News of the Weird

-- Recent Too-Cute Diagnoses: "Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome" (a strong urge to stay out late, followed by an inability to wake up on time, according to Dr. Michael Thorpy, a sleep-disorders specialist interviewed for an April New York Observer report) and "Pseudologia Fantastica" (a condition doctors offered up to a judicial disciplinary commission in May as a medical explanation for why Los Angeles Judge Patrick Couwenberg had padded his resume with tall tales).

-- A Tucson, Ariz., international big-game-hunting organization recently pressured the government of Botswana to lift its ban on shooting at the rapidly dwindling lion population, with help from three of the group's highest-profile members, former President George Bush, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and former Vice President Dan Quayle. According to a leading Botswana conservationist, rich hunters (safaris cost $20,000 to $35,000) create even further attrition by demanding to kill only mature males, because of their bushy manes, leaving lairs unprotected from other lions. Said the conservationist (to London's The Guardian): "There's no reason to shoot a lion other than ego. As a hunter you want to feel great so you can hang it on the wall and your mates say, 'Wow, what a man!'"

-- A steadily increasing number of Cambodians in the northern Dangrek Mountains are trekking to the gravesite of the heinous dictator Pol Pot (who presided over the murders of a million people during the 1970s) because they say that communing with his spirit brings them good luck and, in some cases, winning lottery numbers, according to a June New York Times dispatch.

Scotland Yard was called to investigate a citizen complaint against a police officer who purposely broke wind while investigating a crime scene at her home (Chingford, Essex, England; June), but in Werribee, Australia, in June, a misdemeanor convict was fined about $100 (U.S.) for purposely breaking wind inside a police station. And Drew Shintani, 35, was charged with stabbing a 30-year-old co-worker because he was tired of the co-worker's laughing at Shintani's flatulence problem (Hilo, Hawaii; April). And two men (aged 49 and 64) were arrested at a ShopRite store for harassing customers with cans of an aerosol spray that sounded and smelled like someone breaking wind (Washington Township, N.J., May).

-- A state judicial board's fact-finding panel concluded in April that Los Angeles County Judge Patrick Murphy was not entitled to the 400 days sick leave he has taken since 1996 and that he was merely malingering while being paid $130,000 a year to be a judge. Murphy said he was plagued with various maladies, including a phobia for the job of judging, and that's why he had left the country and enrolled as a full-time medical student in Dominica while still on the courthouse payroll.

-- New Mexico District Judge Stephen Bridgforth ruled in March against a new trial for Joseph Montoya, 22, leaving him to serve the 20-year sentence he was given in a 1999 shooting death, despite the subsequent confession (backed by a polygraph) by Montoya's twin brother, Jeremy, that it was he who committed the crime. The judge reasoned that, after all, several witnesses freely admitted they were confused about which one of the Montoya brothers fired the shots, but that the jury, in its wisdom, decided it was Joseph, and that was that.

-- According to police in Wethersfield, Conn., Richard Levitt, 42, secretly videotaped himself having sex with a girlfriend and decided to post the video on the Internet, which caused problems when the girlfriend found out, and more problems when a second Levitt girlfriend found out, and even more problems when Mrs. Levitt found out. (The girlfriends met and together confronted Levitt and his wife at home at 2 a.m. on March 25.) Levitt was arrested for disseminating voyeuristic materials.

-- Prison officials in Australia told reporters in May that they would review their procedures after they found out that convicted mass murderer Julian Knight (who killed seven and wounded 17 in an incident in Melbourne in 1987) had earned a behind-bars college degree in military strategy and weapons systems. One official acknowledged that the curriculum Knight chose might conflict with the rehabilitation goals the prison had set out for him.

-- A mirrored dome used in playground equipment in 45 locations around the country, called a playscape, concentrates the sun's rays inside to a temperature of over 250 degrees, but before an incident in Bristol, Conn., playscapes were thought to be acceptable devices for small children to play in. (At a Bristol day-care center in April, the shirt of a 3-year-old boy burst into flames, and though the boy was not injured, the New York company that makes playscapes recalled them so that the mirrors could be replaced with safer material.) [Boston Globe-AP, 4-27-01]

-- In April in Chicago, IBM acknowledged it had authorized an on-the-street advertising campaign (for the Linux computer operating system) that involved the defacing of public sidewalks with graffiti at 100 locations around the city. The 20-year-old man hired to paint all the hearts and smiling penguins was arrested, and municipal officials said IBM would be liable for cleanup costs. An IBM spokeswoman admitted the campaign "got a little carried away."

News of the Weird reported in 1999 on the work of Reading University (England) Professor Kevin Warwick in the uses of surgically implanted microchips, which he then was offering as technology to track the whereabouts of employees, pets, and people licensed to carry firearms. Recently, Warwick announced that in September, he and his wife, Irena, will have transmitter/receiver microchips implanted in their arms, attached to nerve fibers, and that Warwick will attempt, by intentionally moving his fingers, to send a radio message from his arm to Irena's that will cause her fingers to move also. Researchers believe the technology could be used to allow spinal-injury patients to move paralyzed limbs by sending radio waves directly from the brain to the limb.

Public works officials in Kannapolis, N.C. (population 30,000), were forced to issue a plea to residents in June that two recent sewer breakdowns (producing solid-waste flooding) were caused by flushing cloth underwear down toilets and that people should please stop that.

Two men were arrested for selling marijuana from a neighborhood ice-cream truck, after drawing the attention of police because the only customers in line were adults (Brooklyn, N.Y.). A judge ordered a 19-year-old man to abstain from sex until marriage (under potential penalty of decades in prison), after noting his penchant for impregnating young teen-age girls (Corpus Christi, Texas). A 73-year-old woman rescued her Scottish terrier from the jaws of a pit bull by biting the pit bull on the neck until it released her dog (Tallahassee, Fla.). A 17-year-old boy on a bicycle was arrested after robbing a Taco Bell via the drive-thru window, having been hampered in his getaway by his decision to wait around until an employee could fix him a hot chalupa and put it into the money bag (Fort Worth, Texas).

(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 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/.)