News of the Weird

-- According to a November Boston Globe story, upper-crust restaurants in New York and Boston have taken to adding genuine gold flakes to some dishes, not merely as garnish but with the expectation that they be eaten. Boston's Riba restaurant recently offered "risotto of summer's golden squashes with leaf of 24-carat gold." Said the owner, "It's so thin and weightless that by the time you eat it, it's gonzo." She added, "There's a feeling of plenty around. People are feeling rich."

In July, London art student Kursty Groves told reporters she had developed a prototype "Techno Bra," which houses in its lining a Global Positioning Satellite locator, heart-rate monitor and cell phone transmitter, to be activated if the wearer is attacked (which supposedly produces a heartbeat distinct from that produced by exercising or passion). Also in July, a report of an American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery study indicated success with the battery-operated vacuum bra that removes air from its two domes so that breasts are sucked forward; 15 women testers grew by an average of one cup size after 10 weeks.

-- Tensions grow daily in rural Eatonton, Ga. (60 miles southeast of Atlanta), between the Putnam County sheriff intent on enforcing agricultural zoning laws and the 80 African-American disciples of Chief Black Eagle Malachi York, who has built a religious retreat, with shops and 40-foot-high pyramids, called Tama-Re: Egypt of the West. York, a convicted felon who says he was born in the galaxy Illyuwn and who invented the group's Arabic-English-blend language, Nuwabic, teaches that a spaceship will land in 2003 and take away only 144,000 chosen people.

-- According to an October report in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, a national Christian "lighthouse movement" seeks to pray for every single person in the United States by the end of next year. Among the techniques suggested: praying for the 10 households to your left and right and to the five in front; praying for people listed in telephone directories; and, in rough neighborhoods, "drive-by praying." In late August, a convention of related groups met near Dallas to assess how they could best spend the remaining months on their particular goal of exposing every single person on Earth to Christianity by the end of next year.

-- The Wall Street Journal reported in September on efforts by the United Society of Believers (better known as the Shakers, named for the way they tremble while worshipping) to recruit new members. By the mid-1800s, there were 6,000 members, but since part of their philosophy is celibacy, there are now only seven, living near New Gloucester, Maine. Though their original philosophy was built on "separation from the world," the Shakers now have a Web site, give musical concerts and sell CDs.

-- Police in Stockton, Calif., arrested Tina Watts, 28, in June and charged her with cruelty to an animal after she shot a neighbor's dog. She claimed the dog had just bitten her 4-year-old son, but she later admitted that wasn't true after police discovered that the bloody dog-bite wound was just a bandage she had saturated with ketchup.

-- Thieves Living Large: In July, thieves stole more than a mile of natural-gas pipeline, weighing 250 tons, near Kotovskoye, Russia. And in August, thieves stole an entire neighborhood garden in London's West End. And in March, thieves stole an 11-prefabricated-building high school, along with its security fence, in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. And in July, thieves stole every single thing (except a few clothes) out of a townhouse in Montreal, including toilet paper on the holder.

-- Two thieves abandoned their rental car in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in May and escaped, leaving a sheep and three goats in the car, allegedly rustled from a farmer. The sheep was wearing a dress, and the goats wore shirts, pants and hats. Police guessed the thieves had dressed the animals to avert suspicion, but with nightfall approaching, the driver actually created suspicion when he failed to turn on his headlights.

-- Problems of Postmodern Policework: Flamboyant cross-dresser Donald Ray Johnson was arrested in Baton Rouge, La., in September on theft charges after police found him hiding in a closet. According to an Associated Press report, Johnson did not resist arrest, but he did ask police if they could wait a couple of minutes for him to fix his hair.

Paul Faglin, 87, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for strangling his wife (age 83) out of jealousy (Rouen, France, in June). Brose Gearheart, 90, was sentenced to four years in prison for trafficking in crack cocaine (Saugerties, N.Y., April). J.L. Hunter Roundtree, 88, was arrested and charged with bank robbery (Pensacola, Fla., October). Driver Warren Collins, 83, critically injured his wife and himself by plunging over an embankment into the Pacific Ocean after doing "doughnuts" with his car showing it off to a prospective buyer (Long Beach, Calif., October).

