News of the Weird

-- In recent New York City art auctions, according to a May report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tom Friedman's "Untitled" (a Styrofoam cup of evaporated-coffee stains, pinned to a piece of wood along with a ladybug) went for $30,000 at Phillips Auctioneers; Robert Gober's "Broom Sink" (a fancifully constructed wash basin) earned nearly $500,000; and Jeff Koons' life-sized ceramic "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" (the chimp) sold for $5.6 million.

-- Golfers cannot play on courses in Germany without a license, which applicants must earn by passing a written test and a skills test in putting, chipping and driving, according to a June dispatch in The Wall Street Journal. Golf association officials defend the requirement for keeping away slow-playing novices, but they estimate it might take about $800 or more for lessons and classes just to get the certificate.

-- Hard Times for Rape Victims: In St. Petersburg, Fla., in June, a 29-year-old rape victim, still shaken up and in a hospital gown after being treated, was arrested and ushered off to jail when a routine check revealed that she had three outstanding judicial warrants (failure to pay a traffic fine, failure to pay an unlicensed-dog fine, and allowing her young daughters to miss school). Also in June, in Albany, N.Y., Supreme Court Justice James Canfield performed the wedding of Robert Gorghan to his girlfriend, Cheryl, only minutes after Gorghan had been sentenced in another courtroom to 25 years in prison for the serial sexual assault of Cheryl's daughter over a 13-year period. (Canfield is notorious for marrying the just-convicted, which he said reduces the likelihood that they will engage in homosexual sex in prison.)

Following recent FDA approval and as a safer alternative to surgery, doctors have begun offering the $2,500 Brava Breast Enhancement vacuum device that its developer says can increase cup size by stimulating tissue growth, although the contraption must be worn for 10 hours every day for 10 weeks, pulling tissue gently inside its vacuum domes. And a researcher in Melbourne, Australia, told a recent meeting of surgeons that he had grown breast tissue in rats, mice and rabbits, and that, if it could be done for humans, it would allow women to grow larger breasts. And a 31-year-old woman in Frankenmuth, Mich., reported in June that a nail that flew up from her lawn mower's blade and that could have penetrated her heart was deflected by her "liquid-curved" Maidenform bra; she said that "a higher power" had told her that day to wear a bra for lawn-mowing.

-- In March, the Yakima Indian Nation performed two rain ceremonies (ancient rituals involving fruits and berries) in the Washington mountains to bring an end to the drought plaguing the Northwest and then sent the bill for expenses ($32,000) to the region's electricity provider, Bonneville Power Administration, pointing out the (slight) increase in rainfall afterward. Nonetheless, Bonneville declined to pay.

-- Testifying at his sexual molestation trial in Leeds, England, in March, psychic healer Terence Wood, 41, admitted that he might have put his hands inside the clothing of the four complaining females but that he was unaware he was doing anything wrong: "When I'm healing, I'm in an altered state, and I just go where the spirit tells me the pain is. I close my eyes. My hand becomes very, very hot."

-- Tom Wahl and his wife, Suzi, were convicted in St. Louis in April of "prostitution," in that a jury found that they had engaged in sex for money, even though they were having sex only with each other, at paid sex-education "seminars" the couple ran. Their lawyer's unsuccessful closing argument compared the Wahls to a golf pro trying to teach duffers the proper techniques for swinging a club. That would not be "golf," said the lawyer; it would be a demonstration of techniques, and thus, a demonstration of sex techniques would not be "sex."

-- In May in Denver, Richard M. Young, 43, filed a federal lawsuit against his ex-employer, Ohio Casualty Insurance, for firing him after an incident in which he kept sheriff's deputies at bay for six hours while wielding a gun in a shopping center parking lot, threatening to kill himself. Young said he has a mental illness, which the company is required to "accommodate" under federal law, and that just because he wanted to kill himself doesn't mean he doesn't want to continue working for Ohio Casualty. Young's job at the company was regional manager of litigation.

-- In separate lawsuits filed in January, two teen-age boys claim that York, Pa., personal injury lawyer Mark David Frankel fondled them inappropriately when the boys, with their mothers, went to Frankel's office to discuss injuries they had suffered in auto accidents. According to the lawsuits, in each case Frankel quickly attempted to examine the boys' buttocks, thighs and genitals, claiming that he could detect injuries that doctors often miss. According to one mother, Frankel said he needed to examine those areas because, if a doctor had diagnosed a head injury and a foot injury, there was usually another injury in between.

Arrested for murder: Andrew Wayne Toler, 21 (Houston, May); Christopher Wayne Scarber, 25 (Independence, Ky., February); Kenneth Wayne Jackson, 32 (Balch Springs, Texas, May). Filed for a new trial: convicted murderer Jack Wayne Napier, 48 (Lexington, Ky., March). New trial granted: convicted murderer Anthony Wayne Walker, 39 (Cincinnati, September 2000). And, occasionally, this happens: acquitted of murder at his retrial (after five years on death row): Gary Wayne Drinkard, 45 (Decatur, Ala., May 2001).

