News of the Weird

-- An August Wall Street Journal dispatch from Nuoro, Sardinia (Italy), described locals' love for "casu marzu" ("rotten cheese"), brown lumps of sheep dairy, crawling with maggots, a "viscous, pungent goo that burns the tongue" and whose "wiggling worms (often) jump straight toward the eyes with ballistic precision." Though the cheese is banned by the government, a black market has pushed the price to double that for ordinary cheese. Some locals believe the maggots provide authentication, in that it is only when the maggots die that the cheese is inedible.

-- Damanhur, a 23-year-old, largely self-sufficient commune in northern Italy, features an underground, five-story-deep temple (an expansion of 10 times the space is under way); 500 full-time residents; its own currency, schools and tax code; and renowned workmanship that produces Tiffany-style glasswork and silk and cashmere fabrics for European designer labels. According to a July New York Times report, Damanhur was a secret until 1992, when an expatriate sued to get his money back, causing the tax collector to take an interest. Among the passions of the New-Age group are active experiments with time travel and an absolute ban (Damanhur's only "rule") on smoking.

In an interview in May in the trade journal of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's safety standards program, Marthe Kent, said she loves her job: "I absolutely love it. I was born to regulate. I don't know why, but that's very true. So as long as I'm regulating, I'm happy." Kent, who heads the agency's controversial ergonomics program (which oversees the effects of, for example, furniture design on back stress), said, "If you put out a reg, it matters. I think that's really where the thrill comes from. And it is a thrill; it's a high."

-- Motorist Michael Eck, 43, a Teamsters truck driver, endured an ultimate-experience, 12-minute thrill ride in his Chevrolet Impala in August on Interstate 83 near York, Pa. According to police reports, another truck driver, James E. Trimble, 65, felt Eck had cut him off during a lane change and angrily bumped Eck's car with his Peterbilt 18-wheeler at 60 mph, and did not stop bumping him. One hit damaged Eck's fuel pump, disabling the engine, and Trimble continued to ram the Impala at full speed for eight miles ("I counted 24 bumps until I stopped counting," said Eck) until police pulled him over and arrested him. Eck was not injured but was disappointed that police would not let him fistfight Trimble before they took him away.

-- Latest Survivors: Eugene Slocum, 52, walked three miles with a fractured neck to get help after a rural truck collision (Brighton, Colo., May). Leslie Roth, 35, suffered only a minor headache after being struck by two separate bolts of lightning on July 15 while with an Outward Bound wilderness school group (Killarney, Ontario). Jose Rojas Mayarita, 39, was incapacitated in his isolated boat for two days before help arrived, after a 10-foot-long marlin leaped from the water and speared him, penetrating all the way through Mayarita's abdomen (near Acapulco, Mexico, July).

-- To encourage hunting, Canada's Ministry of Environment introduced regulations in August to allow children as young as 12 to learn to shoot ducks and geese. The country has 60 percent fewer hunters than 10 years ago, said the Canadian Wildlife Service, which has led to animal overpopulations. Participating kids must have had a safety class and must be accompanied by a licensed hunter at least 18 years old, but gun-control and children's advocates were nonetheless enraged.

-- Mount Clemens, Mich., attorney Michael L. Steinberg was sentenced to 10 days in jail for contempt of court in May as the result of his repeated refusal to obey Judge Michael Martone's admonitions to turn off his cell phone in the courtroom. The last straw for Judge Martone was when Steinberg chose to interrupt his questioning of a witness to take a call.

-- In June, Darryl Ennis, 34, called 911 in Slidell, La., for the sole reason of getting police assistance to force his mother to cook him some pork chops. When he allegedly verbally abused the emergency operator for declining his request, officers went to his home and arrested him.

-- Very Much Opposed to Becoming a Grandmother: In August, Glenda Dowis was arrested by police in Lake Clarke Shores, Fla., near West Palm Beach, and charged with forcing her 16-year-old pregnant daughter at gunpoint into the Aware Woman Medical Clinic for an abortion. After Dowis allegedly told the staff that she would "blow (her daughter's) brains out" if she refused the abortion, someone called 911. According to a detective, Dowis is a construction worker who had been trying very hard to social climb and thus felt that having a pregnant teen-age daughter would ruin her standing.

The 21-year-old Lower Paxton Township, Pa., man (still unidentified in press reports) whose teen-age girlfriend used Quick Tite glue to bond his penis to his abdomen on July 11 to punish him for cheating on her, to the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News: "She knew I was a dog and she found out I was fooling around on her, but it shouldn't have come down to that. She could've just slapped me or something."

