News of the Weird

-- The human-egg-donor business is flourishing in America, with brokers offering tall, athletic, brainy blondes as much as $80,000 for a multiple-egg harvest (though the average woman gets $5,000 or less), according to a May Los Angeles Times report. Several Ivy League women told the Times they pay off a semester's bills in a single doctor's visit to have eggs extracted by syringe (after a several-week hormone regimen). Said a bioethicist, "There is not much difference between those [egg brokers'] ads and what goes on with prize breeding of animals."

-- Saddam Hussein recently ghost-wrote a 160-page romantic novel, "Zabibah and the King," according to CIA sources interviewed by The New York Times in May, which included a rape sequence in which his heroine (whose name translates to "people of Iraq") was invaded, probably as an allegory to the Gulf War. Sample dialogue: The King: "I'm a great leader. You must obey me. Not only that, you must love me." Zabibah: "The people need strict measures so that they can feel protected by this strictness."

-- British researchers, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists in San Francisco in May, reported that a poison used by South African Zulu tribesmen to coat the tips of their spears and arrows appears in trials to deprive human cancer tumors of blood without harming the surrounding tissue and thus could be a major weapon against cancers of the colon, ovaries and lungs. The toxin comes from the root bark of the Cape bushwillow.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (43) People who impersonate teen-agers and return to high school to satisfy various psychological needs, such as Treva Throneberry, 31, who for four recent years was Brianna Stewart (Evergreen High, Vancouver, Wash., Class of '00, GPA 2.83), notable for getting a D in drama class despite her successful ruse and for getting a 45-year-old man jailed for having sex with an underage girl (which, in reality, she was not). And (44) the periodic scares in African nations, in which vigilante mobs are stirred up against outsiders rumored to have the power to make local men's penises disappear, as happened in April (two killed) in Ilesa, Nigeria.

-- Richard L. Greist filed a lawsuit in January against the state mental hospital in Norristown, Pa., where he has been a patient since 1978 because he killed his pregnant wife and stabbed his daughter and grandmother. Greist complained that when officials would not consider him for an in-house job as a clerk, they violated his rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act, in that they were obligated to "accommodate" his severe paranoid schizophrenia.

-- Debby Messer of Livonia, Mich., filed a $1 million lawsuit in February against her late ex-husband, Gordie Milner, claiming that because he allegedly harassed her after their divorce, she still fears him to this day and cannot stop imagining that he is lurking around her. She said she knows full well that he passed away six months earlier but said that he still "continue[s] to hurt me [and] hurt the children."

-- In January, a Canadian court ruled in favor of convicted drug trafficker Khon Ha Tri in his lawsuit against the prison in Peterborough, Ontario, for his 1996 injury when he fell out of his bunk and tore a knee ligament. Tri said that a prison doctor had prescribed him a lower bunk because of a previous prison-incurred injury but that guards ignored the order. Though Tri had been released from prison after the lawsuit was filed, he has since been re-jailed on another charge.

-- In March, the day after a federal grand jury in Philadelphia handed down a massive fraud indictment against him, former U.S. Rep. Edward Mezvinsky sued his doctor, his drugstore and the pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding, claiming the reason he got into trouble with his investment business was because the anti-malaria drug Lariam fogged up his thinking. Mezvinsky, who took the drug for business trips to Africa, was charged with 56 counts, totaling $10.4 million, based, said the government, on a series of lies to banks and clients, including his mother-in-law.

-- Martin Joyce, 20, filed a lawsuit in April against Reese's Tavern in Warminster, Pa., for serving him alcohol, which he says caused him to get shot. According to the lawsuit, if Reese's hadn't served him illegally, he would not have thought it such a good idea to stop a motorist just outside the bar to ask to borrow money to make a phone call. According to a police report, when the motorist declined the request, Joyce became belligerent, reached into the car, punched the motorist and threatened to kill him. The motorist then pulled out his licensed gun and shot Joyce in the stomach.

