News of the Weird

-- The U.S. Department of Agriculture is actively proposing that animal carcasses with cancers, tumors or open sores be regarded merely as unaesthetic but safe for human consumption as long as the offending part is cut away. The proposal is part of a general loosening of slaughterhouse inspection standards, whose public comment period ends Aug. 29. One critic already weighed in, saying she did not want to "eat pus from a chicken that has pneumonia," but also included as benign by the proposal are glandular swellings, infectious arthritis and diseases caused by intestinal worms.

-- Devotees of the late, widely discredited psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) convened in upstate Maine in July to exchange papers on his most famous work, his "discovery" of the cosmic life force produced by sexual orgasm. The highlights of the conference were the presentations of more than a dozen variations of Reich's "orgone accumulator," which is a series of partially metal blankets or boxes in which a person wraps himself to attract the excess sexuality out of the body so as to prevent the neuroses caused by the energy that wells up from the lack of orgasm.

David W. Bolton, 45, was charged in July with assault for hitting a fellow boardinghouse resident in Clarkstown, N.Y., after trying at first to drive a sharpened wooden stake through the man's heart with a hammer. (Police said Bolton told them he was acting on "instructions from a higher authority.") Two weeks later, in San Francisco, hitchhiker Eric David Knight was arrested for assaulting a 28-year-old driver who had picked him up; Knight had allegedly bit the driver in the neck and sucked his blood after thanking him for the ride, and had later told police, "I need the cure. I need blood." (San Francisco's 1998 "vampire killer" Joshua Rudiger had an alibi this time: He's in prison, serving 23 years to life.)

-- After a Schneiders Hot Dog promotion machine (the Blaster, intended to shoot free wieners into the stands at Toronto's SkyDome during baseball games) went awry in April, pulverizing the franks and spraying fragments on fans, a vegetarian Blue Jays' fan told the National Post newspaper she would sue if she got spritzed. "What if I had my mouth open and a piece of hot dog landed in my mouth?"

-- Homeless man Dennis Downey, 42, complained to a Chicago Tribune reporter in March that the sprinkler system at a building on Lower Michigan Avenue was drenching him and some colleagues as they had settled in for the night. "They're trying to get rid of the homeless," said Downey. (The building manager said the sprinklers are necessary to clean the feces and urine left by the homeless who camp alongside the building at night.)

-- In March, to bolster his client's defense that a surreptitious police station videotape (which caught Constable Graham Hunt taking something from a room) violated his right of privacy, Ontario lawyer Clayton Ruby pointed out that later in the tape was another officer, caught receiving oral sex in the room from a female police employee. Obviously, reasoned Ruby, police officers who used that particular room had a legitimate "expectation of privacy" (beyond the reach of a surreptitious video) because, otherwise, why would the other two employees have gone in there for oral sex?

-- In May, the Quebec Superior Court and Quebec's Administrative Tribunal ruled that Alain Desbiens had the right to have his tattoo removed at government expense in that the tattoo adversely affects his psychological well-being. The estimated cost of erasing the blue and gray caricature of a death's head above his right bicep was estimated at $2,000 to $3,000.

-- Felicia Vitale, 41, told reporters in February that she would sue the New York Police Department for wrongly arresting her after she walked away from a sting operation at Staten Island Mall carrying a planted purse containing $2. She admitted that the purse did not belong to her but denied she intended to steal it and pointed out that she suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and thus must go through a list of tasks in rigid order every day and that she simply had many other things to do before she got around to returning the purse.

-- According to an April Seattle Times report, the Great Ape Legal Project, headed by a Seattle lawyer, is moving toward a goal of demonstrating, within the next decade, that chimpanzees should have some of the same legal rights as humans (beyond being mere property, according to the Times, "to (becoming) people with rights to life and liberty and perhaps even the pursuit of happiness"). Though it would be possible for a chimp to sue his guardian, a reassuring spokesperson said animals such as cockroaches and ants "will never be eligible for any kind of rights."

Just three months ago, in mentioning dental-office abuses, News of the Weird reported on the Australian dentist hauled before the licensing board for the unauthorized practice of relieving facial pain by administering ozone through the patient's rectum. The practice apparently is known in the United States, as well. Two weeks after that issue of News of the Weird appeared, a jury in Scranton, Pa., convicted Richard Harley and his wife, Jacqueline Kube, for defrauding investors in their company that offered to treat AIDS patients by pumping a mixture of ozone and oxygen into the rectum, at $250 per session, sometimes prescribed for 30 days at a time.