-- During its first year (1988), News of the Weird reported on a Houston fellow named Patrick Johnson, who was not a bus-company employee but who liked nothing better than to dress up in company uniforms, hop into an unoccupied transit bus and drive a route, picking up and discharging passengers to satisfy his love of buses. In June 2000, Pittsburgh Port Authority police arrested a man with the same obsession: Ronald Johnson (no relation, as far as authorities know), 21, who admitted that he had taken three buses out in recent weeks and picked up and discharged riders. A Port Authority executive said Johnson "does have (bus-)driving skills," had a uniform, and apparently "loves buses."

July 4, 2000: A 43-year-old man in Lombard, Ill., and a 34-year-old man on New York's Long Island were killed when their unlicensed fireworks did not immediately ignite and the men peered down the launching tubes as if that would help them detect the problem, only to catch the explosion full-force. Also, a teen-ager was killed in Des Moines, Iowa, when a firecracker tossed out the window of their SUV blew back inside and exploded, igniting other fireworks, which caused the driver to crash into a pole.

City College of New York announced it will provide students, staff and faculty with professional philosophy counseling in its health-care facility. Officials at Cape Canaveral finally learned the origin of the plastic bags of urine found recently in a launch-pad complex; a worker was too lazy to use the rest room, which was an elevator ride away. Police called to an apartment where a man had been dead for a week were held at bay for two hours by the man's 18 cats, aggressively guarding the body (Cairo, Egypt). A 29-year-old man who broke into a house at night and fondled a sleeping woman's thigh was chased by the woman's boyfriend out the door, where the molester tripped and broke his leg (Chambersburg, Pa.).

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

LEAD STORIES

-- In a July hearing in Akron, Ohio, Judge James Murphy briefly reopened a 1994 case to take testimony from the victim, who was only 7 at the time but who now claims to remember the incident much better. His rectum had been torn by (according to police) his mother's ramming him with an object because he had soiled his pants or (according to the mother) a sexual attack by the family's pit bull (corroborated, perhaps, by the fact that dog semen was found in the rectum). The mother is serving a life sentence, but her son (who was reticent at the trial, because of trauma) is now positive that the dog did it. A week after the hearing, Judge Murphy let the conviction stand, relying on other 1994 testimony.

-- In August, entrepreneur Adam Bilski received a license from the city of Oswiecim, Poland (aka Auschwitz), to open a disco on the spot of a World War II-era tannery that "employed" concentration-camp workers and became a gravesite for many of them. And in September, "Stalin's World," a tourist attraction devoted to themes of the World War II-era Soviet police state, is scheduled to open near Gruta, Lithuania, which was a gateway through which 200,000 Lithuanians passed en route to Siberian labor camps. The developer said he even plans to have visitors eventually enter the park on cattle cars and eat oat gruel and fish broth, just as the prisoners did.

In Columbus, Ohio, on July 12, Lester DeBoard, 36, was sentenced to five years in prison for luring an 11-year-old girl to a far corner of a public library, where he had fondled her feet. (He faces a similar charge in a library fondling in nearby Worthington, Ohio.) Four days later, police arrested Dwight D. Pannell, 40, for the assault of a 33-year-old female student (a stranger to him) in the main library at Ohio State; with a motive he is keeping to himself, he allegedly pricked her foot with a syringe containing an unknown substance.

-- The same engineering firm responsible for the notoriously wobbly Millennium Bridge in London, England, which has been closed as unsafe, was identified as the consultant for the soon-to-be-released Bioform brassiere, according to an August report in the London Daily Telegraph. The Ove Arup company found that replacing the bra's underwire with plastic bands would more comfortably distribute the load and reduce stress; it is also working on shock absorbers to make the Millennium Bridge once again usable.

-- In May, the Food and Drug Administration approved the prescription product Eros Clitoral Therapy Device, a suction-pump instrument that increases blood flow for the purpose of improving sexual responsiveness. (Rudimentary blood-flow suction-pump devices for men, not approved by FDA, have long been on the market and sell for far less than Eros' $359 price tag, and in fact are illegal to possess in Alabama, Texas and Georgia, which ban devices sold for the purpose of stimulating sex organs.)

-- In July, engineer Roman Kunikov gave a public demonstration in Ufa, Russia, of his gasoline-powered boots that he said would enable the wearer to jump around at about 12 feet per stride and run at a pace of about 25 mph. The boots, not yet on the market, weigh about 2 pounds each, including fuel.

