News of the Weird

-- In April, the CIA debuted its home page for children, featuring creative games and gimmicks such as allowing kids to put disguises on models' bodies and to maneuver virtual guard dogs to sniff for explosives. (On the other hand, a month later, the agency failed to detect that India was about to test a nuclear weapon.)

-- Auckland (New Zealand) biologist Larry Jensen and computer animationist Andrew Chung announced in March that they had produced a video depicting the sex lives of moss plants. Said Jensen, "Plants may not walk around and hold hands the way humans do, but they have ways of bringing eggs and sperm together that are very clever." For his next video, Jensen is talking to "two experts on fern sperm."

William Walker was charged in March in Albuquerque, N.M., with trying to hack through a man's apartment door with an ax after the resident said he wasn't interested in buying speakers from him. And in April, two women were preparing for trial after being charged with murder in Frankfort, Germany, for torturing and stabbing to death an underachieving male colleague in a door-to-door magazine sales group they were a part of.

Researcher Dave Smith of Manchester (England) Metropolitan University revealed in March that thinking about exercise is almost as productive as doing it. His group of exercisers improved 33 percent in a month, and his nonexercisers did not improve at all. However, the nonexercisers who practiced the exercise mentally improved 16 percent when it came time to do the exercise again. Reasoned Smith, "If you can improve neural input to the muscle, you can recruit more muscle fiber and exert more force."

According to a May report in The New York Times, biologists and New Jersey authorities still do not know the reason why the plastic grass at Giants Stadium died last year. The Astroturf first turned from green to blue and then began falling out in large clumps, and the best guess so far is that a fungus of some kind infected it.

Hundreds of bottles of champagne (Milford, Conn., December); 22 tons of cold cuts (Hardin, Mont., December); hundreds of jars of mayonnaise (near London, England, February); 21 tons of potatoes (Monticello, Minn., March); 50 boxes of bees (Middleton, Idaho, February); 22 tons of shredded paper (naturally, near Washington, D.C., March); 6,700 gallons of animal fat (Cincinnati, May).

-- A new trend in public education in California, reported the Los Angeles Times in January, is that the parents of some students who are expelled or suspended for violence file lawsuits claiming that the school was negligent in not placing such a troublemaker into a "special education" program earlier on. The 1975 federal "special education" law, originally aimed to help the physically disabled, now covers students whose disorder is that they are, in the words of one physician, "easily frustrated, quite distracted and (showing) serious explosiveness."

-- In February, according to a report on the Agence France Presse wire, Cairo lawyer Mustafa Raslan filed a $1 billion lawsuit in Damanhur, Egypt, against President Clinton, alleging that Clinton's alleged sexual antics make it more difficult for him to raise his own children with good moral standards. "I don't know what to tell (them)," he said. (In December, Sheik Buddy Rasheed, who is the mayor of Bassilya, Jordan, told reporters he wanted to sue Clinton for naming his dog Buddy, which has caused Rasheed a loss of prestige locally, but that he was having trouble finding a lawyer to take the case.)

-- In April, the city of Los Angeles, by a 9-to-1 vote of the city council, agreed to pay $9 million to five surviving victims of a drunk driver whose car wandered across a center line and hit the van in which they were riding, unbuckled. A court in 1997 awarded the victims $29 million and said the city had to pay 57 percent of that because if the yellow line in the center of the road had been brighter, the drunk driver might not have crossed over.

-- In March in Milford, Conn., Ms. Deven Kuchta, 17, filed a lawsuit against truck driver David Kovac over a 1997 accident in which Kuchta's passenger was killed as her car ran into the truck. The truck was legally parked on the side of the road, but Kuchta said it was still a nuisance because Kuchta had a hard time seeing it in the "glaring sunlight." Kuchta is still on probation stemming from a negligent homicide charge in the incident.

-- In May, the parents of Mr. Warren A. Wise filed a $100 million lawsuit against the Long Branch, N.J., police for the wrongful death last November of their son. According to police, Mr. Wise ran a red light, then sped away from an officer, then fled the car into the 45-degree waters of the Atlantic Ocean, where he soon lapsed into a coma from which he never recovered. The family believes the police should have risked hypothermia to swim out 200 yards and nab Mr. Wise, who, until he fell unconscious, was still trying to escape.

In a March 1998 story on internal theft in the local school system, The Times-Picayune in New Orleans reported on Edwards Elementary School employee Ernestine Falls, who in 1994 stole a refrigerator from the school and then, when she realized it was broken, called the school system's maintenance department to come fix it. Then, when the worker told Falls that he knew the refrigerator was stolen, Falls not only did not offer hush money but didn't even offer a tip for the repair job. Not surprisingly, he ratted her out.

News of the Weird reported that two high-profile international murderers have escaped rather easily from custody in Italy in the last two years. In May 1998, wheelchair-confined Pasquale Cuntrera, 63, believed to be Italy's most powerful drug kingpin, escaped from his seaside home near Rome while it was under police surveillance. Cuntrera had five days earlier been released from prison temporarily on a technicality, and authorities had planned to re-arrest him when the proper charges were filed. He was picked up four days later in Spain.

The following people were hit by trains in May: Mr. Heath Hess, Hornell, N.Y. (didn't hear the whistle because he was talking on a cell phone and covering his other ear to block out the distracting noise); Jesse Jones, San Mateo, Calif. (tried to beat a train by driving around a flashing railroad crossing gate); Brian McArdle, 27, Burlingame, Calif. (sitting on the edge of a station platform, thought the train could go by without hitting him); and David Flannery, 22, Berkeley Springs, W.Va. (beat his friend at a game of "Who Can Stand on the Tracks Longer in Front of an Oncoming Train").

(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.)

-- 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.)