News of the Weird reported in 1996 on a hospital in Kinshasa, Zaire, that was detaining newborn babies and their mothers until they paid their bills. In September 1999, Reuters reported that the government's Sina hospital in Tehran, Iran, earlier in the year created a detention cell in the building, staffed by three guards, that has housed about two dozen patients a month who had not paid their bills. Said the hospital's director, "We had no other choice."

In September, Roland Tough, 22, and five colleagues, convicted of theft in Greater Manchester, England, were given prison sentences of from three to six years. The men had burglarized a Tesco's department store in Walkden, with Tough commemorating the heist as the gang's official photographer. However, Tough later dropped off the roll of film for processing at the very same Tesco's, and employees recognized some of the stolen items.

A jail warden accidentally fell to his death from the ceiling on top of a conjugal-visit couple he was spying on (Tapachula, Mexico). The year-old investigation of a used-car salesman's murder was stalled when police discovered that the man was hated by so many people (Edmonton, Alberta). A 40-year-old suicide, rigging a gun to shoot himself in the head, missed, sending a round into his groin (Glendale, Ariz.). A woman serving a life sentence for stomping another woman to death broke down in tears as she told prison authorities how a fellow inmate had killed her two pet fish (Kingston, Ontario). A 270-pound University of Kansas football player got stuck in a Taco Bell drive-thru window when he climbed in after a clerk who had screwed up his chalupa order.

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

-- In September, Pinellas County, Fla., officials unveiled what they hope will be a cutting-edge traffic safety program as a model for reducing pedestrian deaths and calming drivers' road rage. The program asks pedestrians to extend their right hands (as if shaking hands) continuously through an intersection, while smiling, to get the attention of drivers. Said a worker in Clearwater, Fla., when the program was explained by a St. Petersburg Times reporter: "Nobody is going to walk across the street with their arm out. I'm not going to do it. Are you?"

In separate incidents in the same week in September, Debra Rodriguez, 41, of Ames, Iowa, and Kristin R. Smebak, 34, of Superior, Wis., both of whom had been drinking, forced their young kids to drive their cars home so the mothers would avoid DUI tickets if they were stopped. Rodriguez's inexperienced 11-year-old daughter caused a rollover, injuring both occupants, but Smebak's inexperienced 8-year-old son made it safely over the bridge connecting Duluth, Minn., to Superior before being spotted by a patrolman, who arrested Smebak.

-- According to police who arrested Fairfax (Va.) High School math teacher Fred Benevento, 47, in April during a drug sting, Benevento said the 13 plastic bags of crack cocaine in his car "came flying through his open window" and that he "was just looking at them when the police officers arrived."

-- Failed Murder Defenses: In May, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5-to-4 to reject Brad Stone's "automaton" defense, that he was able to stab his wife 47 times only because he was in a robotic state brought on by the trauma of being called a bedroom failure. And in June, an Atlanta jury rejected Christopher Stobbart's claim of self-defense for shooting his boss in the head 14 times, then walking to another room, reloading and shooting him 10 more times.

-- Of Course! In July, just after the end of the war, Yugoslavia's ecology minister said the uncomfortably warm and rainy spring and summer weather was caused by NATO aggression. And in May, a mother in St. Cloud, Fla., told police that the reason she let her teen-age daughters smoke marijuana was so they wouldn't become alcoholics like their father. And Yuji Nishizawa, who hijacked the All Nippon Airways Boeing 747 in July and killed the pilot before being captured, told police his main motivation was to see how a real plane flew, after all the flight-simulation video games he had played.

-- West German criminologist Christian Pfeiffer, writing in the weekly Die Zeit in July, blamed East Germans' proclivities for post-war Nazism and thuggery (they are four times more likely to engage in those activities than West Germans) on too-rigorous potty training. After World War II, the East German government issued manuals on toilet-training for kindergartners, requiring virtually synchronized movements that stripped the kids of their individuality and reinforced government control.

-- Muriel Milne's trial began in Aberdeen, Scotland, in September against the Westhill Golf Club for maintaining a badly designed course, an opinion she came to in 1994 after a ball she hit struck a 2-inch-high rock and bounced back, hitting her in the eye and causing severe damage. (The trial is recessed until November.)

