News of the Weird

-- In June, according to a New York Times feature on the decline of urban male sexuality, author Michael Segell said he found various New York City men who practiced what he called "sexual payback" (seducing a woman but then, on the verge of intercourse, abruptly becoming disinterested), or, as one man in a Segell focus group put it, "The only thing that's more enjoyable than having sex is making a girl want it and not giving it to her." Segell called this a passive-aggressive response to women's increasing sexual power.

The San Jose Mercury News reported in May that because of a housing shortage in Silicon Valley, people are renting attics, basements and storage sheds to live in and that others pay as much as $200 a month for the right just to sleep in a corner of a living room in order to be close to work and avoid a lengthy commute from the family home. And in June, The New York Times quoted a yakuza crime boss in Tokyo, lamenting how his turf has been taken over by immigrant gangs from China: "(T)he Japanese yakuza think of long-term business relationships, but the Chinese mafia thinks just of the short term. Their only goal is money, money, money."

David Sanchez Hernandez, 18, was convicted in June in Punta Gorda, Fla., of egging two police officers on foot patrol. Hernandez, who said he did it in order to win a $2 bet with his brother, was fined $750 and sentenced to 25 hours of community service.

-- In May, "installation artist" Cosimo Cavallaro outfitted room 114 of the Washington Jefferson Hotel in New York City in a cheese motif, using a half-ton of various types from Muenster to Swiss, melted. His only explanation was that his family owned a cheese shop in Canada and that he remembers the rush of liberation he got one day by plastering his father's old armchair in mozzarella. Said former gallery owner Jules Feiler, "When I first talked to him, I thought he was just another in a series of nuts that have entered my life."

-- From a press release on a June San Francisco exhibit by Yukinori Yanagi, who built a giant ant farm in which sand was intricately dyed to create a finely detailed, 15-panel image of a large $1 bill visible through the glass and which the ants would redesign by moving the sand around: "(Yanagi's work) is a dialogue about the fluency of boundaries in the 20th century and the dissemination of cultures through the expanding notions of globalism."

-- At an April show in San Francisco, performance artist Zhang Huan was to "explore the physical and psychological effects of human violence in modern society" by spreading puree of hot dogs on his naked posterior as he lay face down on a cypress branch and permitting eight dogs to enter the room. Immediately, one dog, Hercules, bit Zhang on the butt, drawing blood and causing the show to be suspended.

-- In April, Geraldine Batell filed a complaint against the American Stage in St. Petersburg, Fla., because the characters in the Noel Coward play "Private Lives" were puffing cigarettes (as they were supposed to do), causing smoke to waft to her second-row seat and, she said, violating Florida's Clean Indoor Air Act. And in February, Matthew and Amanda Parrish of Centerville, Utah, filed a lawsuit against their downstairs condominium neighbor because they could somehow smell his smoke when he lit up inside his own apartment. (The local American Cancer Society said it would not support the Parrishes' lawsuit.)

-- In March, six prison inmates in England and Wales were approved for transsexual surgery at government expense (about $18,000 each), but in April, inmate Synthia Kavanagh, who has been repeatedly rejected for such government-paid surgery in Canada, announced she would plead her case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. (Kavanagh is serving a life term for murdering a transvestite.)

-- In April, after its leaders met with the Indonesian government, the Baduy tribe of west Java was granted the right to refrain from voting in the June elections. During the previous three decades under President Suharto, the government forced the Baduy to vote despite their ancient religious prohibition against politics. (The Baduy have similar prohibitions against using electricity and toothpaste.)

In February, authorities in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Caracas, Venezuela, were dealing with suspected urban cannibals. In Cambodia, an investigator found a bag of orderly arranged human bones and parts and surmised that a woman had been made into soup. In Caracas, Mr. Dorangel Vargas briefed the press on his preferences, including men over women, and absolutely no hands, feet or testicles. And in April, a New York jury ruled that murderer-cannibal Albert Fentress was no longer a danger after 20 years' hospitalization and should be released. (In June, just in time, a state supreme court justice overturned the verdict.)

