News of the Weird

-- Latest Jesus Sightings: Hundreds of people began arriving in the town of Bras D'Or, Nova Scotia, in September, when residents spotted a likeness of Jesus Christ on an outside wall of the Tim Horton's donut shop. The clearest image is said to be under the floodlights of a nearby chicken restaurant, called the Lick-a-Chick. And in Rio de Janeiro, designer Patrizia D'Angello and boutique owner David Azulay made plans to introduce men's swim trunks, modestly cut by Rio's beach standards, that feature a picture of Jesus on the seat.

-- In September, Customs officials at Port Hueneme, Calif., went into a tizzy when a fully operational (except for the warhead), 20-ton, 186-mile-range Scud missile was off-loaded from a British vessel, destined for a local address. Said a Customs agent, "All you needed to do was strap on a garbage can full of C-4 (explosive), and you had a weapon." After an investigation, Customs officials said the buyer was not a terrorist but just a collector and that the British seller had merely failed to disable the missile as required by U.S. law.

-- In July, the Los Angeles Times profiled Dan Taylor, 58-year-old retired entrepreneur in Hardeeville, S.C., who is close to finishing the $1 million, 40-foot-long submarine he will take next June to Scotland in order to hunt the Loch Ness monster, which he says he first encountered 30 years ago but in a flimsier submarine that couldn't keep up with the critter. According to his wife, almost all of Taylor's waking hours in the last three years have been spent thinking about "Nessie."

-- A July profile of paralegal Michael Levin, 57, of Santa Monica, Calif., in Los Angeles's weekly Westside News focuses on his 30-year fixation with clipping and saving, and cataloging and cross-indexing, thousands of newspaper articles that for some reason drew his attention. His clippings fill three 5-foot-high file cabinets. "What strikes me," he said, "is the zany, the quirky, or a magnum opus of a piece in the newspaper, such as a solid overview of Albania."

-- Much of the homes of John Livingston of Cleburne, Texas, and Gayle Brennan and Mike Drysdale in Duarte, Calif., have been taken over as shrines to their personal icons: baseball pitcher Nolan Ryan (Livingston) and Garfield the cat (Brennan and Drysdale). Livingston's most prized possession among several hundred items is a 1991 chest X-ray of Ryan. Brennan and Drysdale have 3,000 Garfield items, including 20 pairs of Garfield bedroom slippers, and plan to move to a bigger house so they can display everything.

-- A September New York Times story described some of the hundreds of people who are so taken with the Broadway show "Jekyll and Hyde" that they have seen it dozens of times (in one case, 100), at prices of $20 to $75, and refer to themselves as Jekkies since their obsession resembles that of hard-core "Star Trek" fans. Said one Jekkie, "Instead of going to a therapist, we talk to each other about it, since others truly don't understand."

According to a July New York Times report on adventurers needing assistance, a man who had sent an SOS refused to be airlifted out by an Alaska Air National Guard rescue team because the team had too much of a federal government presence. He relented later that day when the team added two state troopers and returned. And at a recent state visit to Australia, China's premier-in-waiting, Zhu Rongji, held up a procession by lingering in the rest room. When apprehensive guards broke in, they found that Zhu, an engineer, had disassembled the fancy two-button, dual-flush toilet and was studying it. Said Zhu, "We must introduce this to China."

Morton, Ill., June: Two days after he thought he had died from the hatchet his wife had slammed into the back of his neck, Thomas Deas, 53, told reporters, "I still love her. I'd have her back in a minute." And St. Louis, April: Andrea Caldwell Murray begged a judge not to jail Bobby Murray for shooting her in the head last year, sending her into a coma and killing her fetus; said Andrea, "I don't want to lose my Bobby." (Between the shooting and the sentencing, Andrea had married Bobby and is now pregnant with their child.)

