News of the Weird

-- The BBC reported in June that despite recent Pakistani government crackdowns, gangs operating around the shrine of Sha Dola in the city of Gujrat have been deliberately deforming infants handed over to the shrine for religious purposes so that they can be used by the gangs as high-sympathy, and unusually effective, beggars. The so-called "rat children" have distinctively smaller heads, which shrine personnel say is due to genetic defects, but which critics say are the result of clamping medieval iron rings on their heads to retard growth and brain function.

-- NASA revealed in May that it had inadvertently allowed an astronaut impostor to sit at the Mission Control console at Alabama's Marshall Space Center during a shuttle flight in which actual astronauts were preparing to rescue a satellite from space. Jerry Allen Whittredge was arrested in Houston and charged with lying to NASA officials, but his lawyer said he is mentally incompetent to stand trial. Asked how NASA could not correctly identify its real astronauts, an official said merely that Whittredge made a credible impression.

Sometime between March and May, thieves stole an 18-ton steel bridge that connected an isolated cottage to a main road near Bytow, Poland. And in May, in Liverpool, England, thieves stole about 250 feet worth of an entire street (5,000 cobblestones). And in May, thieves stole the entire left field fence of the Capitola-Soquel (Calif.) Little League field.

The Sunday Times of London reported in April that former prominent London male fashion model Chris Reid had just officially been accepted in the South African town of Port St. Johns as the first-ever white witch doctor. Reid, currently known as Ntombhe Mhlophe and whose "fashion" now consists of animal skins, had just finished a four-month apprenticeship in the art, which is said to retain importance for nearly 90 percent of black South Africans.

In February, Timothy Devine, 37, thought he had merely been struck in the ear while in a Boston park trying to purchase marijuana and that he could walk off the pain, but he decided to go to Quincy Hospital, whose attendants confirmed his emerging suspicion that he might have been shot in the head. And in May in Sacramento, Calif., a 19-year-old man was convicted of four counts of attempted murder, based in part on the testimony of one victim who said he was not aware for several days afterward that he had been shot in the stomach and another who said he thought at first he had been hit in the nose by a rock until a doctor told him a bullet had entered through an ear and exited through a nostril.

On the witness stand in March in Albuquerque, N.M., car salesman Sean Gene Druktenis, 28, denied the charge that he had fondled the daughter of the woman he was dating. However, during cross-examination, prosecutor Robert Rambo challenged Druktenis' truthfulness by asking, "As a top car salesman, did you ever lie to a customer?" That question drew what an Albuquerque Journal reporter termed "a long pause," followed by the ambiguous, "I would have to say no to that." (Four days later, a mistrial was declared on an unrelated issue.)

-- In March, a 20-year-old man was charged with attempted murder in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, for stabbing a 29-year-old man, an acquaintance, in the head. The victim walked out of his apartment after the stabbing, fully conscious and speaking, despite the fact that the butcher knife was still embedded in his skull. He survived.

-- In May, according to Pasadena, Calif., Fire Department Chief Joe Nestor, about 1,000 swifts (a small migratory bird similar to a swallow) flew down the chimney of a couple's home and filled their house. There was no authoritative explanation for that, but the explanation in Augusta, Ga., for the thousands of bees that quickly covered Betty Robinson's 1984 Buick in April was the new brand of air freshener she was using in the car. And in May in Weymouth, England, about 20,000 bees covered Jane Clark's house, and furthermore, Clark, trapped inside, could not get the town council to help her because, said a spokesman, bees are a protected species. (After two days, the bees left.)

-- In New York City in March, Adonis Gomez, 2, playing on the sofa in a third-floor apartment, bounced out the window but landed safely in the lap of Barbara Jones, 31, who was sitting in a wheelchair on the sidewalk. And a month earlier, in Brooklyn, Bishme Owens, 2, was thrown out an eighth-floor window by his grandmother (who has a history of mental illness) but was slowed by tree branches and landed in a flower bed so that his only injury was a broken arm.

