News of the Weird

-- Officials at the Paralympic Games, held in Sydney two weeks after the Olympics, said performance-enhancing drugs were a concern, certainly, but that some athletes with spinal-cord injuries presented yet another problem in their quest to get an edge: Some jabbed pins into their legs, or sat on tacks, or blocked their catheters to overfill their bladders, which research shows improves athletic performance (by raising blood pressure) by an average 10 percent. Even though such abuse is pain-free, it is dangerous, a Canadian team doctor told the Globe and Mail newspaper. "(B)ut," he said, "like every other athlete, (these abusers) feel invincible."

-- The New England Journal of Medicine reported in October on apparently the first-ever transfer of a food-poisoning virus during a football game. Florida State beat Duke, 62-13, in the 1998 game, but 43 nauseous Duke players and assistants got some measure of revenge by inadvertently making 11 FSU players violently ill during and after the game by passing the virus via their unwashed hands and the fresh vomit on their own uniforms. The cause was contaminated turkey sandwiches.

Re-release of the 1973 movie "The Exorcist" in September is but one event fueling a recent flurry of Satan-dispatching attempts. The Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago revealed in September 2000 that it had, for the first time, appointed a full-time exorcist. And the Vatican revealed in September that Pope John Paul II had failed in his own exorcism of a 19-year-old woman after the church's chief exorcist had also failed. And in a July investigative piece, the New York Post reported that the $1 billion annual donations worldwide to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Brazil-based, but with 15,000 members in the United States) are made largely under the church-created fear that such giving is the only way to obtain exorcisms.

-- Bismarck, N.D., police reported in October that a man recently telephoned two fast food restaurants posing as a police officer and instructed the manager to strip-search employees for contraband. The caller's persuasiveness caused an adult male to strip for a female manager and an adult female to strip for a male manager.

-- An unidentified man was finally caught by police in August, in Stafford County, Va., after two years of sightings in which he would lie on mountain-bike trails camouflaged with dirt and leaves in hopes (sometimes successful) of getting run over by an all-terrain vehicle. (Last October, according to one sighting, he staggered away from such an incident, bloodied.) The man, who lives in Burke, Va., was not arrested but was ordered to stay off bike trails.

-- Toes in the News: In August, sheriff's deputies in Pineville, Mo., arrested truck driver John Hooker, 54, and charged him with sexually abusing two underage boys by a seduction scheme that started with his fetish for sucking toes and culminated with oral sex. And a different person was reported (but not apprehended) in a St. Louis suburb in October after he forcibly sucked a woman's toes in a hotel hallway. And a police officer in Central Point, Ore., was placed on medical leave in June for forcibly sucking the toes of two women after they had rebuffed his request to submit to the sucking voluntarily.

-- The U.S. Department of Agriculture is now formally considering (following a public comment period that ended in September) new regulations that would reduce the minimum size of Swiss cheese holes in Grade A cheese from 11/16ths of an inch in diameter to 3/8th of an inch. The dairy industry said it could provide the cheese more efficiently if the holes were smaller.

-- Heavy-Handed Regulatory Reform: A sausage factory owner grew tired of repeated visits by federal food-safety inspectors and, according to police, shot three of them dead (San Leandro, Calif., June). A man angry at his treatment at a Social Security office opened fire, killing a guard (Sacramento, Calif., September). Two city officials were shot dead by a homeowner when they tried to cross his property to attend to a sewer problem (Bunker, Mo., September). Five Miami-area homeowners, fearful they will lose their trees, have been charged in 2000 with brandishing guns at state inspectors looking for an infectious citrus disease.

-- In October, the large psychic-hotline company, Access Resource Services of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., promised in a settlement with the state attorney general not to engage in fraudulent practices. One provision of the settlement absolutely forbids the company to hire bogus counselors, but contains the exception allowing telephone psychics to be hired if they swear in writing that they can read people's minds.

New York University instructor (and accused shoplifter) Elizabeth Ayres filed a lawsuit in August against Lord & Taylor in New York City, claiming that when security guards found an unpaid-for bra in her bag, it must have been because they planted it there so that they could accuse her of theft and "torture" her until she confessed to stealing it. At NYU, Professor Ayres teaches creative writing.

-- Among the latest Muslim "fatwas" (religious rulings): Men and women must use separate checkout counters in supermarkets (Malaysia, April). Husbands may hit their wives "gently," "as a warning," but must take care not to hit them in the face (Turkey, July). Having a spouse who smokes is a legitimate ground for divorce (Egypt, July). No shopping at a discount store (Egypt, June). Women caught working for British-funded aid organizations will be kidnapped and forcibly married, in order to keep them at home (Pakistan, August). And an October fatwa by the Egyptian Islamic Group instructed disciples to "kill Jews wherever they are found."