Inman, S.C., police arrested Donald W. Melton, 29, in July and charged him with robbing a CCB Bank. He was easily tracked down on his getaway because he had failed to ask for a bag at the bank to carry the money away in and thus was left to stuff it all into his pants and socks. The result was that enough of the currency came loose during his run that residents along his escape route called police every few minutes to report that another bill had been spotted, and within 40 minutes of the robbery, Melton was in handcuffs.

-- An Iranian judge jailed a man for ogling the judge's wife, but hundreds rioted in support of the man, who they said is merely cross-eyed (Ghir, Iran). Centers for Disease Control found that people who go online to look for sex partners are more likely to have sexually transmitted diseases than those who do not look for sex online. The governor of Arkansas (where 12 percent of the population live in mobile homes) and his wife moved into a triple-wide manufactured home next to the Governor's Mansion, which will be undergoing repairs for the next year. A holdup man saved his own life by forgetting to load his gun before robbing a pawnshop; the clerk wrestled it away from him and pulled the trigger, but the crook escaped (Miami, Fla.).

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

-- William Draheim was fired from his job in St. Louis Park, Minn., in May, for sexual harassment for talking excessively about his pierced penis at work (almost exclusively, he said, in response to questions from co-workers). His workplace was Video Age Inc., whose only line of business is distributing hardcore pornographic videos and sex accessories, large inventories of which fill the offices, which are staffed with telephone operators to take catalog orders from customers, some of whom inevitably talk dirty to the operators. (In fact, each employment applicant is required to certify that he or she understands the nature of the workplace.)

-- According to police and health department authorities in Huntsville, Ala., in July, a father apparently purchased several poisonous snakes for his 13-year-old son to keep around the house as pets, but after the boy was bitten by one, he may have hidden the snakes for fear that they would be confiscated. Included are a black mamba (generally regarded as the world's deadliest) and a gaboon viper (only somewhat less deadly), and at press time, authorities could not rule out that the snakes had simply been released into the countryside, which would significantly lower the quality of life around Huntsville. Said a city health control officer, "It's a macho thing to have venomous snakes. I guess stupid supersedes macho."

A June Wall Street Journal dispatch from Tokyo reported the trend of "serial divorce": Young married women desiring to keep their maiden names on official documents circumvent Japanese law by momentarily divorcing when a government document is needed, and then usually remarrying their husbands immediately afterward. And cosmetics firms' sales of products to reduce or mask the odor of "noneal" are booming, according to a March New York Times report; noneal is a chemical released in greater quantity as people age and in super-hygienic Japan creates the unpopular "old man's smell."

-- In May, Italian female basketball star Fabiana Benedettini, 30, surprised her family and the sports world by abruptly taking vows as a nun and joining the Santa Margherita of Cortona sanctuary. Also recently becoming nuns in Italy: a marchesa, Ginevra Rossi di Montelera; a hotel heiress, Maria Luisa De Angelis (who abandoned her husband and children in the process); an industrial heiress, Idina Ferruzzi; a volleyball all-star, Maria Teresa Ciancio; and, at least joining a convent temporarily, a porn star, Luana Borgia.

-- In June, the Civil Status Court in Alexandria, Egypt, ruled that the Islamic requirement for divorce (after certain preconditions are met, the husband tells the wife three times, "I divorce you") must be spoken in person and not delivered by e-mail. At press time, a similar question was at issue in a divorce case in United Arab Emirates.

-- An April New York Times dispatch from Zhdanovo, Russia (just north of Mongolia), reported on the cultural use of vodka as holy water in that Buryat region, whose predominant religion is shamanism. Mongol devotees sometimes sip vodka during the entire 90-minute services, which brings, according to one shaman, "moral calmness" and the improved ability to "talk to god" (although shamanism includes more than 100 gods).

-- First Things First: Catholic priest Charles Mentrup, 41, was stabbed by a parishioner during confession in May; he survived but refused to identify the man who did it because of his vow of confidentiality. And at Christmastime 1999, a drunken guest disturbed the Cistercian monks of Caldey Island (Wales) by singing Welsh hymns and carols while they were celebrating their 12 hours of "Great Silence," but no one moved to quiet the guest because, after all, the monks could not speak.