Questionable Crimes: An adult brother and his sister were arrested and charged with beating up three men who were conducting loud cell-phone calls while standing in front of the siblings' father's home in an early-evening hour (Boston, March). And three men were being sought by Hartford, Conn., police after a 14-year-old boy and a friend got beaten up in February; most likely, according to police, because the boys had been standing in a street, throwing candy at passing cars. And in April, Wisconsin state Rep. Marlin Schneider sought to formally legalize some retaliatory behavior, introducing legislation to permit battery if committed upon someone who is physically abusing a close relative (but local domestic violence officials were opposed to the bill).

In Charleston, W.Va., in April, James Dale Duncan, 38, was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison for having sex with his daughter beginning when she was 13, for the purpose, according to him, of preventing her from ruining her life by getting pregnant with her boyfriend. Duncan insisted he acted only "from a parent's point of view and not a pervert's," and his sister agreed, telling the judge, "He didn't do this for pleasure." Unremorseful, Duncan said, after sentencing, "I'm going to jail knowing she won't end up pregnant."

A 46-year-old toll-booth operator slipped and was accidentally dragged to his death by an 18-wheeler when he reached out of the booth to grab snow on the moving truck to arm himself for a snowball fight with another toll-booth operator (Wilmington, Del., March). Subway "graffiti artists"/vandals were killed on the job in April in Brooklyn, N.Y. (hit by a train), and Chicago (electrocution). And a 19-year-old man was killed as he ran a red light while attempting to flee a minor traffic accident that he caused (Largo, Fla., April).

A judge threw out charges against a couple carrying 560 pounds of marijuana, because the search was triggered by the incompetent police dog "Falco," two-thirds of whose previous discoveries turned out to be bogus (Knoxville, Tenn.). A man was arrested for locking his 5-year-old nephew in a 100-plus-degree car because he feared thieves would steal the stereo if the car were unattended (Los Angeles). A 42-year-old Good Humor vendor was convicted of disrupting a public school, because so many junior-high kids were walking out of classes to buy ice cream (Winnipeg, Manitoba). Glenda Stevens' dog Sweetie was hit by a mail truck and presumed dead, and then ceremoniously buried in Stevens's back yard, but minutes later, Sweetie dug her way out and is now mending (broken leg and jaw) (Park Hills, Mo.).

(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 Mexican government announced that beginning June 15, it would distribute "survival" kits to its citizens crossing the border illegally into California and Arizona because they face such a rugged journey. Included in the kits are bandages, aspirin, drugs for snake and scorpion bites, dry meat, granola, 25 condoms (or birth-control pills), and anti-diarrhea medicine. Said a Mexican official, "Those who've gone to the U.S. have told us (what) they need."

-- According to a petition filed in Common Pleas Court in Dayton, Ohio, in May, Boomer, a golden retriever, is the plaintiff suing the Invisible Fence Co. because the electrical charge to his collar, triggered when he attempts to leave his guardians' yard, was too strong and, according to an Associated Press dispatch, caused him severe emotional distress, for which he asks $25,000. Boomer's guardians, Andrew and Alyce Pacher, who purchased the "invisible fence" and permitted the electrical charge, were not sued.

-- Smoking Gun: Erik Williams, 21, of the 3600 block of South Michigan Avenue, was arrested in Chicago on May 18 and charged with sexually assaulting (forced fellatio) a 42-year-old woman. The victim arrived at a police station in the early morning hours clutching, in her hand, testicles that she had just bitten off. At about the same time, Williams showed up at Michael Reese Hospital missing his testicles. Doctors confirmed that the testicles were Williams' but were unable to reattach them.

The Iowa Court of Appeals ruled in March that an unarmed man who had disguised his face and ordered a convenience store clerk to give him "the money" (and who then took $110 and ordered the clerk to lie on the floor) committed theft but not "robbery" because the clerk was never in "immediate, serious" danger. And a judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., ruled in April that police had no legal cause to stop a young man seen running from a building holding his hand to the side of his hip because there are other explanations than that the man had a gun (although he was, in fact, holding onto a gun). And a judge in Middlesex County, Mass., ruled in February that because of a loophole in state law, disseminating child pornography by computer is legal, but merely storing the same images on a computer is illegal.