-- While U.S. sewage plants efficiently screen out bacteria and solid waste, many older facilities cannot break down certain chemicals and hormones in pharmaceuticals, including pain killers, caffeine, antibiotics and birth control pills, which, as they spread into wastewater, cause environmental harm, including mutations in the reproductive organs of fish. Findings presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society earlier this year (including studies blaming perfumes), along with recent studies from Europe's waterways (involving antidepressants, seizure medication, cancer treatments and cholesterol-lowering compounds) warn that certain species of fish are in jeopardy of extinction.

-- Latest Useful Genetic Alteration: In June near Plattsburgh, N.Y., Nexia Biotechnologies began nurturing about 150 goats that had been specially bred with a gene from a spider, with the ultimate goal to create silk fibers ("BioSteel") strong enough to use in bulletproof clothing and for aerospace and medical applications. Spider silk has long been admired for its lightweight strength and elasticity.

-- University of South Florida professor Stuart Wilkinson recently developed a robot that fuels itself with sugar and which the professor hopes will be able to power itself even more versatilely by eating vegetation (although unlike sugar, which produces only water and carbon dioxide as byproducts, vegetation would create waste-disposal problems). According to a July BBC News report, E. coli bacteria are provided to break down the food and convert it into electricity.

Police in Durham, N.C., said that the three 15-year-old boys rushed to Duke Hospital on the evening of July 28 with gunshot wounds to the leg had actually shot one another, voluntarily. Said a police spokesman, "They wanted that status symbol of telling their friends they were shot."

News of the Weird has reported several times recently on the "sport" of cockfighting, which is still legal only in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Louisiana, and is under constant criticism from state legislatures and animal-rights activists. However, according to a June New York Times story, the cockfighting infrastructure (33-state breeding industry plus designer-drug developers to enhance roosters' fighting performance) is flourishing, and cockfighting continues illegally in many other venues (for example, police raided events this year in Philadelphia and New York City). Furthermore, an anti-cockfighting bill in Congress, with broad bipartisan support, has been derailed, according to a July Washington Post story, because of the influence of the breeding industry.

T'Chacka Mshinda Thorpe, 25, was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in May and charged with possession of cocaine after a brief chase; police caught up to him after Thorpe tripped on his low-riding baggy pants, fell, and fractured his femur. And in March, Edney Raphael, 39, running from a stabbing in Philadelphia with a bloody knife in his hand, was captured following a foot chase; he had turned his head to see where the officers were and run smack into a parking meter.

A 49-year-old man shot up a bar, wounding five people, on orders from "the Lord," who said subsequent instructions would come from "Nash Bridges" (Topeka, Kan.). A 30-year-old Danish soccer fan returning at night from the Copenhagen-Viborg game in a fans' bus peered out of the skylight and was decapitated by an overpass. And in separate incidents, two elderly people were rescued after enduring three days each, precariously trapped and hidden in rural isolation without food or water (an 83-year-old woman in her car, which plunged off an overpass and hung in a tree above a swamp in Broward County, Fla., and a 75-year-old man in Carroll County, Va., stuck 15 feet down in his outhouse when the floor collapsed).

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

-- Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz, whose best-selling 1991 book "Chutzpah" celebrated the virtues of impudence, asked a team of Florida lawyers in July for a cut of the $3.4 billion judgment they had just won against the cigarette industry on behalf of smokers. Dershowitz, who said it was his strategy that won the case, admitted that "promises" the team made to him were "not in writing," but nevertheless claimed they owed him "1 percent," or $34 million, for his advice, which according to time sheets, he had dispensed over the course of 118 hours, which works out to $288,000 an hour, or $80 a second.

-- Despite televised professional wrestling's on-screen admonitions against trying such stunts at home, the New York Daily News reported in July that as many as 40 amateur (mostly teen-age) "backyard wrestling" clubs are operating in the New York City area, practicing moves nearly as dangerous as the pros'. A Daily News reporter witnessed 14-year-old boys smashing each other with wooden poles until they splintered, landing "chair shots" to the head, diving from platforms or rooftops onto their opponents, slamming each other through plywood tables, and even engaging in "barbed-wire" and "fire" matches. Said one "wrestler's" mother, who watched nervously as her son and his opponent went through their paces: "Easy ... easy...."

Denise Thomas was sentenced to a year's probation by a Littleton, Colo., judge in August for offering her 9-year-old daughter for sale on the Internet for $4,000. Two weeks earlier, Helen Chase had been arrested in Vacaville, Calif., and charged with child endangerment for allegedly giving away for free her 10-year-old son to a couple in St. Petersburg, Fla., whom she had met on the Internet. (Police said the latter kid had been rambunctious and incorrigible despite her threats to give him away, and was apparently thriving in his new home.)

