News of the Weird

-- Dutch researchers writing in an April British Medical Journal advocated that Viagra be dispensed for free in the Netherlands because, even though costly, Viagra enhances the quality of its users' lives even more, for example, than kidney transplants. In fact, according to the researchers' Quality-Adjusted Life Year measure, a dollar spent on Viagra brings twice as much benefit as a dollar spent on breast cancer screening.

(1) A live, 14-foot-long python (prayed to by residents of Kien Svay, Cambodia, according to a January Deutsche Presse-Agentur story); (2) jazz saxophonist John Coltrane (for 29 years the idol of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco, according to a February report in The Independent of London); and (3) dirt, either plain (worshipped by parishioners in Chimayo, N.M., according to a December USA Today report) or perfumed (the result of a New Delhi, India, company's cosmetic dumping, which has attracted huge crowds of pilgrims, according to a December Associated Press story).

-- In January, Boston police officials investigating corruption in taxi-driver licensing, released the test paper of applicant Pierre Edouard, who was granted a passing grade and a license even though he answered only seven of 60 questions correctly and in fact left 45 questions blank.

-- In February, Canada's Reform Party denounced $60 million (all figures U.S.) worth of art grants given by Canada Council, including $3,000 for a piece on the history and culture of chewing gum; $4,000 for a video on the rubber stamp "as a low-tech marking device"; and $900 to an aboriginal poet to write a pamphlet on one of his race's anatomical traits, entitled "Where Did My Ass Go?"

-- In December, three lawyers working cases as court-appointed counsel for indigent defendants in the District of Columbia Superior Court filed a federal lawsuit against the court for constantly missing deadlines for paying them, sometimes even by months. By federal court rules, the Superior Court was obligated to answer the lawsuit within 20 days but, true to form, according to the lawyers, the Superior Court missed that deadline, also, and the lawyers were declared winners by default.

-- In March, a judge in Dedham, Mass., sentenced Thomas Flanagan, 47, to nine years in prison for the longtime physical abuse of his wife and three kids. Included were three counts of attempted murder and 39 counts of assault and battery, but the kids also told investigators that Flanagan made them endure the daily ritual of "plucking," in which he lined them up and yanked out their nose hair with tweezers.

-- In January, suspected serial killer Hadden Clark, 47, led police officers from several New England states to sites around the region in search of bodies of his alleged victims. Massachusetts State Police obtained Clark's cooperation by acceding to his one request, which was that they go buy him some women's panties to wear during the trip.

-- Jason Samuel Lee, 30, was charged in March with improperly disposing of his wife's corpse. Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canmore, Alberta, said Eda Lee, 26, starved to death while fasting with her husband on a remote mountain. Jason, according to the RCMP, is a prophet who believes that food is an "instrument of Satan" and was trying to form a cult but was having difficulty attracting followers.

-- In Milton, N.Y., in March, Thomas Prussen, 42, was charged with endangering the life of a 38-year-old woman he had met through a magazine ad. According to police, the woman was infatuated with a certain Civil War soldier, wanted to "join" him, and so much trusted Prussen (because he, too, claimed to have communed with the soldier) that she asked him to kill her. Admitted a police investigator, of the possibility that Prussen was simply in love with the woman, "It's tough to say what their mindset was."

Minivan passenger Rick Hanson, 27, mooning motorists, was thrown from the vehicle when the driver crashed (giving Hanson a posterior "road rash" and a broken pelvis) (Prunedale, Calif., April). Chris Bailey, 19, was jailed briefly after mooning a police officer, and within an hour of his release had mooned several more and was back in jail (Belleville, Ill., March). Robert White, 49, angry that his trial for disorderly conduct was not going well, mooned the judge, running his total jail time to 40 days (Little Rock, Ark., March).

In 1994, News of the Weird reported the trend of judges ignoring DNA results when they are used to disprove fatherhood among men who have mistakenly accepted legal paternity. Courts put the interests of the child first and thus order support payments to continue unless the actual father steps up. In April 2000, Dennis Caron, 43, went to jail for 30 days in Columbus, Ohio, protesting a court order to continue supporting his 10-year-old "son" despite exonerating DNA evidence, and the same month in St. Louis, Bill Neal lost his lawsuit to extricate himself via DNA evidence from supporting a boy that his girlfriend had convinced him in 1989 was his.

