News of the Weird

-- Nuclear scientist Eric Voice, 73, told England's The Guardian in August that, as far as he knows, inhaling plutonium (as from the effects of a nuclear war) is not dangerous, citing his own successful test 18 months ago in which he sniffed some to try to allay the public's fears. Voice said nothing bad has happened to him so far and that, in fact, plutonium has never harmed anyone, except for those two bombs on Japan.

John Glover, 74, explaining why his car was in the middle of Deal Lake (N.J.), June: gas pedal got stuck. Billy W. Parkham, 68, on why his minivan smashed into a dress shop, Seekonk, Mass., August: gas pedal got stuck. Eleanor Soltis, 76, on why her car ran out of control in downtown Chicago, killing three people (and who agreed to pay a $1.5 million settlement in August): gas pedal got stuck. Marie Wyman, 87, on why her Buick crashed through the Lobster Trap & Steakhouse, Winslow, Maine, July: gas pedal got stuck.

-- Latest Holy Icons: Crocodiles, in a lake near Karachi, Pakistan, where thousands brought fresh-meat offerings in March to secure blessings for their babies; two frogs, joined in Hindu matrimony in Gauhati, India, in March to please rain gods and end a four-month drought; and six Franciscan priests, in remote Copacabana, Bolivia, who specialize in blessing motorists against drunk drivers, bad brakes and gasoline shortages, based on a mixture of Catholicism and Andean Indian beliefs.

-- According to a June Boston Globe dispatch, the kingdom of Bhutan, nestled between India and Tibet, recently legalized television-watching for its 700,000 people and began broadcasting the news and other programs. Before that, the country's few TV sets were used only to watch imported videos. (And, according to a June New Yorker travelogue, the Bhutanese landscape is dominated by penis art, which is a tribute to the legendary Drukpa Kunley and supposedly inspires fertility.)

-- Zimbabwe, which seemed on the verge of a breakthrough on rights for women just 15 years ago, was set back by an April unanimous decision of its Supreme Court that adult females are inherently inferior to males and have a status akin to that of teen-ager. The court cited "the nature of African society" as its basis.

-- An April Chronicle of Higher Education report reviewed research showing that, in more than a dozen South American societies plus others in New Guinea, Polynesia and India, all men who have sex with a pregnant woman are considered joint biological fathers. In this "partible paternity," the fetus is considered fertilized by repeated contributions of sperm, and at least one society, the Canela of Brazil, believe the baby will most resemble the man who contributes the most sperm at any time during the nine months.

-- In June, Panama City, Fla., elementary school teacher Wanda Nelson was reprimanded for confiscating a National Geographic magazine from a fourth-grade boy because it was "pornography" (i.e., drawings of naked humans in a story on evolution). And two Illinois researchers told a professional convention in May of their findings that telling a lie triggers a release of hormones to the nose, increasing its size.

-- Sound Like Monty Python Sketches: Clifford Shattuck, 66, owner of the Lighthouse Motel in Lincolnville, Maine, was barred by court order in May from having any contact with motel guests after one complaint too many of his harassing his customers, including once tossing rocks at a potential guest's car. And in July, the first European Swamp Soccer Championship (with 62 teams competing) was played in Hyrynsalmi, Finland, on a playing field purposely knee-deep in mud.

-- Deborah Lee Benagh, 44, filed a lawsuit in July in Denver against Six Flags Elitch Gardens amusement park for roller-coaster injuries. Because her shoulder harness did not hold her securely, she said, she repeatedly struck her head during the ride and later suffered headaches and nausea, as well as short- and long-term memory loss. The name of the ride is "Mind Eraser."

John Paul Roby, 56, was convicted in Toronto in May of 35 counts of sex crimes against minors, but not before a long and torturous trial in which a mountain of evidence (including testimony of 42 victim-witnesses) was produced against him, which in most cases he simply ignored while denying guilt. Highlights: a long colloquy in which he denied that a thoroughly authenticated photograph of him was really of him; a flat denial that "I never masturbate, period"; and repeated assertions that he could never have exposed himself in men's rooms (as witnesses claim) because his bladder control makes urination a rare event in his life.

Michael Robert Wyatt, now 38, made News of the Weird in 1990 when he pushed a woman to the ground in Little Rock, Ark., and began sucking her toes. After several such incidents, he was ordered into counseling and has since stayed out of the news, getting married and taking a job as a mechanic in West Plains, Mo. However, in August 1999, Wyatt was arrested in Fayetteville, Ark., for allegedly harassing several women by telling them they would really look hot if they amputated some of their toes. Some women in West Plains reported similar incidents.