-- Golf Imitates Miniature Golf: In May at Beaver Brook Golf Course in Haydenville, Mass., Todd Obuchowski was credited with a hole-in-one on a par-3 hole after his tee shot went over the green and onto a highway, hit a passing Toyota driven by Nancy Bachand, ricocheted back to the green, and rolled into the cup. At least eight golfers witnessed the shot.

-- Just Like in the Movies: In Aalesund, Norway, in May, Kristin Nalvik Loendal, 9, riding her bike down a steep hill and failing to stop at an intersection at the bottom, swerved into the path of an oncoming car and was knocked into the air. The driver of the car stopped to help the girl but couldn't find her. As he discovered several hours later, she had landed in the bed of a truck going in the opposite direction and sustained only bumps and bruises.

Justin Clark, 19, was arrested and charged with burglary in Sioux Falls, S.D., in April after a homeowner surprised him. According to police, Clark fled, then led police on a high-speed chase before crashing his car into a tree. As Clark ran through a nearby neighborhood, in which several residents were out in their yards, he kept up a steady chatter, informing them that the reason he was running was that the police were after him and asking whether any of them could help him. Several people tackled Clark and held him for the police.

Another Item Stored in the Rectum: Marijuana pipe, which police in Boardman, Ohio, recovered during a drug bust in June but which seemed to disappear in the squad car as suspect William P. Miller, 35, was being driven to the station. Police finally deduced there was only one place in which they hadn't looked and convinced Miller to remove it. He was charged with tampering with evidence.

In April, a 47-year-old man in Peoria, Ill., finally died of a 1971 gunshot wound that had paralyzed him for 27 years. His assailant would thus have been charged with murder, but he died five years ago. But in Boston, Raul Casanova, who had shot a man in 1991 and left him paralyzed and who had served seven years for that assault, was charged in June with the murder after the man died. In fact, the charge was filed on the day Casanova was to be released from prison.

(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.)

-- According to Pat Rusin and her team of researchers at the University of Arizona, the toilet seat is actually one of the least bacteria-laden surfaces in the home. In results published in a June issue of New Scientist magazine, three times as many bacteria were found on chopping boards and a million times more on dishcloths, and Rusin surmised that the toilet seat's nonporous surface keeps it so dry that bacteria have difficulty surviving.

-- A May San Jose Mercury News story reported on the new fascination among Japanese youth with rap and hip-hop music and with a black American lifestyle that includes curling their hair into Afro-style hairdos, darkening their skin, and drinking new Dunk brand beer, which consumers believe is popular because it is dark and associated with basketball. And in June, members of a New York City workshop of Japanese students studying in the U.S. performed gospel music at Harlem's Memorial Baptist Church, to enthusiastic applause. Said the former Tokyo jazz club owner who started the workshops with the church's cooperation, "The black culture is very important in Japan."

-- The eternal flame under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a sacred memorial to the nation's war dead, was briefly extinguished on June 30 when two inebriated tourists from Mexico urinated on it. French officials and Mexico's ambassador to France lit it again the next day in a joint ceremony. The perpetrators were detained briefly and then released.

In separate incidents in a three-week period in April and May, three people attempted to set fire to their spouses yet botched the jobs and actually lit themselves up: Ms. Solonia Gene, 25, Des Moines, Iowa (intended to punish husband for staying out all night); a Durham, N.C., man (just planned to scare his wife after a fight); and Tarance Love, 37, St. Louis (ordinary domestic fight).

A Hollister, Calif., inventor named Wilson Q. Invencion (whose automatic bingo machine received a U.S. patent in May). And the alleged robber of eight New York City Dunkin' Donuts shops named Douglas Duncan (who was apprehended in June, along with his alleged partner, Howard Johnson, who had not attempted a HoJo robbery). And the guy who pleaded guilty to assault named Ned Basher (against singer Bob Seger, in Shreiber, Ontario, in May).

