctured by road spikes. No motive was given. And a man led police on a brief vehicle chase on Interstate 215 in Perris, Calif., in March before being subdued. The chase had ended several blocks earlier when the man's car ran out of gas, but then he got out and pushed it in a futile attempt to stay ahead of the police.

In March, after four hours of questioning and waiting, police in Springfield, Ill., gave up and got a search warrant for the mouth of Mr. Eunice Husband, 27. Husband had stuffed three marble-sized bags of crack cocaine in his mouth and refused to open up, though he continued to talk to officers through his clenched teeth. After getting the warrant, police took Husband to a hospital, where he was sedated and the bags removed.

In April, Malaysian skydivers guided the national car, a Proton Wira, on a parachute to a landing at the North Pole, where the engine started right away. Prime Minister Mahathir Mahamad said the drop "bolsters our spirits," but critics said it was a stunt by the government to get people's minds off the dismal economy.

-- As the U.S.-Iraqi conflict heated up in February, two members of the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors attempted to revive the pacifist sect's tradition of protest in Burnaby, British Columbia. They went on a 25-day hunger strike in jail, where they are serving two-year sentences for setting fires to their own homes, which they said Doukhobors frequently do to demonstrate sacrifice against long-standing evils, including taxation and public education. The other hallmark of Doukhobor protests is frequent public nudity, which it says shows a rejection of wealth and status.

-- Charles Collins III was indicted in Albany, N.Y., in April for his January protest at the state Court of Appeals building over a child custody case. Shortly before dawn, according to the indictment, he hooked a spray gun to a 55-gallon drum of chicken manure and covered the front of the building. And in April in nearby Guilderland, N.Y., a critic of newly elected Town Supervisor Jerry Yerbury broke into his office and left a stack of color photographs of excrement.

-- In April, Jose Albeiro Forero and two other municipal employees in the town of Cartago, Colombia, nailed themselves to wooden crosses with 5-inch nails to fortify their demands for a salary increase and other benefits.

-- Last year, the six-member city council of Glendale, Colo., passed tough restrictions on strip clubs that so angered many citizens that they joined strip-club owner Debbie Matthews in forming the Glendale Tea Party, whose candidates in the April 1998 council election won all three contested seats, giving the party a chance now to repeal or weaken the ordinance. Said Matthews, "I don't think (the old council) realized (how many) people like the club."

-- According to a Chronicle of Higher Education roundup in May, students in at least six colleges in recent months have engaged in violent protests "not seen since the Vietnam war," involving attacks on local police over their "right" to drink in violation of local laws, including drinking even though underage. In all, more than 3,000 students participated at Michigan State, Washington State, University of Connecticut, University of Tennessee at Martin, Ohio University and Plymouth State (N.H.).

In April, indictments were returned against New York City inmates Hector Muniz, Carlos Martinez and Troy Jennings for their alleged get-rich scheme at Rikers Island prison. Authorities said Muniz, who had a day job on the outside, smuggled a gun inside so that, at Jennings' direction, Martinez could shoot Jennings in the leg, which he did. The plan was that Jennings would sue the city for "millions" for negligence in allowing the gun inside and insist on the release of all three men as a condition of settlement.

The latest British company to hire a poet-in-residence is the London Zoo. According to director-general Richard Burge, the poet's jobs will include writing guides in rhyme for visitors and "helping to interpret the lives of the animals." News of the Weird reported earlier this year that the large department store Marks & Spencer had hired a poet two days a week, and since then, the British Broadcasting Corp. and a professional soccer team have hired poets (although the soccer team is still in last place in the Premier League).

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (23) An older female schoolteacher's creating a sexual relationship with a much-younger male student, for which Mary Kay LeTourneau of Seattle received massive press coverage last year and for which Julie A. Feil, 31, of Hastings, Minn., received very little in February 1998 when she was arrested for seducing a 16-year-old boy (after allegedly failing with a 13-year-old). And (24) the firefighter who sets fires to create work for himself, as allegedly was the case with at least two members of the Centreville, Ill., fire department in April and with prominent firefighter-arson expert John Orr, who at press time is on trial in Los Angeles in a death caused by one of the estimated 30 fires he has set since 1984.

(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 New York Times reported in March on the Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to set pollution-discharge limits on livestock farms within seven years. U.S. farm animals produce 130 times the manure that U.S. humans do, and one farm now under construction in Utah will produce more than all of Los Angeles. Also, unlike cities, farms do not have treatment plants. "Sometimes in the night, in the summer, when they start pumping effluent, it wakes you up," said one Missouri farm neighbor. "You are gagging."

-- In March, the Oregon Lottery Commission awarded a $124,000 contract to a company to advise it on how best to restore its gambling games to operating status in case of a catastrophic earthquake or asteroid collision, with a goal of having video poker back up within two hours of a disaster. Several critics suggested there might be more pressing problems after an earthquake, but the commission pointed out that gambling generates $1 million a day for the state.