A leader of a Colombian social service organization, describing the reportedly vicious, murderous guerilla leader Carlos Castano, to a Boston Globe reporter in May: "I think he has a great need to be understood and even to be loved." And Robert Volpe, father of Justin, the New York City police officer convicted in May of brutalizing Haitian immigrant Abner Louima with a toilet plunger, describing his son's depression at being in solitary confinement: "Justin has to get his five hugs a day. He's a people person."

Two female drivers stopped and fought on an Oakland, Calif., street in May after one had become angry and tossed a half-eaten burrito through the window at the other. And Alan Parsons was sentenced in July in London, England, to three years in jail for the robbery of a bakery; his getaway had been slowed when the owner hit him with a bun during the chase. And in separate incidents in June, two San Diego men were charged with assaulting people with large tunas, causing not-insubstantial injuries both times.

A 32-year-old man was convicted of breaking into women's apartments at night and just sitting there, watching them sleep (Edmonton, Alberta). A 26-year-old man missed the mandatory death penalty for heroin trafficking by 0.11 grams; he had 14.89 and got 20 years and 20 lashes (Singapore). A 7-year-old boy accidentally killed his 3-year-old brother in the course of demonstrating the pro-wrestling "clothesline" maneuver (Dallas). A bank's new push-button, upthrusting teller's security shield was successful, trapping a 33-year-old robber by the neck until firefighters freed him (Chester, England). A Harvard study revealed that college students who binge-drink are twice as likely to own guns as non-binge-drinkers.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- In June the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a 1998 decision upholding the privacy rights of child-porn suspect James Anderson of Duluth, Ga., who, as the object of a federal sting operation, allegedly took illegal videos into his workplace. Child porn photos uncovered at Anderson's home were later used against him in his trial, but the courts ruled that the workplace stash was illegally seized because Anderson had a legitimate "expectation of privacy." And three weeks later, British Columbia's highest court ruled that Canada's child-porn possession law was unconstitutional for also criminalizing erotic material written up from one's own imagination.

-- In April, police in Broomfield, Colo., issued a trespassing summons to Kristopher C. Ward, 36, who apparently had moved a female companion, all their furniture and two dogs into a vacant house belonging to Michael Deetz. When Deetz brought a police officer around to evict the squatters, Ward said he had been trying to get ahold of Deetz and decided that the best way to bump into him was just to move in and wait until he dropped by.

-- In April, a judge in Ottawa, Ontario, ruled against inmate Herbert Miller in his lawsuit against the Bowden correctional institution in Alberta. Miller had just lost his prison job, which was aimed at preparing him for work on the outside, and was demanding more than $3,000 (U.S.) in back pay, vacation pay and overtime.

-- Former Florida state Rep. Deborah Tamargo, visiting the House chamber in April for a reunion with ex-colleagues, sat next to her old seat while ex-seat neighbor Rep. Harry C. Goode went out for a smoke. While Goode was away, a bill was brought to the floor, and Tamargo apparently couldn't resist the temptation to vote on it. She pushed the "yes" button, to Goode's astonishment when he found out later. The bill, to ban trespassing on the grounds of a private school, passed.

-- The director of the worldwide charity Feed the Children, Steve Highfill, and several administrative employees were caught on tape in May by Nashville, Tenn., TV station WTVF taking home boxes of goods that had been donated for impoverished kids. Highfill saw nothing wrong with that: "If that's wrong, fine. I don't think so, and I don't think people are going to think so." Apparently, people did think so because the next day, Highfill resigned, and a week after, 14 employees were fired.

-- Three University of Sheffield (England) researchers reported in May that they had found a unique bird whose males not only experience orgasms during sex but also are equipped with a penis-like protrusion (though it does not contain a sperm duct). The male buffalo weaver bird uses the protrusion to stimulate the female so that when he expels sperm, the female will be better able to accommodate them.