An 11,000-volt cable broke during a Hindu ceremony in Daltenganj, India, in April, electrocuting 28 followers. And police in Baghdad, Iraq, arrested four vigilantes in January and charged them with killing at least 19 men recently who religiously incorrectly were alone with their girlfriends in a downtown lovers' lane. And following deadly meningitis outbreaks in four countries introduced by worshippers returning from the Haj pilgrimage in Mecca in Saudi Arabia, French officials announced in April that traces of cholera were found in 10 barrels of holy water brought back to the Alsace region by the Moslem pilgrims.

An eighth-grade teacher apologized for assigning his kids the math problem of calculating how much gas Nazis needed to fill a gas chamber (Boise, Idaho). A save-the-whales activist had to call off a trans-Pacific protest sail after his 60-foot boat was damaged by two passing whales (San Francisco). National Archives researchers seeking to reclassify 50-year-old nuclear-weapons documents discovered actual uranium dust in some files (College Park, Md.). A 16-year-old boy under house arrest allegedly broke into a neighbor's place and beat two girls, one fatally, but authorities did not know about it because the neighbor's house was inside the 150-foot range of his ankle monitor (Anderson, Ind.). An Army supply clerk mistakenly got an order to parachute jump and obediently reported and bailed out, anyway, without training (Fort Bragg, N.C.).

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

-- Ignatius Piazza, 40, has completed $3 million worth of infrastructure toward his planned gated community 50 miles from Las Vegas in which every resident will be trained in firearms use, creating what he calls "the safest town in America." According to an April USA Today story, the town of Front Sight will have (by fall 2002) 12 shooting ranges, a private school and a convenience store to service buyers of its 177 lots, which cost $275,000 each (but come with various perquisites, including an Uzi).

Short schoolboys are twice as likely as tall schoolboys to get bullied (British Medical Journal, March); female inmates in solitary confinement are lonely (University of Alberta researcher, January); many women who work outside the home feel stressed (AFL-CIO poll, March); and drivers need to keep their minds (and not just their eyes) on the road (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, March).

-- In 1993 Patrick McDougall was convicted of sexually abusing several boys at a reformatory in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in the 1960s and 1970s, and after the trial, according to a January New York Times story, another 89 former residents claimed McDougall abused them, too, leading Nova Scotia to set aside about $17 million (U.S.) in compensation for victims. Publicity from that announcement and from McDougall's death last year has now produced 1,400 "victims" making about 14,500 abuse claims against nearly all of the 363 former employees, so that the claimants can avail themselves of payment scales ranging from about $2,400 for a beating to about $59,000 for sexual assault. The government is now rethinking the payment plan.

-- The lawsuit by the family of the late cold-blooded bank robber Emil Matasareanu is set for a September retrial after a hung jury in March on whether the city of North Hollywood, Calif., should pay because police officers might not have taken the mortally wounded Matasareanu to the hospital soon enough. The body-armor-wearing gunman and his partner provoked a televised, 44-minute, daytime firefight with police in 1997 in the bank's parking lot, firing more than 1,200 rounds from their automatic weapons, wounding 17; Matasareanu was hit 29 times and bled to death.

-- People Who Are Just So Upset: Ms. Cleanthi Peters, 57, filed a $15,000-plus lawsuit in Orlando, Fla., against Universal Studios for last year's Halloween Horror Nights exhibit; she said she expected it to be frightening but that it was too frightening. And Charles Settles filed a $2,000 lawsuit in Brunswick, Ohio, in January against his son's high school baseball coach, arguing that, because the team was so bad (winless on the season), it lost out on an all-expense-paid trip to a Florida tournament.

-- A 19-year-old woman, who was conceived by rape, filed a lawsuit in December seeking damages from school officials in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, claiming that since her biological father was a teacher there (and a notorious pedophile who is now in prison), school officials should have done more to prevent him from raping her mother, who was then a student. The woman complains that, since everyone in the community knew of the rape, she has so far led a very lonely and harassed life.

-- National Labor Relations Board lawyers argued at a March hearing that Tenneco Packaging plant (now named Pactiv), in order to disrupt union organizing in July 1999 at a plant in Beech Island, S.C., had activist-employee Gary McClain arrested and, with the help of friendly local law-enforcement, committed to a mental institution for two weeks under the pretense that it feared workplace violence. Tenneco officials said it was just a coincidence that the Aiken County sheriff chased McClain down on the road and arrested him the day after a big organizing meeting.

