News of the Weird

-- The ritzy Barra da Tijuca suburb of Rio de Janeiro is preparing for the October high-society wedding of Pepezinha and Winner, which will be extravagant even though the bride and groom are dogs (shih tzu and cairn terrier). The estate of Pepezinha's owner, Vera Loyola, is just down the road from the notorious Rocinha slum, symbol of Rio's nauseating poverty. Said Loyola (who always serves her pooch on silver platters), "I believe my little Pepezinha is worth every cent."

-- According to the Massachusetts speaker of the House, the legislature's all-night session on April 13, to vote on the state budget, was more a giant "keg party" than serious deliberation, with members drifting into the chamber from various receptions and some falling asleep at their desks. At one point, according to a Boston Herald story, when the presiding officer asked the members, "Are you leaders or followers?" the members chanted "We lead!" which segued into "Toga! Toga!" One result was the giggling joy with which members voted to fund their favorite obscure projects.

In April, in the woods near Tampa, Fla., tourist Gemini Wink went off to photograph alligators, got lost, climbed a tree for safety as night approached, and decided to protect himself against falling out of the tree by duct-taping himself to a branch; rescuers found him several hours later. In March, Massachusetts officials shut down a day-care center in the town of Hudson following reports that a caretaker duct-taped an infant to a wall for amusement. And a February Associated Press report touted Harrisburg, Ill., artist Keith Drone's line of duct-tape clothing, including baseball caps, wallets, pants, belts and a bikini; said Drone, the products are "really cool looking," and, he adds, "If it breaks, just put a piece of duct tape on it."

-- Why We Have the Justice Department Antitrust Division: In January, at an open-air market in Kunming, China, an appliance dealer had a hand chopped off by a competitor who was upset that his rival was underpricing him.

-- Recent CEO Retirement Packages: Douglas Ivester, Coca-Cola, $17.8 million plus $3 million/year, who retired just after laying off 6,000 employees (February), and John B. McCoy, Bank One, $10.3 million plus $3 million/year, who retired after laying off 5,100 employees (March). On the other hand, Sidney H. Kosann, CEO of Shelby Yarn, Shelby, N.C., who reportedly earned a $300,000 salary and lives in a $500,000 home, filed in February for state unemployment compensation just after closing the company and laying off 650 people.

-- According to figures of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, cited by the London Daily Telegraph in March, hundreds of Pakistani women are deliberately burned to death each year by their husbands, either for imagined infidelity or increasingly for economic reasons, in that some Muslim men are finding it harder to maintain a two-wife household during lean times.

-- Eighty-eight orbiting satellites ($5 billion worth) were scheduled to soon be allowed to vaporize by the owners of the Iridium telephone company, which lost hope in April and May to be rescued from bankruptcy. Iridium failed to last even 16 months, due to the rapid and supposedly unanticipated improvements in digital cellular technology that made its bulky and expensive handsets useful only in remote areas. (Among users of Iridium telephones were the Chechen rebels at war with the Russian army.)

-- Brazilian legislator Wilson Lima told reporters in April that he still thought his proposal to require clubs and bars to have three restrooms (male, female and gays/transvestites, for their own protection from homophobic men) was a good idea, even though Brazil's largest gay-rights organization said it was horrified of such a prospect.

-- A police ethics committee in Montreal reprimanded Officer Robert Royal in March after he forced a traffic-stop motorist to follow him on a high-speed chase of another car. Royal had stopped Pierre Boileau for an illegal U-turn when another officer summoned Royal to help him chase another car. Rather than let Boileau go, Royal ordered him to follow the chase, which hit about 70 mph in a 30 mph zone. After Royal caught up to the second car (turns out it was the wrong car), he finished writing Boileau's ticket and sent him on his way.

-- Four years ago, Edward Weslock left his wife and fled New York City for France with the couple's entire $4 million in cash, leaving his wife to support herself with modest jobs and eventually to be evicted from the family apartment. Since then, she has won several court orders against Weslock in the U.S. and his native Canada, but he has avoided the judgments by staying away from both countries. However, when Weslock stealthily returned, briefly, to the United States in April, Ms. Weslock found out and had him arrested. He had come back to have a new hairpiece fitted.