-- Awesome Dogs: Casey, a golden retriever in Raytown, Mo., that made the news in April by recovering from three gunshot wounds to the head. And Suzzy, a German shepherd in Granite City, Ill., that in March was fine after surgery to remove $7.37 in coins she had swallowed. And the husky Whitey, which with local residents' help has eluded animal control officers in the town of Laconia, N.H. (population 15,000), for more than a year now, despite officers' frequent sightings.

-- According to police in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, the blood all over the furniture of the burglarized house in May was the thief's, courtesy of the homeowner's parrot, which attacked the perp and drove him out. Said a police spokesman, "The bird was fairly annoyed." And in an April Stroudsburg, Pa., trial of a man accused of burglary, prosecutors subpoenaed a parrot that was abducted in the crime, in the slight chance that it would identify the thief in court, but the bird was noncommittal.

York County (Pa.) reported in June that its Resource Recovery Center had found about $43,000 in carelessly discarded coins among the last year's trash. Also in June, the Miami-Dade County (Fla.) government announced the demotion of an administrator in charge of processing parking meter collections; the 21-year veteran had just not gotten around to bank-depositing about $150,000 in coins collected over a four-year period.

In February, Russian brain surgeon Svyatoslav Medvedev told reporters in St. Petersburg that he had achieved an 80 percent success rate curing alcohol addiction by removal of a part of the brain that he says facilitates such addiction. And in April, a University of Toronto researcher concluded that patients with brain damage to the right frontal lobe don't get the punchlines of jokes, even though they laugh easily at simpler kinds of humor, such as slapstick.

In May, according to officials at the Brookings (S.D.) County Jail, on the day before trusty inmate Jeffrey Kumm was to be released, he swiped three deputy's shirts and two prison uniforms and hid them outside on the grounds so he could retrieve them the next day after he got out. (He was caught and sentenced to six more months.)

In February, Don Giuseppe Avarna, 83 (the Duke of Gualtieri), died in Messina, Sicily. The duke achieved celebrity in the 1980s when he abandoned his family and took up with a young American female flight attendant and then proceeded to irritate his wife for years by ringing a chapel bell in their village every time he and the young woman made love.

An arson suspect had to be hospitalized after he fell off the roof of a building while admiring the fire he allegedly started (St. Louis). Bangkok police, trying to end traffic-stop bribes, started offering free rice to ticketed motorists who come to the station to pay their citations. The city of Graz, Austria, said it would start paying beggars about $260 per month to stay out of sight. A fire extinguisher exploded from the heat of a fire in the home of a 70-year-old woman and spewed foam wildly, which doused the fire (Rochester, Minn.). About 1,000 Pakistani cricket fans angrily surrounded the home of a player on the national team and threw rocks at his windows two days after the team lost the world title to Australia.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- The animal-food company Ralston Purina introduced earlier this year, from its subsidiary Purina Philippines, power chicken feed designed to build muscles in roosters for the popular "sport" of cockfighting. According to a June Wall Street Journal report, the market for Rooster Booster chow is huge: The Philippines has 5 million "gaming" roosters.

Labor activist Dan Craig, 25, accepted a plea bargain in January in Toronto that will keep him out of jail, despite his having protested layoffs at an aerospace plant by suspending himself from a factory ceiling and playing "Amazing Grace" on his bagpipes for four solid hours. And in West Union, Ohio, last winter, Berry Baker, 54, protested the school district's placing Ten Commandments statues on school lawns by demanding equal space for statues promoting his "Center for Phallic Worship," which he said copies a religion practiced in some countries. (In February, Baker filed a lawsuit against the district; in June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill authorizing the Ten Commandments, but not stone phalluses, to be displayed on public property.)

On May 10, the diversity-seeking Oregon Senate permitted Wiccan high priestess Cleda Johnson to provide the traditional session-opening blessing. And in June, a coalition of Christian organizations, along with U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, demanded that Fort Hood (near Austin, Texas), the Army's largest installation, stop its 2-year-old sanctioning of a Wiccan Open Circle group, whose several dozen members dance through the night at full moons. (Wiccan groups have also been sanctioned for U.S. military bases in Louisiana, Alaska, Florida, Okinawa and Germany.)