In Calgary, Alberta, in June, David Thomas Poole, 49, was sent to jail for one year for perjury committed while challenging a routine traffic ticket. Poole submitted a photograph of the intersection at which he was ticketed showing there was no left-turn-only lane, as the ticket stated. Actually, the left-turn lane had been reconfigured recently, and though Poole swore that he had taken the photo at the time of the incident in January, the judge was struck by the scene's green grass and trees in full flower.

A 47-year-old burglar was crushed to death when a pickup truck fell off the jack as he was attempting to steal the wheels (London, Ohio). The police commissioner of Cambridge, Mass., admitted there was no scientific evidence to support the statement in his training manual that Mexican-Americans' diet makes them immune to pepper spray. An anesthesiologist was charged with stealing her surgeon-colleagues' credit cards from their lockers and buying designer clothes (San Francisco). Two police cars collided on the way to a doughnut shop (Panama City, Fla.; actually, the doughnut shop was a crime scene). Four veterinarians treated 10 dogs exhibiting "hallucinogenic stupor" and believe the cause is wild marijuana near the town's railroad tracks (Nelson, British Columbia).

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

-- Scottish psychopathic murderer Noel Ruddle, who has been in the Carstairs mental hospital in Glasgow for eight years, was released in August because no treatment is currently available for his paranoid schizophrenia, and British law prevents a prisoner's hospitalization if it does not result in the improvement, however slight, of his condition. Various officials and psychiatrists quoted in the British press were aghast at the decision, for nearly 2,000 seriously disturbed prisoners are in situations similar to Ruddle's.

"I know I'm not perfect" (recidivist drunk driver Donald Branch, sentenced to 49 years in prison for killing a pregnant woman and her daughter, Memphis, Tenn., June). "I'm not perfect" (Steven Carmichael, 39, with convictions for burglary, theft, drug trafficking and two rapes, Portland, Maine, July). "I'm not perfect" (convicted murderer Raymond O. Nichols, placing a singles ad from his Massachusetts prison cell, May). "(She's) not perfect" (Salt Lake Tribune reporter writing a sympathetic article about a once-drug-crazed mother asking for custody of the daughter she abandoned, June). "He's not perfect" (Monica Turner, wife of boxer-rapist Mike Tyson, May).

-- The San Francisco Examiner reported in June that one-third of outdoor rodents at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge have both male and female reproductive organs, a finding attributed to a nearby reservoir of selenium, which is a byproduct of agricultural runoff. The lead investigator said the rodents are male on the outside and female on the inside.

-- Latest Survived Plunges: Allen Frith, age 45, 75 feet off a cliff at his home near Pigeon Forge, Tenn. (February); 30-year-old woman in her car, off the seventh floor of a parking garage, Pittsburgh (April); 27-year-old man, 80 feet off a construction platform, Washington, D.C. (July); Leung Man-chun, 8, 17 floors from a Hong Kong apartment (with four clotheslines and a canopy breaking his fall) (April).

-- Spectacular Crashes: Piedmont, Mo., teen driver Rory Dale Smith survived a collision with a train even though he was ejected from his truck and slammed through the rolled-up passenger window of another truck (March). A one-vehicle crash on the Capital Beltway in Alexandria, Va., vaulted the chihuahua Tito over a 4-foot-high median barrier and four lanes of traffic safely to the grassy shoulder (April). Olivier Faure, 21, was knocked off his motorcycle by a car in the village of Upaix, France, but walked and hitchhiked, in shock, to his home six miles away before he realized that his forearm had been severed (February).

-- In July, police in Tijuana, Mexico, investigating a roadside sniper attack, jailed suspect Dennis A. Macchione, 33, before they had released the victim's two companions, whom they were holding temporarily. The companions chatted and shared food with Macchione but only because they didn't know who he was; they said if they had known, they'd have killed him. (In December, Las Vegas police inadvertently locked up a witness to a contract killing in the same holding cell with one of the two men accused of arranging the hit.)

-- At a pretrial hearing in Albuquerque, N.M., in March, a judge disclosed government witnesses' addresses over prosecutors' protests; among the evidence: a rap song recorded by the defendants' gang, the Sureno 13, that included a chorus, "I gotta kill me a witness." And key evidence convicting Jeffrey Myrick at his February trial in Cambridge, Mass., for pushing his girlfriend off of a roof: a poem he wrote, reading: "As we stand here / on the roof top / for an unknown reason / my girlfriend took a hop / I screamed / call a cop / because I threw my girl from the top."