-- Escapee Jimmy Haakansson, in court in Stockholm, Sweden, on a theft charge and who broke a foot leaping through a courthouse window before being recaptured, filed a lawsuit against the police in September for failure to prevent his foolishness. One week earlier, in Roseville, Mich., Cassidy L. VanHorn filed a lawsuit against homeowner Diana Folbigg, whose house he had broken into in July 1997; according to the lawsuit, Folbigg lured VanHorn back to the house the next day, saying all was forgiven, but when he arrived, several of Folbigg's friends beat him up.

According to a Cox News Service report in August, citing official state records, 21 people were fatally run over last year in North Carolina while lying in the middle of the road. (Most incidents occurred around midnight, in the summer, to very intoxicated men.) A few days later, the British Health Education Authority announced that 43 people had been killed in 1998 frying up chips late at night. (The vast majority of victims were intoxicated.)

Police in Fall River, Mass., have been unable to find, since May, the dog owner who trained his pit bull to sharpen his teeth on trees and consequently killed more than 30 in a city park. And in July, an Irish wolfhound freed itself during a United Airlines flight into San Francisco and gnawed through landing-gear wires, but pilots landed the plane safely. And in July, after a Spanish Fort, Ala., police officer pepper-sprayed an alligator that was creating a public menace, the gator bit a $500 chunk out of the officer's cruiser.

Last year, News of the Weird named "Dr." John Ronald Brown "Chief Surgeon to the Weird" upon disclosure that after having had his license revoked for incompetence in 1977, he became the underground surgeon of choice for apotemnophiliacs (who get sexual gratification from having an arm or leg removed). However, one of his patients had died, and in October 1999, a San Diego jury found Brown guilty of second-degree murder. (That same week, Miami Beach's "Dr." Reinaldo Silvestre, who unlike Dr. Brown was never licensed, was arrested after botching several plastic surgeries, including one in which he used a spatula to cram breast implants into a former Mr. Universe runner-up who was expecting only pectoral implants.)

Insufficient Reasons to Kill Yourself: Husband changed the TV channel (woman in Colombo, Sir Lanka, took poison, May); minor car accident (19-year-old man immediately hanged himself from the tree he hit, Flint, Mich., April); police showed a court order to clean up a man's junky yard (man shot himself to death, Brickerville, Pa., March).

-- Quebec bureaucrats ordered an agricultural center to stop giving its cows "human female names" so as not to offend women. A lake-restoration project near Florida's Disney World caused several neighborhoods to be overrun by a half-million mice. Colin Linge, 54, retired after 29 years and 50,000 hours as a firefighter, having never fought a single fire (London, Ontario). Fourteen worshipers seeking eternal salvation were crushed to death when a crowd surged to touch a visiting evangelist (Abuja, Nigeria). A Washington Mutual bank informed a customer that, because of several mergers and relocations, it had lost his safe-deposit box containing $250,000 in family heirlooms. (Fountain Valley, Calif.).

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

-- In August, the school district in Columbus, Ga., assigned aides to alter textbook photos of Emanuel Leutze's famous "Washington Crossing the Delaware" painting because some grown-ups thought parts of Washington's pocket watch, dangling against his thigh, might appear to fifth-graders to be the Founding Father's penis. The aides located matching paint and spent two weeks touching up 2,300 textbooks. Officials in Cobb County (Atlanta's northern suburbs) merely snipped the page from its textbooks.

In April in Alberton, Prince Edward Island, Judge Ralph Thompson gave drunk driver Dennis Joseph Peters, 45, only a suspended sentence for his fourth conviction, citing Peters' medical claim that he should not be jailed because he gets claustrophobic. And jailers in Quebec City sent drug trafficker Michel Racine, 57, home in July because the jail did not have furniture big enough to accommodate the 450-pound man. And in August, jailers in Independence, Iowa, released four Amish men who were serving time for vandalism, concerned that the lockup's modern conveniences (TV, running water) would corrupt the prisoners.

-- Cox News Service reported in August that Florida state-agency DNA paternity tests on child-support-resisting men found that 36 percent of 1,025 "fathers" in four counties were not the fathers after all. However, Florida courts are split on whether even a negative DNA test will relieve men of support responsibilities once they voluntarily begin paying.

