News of the Weird

-- In April, 300 inmates at the Villahermosa Social Rehabilitation Center in southwest Mexico rioted, gathering against the prison's fences and chanting demands for marijuana and alcohol. On the other hand, an April Reuters report on the beginnings of the privately run Wolds Remand Prison in Hull, England, described complaints of veteran inmates that life there was too soft, particularly the part about prisoners eating with guards and calling them by their first names.

-- In April, a Navy official told the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal that the Navy would soon begin running the primary aviators' training at its Corpus Christi, Texas, station using off-the-shelf copies of Microsoft's Flight Simulator software ($50), thus permitting the Navy to create a homemade simulator for about $6,000 (vs. "millions" for a commercial simulator). Also, according to news reports from Littleton, Colo., the two Columbine High School killers were obsessed with the video game Doom, a customized version of which was adopted by the Marines several years ago for infantry training.

-- Build It and They Will Come: The $330 million taxpayer-funded MidAmerica Airport, built in 1998 in an Illinois suburb of St. Louis, Mo., continues to operate daily despite having not attracted a single prospective commercial airline flight, according to a March Associated Press story. Projections by the politicians who advocated the airport had it handling a million passengers by next year, but so far all of the major carriers in St. Louis said they have no plans to leave. Already the county government has spent $2.5 million on upgrades.

-- In March in Ottawa, Ontario, convicted pedophile Owen Dulmage rose to address the judge in an effort to persuade him that he was no longer a threat to children because of his age and should not be imprisoned, or at least not for long, for molesting a boy in 1960. Said Dulmage, who is 77: "I couldn't catch a 6-year-old in a race." Why, the only way he could kidnap a boy, he said (according to a report of his remarks in the Globe and Mail), was if he knocked him out first and dragged away the unconscious body.

-- In Adamsburg, Pa., in March, Mary Marcoz bought a $129 12-gauge shotgun as a welcome-home gift for her son, Christopher Lewis, who had just been released from a mental-health treatment center. After presenting him with the gun, Marcoz went on errands and returned to find yellow police tape at their home: According to police, Lewis had begun shooting in the air, and when two neighbors came to complain, he shot both of them. Marcoz guessed that Lewis was acting out scenes from the movie "Kelly's Heroes," which was in the VCR at the time.

-- In February, the Canadian government approved the meat-processing industry's request to use iron oxide (also known as "rust") instead of caramel to decorate Black Forest ham. According to the industry, rust is cheaper and binds better to the ham, and health officials insisted that rust is safe for human consumption.

-- In February a juvenile court judge in Dayton, Ohio, ruled that Regina Moreland's three children (plus a granddaughter in her custody) should be returned to her after being taken away by authorities when four other children in her care were murdered over a seven-month period. (Police have not filed charges in the murders but said the culprit may have been another child in the family rather than Moreland.) In April, the judge changed his mind and awarded custody to another relative who lives across the street from Moreland, thus still keeping the child-suspect together with the surviving kids.

Job-Rating Rage: Trung Ngo, 32, was sentenced to 30 days in jail in Alexandria, Va., in January for telephoning his supervisor more than 50 times to complain about being rated "highly successful" instead of "outstanding." Slow-Flushing Rage: An impatient Raymond Cruz, 49, was arrested in Schererville, Ind., in March after shooting up a slow-swirling toilet in a tavern with his .40-caliber Beretta. Porno-Denial Rage: A 19-year-old man and several buddies cursed a librarian and chased her out of the Downsview Public Library in Toronto, Ontario, in February after she cut their Internet access because they were viewing sex sites.

Within the last six months, Florida county commissioners in Seminole County (near Orlando) and Manatee County (Bradenton) passed anti-public-nudity ordinances requiring women to cover at least 25 percent of their breasts (including a mandatory-coverage area explained in detail) and at least 33 percent of the buttocks (also highly detailed as to which points the coverage must be measured from). Thus, strictly speaking, the ordinances require sheriffs to make an initial calculation of the total area of the particular region (length times width) before an arrest can be made.