-- A 19-year-old man was hospitalized in Salt Lake City in June after personally investigating whether a .22-caliber bullet inside a straw could be ejected by hitting it with a hammer. Answer: sometimes (including this time, wounding the man in the stomach).

-- In June in Christchurch, New Zealand, Thomas Hendry, 23, won the "How Far Will You Go?" contest at Trader McKendry's Tavern (prize: about $300 (U.S.)) by stapling his penis to a crucifix and setting it on fire. Hendry said he needed to pay some bills and was inspired by an earlier contestant who merely pierced his foreskin with a safety pin: "I thought I could do better than that." Hendry's mother was in the bar that night and said, "I'm just very relieved that he won. I would have hated for someone to go through all that and (lose)."

According to recent figures, about 90 people per day in Japan kill themselves, a per capita rate about 75 percent higher than the suicide rate in the United States. The main reason, according to experts cited in a July New York Times dispatch, is the shame and fear of layoffs during Japan's recession. And in July, Villaricca, Italy, with more than 20 percent unemployed, conducted a televised drawing among 177 contestants for six municipal street-sweeper jobs.

People continue to receive surprises as they innocently take their seats in the bathroom. In May, Betty Rook, 79, was hospitalized in Petersburg, Va., with a rat bite on her butt as she sat on the toilet; city official Tim Jones said he gets about one report a year of a rat making it through sewer lines into a residential toilet. And as Tom Smelcer of Apsley, Ontario, flushed his toilet in April, he saw a bird battling against the flow, finally thrusting itself free and crashing against Smelcer's head; health officials said it probably came from a roof-top septic-tank vent.

I Love This Game: Kenneth Demarrias, 19, was convicted in May in Kansas City, Mo., of killing two and wounding a third after an argument over a basketball game. And Yasser Ashburn, 15, confessed in January in Brooklyn, N.Y., that he stabbed a 14-year-old boy to death after a school basketball game in which the latter starred in his team's victory.

After an investigation to alleviate residents' fears, police in the village of Durness, Scotland, issued a public certificate of assurance that two recently arrived gay restaurateurs were definitely not pedophiles. A Franciscan nun admitted scrawling white supremacist graffiti on the walls of a hospital just to see how people would react (Joliet, Ill.). A fire broke out in a beer factory but was quickly quashed when the flames melted a hose, releasing 25 gallons of brew (Ostrava, Czech Republic). A 38-year-old man was charged with sexually assaulting three sheep (Lakeside, Calif.). A judge foiled a conciliation plan by Cleveland mayor Michael White (who is black) to allow Ku Klux Klan members to use a police building to change into their robes and hoods at their Aug. 21 march.

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

-- As Predicted in the "South Park" Movie: In August, the Ottawa Sun reported general outrage in Canada (led by the war veterans'group, the Royal Canadian Legion) that gay-hating Topeka, Kan., pastor Fred Phelps had burned the Canadian flag while in Ottawa recently. Phelps was protesting a Supreme Court of Canada decision to include same-sex couples as having "spouses" and had called the smoldering Canadian banner the "Fag Flag." Said a retired army captain, "Our government has got to make the stand."

In July, Massachusetts filed a civil complaint against convicted murderer Sean Smith, 34, on behalf of three of Smith's fellow inmates who said Smith bilked them out of $55,000 of family money in an investment scheme. And three days later, a judge in Tampa, Fla., denied tobacco-litigation lawyer Henry Valenzuela his $20 million share (out of $200 million set aside for legal fees from the state's 1997 settlement with tobacco companies) because he had been late in paying his $2,500 share of a litigation expense.

-- Allegedly jealous husband Floyd John Weseman, 27, was arrested in Morristown, Tenn., in April and charged with domestic assault after he reportedly beat his wife and attached a small padlock to her genitals.

-- In June, a New Orleans court awarded bicyclist Jerry Lawrence, 60, $95,000 after he suffered a fractured skull and two broken legs when hit by a police car on call. Lawrence prevailed even though he was drunk and ran a stop sign, which put himself directly in the path of the cruiser, which had siren and emergency lights on. Said Lawrence's lawyer, "(D)runks have some rights, too."

