News of the Weird

-- The owners of Karma Farms in Marshall, Texas, came under severe criticism in November for having purposely bred a litter of deformed cats with short, slinky front legs (because part of a vital bone is missing) and six-toed back legs that allow the cat to stand up like a kangaroo. The first "Twisty Kat," said owner Vickie Ives Spier, which was bred by accident, was "so admired" that she decided to breed more but denied that she intended to raise the Kats for sale. Several animal rights groups howled, and Spier said she has received death threats.

-- According to an October Houston Chronicle report, free-lance advisers Roderick MacElwain, 47, and Neal Caldwell, 47, have set up a canopy in a park along the shore of White Rock Lake in downtown Dallas, nearly every Sunday for the past three years to offer passersby (according to their homemade sign) "Free Advice." They had 15 callers that first day and have progressed now to a point in which people queue up under a nearby tree for the opportunity to hear what they ought to be doing about relationships, neighbors, bosses, finances, home repair or nearly any other subject.

In September, Don and Penny Karch set up a display of 28 toilets in their back yard in Pittsfield, Mass., to complain about an adjacent, restroomless convenience store, whose patrons in need occasionally relieve themselves behind the store, in full view of the Karches' kitchen window. And Edward Aragi dragged a dead deer into a People's Bank branch in Stamford, Conn., in November to get employees' attention about an alleged clerical error on a bounced check. And Levent Kirca, who is Turkey's Jay Leno, went on a hunger strike in November after the government sacked his TV show because he had made fun of an official who proudly proclaimed her virginity.

These days, when a man in the news reveals for the first time that he is a transvestite, it seems not so much to shock as to provide newspapers with a chance to weave a fashion report into the story. In London in November, former financial fund manager Peter Young arrived in court after being indicted on massive fraud counts, which were not discussed by the press as much as his outfit was ("light brown jumper with a pattern of violet and blue pansies over a flowing white dress with red and orange floral prints," wrote the Daily Telegraph). And also in London, Falklands War hero Brian "Lynda" Waling's march in the Remembrance Day parade in November was duly noted (blue skirt, white handbag, floppy hat, all smartly set off by his military medals).

Christine Bergmann, Minister of Women in the new Schroeder administration in Germany, said in November that she would soon submit a bill calling for health, retirement and unemployment benefits for prostitutes, as well as providing a legal right to sue johns who don't pay up. Also, she said, prostitutes should be able to retire, with full benefits, by age 60. And in a stark contrast to the strict no-prostitution policy in the Mao Tse-tung era, the city of Shenyang, China, recently began acknowledging its estimated 100,000 prostitutes, by taxing them.

In November, Roland Dougoud, age 105, received a letter from the local government in Echallens, Switzerland, demanding that he register for school, along with 65 kids whose birth year also is "93." And Rev. Jerry Falwell said in November that he welcomes the problems and shutdowns that might be caused by computers misprocessing the year 2000 because that "may be God's instrument to shake this nation" into a religious revival.

Columbia, Tenn., police filed drug and evidence-tampering charges against Ginger Janet Osborne in November. She was spotted by police acting suspicious in her car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. When ordered out of the car, Osborne allegedly dropped soggy pieces of seven $100 bills on which she had been chewing.

-- Three days after the November election, someone called in a bomb threat to the Minnesota capital during Gov.-elect Jesse Ventura's visit, and police found a suspicious object taped to a tree on the grounds. The package was given full, serious bomb-squad treatment and very carefully driven to a disposal facility. Despite all the precautions, however, a wind gust blew the package out of the bomb-squad truck and onto the street, where it was run over by several cars.

-- Jarold Sanchez, 23, shot himself in the face in November in Craig, Colo., after spotting an elk near a railroad track on a hunting trip. Sanchez had lain down, resting the barrel of his rifle on the near track, pointed at the elk and squeezed the trigger, but managed only to hit the other track two feet away, causing the bullet to bounce back and graze his cheek. Sanchez said he knows now that the barrel is lower than the sight.