Frank T. Singer, 38, pleaded guilty in May to manslaughter in the death of a 36-year-old man in Stroudsburg, Pa., that resulted from consensual bondage play between the two men in a motel room last year. The younger man, wearing a sauna suit, was found duct-taped and handcuffed to a chair and apparently choked to death after, according to news reports, being force-fed 2 1/2 pounds of peanut butter.

A 34-year-old man was shot to death over a piece of sweet potato pie (Atlanta, January). A man was stabbed to death allegedly by his girlfriend when he brought her home a McDonald's ham, egg and cheese bagel instead of the two Egg McMuffins she requested (Martinez, Calif., March). A 48-year-old man was shot to death, allegedly by his wife, after a fight over their satellite-TV controls (Orlando, April). A 37-year-old man was beaten to death, allegedly by his roommate, in a fight over the thermostat setting (Dallas, May).

In China, which is enduring one of its worst droughts in history, soldiers were ordered to open fire on any clouds they see, to bring rain. Jail inmates complained at having to wear the new black-and-white-striped uniforms on outside work details, with one man protesting, "It makes us look like convicts" (Pasco County, Fla.). Vineyard owners in southern France began to sell powdered wine extract to pharmaceutical houses in the U.S., to make wine pills that provide health benefits without the hangover. A couple filed a lawsuit against a county building inspector who failed to detect that the attic in the house they bought contained a half ton of raccoon droppings (Bloomfield Hills, Mich.)

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

-- "Pain is the sensation of weakness leaving the body," Phoenix "artist" Steve Haworth told a Phoenix New Times reporter in May, while he was arranging scenes for associates of his Church of Body Modification, including a horizontal full-body suspension (hanging for five minutes by rings in body piercings); a tug of war (full-force pulling contest using a rope held taut through rings on various body piercings); free-moving implants just below the skin that appear to be, say, a living bracelet; and various body alterations such as "Vulcan" ears, a ribbed penis, and a filleted male urethra. Haworth won't amputate anything, though (too "destructive," he said), thus displeasing his girlfriend, who wants to lose two toes in order to fit into smaller shoes, and he has not yet decided whether to honor another associate's request to be crucified.

-- High school senior Trevor Loflin scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs this year despite the potential handicap of having lived the previous three years with his mother and sisters in the back of their Chevrolet Suburban, the result of the mother's having lost her job as a physician in Fresno, Calif. Mother Cynthia Hamilton decided to home-school her kids and, in view of housing prices in California, found the family got along just fine without a house (though they recently moved into a one-bedroom apartment). Since the family turned to religion to get them through their ordeal, Trevor told the Los Angeles Times he would probably enroll in Bob Jones University in the fall.

-- Lawyers Living the American Dream: A consumer who was oppressively required to buy a full season of NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV satellite service (instead of being offered a cheaper weekly rate) gets back $9 to $21, according to a class-action settlement announced in May, but the lawyers would receive $3.7 million. And a consumer who was oppressively charged daily late fees by Blockbuster Video (without realizing how much they could amount to) gets back a few discount coupons, according to a class-action settlement announced in June, but the lawyers would get $9.25 million.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (45) The surgically removed humongous abdominal cyst that might total half the body weight of the patient, such as the 100-pounder excised from a 17-year-old girl in Cairo, Egypt, in May (far off the world record of 303 pounds at Stanford Medical Center in 1991). And (46) the unlabeled or makeshift urn containing a loved one's cremated ashes that gets mistakenly sold at a yard sale or thrift shop, and which unsettles the surprised buyer when he gets home and inspects his purchases, as happened to a woman in Dallas in May.

-- A research team from UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh (writing in an April issue of the journal Tissue Engineering) and another from Duke University recently reported success at collecting valuable human stem cells from ordinary liposuctioned fat, potentially ending the need to collect such cells through controversial fetal-tissue procedures and painful bone-marrow extraction. Stem cells can make replacement muscle, bone and cartilage, and if they come from one's own fat, will not be rejected by the body. Also, as the researchers pointed out, Americans' fat cells are an abundant resource.

-- Centers for Disease Control specialist Charles Beard told the Los Angeles Times in April that he has created a genetically modified dung that might eradicate Chagas disease, which kills 50,000 people a year in Central and South America. Beard's meticulously manufactured bug poop looks and smells like the real thing (made from ammonia, ink and guar gum) but contains special bacteria that prevent the so-called "kissing bugs" from spreading the disease, which they would do if left to their normal "diet" of eating their parents' dung.