According to authorities at the Hampton, Va., jail in March, a civilian attendant from the jail's canteen was pushing a cart full of snacks past the locked cell of Anthony Tyrone Darden, 21, when Darden reached through the bars, hit the man on the head with a broom handle, and took two packs of peanut butter crackers. Darden was apprehended pretty quickly, and the Nabs were confiscated.

In February, according to Kenya's largest newspaper, The Nation, a Nairobi physician who had just removed a bean from a young girl's ear jammed it back in when her parents came up short on cash for the $6 procedure. And in March, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin announced they had found physical differences in the inner ears of lesbians and straight women (perhaps the first evidence of a pre-birth determination of female homosexuality). And in February, burglar Calvin Sewell became the first person in Britain to be convicted with the help of his earprint. He had claimed an extraordinary ability to detect whether a house was empty just by pressing his ear to a door for a few minutes.

In March, near Canyon, Texas, Justice of the Peace E. Jay Hall said he found what "did appear to be a (human) fetus," five to six months post-conception, with a severed umbilical cord, floating in a pool of standing water. He ordered it put into a plastic bag, placed in a Styrofoam container, and taken to Lubbock for an autopsy. Lubbock pathologists called Hall about an hour later and reported it was a doll.

-- At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, mathematicians assembled as usual on March 14 to celebrate pi (3.14159 etc.), one of probably dozens or maybe hundreds of such assemblies worldwide at which people sing songs and recite poetry about pi, have pi trivia quizzes, and eat pie. (Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, is a mathematically irrational number, and is thus considered to be a symbol for the mystery of the universe.)

-- According to a March report in The New Republic, some Wall Street investment houses celebrate the incredible bull market by engaging in ritual worship of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. One firm holds a cake party and songfest on Greenspan's March 6 birthday, and another has outfitted a special office with Greenspan memorabilia and a red leather chair in which bond traders can sit and meditate on the great man.

In March in Chicago, Bears' 290-pound defensive lineman Alonzo Spellman barricaded himself in the home of his publicist for eight hours until he told police he would agree to hospitalization. Police said Spellman was distraught at having to take an NFL-mandated steroid test. And in October, an Indonesian runner named Ruwiyati won the women's marathon in the Southeast Asia Games and promptly told reporters in Jakarta that the secret to her success is that she drinks blood from her coach's finger before each race. Said coach Alwi Mugiyanto, "I don't know why, but she just insists on doing it."

-- In March, Don Graham asked a technician-friend to have a look at the stereo cassette recorder he said he paid $60 for at a Bountiful, Utah, store but whose buttons wouldn't stay down when Graham pressed them. Problem: Four pounds of cocaine (value $200,000) had been wrapped in a 2-year-old Miami area newspaper and duct-taped to the inside, jamming the buttons. Police are investigating.

-- Lucy Ricardo Lives: In November, it took rescuers an hour to cut through the fangs in the statue of the Jaguar at Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville, Fla., to free Andy Wilkinson, 9, who had stuck his head in the statue's mouth and couldn't get it out.

-- Latest Wrong Addresses With Severe Consequences: Drug-raiding police used a battering ram on the wrong Bronx, N.Y., apartment in March, horribly frightening a grandmother and grandchild. The real target was the "furthest (apartment) on the left," not the "first on the left." And a March roof replacement job scheduled for 948 Pons Court, Newbury Park, Calif., was commenced on 949 Pons Court. The drug-raid error will probably result in a $30 million lawsuit, and the family at 949 Pons Court is still mulling its options.

-- When Virginia Broache got home from the Bon Secours St. Mary's Hospital in Richmond, Va., in January, just after having had her cancerous bladder removed, her nurse was unpacking for her and discovered that among the "personal effects" the hospital had sent home with her was the actual bag-encased, just-removed bladder. Said a hospital staffer, "We apologize."

In 1993, News of the Weird reported that the Pasadena, Calif., Humane Society had built a $4.3 million dog-and-cat shelter, with towel-lined cages, skylights, an aviary, sculptured shrubbery, "adoption counseling pavilions" for pet-client meetings, and, according to the architect, "a very subdued classical painting scheme" (all this amid criticism that it was better to be a homeless pet in Pasadena than a homeless person). In March 1998, a similar, $7 million SPCA shelter opened in San Francisco but deflected criticism by almost immediately proposing to allow some sleepovers by homeless people as companions for dogs.

Among the variety of substances used in recent spousal poisonings (all successful): cyanamide (an alcoholism-treatment drug), Madrid, Spain, February; antifreeze, Perry, Okla., October; thallium (heart-test chemical), Wilkes-Barre, Pa., July; liquid flea killer, Bangkok, Thailand, July; and pond water in the wife's IV tube, Darlington, Wis., September.

(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.)