-- In November, in the final moments of West Virginia's 35-28 football win at home over Syracuse, state troopers attempted to protect the WVU marching band from fans who were celebrating so boisterously that they posed physical threats to the band members and their musical instruments. Troopers fired mace to disperse the unruly fans, but a gust of wind blew the mace directly onto the marching band, causing widespread vomiting and sending six members to the hospital.

-- In November, employee John Boernier-Mercier, 45, who was tending to his own business sitting in the men's room at Budney Overhaul and Repair in Berlin, N.H., was grazed on the hand and knee by a bullet fired by his boss, Kevin M. Budney, 31, who was across the hall and had accidentally squeezed the trigger while looking for its serial number.

A man robbed an adult video store in Edmonton, Alberta, in December, and at press time was still at large. However, the clerk got a good look at him because he was carrying a gorilla mask with him, and only after he had picked up the money and cut the telephone line did he put the mask on and walk out.

Shawn Padden, 24, was convicted of manslaughter in November because of his role in the death of an 18-year-old friend. Acquaintances of the men said that Padden's and his friend's hobby was "hanging" (as in, by the neck) and that the two practiced their techniques frequently until Jan. 5, 1998, when Padden accidentally pulled a chair away before his friend, who had his hands tied behind him, was ready.

(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.)

-- A November Associated Press dispatch described the work of commercial leech and maggot suppliers who sell to hospitals for medical treatments. A Welsh firm, Biopharm Ltd., moves about 20,000 3-inch-long leeches a year at $17 each to suck blood through delicate, clogged veins to restore circulation, and a unit of the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend, Wales, produces sterilized maggots to eat decayed skin on a wound to speed the healing process (price: $90 per 100 maggots). Boasts Dr. Stephen Thomas, who guards his secret technique for sterilizing fly eggs, "Our maggots are cleaner than the patient."

-- Los Angeles surgeon Brigitte Boisselier announced in November that her company, Clonaid, might soon accept clients, at $200,000 each, to make genetic twins of themselves. She plans to use the technique that produced the sheep Dolly, which she hopes will be refined for humans by the year 2000. In her spare time, Dr. Boisselier is a bishop in the Raelian religion, founded in 1970 by a French former sports reporter, which believes that Earth was created 25,000 years ago by alien DNA. Said Dr. Boisselier, "I'm a scientist and very pragmatic even if I do believe in little green men."

The developers of the Providence (R.I.) Place shopping mall now under construction announced in November that they had reached agreement to house a private high school of about 100 students with classrooms inside the mall.

Window washer Kerry Burton, 27, was only slightly injured in November after falling five stories from a building in Calgary, Alberta. Burton landed butt-first in the basin of water that was tethered to his body and bounced two feet in the air after the bucket hit the pavement. And in November, Jo'Tan Cooper, 18, escaped from the Natick, Mass., police station lockup by sliding his 5-foot-6, 130-pound body through the 9-by-17-inch food-tray slot. (He was recaptured before he made it out of the station.)

In November, the state of Punjab, India, announced that its 18-month search for its most honest government officer (which carried an award of more than $2,000) was over, because they couldn't find anyone worthy. However, as part of the same program, the government revealed that it had found 300 corrupt officers worthy of prosecution. (India was recently named as the world's eighth most corrupt country by an international watchdog organization.)

The latest episode of inmates acting as winemakers was disclosed by the Chattanooga Times in October, reporting on missing sugar from the pantry of the Franklin County Jail in Winchester, Tenn. Authorities traced the sugar to two dozen inmates concocting a fruit-based wine in, as usual, a jail cell toilet.

In the course of offering support for Scottish independence from Great Britain, Mohamed al-Fayed (father of the late Dodi al-Fayed) told a Glasgow Herald reporter in October that Scots are sexually superior to Brits, in part because of the kilt (which al-Fayed says they stole from his own ancestors, the Egyptians). "The Egyptians wore nothing underneath. That is why they were great (copulators). (W)hen you leave your organs free and ventilated with air, they are always fertile."