-- Last year, Phyllis Klingebiel filed a lawsuit in Elizabeth, N.J., against her son Michael, 40, charging that he reneged on their 10-year-old deal to split any lottery winnings. Michael had won $2.15 million in 1997, but said that that particular winning ticket was not part of the deal. In April 1999, Michael reluctantly agreed to part with almost one-fourth of the money, posing for a notable Newark Star-Ledger photo receiving a kiss from Mom while looking like he had just been shot in the stomach.

-- The Baltimore Sun reported in April that Nettie Levitt Gilbert, 89, filed a lawsuit in Palm Beach, Fla., against her son, Jeffrey Levitt, accusing him of taking out credit cards in her name. If her claim is true, it would constitute a violation of Levitt's 1993 parole on savings-and-loan embezzlement charges and thus would send him to prison for the remaining 23 years of his term.

The government of France, concerned that the 2 million homeless, unemployed and other down-and-outs would be particularly befuddled in having to translate their francs into euros, announced in December that it would pass out free calculators on the street. And the tax collectors in the state of Saarland, Germany, trying to improve their image with the people they have chosen for audits, began in February to hand out blue-and-white pens reading "We Gladly Make House Calls -- Your Friendly Saarland Tax Man."

News of the Weird reported in 1996 and 1997 on people who still fail to understand the social offensiveness of dressing white people in blackface. In January 1999, teachers at Yale secondary school, Abbotsford, British Columbia, adamant about staging a production of the musical "Show Boat" despite the unwillingness of the school's only four black students to join the cast, decided to select four white students for the black chorus and to paint them in blackface. The play opened in February, in the middle of Black History Month.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- Guess Which One Ended the Relationship: In April surveyor William Parker, 51, filed a lawsuit in Kingston County Court, southwest London, England, for about $30,000 to recover money he had spent on Helen Holdsworth during the years 1993-1996 when the two were lovers and produced a son. Included on Parker's tab were such items as about $3 for a lock for Holdsworth's bathroom door, $7 for an oil filter and $13 for motor oil.

-- The Agence France Presse news service reported that the official government newspaper of Baghdad, the Ai-Thawra, played an April Fools' Day joke on its readers, claiming on page one: "Good news: from today, bananas (2 pounds), Pepsi (a case), and chocolate (50 pieces) to be included in rations." Elsewhere in the newspaper, the editors revealed their story to be a hoax, and that the monthly government food ration continues to be small amounts of tinned cheese, flour, rice, sugar, tea, cooking oil, powdered milk and salt.

-- Well-Put: After biologists announced in December that, for the first time, they had mapped out all of the DNA of a multicell animal (a microscopic roundworm, with 19,099 genes), colleagues told The New York Times that the revelation had a profound effect on their ability to do the same someday for humans. Said the president of the National Academy of Sciences, "In the last 10 years, we have come to realize humans are more like worms than we ever imagined."

-- Two researchers from the University of Vienna told a British Psychological Society conference in February that vaginal pheromones appear to block men's ability to distinguish beautiful women from plain ones. After men were given synthetic copulins, they judged plain women more attractive as to face and voice, and the less attractive the women initially, the greater the jump in their ratings. (However, birth control pills appear to block the production of copulins.)

-- Life Imitates James Bond: In March, a joint urban-warfare exercise involving British Royal Marines and the U.S. Marines in Oakland, Calif., marked the first use of a small cannon that shoots a high-speed blast of quick-drying foam that hardens so fast, and with the strength of cement, that it enables troops to cross from building to building.

-- The Kanda Tsushin Kogyo firm of Tokyo, Japan, announced in April that its child's anti-bed-wetting machine had finished clinical tests and was awaiting approval by the Health and Welfare Ministry. The device measures the depth of a child's sleep and how full the bladder is and sounds an alarm when it's time to get up and go. However, the device only works on children, is bulky to wear to bed, doesn't always wake the child, and cost about $1.7 million in government grants to develop, leading some pediatricians to demand that nature be allowed to take its course.

-- A police detective reading the confession of Lyle Clinton May in Asheville, N.C., in March told a jury that after May had killed a 21-year-old woman, he also stabbed her 4-year-old son to death. "It didn't seem right leaving him alive," May wrote. "I felt sorry for him. I did not want to see the kid crying or having the memory of his mom being killed." May was sentenced to death.