-- According to police in Honolulu, Denny Usui, 28, at first told investigating officers in July that his grandmother wasn't home, but when they insisted on looking around, he became progressively more helpful: "Oh, I don't know, she might be here." Then, "Yeah, OK, she's in the shower." Then, "Oh, go inside; my grandma's bathroom is inside her room." Then, "Oh, I think she's dead. She's in the shower." And finally (but probably too late), "I don't want to say anything else until I speak to my attorney because this is a felony and I never committed a murder before."

-- According to a June Los Angeles Times report, about 40 violent male offenders (including murderers) at the Preston Youth Correctional Facility near Sacramento, Calif., are thriving in a program that teaches the rehabilitative effects of sewing. The tough guys stitch, knit and crochet booties and blankets for premature babies and to achieve what one teen (an armed robber) called sewing's "calming" effect.

-- In July, a British Army helicopter, helping on an archaeological dig near Red Deer, Alberta, experienced a wild swinging of its cargo and was forced to jettison it in order to stabilize the chopper. The cargo was a large package of dinosaur bones said to be 68 million years old, which was smashed into splinters. Said the pilot, "I'm very sorry."

-- Firefighters in Nixa, Mo., failed to make it to a burning house in a cul-de-sac in May in time to save it. The problem, said the fire chief, was that too many people were attending a crowded yard sale in a nearby house and were reluctant to move their cars to allow the engines to pass. And, said the chief, "When we were pulling out the hoses, they were tripping over them to get a look."

-- More than 63,000 people visited the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., in July and August to see the rare (considered by some botanists as their holy grail), huge Sumatran titan arum plant blossom to produce the world's largest flower. It is also possibly the world's most putrid, resembling rotting flesh and luring not bees but dung beetles. Coincidentally during the run, renowned botanist Bastiaan J.D. Meeuse passed away in Kirkland, Wash., at age 83; he was best known for his work with the large voodoo lilly, which produces half-pound flowers that generate their own heat and a stench comparable to the titan arum's.

-- Food in the News: Yogurt developed for the Russian space program, using bacteria from cosmonauts' saliva to bolster the immune system, will go on sale to the public soon, according to an August report in New Scientist magazine. And in May, Eiichi Urata, 59, was rescued after being lost for 15 days on a 7,700-foot peak in the Japanese mountains near Nagano; for the last 14 days, he had nothing to eat except two jumbo squeeze-tubes of mayonnaise, which he daubed on ice to make snow cones.

In Almaty, Kazakhstan, three employees of a psychiatric hospital were charged after bringing home seven prostitutes and killing and eating them in gourmet, ravioli-type dishes. And India's national news agency reported in August that a 3-year-old girl had been sacrificed to a Hindu goddess in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, in order to bring prosperity to the village, but that no arrests had yet been made.

News of the Weird has reported on parents too busy to arrange for sitters for their toddlers and who thus brought them along on crimes, most recently in 1998 when an Oregon woman robbed two banks with her three young daughters in the getaway car. In Paducah, Ky., in September 1999, Gloria Schoffner, 55, was arrested for prostitution in the front seat of a man's car; she had temporarily placed her 2-year-old granddaughter in the back seat while she conducted business.

In August, a 20-year-old man was electrocuted when he opened the power box on a lamppost in Newport Beach, Calif., and snipped a wire to attempt to dim the light to afford a better view of the Perseid meteor shower. And in July in New Freeport, Pa., a 19-year-old man, joking with friends about shooting himself in the head, accidentally pulled the trigger and killed himself.

A garbage-bag-wearing convenience-store robber was easily identified later by a clerk because his bag was made of transparent plastic (St. Petersburg, Fla.). A 31-year-old man had his own arm chopped off for the insurance money ($465,000) (Sao Paulo, Brazil). The Nebraska Bar Association rejected Paul Converse's application because it said he is too abusive to be a lawyer. Three teen-agers swiped a small, attractive box from Jo Ann Walker, assuming it to contain valuables when actually she had just walked her dog and had used the box for the droppings (Des Moines, Iowa). A hospital announced that a husband and wife had decided to trade roles and were undergoing sex-change operations (Szekesfehervar, Hungary).

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