Daniel Sneed, 22, spent a week in Los Angeles County jails in June when prosecutors in the city of La Mirada erred in charging him with having ignored a $100 loitering fine from 1996. After several days, Sneed's bank produced the canceled checks, but even then he was not released until the next day. Apparently useless in overcoming these errors and red tape was Sneed's father, who is a police lieutenant in Compton, Calif.

Tweety Bird Rage: In Pleasanton, Calif., in July, after two men brawled over which one deserved the last stuffed toy bird prize at the Alameda County Fair, one of them pulled out a handgun and started firing wildly, wounding eight people. Shrinking-Genitals Rage: At July retirement ceremonies for an army general in Canberra, Australia, former soldier Darryl Hanel, 36, ran screaming at the general and tackled him before guards pulled him off. Hanel claims the general was responsible for giving him a sex-inhibiting drug years ago and that since then (documented in Hanel's charts and graphs), his penis has shrunk.

When Pigs Fly: In Corbeil, Canada, in August, Lucette St. Louis, 66, suffered a broken leg and other injuries when a 180-pound pig, owned by her son, came flying through the air and hit her broadside. It had been knocked airborne by a passing car.

Christopher Grant, 21, was arrested in Danville, Ill., in September and charged with a series of burglaries. Officers had stopped Grant's car as resembling one used by a burglar, but their optimism increased when they saw that the inside of the car was littered with gum balls. A gum ball machine had been stolen earlier that day.

In September, according to police in Trotwood, Ohio, Rev. Andrew Lofton was shot to death just as he was explaining the Book of Revelation to Bible students by a parishioner who had frequently quarreled with Lofton over Biblical interpretations. And in Jacksonville, Fla., nine days later, Rev. Melvyn Nurse, 35, accidentally killed himself by firing a defective round of blank ammunition at his head while demonstrating for parishioners that committing certain sins was the equivalent of playing Russian roulette.

(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 a Chicago Tribune report in September, some parents in Oak Park, Ill., are objecting to what they believe is an implicit anti-Americanism in a "Pledge to the Planet" that some Hatch Elementary School teachers require students to recite along with the "Pledge of Allegiance." (The controversial oath: "I pledge allegiance to the Earth, this unique blue-water planet, graced by life, our only home. I promise to respect all living things, and to protect to the best of my abilities all parts of our planet's environment, and to promote peace among the human family, with liberty and justice for all.")

-- Five people were indicted in Brenham, Texas, in August for a scheme to kidnap a pig, which had just lost a livestock show judging in Houston, and spirit it away to another show in San Angelo, Texas (where, by the way, it won first place, worth $4,000). The pig had belonged to one of the five people accused, but under the rules of the Houston contest, all losing pigs automatically became the property of a slaughterhouse.

In May, a judge in Red Deer, Alberta, sentenced Nelson Dicks, 32, to 21 days in jail for making a false claim on an unemployment insurance form. Jail time is not usually given on first offenses, but Dicks got in additional trouble by volunteering that life was tough for him and that he might be forced to apply for benefits again even though he was working, provoking the judge to ask him, point-blank, "So you'll lie again?" Responded Dicks, "You're damn right."

In August, Douglas Illingsworth, 83, had his driver's license suspended for a year by a court in Barnsley, South Yorks, England, after several incidents in which he tied up traffic by driving less than 15 mph on thoroughfares, including a stint at about 1 mph. And in Dale City, Va., in June, a 30-year-old motorist was beaten with a steering-wheel-locking device (which was apparently the closest available weapon) at a traffic light by a 33-year-old woman who was incensed that he had been driving too slowly.

In May, residents of Qiongshan village in Guangdong province, China, blew up a brand-new bridge on a main artery because they believed it had been constructed in violation of the principles of feng shui (spiritual beliefs about the arrangement of objects in a space). And New York feng shui authority Eliza Arekelian told The Independent of London that the July scaffolding collapse in Times Square was caused in part by the Concorde jet's nose on a nearby billboard, pointing the wrong way. And Newsweek reported in May that business was booming for New York City "smudger" Eleni Santoro, who charges real estate agents $200 an hour to erase the negative energy from a property.