-- The Swedish Hotel Workers Federation protested in March that maids are at risk on the job because hotels feature hard-core pornography on television, leading some male guests to become "overexcited." Already, maids complain of having to clean off "sticky" television screens, and now demand to be furnished signal alarms in case they are attacked.

-- Ontario's Social Services Ministry, seeking to find savings in worker efficiency, announced in March that some employees would be fitted with electronic monitoring devices that would track their whereabouts nearly every minute of the workday for 16 weeks. A union official called the plan a gross invasion of privacy, especially since the obvious result of the project will be layoffs.

Canada's notorious Karla Homolka, 29, who was convicted in 1993 of helping her husband rape, torture, video and kill three teen-age girls including her own sister, wrote (in a note to her warden in November on why she should be sent to a halfway house and then paroled): "I (have) learned (in prison) to get rid of my mistrust, self-doubt, misplaced guilt and defense mechanisms. I am now completely in touch with my inner feelings. My self-esteem is quite high."

One of the widely reported stories of 1993 was the Vinton, La., crash of a car containing 20 naked Pentecostals from Floydada, Texas, who had received word from God that they should discard all their worldly possessions to make it more difficult for Satan to catch up to them. In April 2000, in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, a state trooper stopped a car containing three women and a 3-year-old girl, all of whom were naked and who told the officer that God had told them to burn their clothes, drive to Wal-Mart, and buy new clothes. Said the trooper, "It's always something. No two days are the same in this job."

More Easy Identifications: Johnny Lee Miller, 32, was arrested for bank robbery in January in West Valley City, Utah; he had left behind a large envelope (in which he had concealed his gun) that contained a personalized certificate from a prison-sponsored course in anger-management, which he had completed during his last lockup. And a four-year credit-card-theft spree ended in March with the arrest of Elnetta Denise Brown, 28, in Tampa, Fla.; she had finally lost her anonymity by sitting for a Christmas portrait and paying with a stolen card.

A sheriff's SWAT team surrounded a house for seven hours because the sound of a blown tire nearby made a police officer believe he had been fired on from inside (Madera, Calif.). Three teen-age fast-food workers were charged in an eight-month-long binge of spiking food with urine, spit, Easy-Off oven cleaner and Comet (Scottsville, N.Y.). Brain-injury victims suffering from aphasia were found by researchers to have an uncanny ability to detect liars. A woman pled guilty to robbing a Bank of America to get money to make overdue payments on her mortgage, held by Bank of America (Richmond, Va.). British breeders announced they have produced six Labrador retriever-Chihuahuas to better serve hearing-impaired clients unable to manage larger dogs.

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

-- Fox Network's Far-Ranging Influence: On April 27, a reporter for Russia's RTR television arrived in the town of Ivanovo to shoot a piece on a housewife merrily feeding her family while her soldier-husband was away serving as a peacekeeper in Kosovo. However, the reporter had received word minutes before that the husband had just been killed on duty. Thus, the reporter shot some "before" scenes, in which the carefree wife earnestly spoke of her husband's imminent return, and then the "after" scene, featuring uncontrollable crying after the reporter broke the news to her.

In January, the general manager of a Ford-Toyota dealership in Lake City, Fla., told reporters that the acid-splashing vandalism on his lot should be punished as a hate crime because only Fords were hit. And in Berlin, Germany, owners of pit bulls and other aggressive breeds planned a May protest against proposed legislation to ban the dogs; organizers planned to dress their dog-victims with yellow Stars of David, which is what Third-Reich-era Jews were forced to wear as identification.

-- Recent Weapons: In a bar fight, one woman hit another on the head with a toilet lid (Rock Island, Ill., January). A 21-year-old man wielding a small python robbed a convenience store (Oklahoma City, December). A man holding a dildo and wearing a jockstrap over his head robbed a Hungry Howie's of $40 (Toledo, Ohio, February). A man robbed an adult sex shop, menacingly waving a vibrating tongue at the clerk (Pinellas Park, Fla., February).

-- Those Compassionate Canadians: The man who cleaned out the cash register at a Tim Hortons doughnut shop in Hamilton, Ontario, in February came back a few minutes later and returned the portion of the money that had been segregated as employees' tips. And in April, recently released sex-assaulter Jody Robinson, 33, offered one of his kidneys to his 1996 victim, who is awaiting a transplant.