A 34-year-old woman was hospitalized in Nashville, Tenn., in May; a toilet at Nashville Arena had caught on fire after she flushed it, possibly due to fireworks in the building being used by the World Wrestling Federation. And a 29-year-old man was hospitalized in St. Paul, Minn., in June when his bathroom exploded, probably because his burning incense ignited the gasoline he was using to clean his hands. And a 32-year-old camper was killed when a campsite toilet exploded near Montabaur, Germany, in April, probably caused by leaking gas from a septic tank.

In May, the British government's Broadcasting Standards Committee criticized the evening program "TV Dinners" over a February episode that featured a woman preparing a dish based on her own just-born daughter's placenta. (Recipe: Fry the placenta with shallots and garlic, flambee, puree and serve on focaccia bread. The mother, father and 20 guests sampled the dish on camera.) And in June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ruled that salsa can count as a required vegetable in government-reimbursed school meals.

-- Life Imitates a Bad Sitcom Premise: In June, three retired police chiefs from the Syracuse, N.Y., area started a business to supplement their pensions: a doughnut shop, in Lakeland, N.Y. Said one, "We took our ... police experience and put it toward what we know best."

-- From the Police Beat column of the North County Journal in suburban St. Louis, May 24: Police in the town of Bellfontaine Neighbors arrested a man on May 15 driving a stolen automobile. He was released pending a court hearing. Three days later, the alleged thief reported being robbed, himself, of a gold necklace. Policework turned up what the cops believe are both perpetrators. The car thief was the robbery victim, and the robber was the man whose car had been stolen.

-- In March, the Oakland (Calif.) Police Review Board ruled that Officer Anthony Toribio had done nothing improper despite an arrestee's complaint that he had been subjected to "the most degrading and humiliating experience" of his life. The officer admitted the gist of the complaint, that upon learning that the arrestee was a singer, named Julian Aldarondo, Toribio began singing (apparently, very badly) the 1970s song "Escape, The Pina Colada Song," but said he was only trying to defuse the tension of the arrest and to ask Aldarondo if he knew where he could find sheet music to the song.

-- In May, police in Toronto, Ontario, arrested a man they had sought since November for a series of bank robberies. According to Detective Mike Earl, they had an idea who they were after because, according to witnesses, the fugitive looked, in face and body language, like the TV cartoon character Homer Simpson. Arrested was Gary Hammond, 28, of North York.

-- Scott Eric Smith, 32, was arrested in Oakdale, Calif., in June on suspicion that he was the one who had stolen 800 copies of the local Oakdale Leader newspaper. The newspaper contained a report of Smith's recent arrest on drug charges and, according to police, Smith said he didn't want his family to know about it.

Joseph L. Cantey, 22, was arrested in Lindenwold, N.J., in May on several charges. According to police, he had made a clean escape after burglarizing a home on May 5 and stealing a cell phone but had returned to the home on May 10 to confront the victim to get him to reactivate the cell phone service. The victim called his company but was unsuccessful, and Cantey fled, but now armed with a description, police spotted Cantey, and in the ensuing chase, Cantey dropped 15 bags of crack cocaine and eventually led police to his brother and two others, who were charged with possession of even more drugs.

Bobby Wayne Woods, 32, convicted of capital murder, Llano, Texas, May. Coy Wayne Wesbrook, sentenced to death for murdering his ex-wife and four others, Houston, June. Dennis Wayne Eaton, executed for the murder of a Virginia state trooper and three other people, June. Michael Wayne Gallatin, suspected through DNA tests of five rapes and a murder, Vancouver, Wash., May. John Wayne Stockdall, 34, allegedly confessed to police that he killed his girlfriend's ex-husband, Mexico, Mo., March. Jason Wayne McVean, 26, still on the lam after allegedly killing a police officer in the southwestern Colorado manhunt that began in May.

New York divorce and palimony lawyer Raoul Felder, praising the nation's economy to a Washington Post reporter in May: "I can tell you how the economy is doing by how many mistresses come into my office looking for justice. I don't need no Greenspan."

(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 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.)