Just before an April angling tournament in Appling, Ga., as Verdell James, 70, was tying his line, he sneezed his $300 false teeth into Thurmond Lake and had to fish them out before getting down to business. And in July, near Calgary, Alberta, a 19-year-old man being pursued by police after he hijacked a car dumped the car and hid out in the tall grass in a field but blew his cover when he couldn't suppress a sneeze.

-- Nissan's quality-assurance director at its plant in Sunderland, England, announced in July that the company had developed a substance based on the most destructive forms of bird poop they had found throughout the world, for the purpose of rigorously testing its automobiles' paint jobs. Added the director, John Burke, "It looks like the real thing: It's white, it's viscous and it smells horrible."

-- In July in the remote Australian town of Ravensthorpe, newly arrived family doctor Steve Hindley saved the life of 23-year-old football player Hayden McGlinn, who suffered a rapidly hemorrhaging head injury and would not have survived an airlift to surgery. Dr. Hindley cleaned off a rusting brace-and-bit drill from a woodshed and made a hole in McGlinn's temple to relieve the life-threatening pressure, which allowed time for him to be sent to a hospital in Perth.

-- Physicist Juan Atanasio Carrasco announced in August in Guijuelo, Spain, that he was using CAT scan technology to determine how salt makes its way through delicate Iberian hams in the process known as curing, in order to improve the hams' quality and minimize spoilage.

-- Mrs. Xian's Delight: In March, China's official Xinhua news agency reported that surgeons at a military hospital in Chongqing had successfully removed two of the three tongues of farmer Xian Shihua, 32, enabling him to eat and speak comfortably for the first time in 20 years. His birth tongue, 13 inches long, remains; the other two (about 3 inches each) had grown during adolescence.

News of the Weird reported that in January 1998, the executor of the estate of the late Larry Lee Hillblom (founder of the DHL international courier service) agreed to pay out $90 million to four Pacific Islands teen-agers if they could prove paternity by Hillblom's DNA. At the time, proof seemed imminent, but shortly afterward, the children's lawyers reported that not only had all of Hillblom's belongings disappeared from his house in Northern Mariana Islands but that the house had been sanitized to such a degree that not even a single hair could be found. Also, the site of Hillblom's 1995 plane crash was devoid of even a single speck of blood. In June, a former Hillblom associate was identified as a suspect in the movie-plot-like cleaning.

In September at a bar in Porto Hel, Greece, British vacationer Daniel Littlewood, 23, died showing off to a female companion that he was impervious to pain; he had instructed her to place a Swiss Army knife against his abdomen while he leaned into it with great force, but he miscalculated. And in August, Ivory Coast army Col. Pascal Gbah, 49, shot himself to death while testing a supposedly "magic" belt that the manufacturer (Gbah's cousin) said would protect the user from gunfire.

(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 a Reuters wire service report in August, lobbyists in Bonn, Germany, called the Working Group for the Unemployed held a series of rallies to demand six weeks' annual paid vacation for people out of work, pointing out that those looking for work often are under greater stress than those with jobs and thus need a longer holiday.

-- In September, federal, state and local authorities raided a field near Salinas, Calif., and seized about 1,000 khat plants, which produce a controlled substance that is still fairly new to the U.S., probably having been introduced by soldiers who served in Somalia. Khat is said to produce bliss, clarity of thought, euphoria and excessive energy. And the Chicago Tribune reported in August that Abbott Laboratories has just completed successful human trials of ABT-594, a drug said to be 200 times as powerful as morphine but still nonaddictive. The drug comes from a tiny Ecuadoran frog whose highly poisonous secretions have long been used to coat blowgun darts.

