News of the Weird

-- The attorney for alleged San Francisco dog-abuser Steven Maul said in November that Maul only bit the dog in the neck as part of an unorthodox but loving discipline method and that in fact Maul "is very oral" and "has French-kissed his dog." According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Boo, an 80-pound Lab, had darted out into traffic in November (again), and Maul, intending to teach against that, clamped down on Boo's neck in a way he said dogs signal dominance to each other, but did not break the skin. (Researchers have written about bite-training, but the method is currently far out of favor.)

-- In October, Rev. Derek McAleer revealed to his 350 small-town St. Marys (Ga.) United Methodist parishioners that their church had become the recipient of what is believed to be the largest one-time church donation in history: $50 million from the estate of the recently deceased man who founded the local telephone company. Actually, the donor, Warren Bailey, was a long-time church supporter but was also known in town for not having attended services in more than 20 years.

In the Sept. 19 primary in New Ashford, Mass., none of the town's 202 registered voters cast ballots, including the disgusted town clerk, who manned the polls for 14 hours. And a Green Party candidate for the Maine legislature failed to vote for himself in the June primary, leaving him with zero votes and forcing him to return his public financing. And Texas Lt. Gov. Rick Perry sent a fund-raising letter in July that not only shook down lobbyists but asked lobbyists to rank their clients as to how much they could be expected to be shaken down for (from $1,000 to $25,000). And the money flowed so freely at the GOP convention in August that Philadelphia Inquirer reporters discovered an accidentally discarded $5,000 lobbyist's check to a congressman stuck to the bottom of a utility cart outside the hall.

-- The Golden Tower Project, an installation by Seattle artists at this year's Burning Man festival, consisted of 400 jars of urine from other artists, stacked and electroluminescently lighted ("gorgeous," "faintly blue and gold," "warm, kind of like biological stained glass," according to Seattle's The Stranger weekly). (In 1993, News of the Weird reported that New York City artist Todd Alden had asked 400 art collectors worldwide to send him samples of their feces so he could offer them for sale in personalized tins. Said Alden, "Scatology is emerging as an increasingly significant part of artistic inquiry in the 1990s.")

-- News of the Weird has reported on scientists who borrow the jellyfish's "green protein" for medically productive genetic modifications, but Chicago artist Eduardo Kac created controversy in September by proposing to create embryos with the jellyfish's green-light-producing gene just to make visually appealing organisms, such as a glowing rabbit. (Kac's major work so far is "Genesis," a sentence from the Old Testament, translated into Morse Code, transposed onto DNA, inserted into fluorescent bacteria, and lit up when anyone accesses the piece on Kac's Web site.)

-- In a summer contract with the city of Montreal, artist Devora Neumark performed "The Art of Conversation," which consisted of her standing at the entrance to a subway station from noon to 4 p.m. every Tuesday and "conducting spontaneous interchange with interested parties on a variety of topics."

Frontiers of Science

-- A U.S. Forest Service researcher announced in August that her team had discovered the largest living thing ever found, a 24-centuries-old fungus, covering 2,200 acres in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon; DNA testing confirmed that the underground, stringlike structure was all the same organism. And three weeks later near Lake Okeechobee, a University of Florida biologist discovered what he called an "evolutionary relic," a previously unknown, carnivorous, flowering plant that grows entirely underground but by photosynthesis.

-- An August British Broadcasting Corp. documentary, "Brain Story," featured a man whose cranial lobes were surgically severed in order to treat epilepsy and who now is able to do what he calls the "party trick" of drawing different designs, with each hand, at the same time.

-- Japan's Mizuno Corp. has developed a synthetic material for men's underpants that would keep the covered area one Celsius degree cooler than cotton underwear and therefore helpful, for example, to skiers (and, say doctors, to those desiring increased sperm production), according to an August New Scientist report. However, Canadian polyester-mesh underwear manufacturer Stanfield's Ltd. disputed Mizuno's claim of superiority; said a spokesman, "We just haven't got up the guts to measure the temperature of someone's crotch yet."

Thomas Lavery, 56, was indicted in Akron, Ohio, in August on nine counts of roughing up two of his high-achieving, home-schooled daughters when they performed worse in their endeavors than he expected. According to the indictment, when one daughter came in second in the National Spelling Bee, botching "cappelletti," Lavery threatened to kill her and had to be physically restrained. The girl told the Akron Beacon Journal that Lavery would punch them in the head for their failures and that screaming and profanity were common. Lavery complained to the Associated Press that he was "easier on (his kids) than my father was (on me)."

News of the Weird reported in 1999 on the lawsuit by 5,400 descendants of the 18th-century Welsh pirate Robert Edwards, claiming ownership of 77 acres of lower Manhattan (including the World Trade Center and the New York Stock Exchange). In August 2000, four descendants claimed to have found a copy of a 1778 lease for the land, which had been given to Edwards shortly before by a grateful King George, stating that Edwards' heirs would get the land back in 1877. The value of the land now is conservatively estimated at $750 billion, or $140 million per descendant. Courts in South Wales, New York City and Pittsburgh have opened proceedings.

Customs Agent Adventures: Cocaine "mule" Jose Antonio Campos-Cloute was arrested at the Melbourne, Australia, airport, in September after a momentary lapse; as he was filling out the Customs form, he absentmindedly checked the "yes" box on whether he was carrying illicit substances, and that led to a search. And Briton Alison McKinnon was sentenced in August to five years in prison in Turkey for attempting to smuggle six pounds of heroin out, strapped to her chest; she was ready to board a plane home from Istanbul but was designated for searching only because one of her body-piercings set off a metal detector.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn a Californian's drug-possession conviction even though one juror admitted he decided guilt by flipping a coin (which the juror defended by noting that he did two out of three). An Atlantic City casino introduced a row of stationary bicycles rigged with 25-cent slot machines. In separate incidents four days apart in Chicago, two cab drivers accidentally drove off with customers' toddlers sleeping in the back seat and required police help in reuniting the families. Doctors revealed that transplanting part of a woman's ovaries into her arm was successful in growing new eggs, for in vitro fertilization (San Diego).

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

-- 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/.)