News of the Weird

-- Rapidly gaining viewers in the competitive Moscow TV market is a program called "The Naked Truth," on an obscure channel, which features straight news delivered by a 26-year-old female anchor, but who appears from time to time topless, or while undressing, or while being fondled on-camera. According to an October New York Times report, however, the station's policy is that any news of President Putin or other leading officials must be delivered while fully clothed.

-- A Quebec-based sect, the Raelians, announced in September that it would start work immediately, in an unidentified Third World country's laboratory, toward cloning a human being, specifically the American girl who died recently at the age of 10 months and whose parents paid the Raelians $500,000 to duplicate her. According to a Princeton University researcher, the technology exists right now to carry out the work within a year. Founder "Rael" (the former Claude Vorilhon) believes that all humans are clones of extraterrestrials and says Raelians could eventually offer a cloning service for about $200,000.

"Rides" called "The Original Shocker" at a Rockville, Md., arcade and "The Electric Chair Game" at various parks in Italy are simulated fatal experiences in a death-row electric chair, from the strapping-in to the controlled dose of electricity (voluntarily administered, enough to cause heavy vibrations) to the sound of sizzling juice to the cloud of smoke, and capped by a flat line on a heartbeat monitor. "Winning" involves staying in the chair until the machine declares you dead; losers release the electrodes early. And among America's best-selling toys last summer was Death-Row Marv (McFarlane Toys, $24.99), in which a man strapped into an electric chair trash-talks his "executioner," almost begging to be lit up with more jolts of electricity.

-- State officials near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, issued $100 citations in August to two drivers whose U.S. Government water trucks were on their way to fight the Montana fires. The officials discovered that the trucks exceeded the highway weight limit of 17 tons (by 1 and 2 tons, respectively). According to the Helena Independent Record newspaper, the trucks were permitted to head out to the front lines only after they had dumped enough water to satisfy the inspectors.

-- In a video outtake mistakenly telecast on a Cape Cod (Massachusetts) public-access cable channel on July 31, the organizer of a cat-adoption service was shown being yelled at by her cameraman-husband (who was off-camera) to get the adoptable cat she was offering to stop squirming during the taping. One viewer told the Cape Cod Times, "The (cameraman) must have used the 'F' word 50 times, along with verbal threats to the kitten (to strangle it)."

-- In July, a federal grand jury in Charlotte, N.C., indicted 18 people in an interstate cigarette-smuggling ring (profitable because of the wide disparity in state taxes), accepting the government's evidence that at least part of the motivation for the scheme was to raise money for the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah.

-- Cristal Campbell, 29, was re-arrested on July 12 in Boston after pulling a prank to escape and spending five days on the lam. At a court hearing on July 7, she urinated on the floor but claimed that she was pregnant and that her "water had broken" and thus was rushed to a hospital by concerned court personnel (most of whom were males who accepted her claim uncritically). Campbell is wanted on more than 50 con-artist warrants, and indeed, after court personnel took her to the hospital on July 7, she escaped twice more before her July 12 capture.

-- Yell What in a Crowded Theater?: In June, Sasha Aleksandr McClain Coe, 22, was charged with reckless endangerment in Sevierville, Tenn., after setting off a string of firecrackers in a theater during the movie "The Patriot." The 78 panicked patrons struggled angrily to get out the doors but once outside, they surrounded Coe and held him for the police.

-- Man Bites Dog: Richard Nelson, 40, fleeing on foot after being stopped in a stolen car, found his arm in the grip of Bear, a Canton, Ohio, police dog, and decided to retaliate by biting the dog on the nose to get it to loosen its grip. Instead, Nelson's bite caused Bear to tighten its jaw, so hard in fact that one of Bear's teeth broke off in Nelson's arm and had to be surgically removed.

John Roberts (executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, commenting in the Chicago Sun-Times on the ACLU's support for the speech rights of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which is being sued by a Massachusetts couple as having inspired a pedophile to rape their son): "My wife's an early-childhood educator. (Because of the ACLU's position) I was expecting to find my clothes out on the lawn when I got home."

Innocent Middle-Named Waynes? In July, CBS News and three newspapers jointly offered to underwrite DNA testing of an already-executed man to determine whether, for the first known instance in U.S. history, the judicial system had put an innocent man to death. The subject of the test would be the Perry, Ga., man convicted on conflicting evidence of a 1981 rape-murder and executed in 1996, and who made News of the Weird because of his name: Ellis Wayne Felker. Also, in August, Texas Gov. George W. Bush issued a pardon to convicted rapist Roy Wayne Criner (the victim was also murdered, but Criner was charged only with the rape) because his DNA did not match that found on the victim, as reported in News of the Weird in July 2000.