-- The Bethesda Center for Reproductive Health and Fertility in Cincinnati announced in March that the previously glum conception prospects of a couple were suddenly improved because the father's limited sperm cells had been safely stored in a hamster egg until they could be implanted to his wife's egg. Normally, sperm cells lose potency when not used immediately, and in the case of a man who produced fewer than 200 (instead of the millions most men produce), the attrition rate would have almost guaranteed failure. In May, the child was born.

-- Swedish scientists from the National Board of Fisheries reported in March that, after observing 117 pairs of trout engaged in sex (quivering violently with their mouths open, followed by the supposed simultaneous release of egg and sperm), they found that males always released their sperm at the end but that, half the time, the females cheated, withholding their eggs. The researchers speculated that the female was "faking an orgasm" as a mating strategy to preserve the eggs in case she ran into a more-desirable male.

-- According to documents released upon the settlement of a lawsuit in Kapolei, Hawaii, in February (involving sexual harassment claims against managers at a Safeway store), in one incident in the mid-1990s, a male employee who was spying on a female customer through a restroom peephole was injured when the woman realized she was being watched and shoved a toilet plunger handle through the hole, into his eye socket. (In the lawsuit, Safeway agreed to pay $250,000 to a former employee who had made numerous allegations about some managers' behavior.)

-- Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported in November that part-time magician Lau Yin-wai, 27, might have saved the life of a neighbor woman from her husband's rage. Alerted by yelling, the magician ran next door to the couple's apartment and saw the husband poised to stab his wife with a knife. The magician quickly threw his coat over the knife, shouted some words of distraction, and deftly removed the knife from the man's hand. Then, as he pulled the coat and knife away, he told the man that he had made the knife disappear, which he said seemed to bewilder the man enough to cause him to give up and await the police.

Even though she had stolen nearly $250,000 over a three-year period from her employer, Elizabeth Randolph Roach, 47, received a sentence in May of only probation (with some home confinement and work-release) because a federal judge in Chicago sympathized with her shopping addiction, which he characterized as "self-medicat(ion)" for severe depression. At the depth of her illness, Roach needed the stolen money to pay for 70 pairs of shoes, a $7,000 belt buckle, and other clothes and accessories she purchased on shopping trips to London, most of which she never wore.

-- In March in Huntsville, Ala., John and Ruby Barnes were hospitalized with severe burns after trying to heat cans of aerosol paint on their stove to make the paint come out easier. Also in March, Greene County (Ill.) inmate David W. Vinyard, in jail for failure to pay traffic fines, was fooling around with a ceiling light while standing on his cell's lavatory when he slipped, leaving a portion of his little finger in the fixture as he fell to the floor. (The local prosecutor said he would file a claim against Vinyard for damage to the fixture.)

The Pentagon's fraud-detection office (the inspector general) was revealed by other government investigators to have placed fake documents in its own files to cover up inadequate fraud investigations. A historic preservation group's headquarters was accidentally destroyed when a wrecking company confused it with the to-be-demolished building next door that the group was trying to save (Miami). The BBC TV program "Crimewatch" declined to stage re-enactments of a recent wave of street robberies, saying it could not find an actor odd-looking enough (huge nose, no teeth) to accurately portray the suspect. For the first time since 1997, U.S. Navy basic trainees were scheduled to fire live rounds in boot camp (but only five bullets each).

(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 Swedish navy announced in May that because of slashes in the military budget, it would cut back from around-the-clock operations to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. The army and air force said they have not yet decided whether to remain open on weekends, but that they, also, were hard hit by the legislature's ban on overtime work.

-- Ben Lambert told reporters in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in May that he was forecasting to sell 40,000 pairs this year of his new E2U men's underwear, featuring a "three-hammock arrangement with non-crushing support" that would allow the scrotum to relax, whether the man is standing or sitting. Lambert said his shorts, priced at about $16 to $22 (US), would fit in much the same way that a bra fits a woman and would remove the need for men periodically to adjust their shorts for comfort.

-- Among the holdover Democratic projects recently canceled by the Bush administration was an $860,000 program to teach public housing tenants to reduce stress and improve their self-esteem by the use of colors, meditation, aromatherapy and "applied kinesiology" (in which a practitioner feels a person's glands to determine, for therapy purposes, which of 14 personality types that person is). The career Housing and Urban Development official who had approved the program is a priest of the International Metaphysical Ministry, and the program's chief trainer said she was "shocked" that something so successful was being terminated.