In November, Ms. Ma Yulan, 41, owner of a restaurant and bathhouse in Beijing, was convicted of allowing her hostesses to engage in sex for hire and was sentenced to death.

The Hotel de Sal Playa (altitude, 12,500 feet and recently renamed the UT Salt Palace and Spa) in the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia is a 12-room setup in which the walls, beds, tables and chairs are made entirely of blocks of salt. According to an August Associated Press travel story, the rooms go for $50 a night and have no salty smell (although during the rainy season, the walls are covered with brine).

In May, after another guest at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria hotel disturbed her sleep for two hours and eventually urinated outside her door, Elizabeth Jaffe received a complimentary bottle of wine and a fruit and cheese basket from the management to make amends for her horrible night. According to Jaffe's $6.5 million lawsuit against the hotel filed in August, the fruit and cheese caused severe vomiting, requiring her to be hospitalized with intestinal bleeding and dehydration. "Obviously," said Jaffe's lawyer, "it was the fruit."

On Nov. 9, according to police in Creedmoor, N.C., Leroy Howard, 30, took a space heater from the back of one truck, placed it into the truck he was driving, and fled, just as the police chief, who happened to be driving by, asked him what he was doing. Chief Ted Pollard chased Howard, who abandoned the truck (which had been stolen in nearby Oxford, N.C.) and fled on foot. Oxford police joined in the chase. Two state wildlife officers were in the area and also joined. Two vans carrying a SWAT team happened to be passing by, headed for training, and joined in, and then called their 60 colleagues at the training site to come on over. A Highway Patrol helicopter was nearby, also, and joined the chase. Four hours after the theft, Howard was in custody.

Several times, News of the Weird has mentioned natural-cause deaths that had gone unreported for months and even years. In November 1998, a landlord entered the Bonn, Germany, apartment of Wolfgang Dircks when rent invoices to Dircks' bank stopped being paid. The landlord found a skeleton in a chair in front of a television set (in the "on" position but now out of order) and beside still-twinkling Christmas lights and a TV program guide of Dec. 5, 1993. Since no one had seen Dircks in years, authorities declared that to be his date of death.

A 29-year-old man was accidentally run over in September by a tractor-trailer on the traffic-jammed Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago after he had gotten out of his car to gather debris to throw at the truck's driver for some alleged highway discourtesy. Apparently, he slipped on spilled oil and fell under the wheels. And a 33-year-old man died in a workplace explosion in Ascutney, Vt., in November when he cut into a 55-gallon drum with a blowtorch in order to make scrap metal and was perhaps surprised that the drum contained propane. According to fellow workers, the man had done the very same thing the week before, but that explosion had merely blown his gas mask off.

(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 October, a California appeals court reinstated the 1997 jury verdict for Robert Cunningham against his Orange County homeowners' association for meddling. Over a two-year period, the association had ordered Cunningham to clean up not only an outside patio but also the inside of his unit, claiming that he had too many books and newspapers lying around, that his bed was too messy, and that piles of old clothing should be given to charity.

-- In November, Ten's World Class Cabaret (a strip joint) asked New York Supreme Court justice Stephen Crane to be exempt from New York City anti-nudity rules because it had begun to admit children to the premises and thus was no longer an "adult" establishment that the rules applied to. Shortly afterward, Crane ruled in favor of Ten's, which at press time at least twice had admitted children (accompanied by a parent, of course) for lunch, with dancers in the background.

According to a November New York Times report, Chinese soccer fans' new traditional yell to harass opposing teams is a word which is street slang for female genitals and which the press has dubbed the "Beijing curse." And in Lagos, Nigeria, in November, the star soccer player on the Cameroon female team, Gwimotoh Lilian, was disqualified from the championship series because, according to officials, "all" of her physical features are "male" (except for her female genitals).