-- Sean Barry, 23, was arrested in Chandler, Ariz., in May after summoning police for help when he couldn't unlock the handcuffs he had playfully put on his wrists. When officers arrived, they ran a routine check on Barry and discovered he had an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court on a traffic charge. They decided to leave the cuffs on him until they got him to the station.

-- John Michael Haydt, 34, was arrested in Mountain View, Calif., in April and charged with burglary after he called 911 to rescue him from the Danish Concepts furniture store at 2 a.m. According to police, Haydt had broken in through a window but had cut himself so badly that he didn't think he could climb back out.

-- Easy Collars: Philip Racicot was arrested in Norwich, Conn., in April for carrying an unlicensed gun; he had called attention to himself when, trying to hide the gun in his car, he shot himself in the buttocks. And in May, a 17-year-old boy identified as Lukasz S., was captured by police in Bydgoszcz, Poland, after an assault; Lukasz slowed down considerably after he shot himself in the foot during the chase. And an unidentified 17-year-old boy, fleeing police in San Francisco in February after vandalizing a construction site, accidentally shot himself to death with a sawed-off shotgun he was trying to hide in his car.

-- Gary Patton and two 17-year-olds were arrested in Grand Junction, Colo., in January and charged with robbing a Norwest Bank branch. They were exposed when one of the teen-agers sent a pair of pants to the laundry without checking the pockets, one of which, according to police, contained the trio's holdup note ("Put the money in the bag and don't say a word or I will kill you").

-- Travis Black, 29, went on the lam on June 1 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., just as his trial for aggravated assault was getting started. The trial went on without him, and the next day, despite the empty chair at the defense table, the jury found him not guilty. (He turned himself in on June 4 and at press time was in jail facing a contempt of court charge.)

-- In January, preparing for a joyous festival at the end of Ramadan, the Taliban government in Afghanistan decided to clean up the six trees in Kabul on which had been hanging the amputated left feet of recently convicted robbers, exhibited as crime deterrents.

-- According to a March report in the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Sentinel, cockroach expert David George Gordon (in town for a local exhibition) called the pests "intelligent, hardworking and fastidious groomers" that are responsible, especially in the tropics, for recycling dead animal matter. Gordon has authored a bug-recipe cookbook, which touts crickets for their calcium, termites for iron and grasshoppers for protein.

-- Fecal Ordnance: The director of the sewer system in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, told reporters in June that the city's pipes may burst by winter from the gases released by the backup caused by last year's Hurricane Mitch, thus potentially showering the city with waste. And neither local officials nor the FAA is certain yet who has been causing the dozen or so instances of fecal bombardment of homes in and around Salt Lake City, Utah, since April; owners of the houses hit by the gobs of thick, raw sewage initially blamed airliners but now suspect an airborne vandal in a smaller plane or someone on the ground using a catapult.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (33) The annual student cheating riots in Bangladesh, first reported in News of the Weird in 1988, in which students are so blatant about their right to receive outside help when taking national placement exams that hundreds are injured and thousands are arrested yearly (with 11,000 expelled in this year's riots in May). And (34) the ego-driven bad guy who goes on a national TV talk show while on the lam from criminal charges, thus making it easy for police or parole officers to find him, as Willie Johnson, 22, did in May, appearing as a drag queen on "The Jerry Springer Show" while wanted in Houston for stabbing his sister's husband.

An inmate was executed in the Philippines when the president's last-minute-reprieve phone call couldn't get through because of busy signals. An Israeli man filed for divorce from his wife of 51 years because she had abandoned the hard-liners and voted for moderate Ehud Barak. A Lockheed aeronautics executive said the company lost as much as $70 million because of a misplaced decimal point in a sales contract. A newly arrived British NATO peacekeeper mistakenly turned right instead of left in Salonika, Greece, and wound up in Athens (250 miles away) instead of at his Macedonian border post (50 miles away). A Home and Garden TV channel study revealed that more men would rather tend their lawns than have sex.

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