In September, a 34-year-old man drowned in his car after he drove through well-marked barricades and plunged into a 15-foot-deep sinkhole in Eau Claire, Wis. In August, a 42-year-old man drowned in Lake Erie near Painesville, Ohio, diving in to retrieve his favorite fishing lure. A 54-year-old man drowned in September after diving into Joe Pool Lake near Dallas after his hat.

A 36-year-old hunter shot and killed a state-protected mountain lion, but according to witnesses had no choice because the lion attacked him while he was squatting with his pants down, answering nature's call (Siskiyou County, Calif.). In a study, 43 percent of doctors said they would have no problem being the one to kill a death-row inmate by lethal injection (Chicago). Angered by his country's soccer loss in the Asian Cup games, Saddam Hussein's son, Uday, imprisoned the team's three most disappointing players and had them whipped on the soles of their feet (Baghdad, Iraq). The mother of a girls' high school softball player sued a teammate's father because his daughter hit a foul ball into a parking lot, damaging the roof of the woman's convertible (Bristol Township, 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/.)

-- The Alberta Ferretti fashion house recently introduced, in New York and London, self-described "gorgeous pieces" made from hamster fur, including a reversible multicolored-fur/camel-leather coat (about $6,000) and a skirt suit ($6,300), a patchwork design in which the hamster pelts appear simply laid side-by-side and end-to-end. The London Ferretti store told The Express newspaper in late October that it had sold 11 of its 12 suit jackets (a size 10 remained).

-- Four weeks after admonishing the government for its treatment of scientist Wen Ho Lee, U.S. District Judge James A. Parker scolded federal prosecutors for demanding too harsh a sentence against a convicted New Mexico perjurer, pointing out that the prosecutors' boss, President Clinton, had asked for leniency for his own false testimony in the Paula Jones case. The New Mexico perjurer, Ruben Renteria Sr., 49, was convicted of lying about consenting to be searched, for which Judge Parker imposed a 15-month sentence rather than the five years the government wanted; President Clinton sought leniency and received no jail sentence but was fined $90,000 and is fighting to keep his Arkansas license to practice law.

Ralph Carlone, 48, was charged with corpse abuse in July for failing to report his parents' deaths (his mother's, two weeks before; his father's, 11 years earlier) and continuing to live with their bodies inside the Akron, Ohio, home he shared with them. And in September, a judge in Phoenix acquitted Frank A. Martinez, 71, of killing his wife in 1987; Martinez had continued to live with her body in their trailer home until 1998, when a suicide attempt brought police, who found the corpse. (Martinez's neighbors had long complained of the smell, but he managed to convince them merely that a dead cat had been buried underneath the home.)

-- Rev. Marvin Munyon of the Family Research Forum (Madison, Wis.) told parents at a September seminar at the Eau Claire Gospel Center how to administer the loving and supportive corporal punishment demanded in the Bible: "You spank them right here on the gluteus maximus, which God made for that purpose." Spanking should begin by age 2, he said, and used properly, it will build self-esteem because it lets children know they are loved.

-- A strippers' club in Hove, East Essex, England, applied for a license variance in September, asking for exemption from the current no-touching-the-dancers rule because it discriminates against customers who are blind, in that they would not have equal opportunity to experience the show unless they could touch. Dancers were said to approve the idea, if limited to bona fide blind people.

-- The Florida Court of Appeals in September turned down lawyer Philip G. Butler's challenge to his bribery conviction. Butler had represented himself at trial and lost, and then claimed on appeal that the reason he lost was that he had failed to inform himself adequately that acting as his own lawyer was foolish.

-- The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced in July that an employee fired for his obsessive belief in the validity of "cold fusion" can sue the employer for "religious" discrimination. As long as an employee has a seriously held conviction that in his own value system he regards as "religious," he is protected under federal law, even though the vast majority of physicists believe "cold fusion" is bogus. The petitioner, Paul A. LaViolette, worked at the U.S. Patent Office, but there was no evidence that he was assisting in the patenting of bogus technologies.

