News of the Weird

-- A two-day, hands-on euthanasia technology conference was held in Seattle in November, in which various techniques and products were presented, with the most promising invention the "debreather" submitted by a Vancouver, British Columbia, man. The device's mask and hose run to a jar containing a substance the man would not identify but which he said made death from lack of oxygen "quick and painless" because it filters out carbon dioxide, thus supposedly preventing the body's natural panic reflex.

In October, Cape Town, South Africa's tourist manager Sheryl Ozinsky said her office was planning to issue a recommended list of top-echelon brothels (even though prostitution is illegal) to help reduce crime and HIV. And in August, Robin Pike of Cape Town said national tourism officials had approved his marketing plans to draw European swingers to South Africa to sample its spouse-swappers. And in July, rancher Johan Maree said he planned to stock his wild-game farm near Ellisras, South Africa, with prostitutes and charge visitors about $45 a head to try to shoot them with paintball guns.

-- Reuters news agency, citing a Hanoi newspaper (Science and Life), reported in October that Ms. Nguyen Thi Tu of southern Ca Mau has not slept, even under doctors' care, since 1967. She tires normally and rests, but cannot sleep. (In a 1986 Reuters dispatch from San Antonio de los Banos, Cuba, with quotes from several of that country's leading neurologists and hospital officials, a man was reported not to have engaged in what is medically regarded as a sleep state in 40 years, though he did rest and close his eyes, especially when administered narcotics.)

-- In October, police in the state of Bihar, India, accused a man of the ritual sacrifice of his two daughters, aged 18 and 13, during the Hindu festival of Dassera. In June, a London Telegraph report from Faridabad, India, cited 1998 police reports of the sacrifices of nine children under age 10 to the bloodthirsty Hindu goddess Kali, mostly by so-called Tantric priests (some of whom are simply con artists) in slums and poor villages in eastern India, who prescribe the child offerings to cure a variety of their parents' misfortunes. And three Satanists were charged in September in Istanbul, Turkey, with killing a 21-year-old woman in a sacrifice to the devil to stop the country's recent earthquakes.

-- According to a September eyewitness report in the Sunday Oklahoman newspaper, cowboy Pat Ratliff, age 78, won $1,700 from three marks in Ardmore, Okla., by tearing a quarter in half. To erase skepticism, Ratliff also took two quarters from the reporter and tore those in half, each in less than 30 seconds. Among his previous work, Ratliff tutored actor Robert Duvall in toughness as Duvall prepared for his role in "Lonesome Dove."

-- After an unsuccessful appeal to the Nebraska legislature, South Dakota's Oglala Sioux Tribal Court said in August it would have to find other ways to stop beer sales in the nearby border town of Whiteclay, Neb. (population 22). Stores in Whiteclay, far away from any populated area except the Oglala reservation, sell 4 million cans of beer a year (an average of 1,800 six-packs a day).

-- Town officials in Oakville, Ontario, banned Tamara Sanowar-Makhan's "Ultra-Maxi Priest" sculpture from its September Visual Raaga exhibit. The piece is a life-size Catholic vestment composed of more than 200 feminine maxi-pads, to symbolize, said Sanowar-Makhan, "the oppressive control by organized religion over the freedom of girls (and) women."

-- City officials in Recife, Brazil, voted in August to reject Francisco Brennand's proposed 100-foot-high, glowing sculpture intended as a beacon to outer space. Officials and many townspeople said the sculpture too closely resembled a phallus. When they attempted to get Brennand to modify the statue to more resemble a lighthouse, Brennand quit in disgust and smashed another structure on his way out the door.

-- In July, while Windsor, Ontario, school breakfast-program staff members looked on in anger, artist Les Levine and volunteers emptied more than 250 boxes of corn flakes in a waterfront park to commemorate a piece he had done in 1969 (to considerably more success) to support the then-fledgling ecology movement. Seagulls devoured the flakes in less than a minute, provoking a chagrined school official to note that he could have fed everyone at his school for a year with that cereal.

A Taiwan distributing company began an advertising campaign recently for German-made space heaters, using a smiling Adolf Hitler character to "Declare War on the Cold Front"; a company representative said it was important to show the product as being German-made and that he didn't think Taiwanese were very sensitive about Hitler (but the ads were pulled in November). And the Vatican announced in December that it was appalled at the Beretta company's ad campaign for a new series of $7,000 "Jubilee"-model guns, which is also the name of the Roman Catholic millennium celebration; the ads' tagline is "The pope would like them."