-- Inmate Chad Gabriel DeKoven's lawsuit against the Standish prison in Bay City, Mich. (and several other defendants), was tossed out in April as frivolous, despite DeKoven's insistence that he is the "Messiah-God" and rightfully president of the United States (in that, since his name is "Chad," he figures that many thousands of punch-card votes last November were symbolically for him). However, Judge David M. Lawson did compliment DeKoven's typing, his "lengthy expositions" on his deity, and his "disciplined effort" in assembling his 125-page brief's exhibition of numerical analysis and secret codes that prove he is God.

-- Recent Messages Received: A 34-year-old man was stabbed to death in February, allegedly by his mother-in-law at the command of God and a Ouija board (Chickasha, Okla). And a convenience store clerk was hacked to death with a machete in February, allegedly by a man ordered into action (and praised for his good work) by God (Bellefonte, Pa.). And a 39-year-old man was arrested for torching a theater in which 12 mentally retarded adults were watching a movie, also on the command of God, who apparently also told the man he didn't need a lawyer because He would be representing him in court (Vinco, Pa.).

-- Divine Wisdom: Rev. Richard C. Weaver, 55, the Sacramento preacher who penetrated the Secret Service detail to shake President Bush's hand on Inauguration Day, said it was God who had gotten him access to the restricted area; the Secret Service was embarrassed, especially since they were on the lookout for Weaver, who had told them at President Clinton's 1997 inaugural that he would be back in 2001. And passerby Ray Hutcherson, who happened upon a truck spill of processed chicken on a Houston freeway in March, and who stuffed his car with the birds, summed up his good fortune: "Anytime you get anything free, it's got to be the work of God."

-- Following the death in a March auto accident of abrasive Greenpeace founder David McTaggart, the internal backbiting that has long characterized the environmental organization passed on to veteran activists Paul Watson and Patrick Moore, based on Watson's longtime feud with McTaggart and his upcoming Hollywood movie of Greenpeace exploits. According to a National Post report, Watson plans to fulfill his longstanding promise to urinate on McTaggart's grave, and Moore was exploring a lawsuit because he had heard that his character in Watson's film (starring Pierce Brosnan) was a tyrannical bureaucrat. Watson himself is offended that Moore, when he left Greenpeace, went to work for the Canadian forestry industry (a "running lap dog whore to corporate power").

-- In 1986, 15,000 tons of incinerated ash in Philadelphia was loaded onto a barge, which set off for disposal. After seven countries refused to accept it, the captain lied about the contents to get Haiti to take some of it and then outran the Haitian military when they found out the truth. The captain and crew have long since moved on; the barge has been recommissioned (after probably dumping most of the ash at sea); but the 3,000 tons remained on a Haitian beach until April 2000, when Waste Management Inc. was hired to bury it. However, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia and Florida have now rejected it, and in April, the owner of the barge currently holding the ash sued Waste Management for $490,000 in storage fees for the now-15-year-old cargo.

In a February German television stunt, Swiss citizen Roger Weisskopf, 32, won a lifetime supply of toilet paper when he correctly identified several brands blindfolded, by feel and taste. In December, Cambodian university lecturer (and Pol Pot opponent) Pak Leakreasy introduced a line of toilets with facial likenesses, on the side of the bowl, of several leaders of the evil Khmer Rouge regime. And in February, Hong Kong jeweler Lam Sai-wing introduced a solid-gold bathroom (including wash basin and two toilets), constructed as homage to Vladimir Lenin's critique of capitalist waste, telling reporters that he had dreamed all his life to have enough money to build a gold toilet.