-- "Bus driver" Darius McCollum, 35, was profiled in The New York Times in August after his 19th arrest for impersonating a city transit worker. Said McCollum: "I am not insane. I (just) like the (bus) activity. I like the noise. I like the people who work there." Said one official, "(W)hat this guy does is kind of wacky, but he is very much on the ball." McCollum apparently spends much time on the grounds talking to bus and train employees at all levels and is well-versed in transit procedures and techniques. Said McCollum: "To tell you the truth, I wish they would just (hire me). It would be a lot easier."

-- In August, the New Hampshire Supreme Court OK'd worker compensation payments to a state employee, for "work-related" depression, even though the cause of the depression was merely that she had gotten bad performance reviews. The state appeals board acknowledged that the employee, Gail Sirviris-Allen, had been justifiably cited for inaccurate work and a bad attitude.

Lucrecia Ortuno, 30, was charged in August with injuring her 8-month-old son in a car crash in Houston; according to police reports, she was driving while breastfeeding him. And Kenneth Herron, 40, was charged with manslaughter in August in Little Rock, Ark., after his car crossed the center line and collided with another car; according to police, Herron was driving (with his knees) while preparing his crack cocaine. And a 27-year-old woman was killed when she lost control of her car on I-75 near Atlanta in August; according to witnesses, she was driving while applying makeup.

Three months ago, News of the Weird referred to laws in Alabama, Texas and Georgia (until May, Louisiana was on the list) that banned the sale of products whose primary purpose is to stimulate the genitals. In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of Alabama's law, and in August, the Austin Chronicle reported on how Texas sex shops are coping with that state's law (by legally selling "anatomically correct condom education model" dildos). And at press time, the Augusta (Ga.) Commission had a license-revocation action pending against Lucy's Love Shop for violating that state's version of the law.

Federal grand juror Mark Vincent Hinckley, 37, part of the panel that had just voted secret indictments against an alleged Denver drug dealer, was arrested in August after he went to the dealer's office and attempted to sell him information about the government's case, for $50,000. Hinckley had apparently forgotten some of the evidence that he had just heard: that the government had bugged the alleged dealer's office. Thus, Hinckley's proposition was recorded in full. The dealer's indictment had to be dismissed because of Hinckley's misconduct, but Hinckley himself was indicted a few days later.

In a midday public demonstration, three martial-arts masters, without using their hands, pulled a truck containing 80 people 12 inches with ropes attached only to their penises (Taipei). A divorce-court judge awarded the family home to the two kids (ages 11 and 13), allowing the mother three weeks' visitation a month and the father one week (Victoria, British Columbia). USAirways admitted that it had allowed a 300-pound pig to ride in the first-class aisle on a flight from Philadelphia to Seattle, in the belief that it was a customer's emotional equivalent of a seeing-eye dog. Two female prisoners and their boyfriends were arrested for drug-partying at the South Dakota governor's mansion (during the first family's absence), where the women had work-release jobs on the kitchen staff.

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

-- Wealthy retired Italian law professor Giacinto Auriti began in July to circulate a private currency, called the "simec," among citizens (and about 40 shopkeepers) in the town of Guardiagrele (about 125 miles from Rome), to "prove" his longstanding theory that any currency, if put in the hands of consumers instead of banks, yields more purchasing power. Auriti prints the simecs, sells them at par with the lira, and then guarantees to merchants that he will redeem them at double their value (by paying out from his family fortune), thereby encouraging merchants to lower their prices. The simec has caused an explosion of consumer sales, but the government believes the whole idea is ridiculous and will collapse as soon as Auriti stops guaranteeing simecs' value.

-- The World Wrestling Federation (whose savage, tawdry matches, under the slogan "WWF Attitude!" top cable TV ratings) filed a lawsuit against William Morris Agency in October, asking a judge to please rescue it from a 1997 contract in which it handed over to the agency a piece of every future dollar it earns. WWF argues that, unable to protect itself, it was bullied by WMA into signing an exploitative contract.

In October, Matthew J. Glavin, president of the conservative legal foundation leading the fight to disbar President Clinton for lying about his sexual affairs, was charged with public indecency, allegedly caught trolling for anonymous male sex partners in a suburban Atlanta park. And John Paulk, whose personal "religion cures homosexuality" experience landed him on the cover of Newsweek in 1998, was demoted as an executive with the Christian group Focus on the Family after he was caught in October reveling in a Washington, D.C., gay bar. And Mike Trout, another Focus on the Family official, resigned in October after confessing to an extramarital affair.

-- Two Altamonte Springs, Fla., police officers were suspended in August after a photograph turned up of one officer exposing his genitals during a music festival. The two officers had been stationed near the stage for security and were being handed fans' cameras to take close-up photos of the performers, and somehow, one fan got her camera back with the extra photo. Initially, the officer who aimed the camera defended his action by claiming, inexplicably, that he and his buddy were just fooling around and that he did not believe there was film in the camera.