Man Vs. Train: In October in Burlingame, Calif., an 18-year-old woman became the latest fatality among people who walk along railroad tracks while listening to music on headphones and don't hear a train coming. And three days later in Kanagawa, Japan, a 61-year-old man was hospitalized in serious condition, the latest injury to someone standing on a passenger platform and leaning over the track (in this case, apparently to spit) just as a train was rumbling by.

People Who Haven't Quite Figured Everything Out: Alexander Nemeth was arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, in September and charged with attempting to extort $14 million from the Nestle food company by poisoning its products on supermarket shelves; the ransom money was to be placed in pouches around the necks of his homing pigeons, but police merely put radio transmitters into the pouches before sending the pigeons on their way. And Donald Mallison, 20, and Robert Mims, 18, were arrested in Irving, Texas, in November and charged with robbing a Blockbuster Video; they were caught outside their getaway car, having accidentally locked the keys inside.

Robbers in Manila stole the entire $50,000 life savings of a recent government retiree who had withdrawn the money from a bank out of fear of Y2K computer problems. The Russian parliament passed a bill making it specifically illegal for people to eat their pets. An Austin, Texas, record label issued "The Charmer," an album of calypso songs recorded by Louis Farrakhan before he became the leader of the Nation of Islam. A half-ton, $60,000, all-chocolate, full-size replica of a Grand Prix racing car, being transported by truck to a London exhibit, arrived smashed to pieces. Ernest Bernard "Rabbit" Eady was convicted of murder in Knoxville, Tenn., based on the testimony of James L. "Chicken" Cannon.

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

-- Officials in Suwon, South Korea, showing off their 580 plush public restrooms to reporters in November, hinted that the toilets were one sure way toward greater world respect. "In this era of globalization," said a government cultural official, "it is important to become the leader in the world in the cleanest bathrooms." Toilet seats are heated, violin music plays, and tasteful paintings and flower arrangements adorn the rooms. There are weekly guided tours, and according to the official, some people arrange to meet inside to have tea.

Cuckold Jimmy Watkins, 34, got only four months in jail for killing his wife, whom he caught in the act with her lover; the jury accepted his defense of "sudden passion" even though he fired one shot, then went out for a few minutes before returning to finish her off (Fort Worth, Texas, October). Michael Nikkanen got only probation for rape, in part so he could keep attending his son's hockey games (Ontario Court of Appeal, October). Karine Gaelle Epailly, 25, got a suspended sentence in the death of her infant daughter, whom she abandoned outside in near-freezing rain (Alexandria, Va., October).

-- In July, Athens, Greece, dentist Theodoros Vassiliadis was sentenced to four years in prison based on the testimony of seven former patients. Though Vassiliadis termed his techniques "pioneering," the patients described odd-looking dental plates that were inserted with screws that were more than an inch long (allegedly taken from Vassiliadis' television set) and that pierced their sinus cavities.

-- After a $20 million school cutback in Ontario earlier in the year that limited funding for special education, three parents of disabled children wrote Premier Mike Harris offering to donate their kidneys to raise enough money to restore the budget.

-- Bill Webb won the annual Rio Vista (Calif.) Bass Derby in October, and his 33-pound catch was so convincing that derby sponsors declined to call private investigator Charley Johnson, who was on standby to administer lie detector tests in suspicious cases. (Increasingly, fishing contest organizers use at least the threat of the polygraph.)

-- In September, Sheriff Charlie Logan (Pickett County, Tenn.) resigned, telling the public that he needed to fight the charges that he had been having sex with a 15-year-old girl. However, according to some observers, that was a distraction for another charge: The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was inquiring into whether Logan cheated on his GED (high school equivalency test). (Tennessee sheriffs must be high school graduates.)

-- The Loneliest Number: Randy Phillips graduated from Riverside Christian School in Andalusia, Iowa, in May, the only member of his class. (For his senior trip, he invited two juniors along.) And an Associated Press report in August on Granby, Vt. (population 90), noted that the town had only one reported crime the previous year: Someone wrote a farmer a $300 check for six piglets, but it bounced, and no one can find the man. (The same farmer said that earlier in 1999, a woman paid cash for more piglets but shorted him, and that that might be the only crime this year, but it won't be counted because he didn't report it.)