Christopher Simms, 34, the father of two small kids, was charged with invasion of privacy in Montgomery County, Pa., for rigging a hidden camera in a room in his workplace used by new mothers to pump breast milk for their infants. Said a neighbor to a Philadelphia Daily News reporter: "You would think he's seen enough of that at home." Said a prosecutor, "This is perversion at its lowest."

On March 24, two East Orange, N.J., police officers fired 38 shots at two unarmed black teen-agers sitting in a stolen car, connecting on eight and sending both, age 14 and 18, to the hospital. A subsequent investigation revealed, according to a report in the Newark Star-Ledger, that the shooting erupted when two officers approached the car and one accidentally shot himself in the thigh. When he uttered, "I'm hit," the second officer assumed the teen-agers had shot him, and he emptied his gun at them; another officer coming onto the scene subsequently fired 25 more shots. The boys survived.

Tye Thomas, 22, resigned as mayor of Gun Barrel City, Texas, a week after he telephoned police to insist that they come arrest him because he was intoxicated in public. A college student threw a pair of cow eyeballs at a writing professor who had undervalued her required-for-graduation essay, which was on the horrors of slaughterhouses (Johnson, Vt.). A 21-year-old man, in court for illegal skateboarding, threatened a judge and others and climbed a table, screaming, "You'll never take me alive!" before being subdued (Santa Rosa, Calif.). At a retirement community, a man allegedly fired shots at his girlfriend's house in a drive-by shooting from a golf cart (Green Valley, Ariz.).

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

-- Brandon Clifford, 27, pled guilty in May in Bucks County, Pa., to attempting via the Internet to lure an underage girl for sex, but apparently Clifford's perversion of choice is merely to experience pain by having someone kick him in the testicles. This fetish, named (according to the prosecutor) "Asian Ball Busting," would also have been practiced by the girl's smashing Clifford's scrotum violently with her hand from underneath. After his arrest in January, Clifford was fired from his job as an inspector with the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

-- Ignorance on Parade: In March, the principal of Stony Brook School in Branchburg, N.J., ordered a 12-year-old, hearing-impaired girl to stop using sign language on the school bus because it was somehow causing a disturbance. And in April, a National Park Service ranger at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., ordered a visiting group of high school patriotic-essay contest winners to stop singing the National Anthem because they did not have a permit for a demonstration. (In both cases, the orders were rescinded several days later, following protests.)

-- On April 29, Carla Renee White, 17, beat out 10 other women in casual wear and evening gowns to win a Berkeley County, S.C., beauty contest now in its 30th year: Miss Hell Hole, named after the Hell Hole Swamp, the local community's "defining body of water," as a May Boston Globe dispatch labeled it. White will not compete in the Miss South Carolina Pageant because the entry fee is too steep, but the pageant director said, "We'd love to have Miss Hell Hole."

In March, this year's Miss Brazil admitted to four plastic surgeries and 19 other cosmetic procedures (including ear reductions) in her quest for perfection, but perhaps she merely reflects the obsession of her country, which has the world's highest per capita rate of plastic surgery. Meanwhile, in the United States, an April raid in New York City closed down an unlicensed, makeshift liposuction/implant shop that had been serving (at cut-rate, but still high, prices) dozens of largely dissatisfied customers, many of whom were spotted by neighbors staggering out the door, bleeding. And in Miramar, Fla., a woman died in March from illegal silicone injections to her buttocks by a man whose day job is house cleaner, and authorities warned of neighborhood, Tupperware-style, silicone-injection "parties."

-- Women in villages and small towns across Slovakia continued this year to endure the hundreds-years-old tradition of Easter Monday, though not with the pain and humiliation suffered as recently as the 1950s. Historically, unmarried men ritually threw cold water on, and then whipped, single women, and the women in turn rewarded the men with hard-boiled eggs and chocolate and bragged about the number of men who visited; nowadays, except in the remotest villages, men gently spray scented water on women.