In April, a jury in Tyler, Texas, sentenced, as a habitual criminal (10 convictions, all relatively minor), Kenneth Payne, 29, to 16 years in prison for shoplifting a Snickers bar from a grocery store. (The incarceration cost in Texas is reportedly $13,000 per year per inmate.) And at a high school sex-education rally in Chicago in April, abstinence advocate Pat Socia told the assembled teen-agers that if they feel a sexual urge coming on, "Just eat a Snickers bar. You'll be fine!"

More Sex Crimes You'd Rather Not Know About: James Donald Ray, 39, convicted of molesting sheep (San Diego, May); Daniel Bruce House, 54, arrested for molesting a horse (Malibu, Calif., February); Jason Carl McRoberts, 19, arrested for molesting a lamb (Stewartstown, Pa., April); Roger Powell, 59, arrested for molesting a pig (Enfield, N.C., May), which he explained by pointing out that sex with his human girlfriend is undesirable because she is a "crack whore."

St. Pancras Coroner's Court in London, England, ruled in April that the 38-year-old man who plunged 10 stories to his death in Islington last August had lost his balance while on his balcony searching for a signal on his cell phone. And a 30-year-old marathon runner, who hoped to qualify for the Olympics, was killed in Las Vegas in February when he was hit by a van as he ran to catch a bus.

A 68-year-old man got too much toe while attempting to shoot a corn off his foot (Proberta, Calif.). Immigration and Naturalization Service said drug-sniffing dog purchases would be limited to two European breeds, which officials said were relentless compared to easily exhausted American breeds, such as Labradors. Police arrested a 28-year-old man who had set out to rescue a 7-year-old girl in a lake, but who, when currents increased, snatched her life preserver, saving himself but allowing her to drown (Southaven, Miss.). At a national breast-feeding technique pageant, 270 women competed for a prize of about $2,400 (Bangkok, Thailand). An art gallery visitor sat in and broke a chair, which he did not realize was part of an exhibit dating to the Ming Dynasty and which is valued at around $100,000 (but it was repairable) (Minneapolis).

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

-- In April, doctors at Washington, D.C.'s St. Elizabeths Hospital said Tomar Cooper Locker, 25, was no longer mentally ill and should be unconditionally released. Just two months earlier, Locker had been found not guilty by reason of insanity (post-traumatic stress) in the murder of boxer Reuben Bell, whom Locker had fatally shot because he thought Bell had killed Locker's girlfriend. Though Locker thus escaped penalty for murder and the wounding of five bystanders, he was sentenced to 20 to 60 months for gun-possession (but since he was jailed pre-trial for 26 months, a judge at press time was considering whether to release Locker immediately).

-- The hottest-selling item this spring for turkey hunters has been Delta Industries' male decoy that fits on top of its traditional hen decoy to give gobblers the illusion that a stranger is having his way with one of the gobbler's harem. According to a hunters' store manager in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (reported in the Cedar Rapids Gazette), the appeal to territorial jealousy is especially effective with older gobblers too wise to fall for hunters' simple mating-call lures.

Among this year's political candidates: For governor of West Virginia: Joseph Oliverio, who admitted in February that he's had 60 speeding tickets and been arrested 150 times. For Anderson County, Tenn., property assessor: Bobby E. Jones, who served time for 37 counts of making false statements to the federal government. For a seat in the Missouri General Assembly: Richard Tolbert, who recently filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy for the seventh time in three years. For Scottsdale, Ariz., City Council: Gary Tredway, on the lam for 30 years after a conviction for throwing a firecracker at firefighters during a student antiwar demonstration.

-- Dutch researchers, writing in a December issue of British Medical Journal, reported their findings on observing couples engaged in sexual intercourse while inside MRI machines (modified so the couple would fit inside), for example, that during missionary-position sex, the penis is not straight but actually takes the shape of a boomerang.

-- Recent Language/Brain Scramblings: Wendy Hasnip, 47, told BBC Television in December that a minor stroke had given her the rare Foreign Accent Syndrome (in her case, a French accent, though she knows no words in French). Also in December, the Moscow (Russia) Times featured Willi Melnikov, 37, brain-injured by a landmine in the Soviet-Afghanistan war, who emerged from the hospital with an activated (previously dormant) facility for languages and has since become fluent in dozens and conversant in 93.