-- Celebrity mother Jacqueline Stallone, previously known as a mere astrologer, recently began specializing in "rumpology," the study of a person's character and future, based on the contour of his or her butt. Stallone does not conduct hands-on examinations, but rather gets subjects to sit on sheets of inked paper and make impressions ("maps"). The left cheek supposedly indicates natural talents and personality; the right cheek shows reality vs. potential.

-- Medium Suzane Northrop announced that she will lead a week-long, contact-the-dead cruise out of Miami in March, "NowAge 2000," with guests getting free channeling, plus seminars and workshops on psychic powers. Asked about whether the channeling guests will bother the recreational cruisers on board, organizer Cindy Clifford said: "Tough luck. There are people who go on cruises and wind up with the entire Iowa state bowling league."

Bruce Edward Hall, 48 and blind, was arrested in December and charged with robbing a First Tennessee Bank in Memphis. Hall had pretended to be a customer and was escorted to a teller's window by a guard as a courtesy before presenting the teller with the holdup note. And Leon Grigsby Martin, 33, blind and carrying a white cane, was arrested in Muskegon, Mich., in September and charged with robbing two stores of a total of $340. (He got only $20 from one clerk, who might have tricked Martin into believing he was giving him higher-denomination bills.)

In News of the Weird earlier this year was the report on Virginian Anthony M. Rizzo Jr., who had been granted permanent disability retirement (unable to do his job as school principal) for his "psychosexual disorder," which was that it was impossible for him to supervise females without trying to force sex on them. In October 1999, Paducah, Ky., gynecologist Harold D. Crall filed a lawsuit against Provident Life & Accident Insurance Co., demanding $8,700 a month disability for what he calls a sexual addiction; because of complaints from women, the state licensing board had revoked Crall's ability to practice ob-gyn.

In Edwardsville, Ill., in October, a 48-year-old woman was accidentally shot to death by her husband as the couple posed in an Old West-style wedding photo with him holding a rifle. And in Willingboro, N.J., in November, as two partners in a record store were rehearsing what they would do if they ever got robbed, the partner acting as the clerk accidentally shot to death the partner acting as the robber.

Shopper Bryan Cote parked his $2,000 bicycle in the wrong spot at the Salvation Army store in Concord, N.H., and a clerk sold it for $15. A group of Albanians demanded that the U.N. Mission in Kosovo put its mascot stray dog, Unmik, to sleep because he is "Serbian." A fastidious fingerprint-wiping burglar was caught in Pittsburgh when he slipped up and left a print on the foil wrapper of a stick of gum. The founder of Cliffs Notes, the aid for the reading-averse, funded an endowed chair in English at the University of Nebraska. A Barbados pet-shop owner was arrested by Customs in Miami trying to smuggle in 55 tortoises (value $75 each) in his pants.

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

-- A November feature in Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper recounted the exhibits in Philadelphia's Mutter Museum of medical oddities, including the preserved corpse of a woman with a condition that turned her fatty tissue, upon her death, into a soap-like mass that halted decomposition; the "Muniz collection" of circular-sawed Peruvian human skulls; the extensive, 70-year-old Chevalier Jackson Collection of Objects Swallowed and Inhaled; and the huge colon (described as "about the size of a large basset hound") that caused fatal constipation.

Parishioners at Saint Andrew's Church in south London, England, overpowered a naked, sword-wielding man after he had attacked nine people during a children's service (November). Two former Rutgers male basketball players filed a lawsuit against the school and its coach for making them run laps naked during a practice two years ago (November). A naked University of California at Santa Cruz student was hit by a car, commandeered it, drove off, and promptly crashed into a tree (October). A judge released often-nude gardener Robert Norton, 76, of Pekin, Ill., after his 19th arrest, but said he will go to jail if he is seen naked again (August). ("I can't (promise) anything," Norton said.)

-- Douglas Alan Feldman, 41, was sentenced to death in Dallas in August for two road-rage murders, based in part on letters he had sent to a former girlfriend after his arrest. Wrote Feldman: "I found it quite pleasurable to kill those two men. If you are an angry person and someone provokes you to violence, (it) feels wonderful to cause their death and to watch their pain."