-- A Carnegie Mellon University researcher revealed in March that the 20-year movement to open shelters for battered women, and to empower women to leave abusive men, has not seriously reduced the number of such women killed but has drastically cut the number of abusive men killed by retaliating women. The researcher theorized that shelters encourage women to leave men (rather than to stay and perhaps eventually be motivated to kill their tormentors) but also that shelters so empower women that it really enrages their men and pushes them closer to homicide.

-- In April, prominent Canadian geneticist Robert Hegele told a conference in Edmonton, Alberta, that when he revealed to some Newfoundlanders in remote villages that they possessed a genetic flaw that increased their chances of heart disease, they were happy. Their initial reaction, said Hegele, was, "This is great! They figured, 'This means we're doomed, so we ... don't need to quit smoking or (stop eating fatty foods).'"

Inmate Joshua Williams, 38, was released by jailers in Olathe, Kan., in February after he sent them a fake fax announcing that a warrant against him had been dismissed. Among the fax's misspellings that failed to alert jailers: "Govenor." And Detroit inmate Waukeen Spraggins escaped in February when, impersonating a police official, he called jailers and ordered them to transport him to his girlfriend's house. Said Police Chief Benny Napoleon, "His request was so bizarre that people thought it had to be true."

Two 15-year-old boys, on a break from volunteer duty in a Winston-Salem, N.C., courthouse in March as part of a sentence for vandalizing a telephone booth, were captured on surveillance videotape urinating in a coffee pot used by lawyers, according to an Associated Press report. The coffee pot was left plugged in all night, creating a particularly pungent cooked-urine smell the next morning. Said one lawyer who often uses the coffee room, "(The boys) are going to have to get (someone) from out of state to defend them on this one."

In 1997, News of the Weird reported that a man on trial for attempted murder in Newmarket, Ontario, was released when the foreman cleared his throat before uttering the word "guilty," causing the judge to interpret the verdict as "not guilty." (The defendant turned himself in three days later.) In April 1999, Alan Rashid was sentenced to two years in prison in Cardiff, Wales, when the jury foreman coughed during the "not" portion of "not guilty," causing the judge to believe the verdict was "guilty." (A few minutes later, the jury returned to the courtroom to clear up the matter, and the defendant was released.)

-- In Bucharest, Hungary, in March, Romanian professional soccer player Mario Bugeanu and his girlfriend accidentally passed away from carbon monoxide poisoning in his car while having sex. And in New York City in March, software salesman Douglas R. Buchholz, 36, was pushed out a window to his death from the 13th floor of his office building during horseplay with a colleague celebrating a business success.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- After marathon partisan sessions in March, the Alabama senate reached agreement to permit Lt. Gov. Steve Windom to retain his traditional presiding powers. However, during the fierce debates, Windom was forced to remain continually at the presiding officer's podium, and things got so tense on March 28 that he had to urinate into a pitcher because opponents would have won votes if he had taken a restroom break. Afterward, the director of the state archives asked for the pitcher, but Windom said it had been discarded.

-- Berkeley, Calif., Councilman Kriss Worthington announced in April that he would propose that the City Council pass a reparations package to heal sociopolitical wounds dating back to the 1960s. Included were proposals for official apologies to anti-Vietnam war protesters and to Patricia Hearst Shaw, who was kidnapped by (and later joined) the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. Worthington also proposed that the city erect a statue of Hearst Shaw in her notorious gun-toting pose and declare the abduction house in Worthington's district a historic site.

In January, a pair of popular dolls was introduced in Japan from the firm Mataro, consisting of a female with her hands out asking for a loan and a male banker in a business suit rejecting her. And in Mompos, Colombia, in March, local teachers stole about 50 Easter figurines from a church and vowed not to return them until the city issued their six-months-overdue paychecks. And Nike announced in March to great fanfare that it was raising the minimum wage for its Indonesian workers, to about $37 per month, which in the U.S. buys one-fourth of a pair of Air Jordans.

-- Unitel Corp. announced in March it was relocating its 100-job telemarketing office from small-town Frostburg, Md., to Florida. Unitel said Frostburg workers' telephone manner is too polite for the telemarketing business.