-- Jeffrey Bruette and his former roommate filed an $8 million lawsuit against the Montgomery County (Md.) Police in July, alleging that they were humiliated when child-pornography charges were filed against them because of a videotape they had shot and handed to police. In early 1999, the two men, concerned that a teen-age neighbor boy was stealing from them, had set up a surveillance camera, which happened to catch the boy involved in sex with the men's dogs. They ultimately handed the tape to police to facilitate the boy's getting counseling, but then police arrested them as if the video had been made for sexual purposes, and the men now sue to clear their reputations.

-- In July, residents of Wertz Avenue in Charleston, W.Va., were just about at the breaking point because of chronic blocked-sewer problems. Not only do the city's storm drains regularly get clogged, sending raw sewage into the street, but recent sewer line backups have spilled waste from Gunnoe's Whole Hog Sausage slaughtering and processing plant, in the form of waves of blood and meat chunks oozing down the street.

-- Chippewa Falls (Wis.) High School senior John E. Smith Jr. was suspended in September for a revenge-based prank in which he brought a cake to school and announced that it was his birthday and that he wanted to share it with administrators. As the six staff members who accepted his generosity found out with their first bites, the secret ingredient in the cake was clumps of hair from different areas of Smith's body.

-- Darryl Bruce McDowell, 34, was arrested near Cranbrook, British Columbia, in July and charged with assault and seven other counts related to roughing up his common-law wife, against whom he was allegedly retaliating for her having tried to leave him. According to his own testimony at a bail hearing, McDowell uses a wooden rod from time to time to discipline the wife and her children as the Book of Proverbs "command(s)" him to do. Said McDowell, "There is no enjoyment about rodding. It's a biblical imperative."

-- Among the issues roiling the Roman Catholics' Italian Bishops Conference in Turin in September was the pending recommendation that all exorcisms be conducted in Latin rather than in local languages, and an important subissue, according to a report from The Independent (London), was how Satan ought therefore to be addressed: by the formal version of the Latin pronoun "you" ("lei") or the more intimate version ("tu").

-- Sylvia Louise Gillard O'Brien filed a lawsuit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in August, asking about $7 million from Coca-Cola because, while she was pregnant in 1997, a Fruitopia bottle broke while she was drinking from it, cutting her lip and causing her to bite on shards; she claims that her resulting fear of miscarriage caused the fetus, now a child of 3, to fail to trust and like her sufficiently. And Jeffrey and Julie Marie Leinweber filed a lawsuit in Medina, Ohio, in July for $50,000, claiming that Mrs. Leinweber's third-trimester fetus was so stressed by an auto accident (even though the child, now 3, shows no apparent effects) that the "special bond between mother and child" was "taken away" by the collision.

In 1999, News of the Weird reported on two South Koreans who ran insurance scams by chopping off their own feet and finger for payoffs of $40,000 and $7,500, respectively. During a two-week period in August 2000, three more scams were reported: Huang Chun-ming, 35, hacked off his wrist after purchasing additional insurance (Taichung, Taiwan); Chen Shih-hung, 37, chopped off his finger to make his claim (Chiching, Taiwan); and a 28-year-old man was charged with collecting $15,000 in an insurance payout in Dusseldorf, Germany, after he castrated himself and blamed it on a gang's attack.

A 16-year-old boy riding in a car near Gaston, Ore., in August was killed by an airborne, 1,500-pound elk that had just been hit by a truck. In April, another 16-year-old boy, on his bicycle, was killed by an airborne deer that had just been hit by a car in North Canton, Ga. (And in August, Hida Yochikata, 37, survived, but with major back injuries, after being hit by an airborne dog that had fallen from a ninth-floor window in a Paris suburb.)

Murder defendant Gregory D. Murphy, strolling out of his uneventful pre-trial hearing, suddenly turned and coldcocked his lawyer with a left to the face (Alexandria, Va.). A woman filed a lawsuit against the American Red Cross, claiming that she contracted oral herpes from her CPR class's unsanitized dummy (Hammond, Ind.). In a settlement of fraud charges with the Florida attorney general, a psychic hotline agreed to hire only people who swore in writing that they had psychic powers. An off-duty police officer, out on bond after his arrest on suspicion of DUI in the deaths of two motorists, was himself hit by a drunk driver a week later while out bicycling (Kailua, Hawaii).

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