A 12-year-old boy was let off with six months' probation in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., in October after he admitted urinating in his teacher's water bottle. Although she went to the hospital with nausea and stomach cramps, the boy's lawyer said, "The bottom line is, urine is not harmful to drink." And 10 days later in Tucson, Ariz., Caroline Gomez Maldonado, 42, was arrested and charged with chasing a reluctant 8-year-old stranger down the street in order to convince him to urinate into a cup so Maldonado could use it for an upcoming test as part of her probation on drug charges.

Jordan Locke, 5, was suspended from elementary school in Pittsburgh in October when he showed up in his Halloween firefighter costume that included a 5-inch plastic hatchet, which the school calls a "weapon" (though firefighters call it a "tool"). And in November, a Canoga Park, Calif., advertising agency was forced to pull ads for perfectly legal Alterna Hemp Shampoo from 106 bus-stop benches because an anti-drug group complained that "hemp" should not be portrayed favorably.

The Boston Globe reported in November on the upcoming trial in Richmond, Va., of Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Barry Black, who was arrested for burning a cross in violation of a state hate-crimes law. His lawyer is a black man, David Baugh, who took the case without fee to defend Black's right to symbolic free speech, even though Black said, "I am not going to invite (Baugh) to my home to break bread with me because my Bible tells me that mixing leads to the destruction of my race." Black also said he believes Africa is still today the home of naked cannibals who, when sick, "are going to some witch doctor with a bone in their nose."

In November in Austin, Texas, Henry Benedict, owner of the under-renovation adult theater Cinema West, announced that he will defray renovation costs at a public celebration of the new building by selling the 500 seats from the old theater as souvenirs for $25 each.

-- In India, according to a May New York Times report, parents in several rural states continue the tradition of forcing their children into arranged marriages, at ages as young as 4, in violation of national laws setting the minimum age at 18. By contrast, in August in Annapolis, Md., in a perfectly legal ceremony under state law, Phillip Compton, 29, married Tina Akers, 13. (It was legal because Akers' parents consented and Akers was pregnant. On the other hand, Compton appeared to have violated the state law on statutory rape.)

-- In September, a judge in Chilton, Wis., sentenced Michael and Angeline Rogers to a year in jail, 39 years less than they could have gotten, for physically abusing four of their five children and imprisoning one of them several times overnight in a dog cage in their basement. Judge Steven Weinke said he was trying to show "compassion," which the parents had requested so as to improve their chances to begin the process of retaking custody of their kids.

-- In October in Kitchener, Ontario, a man was sentenced to six months' probation living away from his 15-year-old stepson, as punishment for growing 20 marijuana plants; he said he planted them so the boy would not be exposed to the "dangers of street drugs." And in November in Milwaukee, a man was convicted for supplying his 13-year-old virgin son with a prostitute, saying it was about time he learned.

-- Quality Time With the Kids: Baltimore police dispatcher Harry Gilmore Watts, 32, was arrested in August and charged with chauffeuring his son and a friend, both 15, to rob a Peoples Bank. And on the same day, in Medford, Ore., Cynthia Alice Lockinger, 40, pleaded guilty to robbing two banks while her three daughters waited in the back seat of the getaway car.

Kevin Johnson of Chesapeake, Va., was convicted in November of attempting to defraud a Lowe's Home Center store in a 1993 incident. According to the prosecutor, Johnson and a friend dropped cans of paint in an aisle in an attempt to make it look like the cans had cascaded from a high shelf and knocked Johnson unconscious. Johnson was taken to a hospital and later filed a lawsuit for $250,000. After the judge saw evidence that the open, strewn paint cans were undented and had come from different parts of the shelf so that they were unlikely to have hit Johnson, he dismissed the lawsuit, and prosecutors took over.

In 1996, News of the Weird reported on a new breeding of sheep that produces muscular flanks (in fact, it is named the "beautiful buttocks" strain) and 30 percent more meat. In November 1998, a scientist with England's Meat and Livestock Commission said the scheme has been abandoned because the resultant meat was invariably "tough as old boots," and the best food technologists have not been able to find a way to tenderize it.

(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.)