News of the Weird

-- Jim Gordon, a candidate for South Carolina's elected agriculture commissioner, told a campaign-stop audience in Greenville in May that the two most important issues stifling the family farm are access to technology and "the homosexual agenda." "How does that relate to agriculture?" he asked rhetorically. "We can't have Bob and Bob being married" without hurting the concept of the family farm.

-- In May, Bobby S. Hidalgo, 34, who renamed himself "Kern" on the ballot, won the Democratic nomination to challenge powerful incumbent Dan Burton in November for Indiana's 6th congressional seat. According to an Indianapolis Star report, Hidalgo has impersonated a local female judge; was imprisoned for doctoring a check; was arrested (but acquitted) for offering oral sex to an undercover policeman (and maintains anyway that he is a virgin); and has extensively used without consent the name of former "Charlie's Angels" actor Tanya Roberts to get entree to various local events and people.

In February, police in Bemidji, Minn., raided a methamphetamine lab and discovered that several of the workers making the drug were local jail inmates on a work-release program. The alleged meth kingpin was also a local contractor and had requested the inmates for his legitimate business, but then diverted them.

In a 32-part series ending in December, the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin chronicled Wendy Moricas' pregnancy in which she received the sperm of her sister's husband, Joe, and bore the couple a child that would have many of the couple's genes. Said sister Kathy, after having given Wendy a syringe containing Joe's sperm, "This is God's will." Also in December, Pietra Thornton (estranged wife of actor Billy Bob Thornton) told USA Today that she was proud of her surgically enhanced breasts. "[S]uddenly everyone's looking," she said. "God gave me this body, and I shouldn't be ashamed of it."

In April, an assistant to Vice President Gore told The New York Times that Gore's "Hammer Award," to the New York Police Department for creative excellence in government, "will probably be FedExed" to the mayor (rather than sent by Postal Service Overnight Mail). And Italy's controversial law forbidding the payment of ransoms was circumvented in late 1997 by the family of prominent businessman/kidnappee Giuseppe Soffiantini, who gathered about $2.3 million and was ready to pay but never could because the kidnappers' drop-point instructions were lost in the mail.

Vying for a council seat in the town of Beaufort in eastern France this spring were identical twins (i.e., every gene the same) Christian and Claude Buchots. Christian is of the Gaullist (conservative) party; Claude is a Socialist-Green candidate. On the other hand, in March, the Albuquerque, N.M., jail was the temporary home of John Simms, 52, and his son Stacy, 27, both charged with separate rapes.

-- In March, according to an Associated Press report, there were once again calls in Thailand to end the custom of the ex-Burmese Padaung tribe to routinely outfit some women with up to two dozen metal coils around their necks. A typical set of rings can weigh 11 pounds and severely elongate the neck by pressing down on the collarbone and ribs, and the practice continues largely for the photo opportunities it provides tourists at about $6 each.

-- In March, a representative of the former Soviet republic of Ingushetia made a formal plea to Boris Yeltsin for the Russian government to stop hampering the Ingush tradition (and that of most of the surrounding Caucasus) of a man's selecting a wife by kidnapping a woman and carrying her away. Said the Ingush lobbyist, "This practice should be [regulated] by local authorities, who understand local needs."

-- The chief justice of Sudan, Obeid Hajj Ali, issued a decree in April to halt the flogging of women, following an outcry over the recent government beatings of 40 females who had merely handed an official a note protesting Sudan's military involvements. However, the chief justice said there were exceptions to the decree and that women could still be flogged for drinking alcohol or committing adultery.

-- The French Health Ministry disclosed in March that it had produced five short sex-education films, so graphic as to be called hard-core pornography, supposedly for the purpose of remedying a major lapse in sexual knowledge in France. As one film director described it, "I had to show that if a man has sex with two women together, he must use a different condom with each one." Men's ignorance in that circumstance, said a Health Ministry spokesperson, is "a big problem."

-- The Austrian parliament approved a law in February to require that husbands assume half the household chores and child-rearing responsibilities. (In a recent case, a man had won a divorce because his wife didn't use a certain dishwashing detergent.) On the other hand, after studying 1,000 women, Dr. Jean Claude Kaufmann, a sociologist at the Sorbonne in Paris, reported in March that more than half found housework pleasurable, with nearly all who worked in the home saying the work heightened emotion in some way, even erotically. One said she ironed immediately after breakfast to experience "explosions of joy"; another became "inflamed with passion" by touching "the merest dishcloth."

FBI agents arrested Jeffrey Brian Whitlock, 26, in Richmond, Va., in February and charged him with making telephone bomb threats to three downtown federal buildings. Agents went to the ransom dropoff point and found it to be the office of a telemarketing firm; when the agents explained why they were there, the manager looked over his work crew on duty and suggested that Whitlock might be the guy. Indeed, according to the FBI, Whitlock soon confessed.

News of the Weird has reported several times on charitable bingo games in which a recently fed cow is let loose in a pasture marked into squares, with the winning square being the one onto which the cow first relieves herself. (The last such story, in 1997, reported Nova Scotia's banning the game because it was deemed too easy to rig.) In March 1998, the Bryanston Primary school in Johannesburg, South Africa, raised about $60,000 with "elephant-patty bingo," played the same as with cows except with larger squares.

Cheung Tat-kwong, 76, was found guilty in March in Hong Kong of murdering his roommate, Mr. Wong Fai, 75, after Mr. Wong had complained one time too many about Cheung's habit of scratching his butt around the house. And in a two-week period in March, a 20-year-old man was shot and killed in New Orleans, allegedly by his brother, and a Baton Rouge, La., man was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the murder of a friend, with the cause of both incidents being fights over the TV remote control.

(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 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.)