Witnesses to the bar shooting by Luther V. Casteel, 42, in Elgin, Ill., in April, in which two people were killed and 18 wounded by the gun-obsessed ex-con, say they were most disturbed by the fact that Casteel laughed all the way through the ordeal; said one, "How can you laugh when you're killing people?" And according to a police report in the Vail (Colo.) Daily on Feb. 22, a man was arrested for vandalizing a Colorado Mountain College building with a fire extinguisher, motivated, the man later said, because he was being chased by seven men and a baby and that the baby was laughing at him. And according to a Naples (Fla.) Daily News report in March, laughter "clubs" are starting up all over the world, with "certified" laughter "leaders" teaching members the techniques (and psychological and physiological benefits) of the "lion laugh," the "roller coaster laugh," and the "tickle laugh," among others.

-- When sheriff's deputies decided to break routine on April 17 and search not only visitors entering the Daley Center court building in Chicago but also the people who work there and who thus usually enter without inspection, they confiscated several dozen items of contraband from badged employees, including brass knuckles, tear gas and a dagger, and their booty does not even count what some lawyers and judges might have had on them except that they saw what was going on and simply declined to enter until the inspection ended.

-- At the International Beauty Show in New York City in April, Fort Myers, Fla., hairdresser Valentino LoSauro showed off his "Edward-Scissorhands"-type finger scissors, "Clawz," which he has been using in his salon and now hopes to bring to market. By attaching the devices to one or both hands, he can run his fingers through hair, with independent cutting action from each finger, greatly reducing the time for a haircut.

-- In the five years since he moved to Wilkie, Saskatchewan (population 1,300), Louis Harewood, 56, who operates assisted-living homes and who is a former Baptist preacher, has been accused by husbands of seducing local married women, using his charisma to allegedly send the women into voodoo-like hazes in which they reject old friends and otherwise act strange. Harewood denies any sexual contact and blames certain former employees for spreading rumors. Still, petitions recently circulated urging him to go away. Said one woman, "Our biggest worry is that if he can control 40-year-old women, what about our 16-year-old daughters?"

-- A February report in the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle described a local patient's remarkable recovery from botulism paralysis at Park Ridge Hospital. The woman recently recalled that, after the toxin struck her in June 2000, she lay in her hospital bed, able to hear everything around her but unable to communicate in any way with anyone, and that someone had erroneously said she was a big fan of singer Celine Dion. After that, the hospital staff, in an effort to aid the woman's recovery, played the singer's music in her room around the clock for weeks. When the paralysis left the woman, one of the first joys she experienced, she said, was stopping the music because she actually never cared for Dion.

-- In March, Alice Hoppe, 80, of Cheboygan, Mich., settled her lawsuit with her physician for his failure, over 18 months of treatment, to detect that the reason for her difficulty in swallowing was because her lower denture had caught in her throat during knee surgery in 1995. According to the doctor's attorney, the denture was hidden behind some folds of skin and "was very difficult to find."

Beverly Hills, Calif., security consultant Paxton Quigley introduced SuperBra recently, a $30 garment that doubles as a holster for a gun the size of a snub-nosed .38 revolver; said Quigley: "If a woman is attacked, the purse is the first thing taken from her (so) a good place to conceal a weapon is in the chest area." And in March, the British firm Gossard introduced the $40 Ultrabra Airotic that inflates (via accompanying pump) up to two cup sizes for the woman who, according to a spokesperson, doesn't want "huge breasts through the day but (does) want to have them in the evening."

-- In January, Ms. Sierra Kirkpatrick, 15, married Mr. Sauren Crow, 48, of Taos, N.M., after Sierra's mother vouched for her at a Las Vegas wedding (which is required for a minor to marry in Nevada). Sierra's father (the mother's ex-husband) went nuts when he found out, but the mother and others say the couple is well-suited for each other, in that both are artsy types, dress in "Goth" attire, and actually resemble each other, with their all-black clothes and long black hair.

-- As always, many people (375) died from accidents and fights during Thailand's New Year festival in April. And as always, there were several deaths on New Year's Eve in Japan from eating the traditional mochi rice cakes, which are so sticky that about a dozen people choke to death on them every Dec. 31 (eight last New Year's). And as always, many (this year 35) hajj-pilgrimage Muslims at the annual stone-the-devil ritual in Mina, Saudi Arabia, in March were crushed to death by the sheer numbers of those worshipping.

Police in the retirement town of Sun City West, Ariz., said they've been having problems lately with seniors having sex in public (on golf courses, as well as in lovers' lanes). Neighbors convinced Penn State University to close a research lab because they feared the consequences of living next door to its ongoing cockroach experiments. At least a dozen sheriff's deputies and drug officers in vans and SUVs aggressively raided a home because a helicopter patrol had spotted a patch of ubiquitous mulberry weed (mistaken for marijuana, which it vaguely resembles) in a woman's back yard (Spicewood, Texas). China's news agency announced that 3 million of its people practice auto-urine (i.e., drink your own) therapy, to strengthen the immune system.

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