-- John Murphy, 64, was arrested in Toms River, N.J., after a May 10 spree in which he vandalized 12 doctors' offices because they had refused his request to perform prostate biopsies on him without a medical reason for doing so. According to police, an enraged Murphy went from office to office, breaking windows and spraying black paint over the urologists' signs. One doctor, expressing prevailing medical practice, told a reporter that he wouldn't do the procedure unless some alarming sign surfaced because the procedure "is pretty invasive."

-- Firefighters and police called to an apartment in Fargo, N.D., in June encountered thick smoke pouring out of a window, an odor one described as "noxious and terrible," and the tenant standing in the corner with his fists up as if ready to fight. The tenant finally revealed that once a year, he piles into a skillet all the hair he has saved from his haircuts and burns it. He was arrested when he threatened the firefighters, claiming that he worked for the FBI.

-- In July, according to police, John Hawk, 43, the town eccentric of Celina, Ohio, took it to the next level. While communing with his just-deceased uncle's body at the Ketcham-Ripley Funeral Home in nearby Rockford, Hawk allegedly decapitated it with a hacksaw and carried the head away, presumably to fulfill a religious belief that he could bring the uncle back to life by eating the brain (a belief that was the subject of one of Hawk's periodic rants delivered in handbills around town over the years).

-- Brian Ellingwood had a briefcase stolen from his car in Washington, D.C., in February and reported it, but six weeks later, according to a Washington Post story, he was notified that the D.C. Department of Public Works had levied a $1,000 fine against him for littering because the abandoned briefcase, with contents strewn about, had been found in an alley about six blocks from his home. After what he estimated as "hundreds" of calls to various government offices, Ellingwood could not clear the matter up and was forced to go trial in June to have the charge removed.

-- According to a June Chicago Sun-Times report, Illinois Republican activist Connie Peters has virtually no other duty in her $23,000-a-year state job except to be an "observer" at two state water-management meetings a month. The newspaper estimates that she has collected $185,000 in the 15 years she has been in this arrangement, primarily because the legislature inexplicably kept raising her compensation, which in 1985 was $150 a year.

-- The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged in July that it knew as far back as 1982 that asbestos fibers from a W.R. Grace Co. mill in Libby, Mont., were implicated in the deaths of residents (casualties now number as many as 200) but did not notify the town. The agency had dismissed its own toxicology study and squelched follow-up studies, relying instead on company assurances that asbestos levels were minimal in its building-insulation materials.

Krystin Nicely, 14, in a July St. Petersburg Times story about the closing of the 28th Street Drive-In theater (which her mother, now 30, and father had frequented on dates): "If it wasn't for that place, I wouldn't be here." And Maryland legislator Van T. Mitchell, during a March debate in the House of Delegates on a bill banning marriages between first cousins: "If this law was in effect in 1918, I (wouldn't) be (here).

News of the Weird reported in March 2000 that the stretch of I-95 between West Palm Beach, Fla., and Miami (and connector freeways) was the "impalement capital" of the country because of the frequency with which unsecured objects fly off of speeding trucks. In May, Yanier Torres escaped decapitation by moving his head a couple of inches, avoiding a sheet of 3/4-inch-thick iron that had flown off of a flatbed truck, through his windshield, and which sliced his headrest in two. As is typical, the truck's driver did not stop, and, said a Highway Patrol spokesman, "was (probably) not even aware that this object fell off his truck."

"Higher Education": A Ferris State University (Big Rapids, Mich.) freshman died in March of excessive alcohol consumption (0.42 level) during a drinking game. An intoxicated Keene (N.H.) State College student was killed in May while celebrating his 21st birthday when he jumped into a dangerous waterfall despite the pleadings of eight friends not to do it. A University of California at Davis senior choked to death on his own vomit in April (0.54 blood-alcohol level) after downing 21 drinks at a bar on the day he turned 21.

An Ohio law went into effect imposing a five-day waiting period for a person to buy five or more kegs of beer at the same time. A 34-year-old woman, "Queen Shahmia" (God's only daughter), was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering her servants/disciples to commit five robberies while she lounged at resort hotels (Fort Myers, Fla.). Seven nudists had their feet badly seared in a mesquite-wood firewalking ceremony at a naturists' convention (Jacumba, Calif.). United Kingdom coast guard ships off Wales rescued boater Eric Abbott, 56, for the 11th time this year (cumulative cost: about $90,000), owing to Abbott's habit of "navigating" mainly by an automobile club atlas.

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