-- In Indonesia in February, young Dayak tribesmen in Borneo slaughtered more than 400 job-stealing immigrants from the island of Madura in the renewal of a centuries-old rivalry that had largely been relaxed in recent decades through Dutch and Christian missionary influence. As their ancestors had done, the Dayaks beheaded their victims and displayed the skulls for their alleged magical powers of increased security and rainfall. According to a March Washington Post dispatch, Dayak elders were shocked by these youthful rampages because Borneo is relatively modernized (satellite dishes, designer clothing, motorcycles).

-- As the time nears for the International Olympic Committee to select its 2008 site, China dogged Paris' bid, primarily because of the city's notorious canine poop problem. An April Boston Globe dispatch reported on the city's casual approach to cleaning the 16 daily tons of droppings (and average of two hospitalization injuries a day from people slipping on them), with a Paris Olympic official shrugging off the criticism: "It's just that there are no dogs in China, because they eat them."

-- The land of the matriarchal Mosuo people, in southern Tibet, has become a popular in-country tourist destination recently for newly rich Chinese because of its tradition of females choosing which males will be their sexual partners. According to a March London Daily Telegraph dispatch, a woman typically "lamps" her choice by shining a flashlight into the man's face (a switch from the traditional tickling-the-palm method), but prostitutes have begun to flood the area and impersonate Mosuo women, in order to serve visitors' fantasies.

During the last five years, nearly 28,000 fugitives have received Supplemental Security Income disability payments, in violation of federal law, money which has undoubtedly contributed to their ability to evade capture, according to government reports disclosed in April by the Associated Press. And the German government announced in April a program to persuade neo-Nazis to renounce their philosophies and memberships; about 10,000 of the most violence-prone could claim incentives worth up to about $50,000 each.

In January, the Columbia, S.C., City Council was informed that the land for the almost-completed municipal golf course primarily for youth was formerly a graveyard in which as many as 1,400 bodies of indigent black mental health patients had been buried in the early 1900s; some fearful officials want the project stopped immediately and are seeking help from a major funder of the course, the Tiger Woods Foundation. And in Palatine, Ill., according to a February Chicago Sun-Times report, funeral director Doug Ahlgrim celebrated the 35th anniversary of the basement miniature golf course in the Ahlgrim & Sons funeral home, which is apparently a community institution that Ahlgrim believes cheers up his customers.

A Vancouver, British Columbia, apartment complex was evacuated and condemned in April after a dentist died inhaling toxic vapors while engaging in his at-home hobby of fooling around with his large collection of mercury. And in Cardington, Ohio, after chemist Thomas Beiter died of apparently natural causes in his apartment in February, authorities found 17 pounds of mercury and two containers of uranium, with which, according to a brother, he liked to conduct various experiments in his home laboratory.

Michael Johnson, 37, and Sung Taek Park, 67, were arrested in Toronto in February and charged with several counts of fraud for attempting to obtain a line of credit from a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce branch by leaving collateral of $25 billion in U.S. government bearer bonds that turned out to be fakes. The bonds, picturing President Grover Cleveland, appeared to have been issued in the 1930s, supposedly to have helped fund Chinese nationalist Chiang Kai-shek. The men's scheme might have been too ambitious, however, because in the 1930s, the entire U.S. national debt was only about $30 billion, and $25 billion of that would not have been tied up in a single set of bonds held by one entity. Also, the Federal Reserve addresses on the bonds had ZIP codes (which were only introduced in 1963).

A 36-year-old man who fell asleep in a garbage bin was automatically loaded onto a truck and compacted before being rescued and treated for multiple fractures (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan). The new owner of a bungalow in northwest Chicago, inspecting his property, found the corpse of the previous resident, in a chair, apparently dead of natural causes and unattended since February 1997. Five 2001 Rolls-Royce lines, including the three most expensive models in the world (led by the $353,000 Corniche), had to be recalled to the factory when the power window switch ignited the car's fuel line at a Michigan dealership and blew out the windows. A city welfare agency contractor was revealed, in brochures in service for several years, to have been recommending to welfare recipients that they regularly check Dumpsters to help make ends meet (Eugene, Ore.).

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