Traffic patrol officers often find that a suspected drunk driver will try to switch seats with a passenger after a stop, before the officer can reach the car. However, that strategy succeeds only if the passenger is more sober than the driver. In July, police in Lake City, Tenn., witnessed a driver-passenger switch, but it did not matter because both failed sobriety tests (along with the two people in the back seat). And in August, Hackensack, N.J., police stopped a weaving van to discover an open bottle of Scotch, an impaired 20-year-old man in the driver's seat, and an impaired 22-year-old man sitting in his lap; apparently, the two men got stuck trying to execute the seat switch.

A female placekicker who was cut from the Duke University football team won $2 million when a jury attributed her release primarily to her gender, despite evidence that several competitors were better kickers. Two prison guards were indicted for smuggling out sperm belonging to organized-crime inmates, who recently became fathers despite their long incarcerations (White Deer, Pa.). The Tampa Bay Devil Rays apologized to members of a local high school band, who were to play the national anthem on the last day of the season, for requiring them to buy tickets to get into the ballpark. A 54-year-old ex-Marine stabbed his new son-in-law (Air Force) during a heated discussion of which military service is best (Linwood Township, Minn.).

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

-- Legitimate Chinese cricket-fight promoters once again staged their national championship matches in Beijing in October despite fears from their ranks that illegal gambling was ruining their "sport" that has endured for 1,000 years, according to a New York Times dispatch. Thousands of men descend on farmers in Shandong province each summer, seeking crickets of the proper physique and character to endure rough matches inside 8-inch-wide plastic containers. Matches end when one contestant tries to flee or gets tossed around hopelessly by the other.

-- The University of Surrey (Guildford, England) announced in October that it was adding to its curriculum in service-sector management by appointing a professor of airline food. A Surrey official said the school intended to beef up its graduate and undergraduate course offerings in in-flight catering and told The Guardian newspaper that the professor would be appointed from either the field of gastronomy (how food is served) or the field of food science (concentrating, for example, on freshness).

Janet Woods, the acting principal of Strong Vincent High School in Erie, Pa., angry at reporters' questions about a rumored gun incident, allegedly displayed a middle finger and told camera operators to "Shoot this!" (August). And in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Kamol Kaewmora, 50, recipient of the gesture, was arrested and charged with shooting to death the 41-year-old German motorcyclist who had displayed it to him (August). In August, a state court in Lancaster County, Pa., and a federal court in Fayetteville, Ark., dismissed criminal charges against people who had made the gesture, and the Arkansas judge in fact ruled the defendant's right to flip the bird at a state trooper was protected by the U.S. Constitution.

-- Newcastle, England, body piercer Lorna Larson accidentally hit a vein while working on the tongue of Gemma Danielson, 18, in July and by the time Danielson got to the hospital, she had lost four pints of blood. Said Danielson, "(Doctors) said they had never seen anything like it." Larson said she was mortified: "That's the last tongue I do."

-- Joseph Pileggi, 69, filed a lawsuit in Akron, Ohio, in July seeking money damages over his 1997 marriage to Carli Buchanan, 61. He claims he intended to marry not Buchanan, but his long-time girlfriend, who is Buchanan's mother, Ducile Palermo, 83. He claimed that he did not realize until May 1999 that the "wrong" woman's name was on the license (despite Buchanan's insistence that Pileggi consummated the marriage with her on the wedding night).

-- Latest Highway Truck Spills: 26 alligator carcasses, weighing nearly 5 tons (headed for a processing plant near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., October); U.S. Army Multiple Launch rockets (from a military truck, adjacent to an elementary school near Hugo, Okla., August); and a load of completed Advanced Placement tests (being taken from a New York City testing center to Educational Testing Service in New Jersey, of which 84 were never recovered, thus hindering those students' college careers, May).

-- In August, Davidson, N.C., police officer Scott Searcy asked to search a woman's car for drugs, giving as his legally required basis ("reasonable suspicion") solely the fact that on the front seat was a copy of the weekly newspaper Creative Loafing, whose cover story on local drug enforcement was illustrated by a photo of a marijuana plant. Said Assistant Chief Butch Parker, "(Searcy) thinks he had reasonable suspicion, and we do, too." (The woman consented to the search, and nothing illegal was found.)