-- According to a February Science News profile of University of South Florida pollution microbiologist Joan B. Rose, her career is devoted to flushing fecal-germlike "phages" down toilets and then sending monitoring crews into local waterways to track down where they end up. She has found, for example, that some bacteria flushed into septic tanks can seep into nearby canals within 11 hours.

-- Another germ ranger is University of Arizona environmental microbiologist Charles Gerba, whose specialty, according to a February New York Times article, is discovering germ patterns in kitchens, bathrooms and laundries. In random home visits, Gerba found that 25 percent of washing machines are contaminated with fecal matter and that hepatitis A and salmonella survive even a very hot dryer and remain on clothes. He is noted for developing the "commodograph," a visual display of where droplets of water land after they are sprayed into the air when a toilet is flushed. (Hint: Gerba keeps his toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.)

-- Janice Peck, 50, filed a lawsuit last year in Salt Lake City against the state Division of Wildlife for alienation of affection. The agency had assigned Janice's then-husband, Randal, to partner up with agent Jodi Becker, now 33, as a married, outdoor couple in order to infiltrate a poaching operation. Apparently, the couple was so good at portraying a couple that Randal divorced Janice after 23 years' marriage and married Becker. Randal and Jodi said they initially slept together in their government-supplied trailer only to give their relationship greater authenticity.

-- News of the Weird reported in 1994 on a Nassau County, N.Y., cell block bragging contest and fight over pay-telephone privileges between notorious murderers Colin Ferguson (race-motivated, commuter-train killer) and Joel Rifkin (serial prostitute killer). Better spirited, according to news reports in March 1999, are the twice-a-week bull sessions at the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colo., of bombers Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City), Ramzi Yousef (World Trade Center) and Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber). Said one former prosecutor, "This is the oddest kaffeeklatsch in the history of Western civilization."

-- The late Bennie Casson's unsuccessful lawsuit against a Sauget, Ill., stripper's club for neck injuries caused by a dancer's swinging her breasts at him was all over the news in 1997. In February 1999, Mark Kent, 28, filed assault charges against the Kappa Kabana club, Kappa, Ill., after a dancer tried to wrap her legs around his neck while holding onto a pole on stage, causing Kent to fall off a bar stool and hit his head and elbow.

-- News of the Weird reported in 1993 that a Santa Monica, Calif., cafe was selling $130/pound Kopi Luwak coffee, produced from choice beans that have been run through the digestive tract of a Sumatran marsupial before being processed for sale. A March 1999 Wall Street Journal story from Vietnam reported on a similarly made "caphe cut chon" (fox dung coffee), employing a mongoose-related civet cat, whose taste in finding the finest coffee beans in a field is said to be uncanny. (The coffee is in shorter supply lately because Vietnamese diners are finding the civet cat, itself, tasty.)

-- News of the Weird has reported several times on capital punishment in China for crimes somewhat less serious than murder. Among the latest: Gao Yunliao, executed in January in Henan province, for stealing a statue. Executive Tang Mihong and his employee Zhao Jian, executed in December in Beijing, for smuggling computers. And Jie Hua Huang, 34, granted asylum in Canada in November because he faced a certain death penalty in China for tax fraud.

-- Stories demonstrating different smell tolerances have once again been in the news. In February, a 52-year-old woman in Hong Kong gave in to the smell after a week and turned her dead husband's body over to authorities; she had held on to the body in the hope that he would revive. And in January, authorities in Thunder Bay, Ontario, recovered the body of an 85-year-old man, dead for four years, which had to be extricated from a house that one officer called "a tremendous biological soup of garbage and debris"; the neighbors had noticed a smell a few years ago but did not think it was bad enough to report.

A 22-year-old woman in an automobile collision in Pendleton, Ore., in January was placed in an ambulance, but seconds later a tractor-trailer skidded into it, crushing it and killing the woman. And a 36-year-old man survived a head-on crash into a utility pole in Miami Beach, Fla., in January, and was waiting to be picked up when the pole fell on top of him, killing him. And a 72-year-old man was slightly injured when his car went off the road near Penicton, British Columbia, in December, resting on a ledge; when a rescuer attempted to reach him, the car slipped off and fell 30 feet, killing the man.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)