-- Great Detective Work: Suspicious police in Spokane, Wash., after questioning Harold Anthony Mazzei, 32, at a January traffic stop, decided to arrest him: The only way Mazzei could turn off his car's engine was using pliers and a screwdriver (and, indeed, the car was stolen). And in February, suspicious police in Chicago decided to arrest Steven Coleman, 24, for robbing a family sewing-machine shop and provoking a fracas while the owner was heating chicken noodle soup for lunch: Coleman was later spotted nearby with noodles in his hair. And in November, suspicious police in Sydney, Nova Scotia, decided to arrest a 38-year-old man on drug charges after encountering him dazed with syringes hanging from both arms.

-- Police in Dublin, Ohio, arrested alleged veteran thief Rudolf Nyari, 64, in April for taking a diamond bracelet from Leo Alfred Jewelers. Nyari had handled the bracelet, then left the store, after which an employee noticed it missing. Police, aided by a license-plate number, stopped Nyari just outside town, searched his car fruitlessly, and threatened to take him for x-rays. Later, according to a detective, Nyari "drank several glasses of water and smoked cigarettes to build up enough phlegm to cough (the bracelet) up." The bracelet was 7 inches long and contained 39 diamonds.

-- A court in Lusaka, Zambia, issued a final divorce decree in March to John Sakapenda and Goretti Muyutu, despite Ms. Muyutu's last-second, unsuccessful attempt to persuade the judges that, by custom of her village of Chingola, the couple was obligated for one last round of sexual intercourse.

-- In December, the longtime North Korean ambassador to China issued another of his periodic rants in Beijing denouncing the 150-mile-long, high (16 to 26 feet tall) and thick (33 to 62 feet wide) concrete "wall of division" that South Korea built 20 years ago that "artificially bisects" Korea. Despite the vividness of the description, according to The New York Times and numerous diplomats from many countries who have visited the area, there is no wall there of any kind and never has been.

-- In Englewood, Fla., in February, minutes after Judy Neuhaus had scolded her son Ryan for not taking better care of his 1995 Mercury Cougar, a sputtering, single-engine Cessna cleared some trees and fell nose-first onto the car, doing considerable damage to both vehicles but not seriously injuring the pilot.

Mob informant Tommy Del Giorno, living a new life under the federal witness security program (quoted in a New York Times story in January): "Legitimate people are worse than mob people. All the time I was in the mob, I never really wanted to kill anybody. Out here in the legitimate world, there's 10 people I've met that I would kill."

In 1997 News of the Weird reported that a female murder suspect had sued Kiowa County, Okla., after an inmate had sex with her, impregnating her, through the bars of their respective cells in the county lockup. In February 2000, Britain's Prison Service launched an inquiry after Donna Stokes, 19, became pregnant after her boyfriend had sex with her through the bars of their temporary cells in the Swansea Crown Court building while both were awaiting a hearing on burglary and theft charges. Said Stokes of the couple's brief encounter: "We hadn't seen each other for months."

-- In April, a 43-year-old recreational snow-machiner was killed in an avalanche in Alaska's Hoodoo Mountains while "highmarking," or driving to hit ever-higher peaks on the slopes; earlier that day, he had been pulled, in shock, from another avalanche after highmarking and advised by rescuers to quit. And a 30-year-old motorcyclist was crushed to death near Phoenix in December after an apparent road-rage incident in which he sped up quickly to overtake a pickup truck, swerved in front of it, and then deliberately slammed on the brakes.

A 39-year-old man was convicted of selling cocaine, with an enhanced penalty because the deal took place near Rosemary Minor Park, which is named for a deceased community activist, who was the man's mother (New Orleans). A handcuffed stolen-car suspect allegedly took $23 from a state trooper's wallet while in custody in the front seat of a cruiser (Frederick, Md.). A 39-year-old driver, scheduled to report to prison in two weeks for his fourth DUI conviction, drove drunk and collided with another car, killing a 5-year-old boy (Stockton, Calif.). Thieves dug up and stole almost an entire backyard garden (trees, ornaments, shrubbery and cement pond) (Bristol, England). A medical journal reported that large-breasted women are more likely to suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome than small-breasted women (Tuscaloosa, Ala.).

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