-- Researchers from Boston University and Cornell, writing in a December journal article, said they have identified the behavior that the male bat uses to elicit mates for procreation (the equivalent, said a Science News writer, of a man's slapping on aftershave). At about the same time every afternoon for a half-hour, male bats transfer urine to sacs in their wings by alternately licking the penis and the sac. Later, the bat hovers in front of females and flutters his wings to spread what one researcher called the "very sweet and spicy" scent.

-- China's Xinhua News Agency reported in March that the 13-pound cyst removed from a 28-year-old farmer in the northern province of Shaanxi actually contained the ossified fetus of his identical twin brother. Physicians at Hanzhong Medical School and Xi'an University of Medical Science said the fetus had grown for a while after the farmer's birth, then stopped, with the result that it had hair, skin, and teeth similar to an adult's but other features that resembled a fetus'.

-- In March, Christie's Auction House of New York City unloaded all of the 60 paintings created by artists that happen also to be elephants, including Sao (a former log-hauler in Thailand's timber industry), whose work was likened by Yale art historian Mia Fineman to work of Paul Gauguin for its "broad, gentle, curvy brush strokes" and "a depth and maturity." Fineman said she is writing a book on the three distinct regional styles of Thai elephant art.

-- Garbage artist Tom Deininger's one-person show opened at the Newport (R.I.) Art Museum in January, consisting of his sculptures made of discarded trash, including packaging, toys, clothes and computer parts. Deininger says fans feed him tips on particularly cool Dumpsters to raid and told the Providence Journal that he was working on a self-portrait made of cardboard boxes, with cheeks made of wads of Pokemon wrappers, teeth of Styrofoam, and a toy soldier forming a nostril.

-- According to an April San Francisco Chronicle feature, a painting by local artist Catherine Anderson had been accepted for hanging, then rejected, by the fancy Lodge at Sonoma resort set to open later this year. Anderson specializes in paintings of cows, but the Lodge declined her first piece because the cows in the field included too many posteriors, and also declined a substitute because one cow was in what a Lodge representative allegedly said was a "provocative position."

Madera, Calif., magazine publisher Kathy Masera, to a journalist investigating reports in May that Masera's office building's ventilation system was hosting several types of noxious molds, striking 26 of her 30 employees ill: "There isn't anything more frightening than sitting in a meeting and three people suddenly have blood running from their noses."

A year ago, News of the Weird reported on Reading (England) University professor Kevin Warwick's forearm implant of a transponder to allow his whereabouts to be monitored remotely. Warwick's next implant, according to an April 2000 Cox News Service report, will give him the same "sonar" system that bats and porpoises use for navigation by sending signals from the air to a microchip, which will be "tapped into" a nerve bundle that runs from Warwick's arm to his brain. Warwick believes he can train himself to detect what's in front of him even if his eyes are closed.

Edward Hall, 50, was arrested in March and charged with thefts of trailers from a Home Depot in Albuquerque. According to police, Hall took a trailer from the store's lot early in the morning, hitched it to his truck, and drove it a few miles until it came loose and crashed. He returned to the store, hitched up another, and drove it on the same route, but it, too, came loose and crashed at the site of the first crash. He returned, hitched up a third trailer, and drove it on the same route. A police officer had stopped at the previous crash site to investigate, and as Hall drove by, he accidentally bumped the squad car, provoking the officer to chase Hall down, after which he discovered the thefts.

A lawsuit by a brother and sister, both schoolteachers, to defy the government and keep their mother's corpse permanently at home, in a glass-topped freezer, was rejected (Bordeaux, France). A 52-year-old nightclub stripper filed an employment discrimination complaint over her recent firing (Brantford, Ontario). Japanese toymaker Bandai Corp., to help grow the market for its products, announced it would pay employees to have children, at $10,000 per child after their second. A theater-goer filed a lawsuit against the comic actor Dame Edna after one of the gladioli she throws to the audience at the end of her show poked him in the eye (Melbourne, Australia). A NATO elite training force of 116 Italian infantrymen landed at Kristianstad, Sweden (not a NATO country), instead of the assigned Kristiansand, Norway.

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

-- 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/.)