-- In July, a 48-year-old woman filed a lawsuit against Gold Coast Hospital in Southport, Australia, for about $450,000 (U.S.) because the hospital apparently misplaced part of her brain after aneurysm surgery in 1996. According to the lawsuit, doctors were to temporarily remove her right frontal lobe and replace it when swelling subsided, but then, when they went to insert the lobe, they couldn't find it. She has a temporary titanium plate but claims various symptoms including "irritability" and a "perception" that the lobe might have been fed to dogs.

-- According to a March Boston Globe story, residents of Portsmouth, N.H., are finally at the breaking point over the city's ancient and deteriorating sewer system that has resulted (according to one resident) in raw sewage overflow in his basement and on city streets during every high tide in the past 10 years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency believes repair would be so costly that it has long exempted Portsmouth and 100 New England communities from raw sewage discharge regulations. The city manager said a solution is at least 10 to 15 years away, but, asked one resident, "Why are we talking about building a new library and parking garage when we have sewage in our basements?"

-- The Safety Tanteisha detective agency in Osaka, Japan, told New Scientist magazine in June that it sells about 200 aerosol-spray kits a month (at $400 each) to help women find out whether their men are having affairs by detecting the presence of fresh seminal fluid on their underwear. Another "miracle product," Infidelity Detection Cream, rubbed on a man's skin, will cause blisters the next time he showers, which would subject him to wifely questioning if he arrived home with freshly blistered skin.

-- In May, scientists at the University of Hawaii announced that they had successfully transferred the gene that gives jellyfish a green color over to the permanent DNA of a mouse via a method of "transgenesis" that breaks the coating of sperm and allows gene-commingling. That a pink mouse turned fluorescent green under an ultraviolet light was cool, but the scientists were much more excited that their transgenesis was a big improvement over previous methods.

-- The Times of London reported in May that officials from Britain's Ministry of Defense had recently met with Eric Herr, the American who has patented a phaser gun and seeks $500,000 to make a prototype. Current "taser" guns are not effective unless applied directly to the skin, but Herr's gun would shoot a laser at someone up to 100 yards away and then pass an electrical current through it that would temporarily immobilize the target.

Londoner Lisa Wright was granted a loan of about $4,500 from the Prince's (of Wales) Trust during the spring to help her start a business to design "respectable and elegant" women's clothes for male transvestites. Said Wright, "If they're going to dress as women, they must learn how to dress properly. We don't want transvestites to frighten children." And according to documents released by Canada's Reform party in June, film director Cynthia Roberts received about $78,000 (U.S.) in 1996 and 1997 from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council to make "Bubbles Galore," starring American porn queen Nina Hartley and featuring, according to Roberts, "wall-to-wall sex."

On July 7 in Bari, Italy, neighbors found the skeleton of a man, later learned to have been born in 1928, fully clothed and lying on his bed. After contacting relatives and neighbors, police estimated the man had been dead for around five years. That might tie the record set by the late Wolfgang Dircks of Bonn, Germany, when his body was found in November 1998; he apparently expired during December 1993 based on the TV program guide next to the still-"on" (but broken) television set that the body was propped in front of.

In May, four men, aided by an employee of the State Theater in Menomonie, Wis., stole a print of the "Star Wars" movie "The Phantom Menace" (value: $60,000) in one of the worst-executed crimes in state history. As the men lifted the 3-foot-wide spool from the projector, it unraveled, leaving two miles of celluloid on the floor. The men scooped the mess up, took it home, and tried to wash the film in a bathtub to get rid of their fingerprints (hint: doesn't work). Then, they cut it up for disposal but, after a while, finally realized they needed to turn themselves in. (Authorities said alcohol was heavily involved in the caper.) In sentencing in July, each man got five days in jail.

-- A thief who stole $500 from Frieda Folsoms 36 years ago returned it to her anonymously (but without interest, which would have been another $2,200) (Sacramento, Calif.). A 42-year-old Boy Scout volunteer, missing for 24 hours, was found naked and hanging by his ankles from a tree, as a result of an autoerotic mishap (Orlando, Fla.). A groom divorced his wife at their wedding reception after she had dissed his mother's dancing ability (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia). A credit-union robber ducked out quickly with his stash, failing to notice that the teller had honestly misread the holdup note asking for "$2500" and put only "$25.00" in the bag (Pawtucket, R.I.). A pizzeria robbery was foiled when the manager thought the robber's "I want it all" demand referred to a large-sized pizza and began reading off the options and prices, confusing the man (Dayton, Ohio).

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