-- In July, Rev. Nelson W. Koscheski, a delegate from Dallas to the national Episcopal convention in Denver, was seen scattering salt under the tables of openly gay and lesbian delegates. According to some authorities, tossing the salt is a symbolic gesture to rid the premises of Satan. After some participants expressed their outrage, Rev. Koscheski resigned as a delegate.

-- Lisa Alger of Roy, Wash., had to take her claim all the way to state judge Paul Treyz in June, but she finally got a dismissal of one of the municipal citations against her for housing an unlicensed cat named "Patches." Reason: "Patches" is a stuffed animal. (The local Humane Society monitors for violations of licensing law by knocking on doors and asking kids the names of their pets, so it can check license lists. When Alger's 7-year-old son mentioned the highly regarded "Patches," and the Humane Society found no license for it, it wrote Alger up without investigating.)

Jail guards employed by the Nova Scotia government had their "privilege" of being able to eat free in the inmates' dining room taken away in July because of budget cuts and must now pay $2.50 to get their prison meal. And Brazilian multimillionaire Jair Coelho, 68, was arrested in August and locked up before trial; he had made a fortune on the country's jail contracts, supplying nearly inedible food, but the government proved that he got the contracts through bribery, and thus he must now eat his own food.

News of the Weird mentioned in 1999 that the Safety Tanteisha detective agency in Osaka, Japan, was selling about 200 aerosol spray kits a month (at $400 each) to help women find out whether their men are having affairs, by detecting the presence of fresh semen on their underwear. In July 2000, according to a Phoenix New Times report, a venerable local medical lab has introduced Forensex, which charges spouses and lovers from $350 up to test partners' underwear for semen (hers, to see if sperm is present; his, to see if he has ejaculated at inappropriate times).

In August, a 20-year-old man who worked at a landscaping business in Phoenix proposed to his girlfriend (she accepted), took her to the worksite, turned on a woodchipper, climbed in, and tried to pull her in, too. He was killed, but she escaped. Also in August, the style and etiquette columnist for The Times of London was found dead, clad only in a shirt, beneath his fourth-floor apartment window, but colleagues said the suicide scenario was too tacky for the man. Said one friend, "(H)e'd have wanted to be really dressed appropriately." Said the coroner, "It would be likely that he would write a letter to explain, and no doubt on the Smythson's notepaper that was found in the (apartment)."

The new head of a Hudson River environmental organization, on a well-publicized maiden kayaking voyage around New York City, discovered a floating corpse. A Zambian man was granted a divorce after testimony that his wife routinely locked him in the bedroom at night to stop his philandering (Lusaka, Zambia). Police said two burglary suspects, left alone briefly in a stationhouse storage/interview room, stole some Twizzlers and the change from the office coffee fund box (Albuquerque). Police-dog trainee Ben, let out of a squad car on a rural road to relieve himself, picked up the scent of a nearby, 125-plant marijuana field (Perkins Township, Maine).

(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 September, driving-school owner Bharat Patel, 49, became the 31st person convicted in a driver's-license bribery scandal at a Chicago examining station. According to testimony, Patel did not even bother to teach and spent all his time with examiners. Some of Patel's students were such bad drivers that examiners, who took $300,000 in bribes in two years, actually gave Patel his money back. Some subsequently licensed drivers did not know how to start a car or engage the transmission; others turned directly into traffic during the test; and sometimes, terrified examiners halted the test mid-trip and hitchhiked back to the station.

-- Federal wildlife officials believe that the voracious and largely indestructible Asian swamp eel has somehow made its way to within a mile of Florida's Everglades National Park and poses an imminent threat to its balance of nature, according to a September Wall Street Journal report. The 3-foot-long eel apparently eats anything in its path, has no known enemies, survives in salt- and fresh water and on land, can change genders in order to facilitate year-round breeding, lays 1,000 eggs at a time, and is so durable that one lived in a wet towel for seven months with no food or water.

Protesting taxes (Actress "Dziewanna" rode, Lady Godiva-style, through Krakow, Poland, in July). Bicycling for charity (Three men and a woman were arrested in Vernal, Utah, wearing only helmets, in July). Burglarizing a house (Dwight Mills, 38, set off by the receipt of divorce papers, took off his clothes and broke into a neighbor's house before being gunned down, Pensacola, Fla., July). Celebrating a soccer "victory" (In August, a nude fan joyously rushed onto the field and around the sidelines in the final moments of a 2-1 game, but he apparently also distracted his own Blackpool, England, team, because Torquay scored two quick goals to win, 3-2).