-- In March, according to a Dallas police report, pro hockey goaltender Ed Belfour, desperately trying to avoid a public intoxication arrest, offered two patrolmen $100,000 to forget the whole thing, and by the time they were set to haul him to the station, Belfour had vomited all over himself and upped the offer to $1 billion.

-- Thieves With Identity Crises: Three gangs of cross-dressing male thieves were operating in three cities during May. Two of the three gangs cross-dressed as a distraction, in that the four black males working Annapolis, Md., stores were "very unattractive and obviously males," according to a police spokesperson, and the crew of four that hit stores in Calgary, Alberta, had been spotted parked in their car at a mall, donning dresses to resemble elderly women. However, a cast of about a dozen drag queens operating in Fort Lauderdale and Miami stores used their stolen credit cards mostly for female fashions and cosmetics.

According to an official in the regional government of Madrid, Spain, a public-financed guidebook for hikers was erroneously distributed despite the agency's dissatisfaction with some of the contract writer's geographical descriptions. In the book, the mountains of the Cuerda de las Cabrillas range near Madrid "are just like women -- the desire that they inspire is inversely proportional to the number of times one gets on top of them," and La Maliciosa mountain "has a pair of highly suggestive protuberances" that are "black, svelte, (hard) and slippy, like Naomi Campbell's loins."

News of the Weird reported in 1988 on an Indianapolis substitute teacher's suspension for arranging for the well-behaved kids in her fifth-grade class to line up and spit on the ones that had been bad, as they walked the line. Among this year's classroom line-up-and-punish incidents: A sixth-grade teacher allegedly assigned good kids to line up and punch a bad one (Somerset County, N.J., May); a preschool principal allegedly urged good 4-year-olds to line up and bite a bad one (Boston, June); and, in fact, second-grade teacher Madeline Raven, 27, allegedly had good kids line up and spit on a bad one, which forced the teacher to find the boy another shirt since the one he wore to school was thus covered with saliva (Sugar Land, Texas, April).

A 22-year-old bungee jumper was killed in the Swiss Alps in May when guides for the tour company Adventure World, according to local police, failed to change cords after people had finished their earlier, much-longer jump. Two weeks earlier, at a regional track and field meet in Turnov, Czech Republic, an 18-year-old female athlete was hit on the head and killed by an errant toss by the country's best hammer thrower.

A 3-foot-long iguana escaped from captivity, prompting a police alert, given its propensity for aggression toward menstruating women (St. Austell, England). A soiled diaper, in a plastic bag left in a 100-degree sun for three days, combusted, setting afire the walls of two apartments, causing $3,000 damage (Ennis, Texas). A disabled man had his motorized wheelchair stolen at gunpoint in a routine street mugging (Milwaukee). One of Rio de Janeiro's notorious bus thieves, who had just snatched about $800 from passengers, escaped by leaping out a door but landed in the midst of a 400-officer police force guarding the municipal governor during a downtown ceremony.

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

-- On July 4 at Coney Island in New York, Japan's Kazutoyo "The Rabbit" Arai (who weighs 101 pounds) beat defending champ Steve Keiner (400 pounds) in the annual Nathan's international hot-dog-eating championship. Arai gobbled up 25 in 12 minutes, to Keiner's 16. Slim Japanese eaters have frequently won the contest, which struck Keiner as "one of God's mysteries," but another bulbous former U.S. champ, Ed Krachie (who ate 15 this year), once postulated the "Belt of Fat" theory, that surrounding fat limits stomachs' expansion.

-- Researcher Peter Cochrane of British Telecommunications continues development of his "Soul Catcher" brain-implanted microchip that he believes some day will be capable of recording all of a person's chemical reactions in all senses so as to capture "a lifetime's worth of experience and feeling," according to a June New York Times report. (Already, doctors at a Veterans Administration hospital believe they have trained a patient whose ability to communicate was shut down by a brain-stem trauma; after an implant, he can order a cursor around merely by thinking of where he wants it to go.)

In June, a British housewife held an appliance repairer hostage in her home for three hours until the company agreed to replace the faulty washing machine it had sold her and been unable to fix (Somerset, England). In April near Milan, Italy, about 30 voters showed up at the polls wearing only underwear, somehow in protest of excessive airport noise. In May, an unidentified man burst into a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., armed with jagged-edged soda bottles and threatened to kill himself if someone didn't stop Pepsi from selling sodas to eastern European countries.