U.S. News & World Report disclosed in July that Iraq, with a supposedly hungry populace yet limited to buying only essential "humanitarian" items under the U.N. trade embargo, ordered 25 rowing machines and four liposuction devices from a German company. And in August, in a 13-page bequest released by the Register of Wills in Bethlehem, Pa., Robert Allan Miller of Bethlehem was revealed to have set aside $5,000 for 10 monthly awards "to the most conscientious police officer(s), who (give) the most traffic tickets to motorists who double-park." Said a friend, "(Miller) lived on a really narrow street."

In August, a 26-year-old woman reported being raped by five men in her van on a street in Spokane, Wash., and a massive police manhunt began. Several days later, she apologized and said the sex was consensual, part of a fantasy she lived out by picking the men up, and that her husband was involved. And in August, a couple from Silver Spring, Md., were arrested for indecent exposure at an adult cinema in Baltimore after the husband had arranged for four men to have sex with his wife on the premises. According to police, several other males in the theater complained, apparently because the live sex interfered with their watching sex on the screen.

John Grotluschen, police chief of Clarksville, Iowa, accidentally shot himself in the hand in August while cleaning his gun. And Bruce Seal, sheriff of Claiborne County, Tenn., accidentally shot himself in the foot in July while reaching into his pocket for his car keys. And Chuck Lewis, police chief of Coggon, Iowa, revealed to reporters in July that because of his 1995 assault conviction, Sheriff Don Zeller won't give him a license to carry a gun.

-- Rev. Muhamed Siddeeq, spiritual adviser to Mike Tyson, telling the New Jersey State Athletic Commission in July that the fighter is of such great character that not only should he get back his boxing license (which was removed after he bit off part of Evander Holyfield's ear in his last fight) but is a prime candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as U.N. secretary general: "I see Mike solving many of the world's problems."

-- Mary Lauro, head of a civic group seeking to incorporate the new town of Imperial in Jefferson County, Mo., upset in May that her issue was not being taken seriously enough by the county commission: "(Commissioner Jon Selsor) is right next to Hitler, Stalin and all the other dictators."

-- The Los Angeles Times reported in July that in addition to construction of a small park in Washington, D.C.,'s Dupont Circle neighborhood named for the late Sonny Bono, there is "talk" at the University of California, Riverside, of creating a Sonny Bono School of Government.

-- In July, a 28-year-old man was ticketed for speeding in Great Falls, Mont., allegedly doing 104 in a 45 mph zone. According to the Cascade County Sheriff John Strandell, the man said he had just washed his car and needed to drive fast to dry it off.

-- In September in Arusha, Tanzania, former Rwandan prime minister Jean Kambanda was convicted of genocide in a United Nations tribunal for his role in the slaughter of 500,000 Rwandan Tutsis in 1994 but professed surprise that he was sentenced to life in prison. His lawyer said that because Kambanda had cooperated with authorities in naming his henchman, he was hopeful of doing no more than two years.

James L. Liddell was arrested in Granite City, Ill., at his home, about an hour after police say he robbed a Magna Bank branch. Police said Liddell apparently decided to rob the bank while in line to cash a $12.19 payroll check made out to him, which was recovered at the scene, along with the ID he intended to use to cash it.

News of the Weird reported in 1995 on the preferred expression of worship at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship Church, Toronto, Ontario: falling to the floor in soothing laughter over the greatness of the Holy Spirit. Worshipers came from around the world seeking the "Toronto Blessing" that is likened to the euphoria in other religions that causes adherents to speak in tongues. Among the more successful programs in the U.S., according to recent reports in the Chicago Sun Times (August) and the Providence Journal-Bulletin (September), are the nondenominational Fun Church in Chicago that also attracts busloads of worshipers from Indiana and the "Laughing Revival" of the New Life Worship Center in Smithfield, R.I., whose parishioners may remain on the floor for up to an hour, giggling.

In September in Lanham, Md., a 26-year-old man lost control of his motorcycle and crashed, killing himself. Police said it was alcohol-related; four hours earlier, the man had been driven home from a part-time job, which was to get drunk at a police training class so officers could practice doing sobriety tests on him. When he left work, he had a 0.12 blood-alcohol level.

(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.)