-- Helene Canuel filed a lawsuit in August against the Rimouski (Quebec) Minor Hockey Association, asking about $700 (U.S.) in damages, because the coach of her 14-year-old son benched him for the playoffs. Canuel said she just wanted "justice for my son," but the coach was apparently more interested in surviving the single-elimination tournament.

-- In June, a school district in Orange County, Calif., was ordered by a jury to pay $1.4 million to Taylor Steiskal, age 10, who three years ago fell off his school's monkey bars and broke his arm, which developed further complications and has required eight surgeries. Steiskal's lawyers argued that monkey bars for children should be no higher than 72 inches off the ground (thus giving a few inches' ground-clearance for a 48-inch-high boy hanging from his hands); the one Steiskal fell from was 79 inches high.

-- Anne and Lucy Abolins filed a $4 million lawsuit in May against the owners of the house they formerly rented in Edmonton, Alberta, from which their 114 cats were confiscated by health inspectors, who ruled in June 1999 that the feces-laden dwelling was uninhabitable. Contrary to neighbors' claims that the Abolinses had lowered their neighborhood's value, the sisters now say that their own lives were ruined by the health inspectors and that notoriety has made it impossible for them to find new living quarters. (In August 2000, a judge fined the sisters about $3,500 (U.S.) for housing code violations, and Lucy Abolins then called the SPCA "the Antichrist" for taking her cats away.)

-- In September, a jury in Tacoma, Wash., ordered the state Department of Corrections to pay $22 million to the family of a woman killed when a convicted felon (domestic assault) on probation ran a red light and hit the woman's car, concluding that the department somehow ought to have supervised the man better. The governor's office said it would appeal the verdict, questioning the state's ability to monitor the driving behavior of its 55,000 probationers 24 hours a day.

-- According to an Associated Press report in August, quoting lawyers close to the case, the Catholic Diocese of Nashville, Tenn., planned to use the defense of "comparative fault" in two lawsuits filed by boys who claimed to have been sexually molested by former priest Edward McKeown. Such a defense would allow the church to reduce its damages by showing that other people had knowledge of McKeown's continued abuse and did not warn authorities of it. Among those other people the church regards as culpable are the 21 other victims who were abused but remained silent.

-- Paralyzed inmate Torrence Johnson filed a lawsuit in July against the Spartanburg (S.C.) County Jail because guards failed to stop him in 1998 when he was whimsically doing backflips off a desk in his cell, the last one of which resulted in a fall and his subsequent paralysis. Johnson claims guards should have been watching him carefully because he had been diagnosed as depressed, although they said he appeared to be vigorous until he landed on his neck.

Mark Sims, 24, filed a lawsuit in August against Ottawa (Ontario) Civil Hospital, alleging that a misdiagnosis (of cancer) caused a doctor to remove one of his testicles, which at that time was the size of a "baseball." Sims now says it was obvious that the swollen testicle was not cancerous but merely the result of an office-party jaunt to a strip club, a visit during which Sims ultimately found himself onstage with a dancer, who "suddenly, without warning" whacked his scrotum. Sims says that if the doctor had waited until his testicle shrank to its normal size, he would still have both testicles.

Last year, News of the Weird reported that a Bombay, India, collection agency had hired six eunuchs to hang around the homes and offices of obstinate debtors to embarrass them into paying up. According to a July 2000 report in London's The Guardian, the Tsaisheng credit agency in Taiwan has begun hiring AIDS patients at about $100 (U.S.) a day for the same purpose. According to the agency owner, many people in Taiwan still believe that AIDS is transmitted through mere social contact.

Sherman Lee Parks, 50, escaped from the Dallas County Jail in Fordyce, Ark., in August, oblivious of the fact that a judge had just ordered his release because he had been locked up too long; he was rearrested the next day, charged with escaping, and jailed. And in September, according to police in Shawnee, Kan., a 19-year-old clerk at a Texaco Starmart reported he had been robbed, but actually he had just looted his own cash register, and to conceal the crime, he had put tape over the store's surveillance cameras. However, he had used transparent tape; said a police lieutenant, "(I)t looks a little fuzzy, but I don't see any robbery in there."

Water and health officials were mystified at the continued appearance of half-inch-long red worms in the tap of a Deltona, Fla., woman but after tests, declared the water safe. A mayoral candidate in Vlore, Albania, promised that, if elected, he would re-open the city's long-shuttered brothels. Officials in Cairo, Egypt, began implementing a 20-year program to relocate 21 cemeteries (with 109,000 graves) to the suburbs. When an arrested stripper on pre-trial release argued that wearing an ankle monitor on stage would hamper her act, the judge relented and dropped that condition (Cleveland).

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