-- In May, the Maricopa County (Ariz.) District Library announced that it had received a 15,000-book donation from a drive sponsored by the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain, a campaign that all together distributed more than 1 million donated books. However, the Maricopa County gift consisted of 1,000 pasta cookbooks, 200 copies of a book on Windows 95 software, and 11,796 copies of the same children's book, "What Would Happen If ..."

-- In April, the New Hampshire legislature voted to correct its law on penalties for sex abuse of children. Adults convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child in New Hampshire can receive up to 20 years in prison, but until the new bill actually becomes law, molesting one's own child still draws a maximum of only seven years.

-- In May, a judge in Tampa, Fla., sentenced teen-ager Valessa Robinson to 18 years in prison for the confessed-to brutal beating death of her mother at the hands of Valessa and her boyfriend. Four days earlier, two other Florida judges had sentenced statutory-rape defendants (whose victims only reluctantly testified against them) to 71 years and 105 years in prison. (The first was a 25-year-old South Dakota man who clumsily romanced a 13-year-old Largo girl with a diamond ring; the second was a Miami college professor who had smuggled a somewhat-eager Honduran teen-age boy into the United States as a housemate and had occasional sex with him.)

-- Queens College (New York City) professor Harvey Baker told The New York Times in May that he had a dynamic new method for helping people overcome even intense fears of tarantulas. However, he had fallen far short of the 100 volunteers he needed to demonstrate the method because few people who have extreme tarantula phobia would participate in his study.

-- In February, Patrick Lee Harned, 17, who is jailed in Astoria, Ore., on charges that he killed a 7-year-old girl at the command of the voices in his head, turned to convicted serial killer Keith "Happy Face" Jesperson, serving a life term at the Oregon State Penitentiary, for advice on prison life, girls and, of course, defense strategy. Wrote Harned, "I just want to get my time done and do good and get married and have a kid and have a better life and walk on the beach with my wife, kid, family, and have a better life with help, amen. What can I do?"

-- An April New England Journal of Medicine article reporting the results of automobile whiplash claims in Saskatchewan before and after the province switched to no-fault insurance revealed that whiplash was much more common under the "fault" system. According to a commentator, part of the result might be due to victims gaming the system, but the results might also show that "if you have to prove you are ill, you can't get well."

Pittsburgh anti-circumcision activist Ron Miller, 58, speaking to a meeting of men to encourage foreskin-restoration in order to enhance penile sensitivity, quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in April: "(The pleasure) you're going to get back is so different, don't expect your brain to understand it." He also admonished men not to delay, as he did: "I'm pissed off about the 40 years of wasted sex I had."

A genre given up in this column four years ago as No Longer Weird has been resurrected by advances in science. It has been known for years that production of heat-trapping methane by livestock flatulence was a major contributor to global warming, but the 1997 Kyoto protocol created technology incentives to reduce the problem, such as the development in Scotland recently of special bacteria for animal feed that converts the methane to less-noxious carbon dioxide in cows' digestive systems, and an industrial Beano-type supplement developed by a Canadian firm to ease cows' belches and other emissions.

In June, according to police in Detroit, Dwayne Nolan was to meet his lawyer at a police station so they could fill out the paperwork to get Nolan's car back after it had been impounded in an alleged drug deal. As Nolan awaited the lawyer's arrival, officers noticed that Nolan was in fact the same man currently wanted locally for murder. Said Sgt. Joe O'Leary later: "I've never seen anybody actually walk into a station on another matter, obviously knowing he's wanted on a murder warrant." To make it official, an officer asked the lawyer, matter-of-factly, to identify a photo taken from the warrant, which he did (according to the police), and Nolan was arrested.

A 23-year-old man died from a friend's punch to the chest, delivered only after the man begged to be hit to relieve his hiccups (Ocean City, Md.). A vicious heat wave in Turkey was credited with saving a life when a suicidal woman on a mountainside swooned before she could leap, and was rescued. An America West pilot (who had flown the day before), riding as a passenger on an America West flight, went out of control, screaming, throwing things, and yelling "Get away from me," until he was restrained by the crew (Phoenix). A county judge (who is an opera fan) enlisted 21 jail inmates to be extras in a local production of Verdi's "Aida," earning community-service credits (Cincinnati).

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