-- When Lawrence Russell Brewer Jr., the second defendant to go to trial in the 1998 Jasper, Texas, racial dragging death, showed up in a Bryan, Texas, courtroom in September 1999, the arresting sheriff had trouble recognizing him because Brewer was so much heavier (having gone from a 30-inch waist to a 40). Brewer's explanation was that he so feared that a Y2K computer crash would wipe out his prison commissary account that he had decided to spend down all his money right away on junk food.

-- In August, an 87-year-old woman, pursued for 30 miles along southern California's Pacific Coast Highway by siren-blaring sheriff's deputies who wanted to stop her for a traffic violation, said when she finally pulled over that she had kept driving because the deputies never did what cops do in the movies: overtake her and force her over. And one month later a jury in Frederick, Md., acquitted motorist Ester Maria Pena, 59, who said she failed to stop for a pursuing officer's siren-wailing car because he didn't do what cops do "in the movies": overtake her and block the road.

-- In August, The Sunday Oklahoman newspaper revealed that the charity Feed the Children, through poignant TV appeals, took in an extra $6 million in the 45 days after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing but gave only half of that to bombing victims, putting most of the rest into its investments because, according to president Larry Jones, there was no proof that the donors intended the money for bombing victims. The newspaper also reported that "almost none" of the $47 million raised last year by Feed the Children actually went toward feeding children.

-- In August, a Portland, Ore., jury acquitted drunk-driving defendant Robert Lee Buskirk after a judge accepted his argument that incriminating statements he made at the scene not be used against him because he was so drunk he didn't know what he was doing when he waived his "Miranda" right.

-- In 1994, psychologist Kenneth Olson of Phoenix, already on probation with the state's licensing board for a 1988 exorcism, filed a lawsuit against the board, asserting that he had a constitutional right to perform a 1993 exorcism on an 8-year-old foster child (and to be paid $180 for it by the state's Child Protective Services). (In July 1999, a federal appeals court ruled against him.)

-- Milwaukee's Thomas Rollo, 53, chopped off his arm at the elbow with a homemade guillotine in October, but authorities found the arm in his refrigerator and made plans for reattachment surgery. However, Rollo refused the surgery, threatened to sue, and promised to chop the arm right back off if it were reattached. However, a week earlier, a judge in Norwalk, Conn., acting on an emergency request from Norwalk Hospital, ordered a 42-year-old man who had severed his penis to submit to reattachment surgery.

Canadian military officials told reporters in September that 23 of their 32 Hercules transport aircraft require expensive structural repairs to replace a main aluminum beam; the beams were corroded by urea acid from urinators who splash (or miss the mark altogether) in the planes' crude cargo hold toilets. And later that month, an official of the upscale University of Toronto Athletic Centre health club told the National Post newspaper that the reason its automatic-flush toilets weren't working is that men were too fast on the draw; because the members were often naked when using the urinals and thus did not take time to unzip and zip, some spent less than the minimum nine seconds needed to reset the flushing trigger.

In September, authorities in Lincoln, Ill., said the "Sock Man" (reported in News of the Weird earlier this year) from nearby Springfield had finally slipped up and committed a crime when he tried to abduct three kids. In Springfield, he had offered female strangers $100 for their socks, and in nearby Auburn in August, he allegedly offered young girls $5 to chew some gum and give it to him. Springfield and Auburn police said neither of those incidents was illegal (or, as a Springfield officer said, "It's no crime to be weird").

One month before the Texas A&M bonfire tragedy, a 17-year-old University of Oklahoma football fan in Kingfisher, Okla., accidentally shot himself to death while celebrating the team's victory over Texas A&M. And in September, a 21-year-old Bryant College (Smithfield, R.I.) student, trying to slide down a banister in a residence hall, was killed when he fell three stories onto his head.

A man and his son, ages 54 and 17, were arrested in Columbus, Miss., for burglarizing a home, both dressed in ninja costumes, armed with swords and star-shaped throwing blades. An armed-robbery suspect, hiding from police in a tree at 4 a.m., was arrested when his wristwatch alarm sounded (Reno, Nev.). Officials at a landmine museum adjacent to two schools finally acceded to demands to defuse its 463 live mines (Zendajan, Afghanistan). A 37-year-old woman was cited for driving on a major freeway while reading a book (Ottawa, Ontario). An ultra-Orthodox religious court in Jerusalem banned women from using cell phones in public, ruling that it makes them look like prostitutes.

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