News of the Weird

-- News of the Weird has reported before on "smart toilets" that can make daily health-status readings, but in July, the Cheshire, England, company Twyford told a BBC reporter that it had racheted up the technology a bit with a model that automatically performs urine and fecal analysis for users and could then transmit the results to the family doctor via the Internet in the event the readings are out of line. A Twyford spokesman said the toilet could also call the local grocer to, say, send over some beans if the results indicated a lack of roughage in the diet. (Availability of the toilet is still several years away.)

-- In a July story, The New York Times profiled ex-Colombo crime family captain Michael Franzese, 50, who "retired" from the mob in 1990 but contrary to the so-called Mafia code, is still alive, and not only alive but is a longtime coach in the Encino (Calif.) Little League, widely revered by parents who know his background but praise him for the unusually calm, encouraging demeanor he displays (compared to that of some parent-coaches). The Times writer speculated that Franzese may have bought his survival with stashed riches, in that his mob specialty was as a financial mastermind.

-- Bernhard Goetz, who became part hero and villain in 1984 when he shot his way out of a perceived subway attack by black teen-agers in New York City, announced recently that he is running for mayor of the city on a limited-program platform: hire Mayor Giuliani (who legally cannot run again) to actually run the city; install vegetarianism in municipal facilities; feed the poor generously but only with deliberately mediocre food (so they won't get used to it); permit city workers to take productive naps on the job; and promote the gentle squirrel as our most precious pet.

In the last several years, top corporate executives have received compensation (via sweetheart deals to buy their company's stock) in ridiculously high amounts unrelated to their efforts, according to experts cited by Fortune magazine in a June report. Several high-profile executives (e.g., Sandy Weill of Citigroup, Jack Welch of General Electric) "earned" over $100 million a year at the same time their companies' profits and stock prices were plunging, and their one-year compensation equals roughly the salary and benefits of as many as 3,000 of their laid-off employees. According to the Fortune experts, corporate compensation committees typically "reason" that if a stock's price falls, it is somehow "necessary" to award the CEO even more stock options because without them, he supposedly has little incentive to improve the company.

-- In a May report on a massive law-enforcement strike in March against the ultra-violent Quebec chapter of Hell's Angels, Toronto's Globe and Mail said the beginning of the end for the group was that, several years ago, the chapter hired two nasty-looking bikers to be contract killers, and then shortly after that, the two men fell in love with each other. Subsequently, the men (Danny Boy Kane and Ace Simard) turned on each other and cooperated with the authorities; Kane committed suicide last year.

-- Detectives in Des Moines, Iowa, caught a break investigating a murder case that went to trial in May: A local Holiday Inn had not yet washed a bedspread from a crime scene in one of its rooms, thus yielding important stain evidence. Iowa law requires only that sheets and towels be cleaned after each guest; soiled bedspreads are judged subjectively, and the one in this case was found to contain (in addition to the stains sought) 106 others, including 38 semen stains.

-- From the Roswell (N.M.) Daily Record, 5-29-01: "A woman, who told Roswell Police she had been on another planet for three years, reported a robbery Friday. She said a known person had taken the upper plate of her dentures valued at $800, silverware in a wooden box valued at $1,000, and various jewelry worth $1,000. She said she hadn't actually seen the named suspect take the items, but he 'moves so swift you can't see him.'"

-- From the Dana Point (Calif.) News section of the Orange County Register, 3-22-01: "Calle Juanita, 26000 block: Deputies responded to a 911 hang-up call to learn the resident's daughter had recently learned how to call 911 in school and thought she would give it a try, 3:25 p.m., March 17."

-- From the Clarksville (Tenn.) Leaf-Chronicle, 5-20-01: "An Inver Lane couple awoke Friday morning while an intruder was inside their residence. Just after 3 a.m., a man entered the residence through a kitchen window. According to Officer Keith Johnson's report, the woman woke up, saw the man standing over her, and he put his finger up the victim's nose."

Earlier this year, News of the Weird reported on a British company that had installed three vending machines in London train stations to sell single-sheet collections of poetry, to appeal to commuters weary of reading newspapers. In April, honoring National Poetry Month, the Alaska Council of the Arts, working with the Borealis Brewing Co., decided upon yet another offbeat delivery vehicle to improve society's exposure to poetry: beer bottle labels. One selection saluted Arctic poet Robert Service: "So cheers to Service, Yukon Bard / Who told us tales of the fearless / I'll take a book and frosty beer / Instead of dying, cold and beerless."

In May, Randy Lunsford announced he would appeal a Raleigh, N.C., judge's decision shutting him out of the estate of his 18-year-old daughter, who died tragically in 1999 but whose estate won a $100,000 wrongful death lawsuit. Court records show that Lunsford moved away from the mother around the time the daughter was born, never came back, and never paid a penny in child support. Lunsford said, however, that he felt obligated to claim "his" share of his daughter's estate because he was fighting for all the imperfect parents out there. His argument: Since the daughter had turned 18 shortly before she was killed, the "abandoned child" rule freezing him out should not apply.

A 13-year-old girl was killed "surfing" atop a speeding SUV driven by a 16-year-old boy (Pensacola, Fla., May). A 45-year-old man drinking with fishing buddies choked to death after trying to swallow a live, 5-inch-long perch (Viburnum, Mo., May); according to one of the buddies, the man's last words were, "Hey, watch this!" A 20-year-old Boston University student fell to his death from a campus building that he was scaling with a rope in a prank attempt to display a swastika on the roof (April).

East Japan Railways began offering a female-only train car for late-evening commuters fed up with inebriated salarymen furtively groping them (Tokyo). Two Seattle police officers, each believing the other was a civilian driving a stolen cruiser, fired a total of 20 shots at each other in a standoff; fortunately, every shot missed. A customer was apparently the victim of a prank in a Kmart men's room and had to be taken to a hospital for removal of a toilet seat to which someone had applied adhesive (Waterloo, Iowa). After liquor seeped underneath a resident's door in a senior citizens' home, police found a leaking moonshine still inside (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia).

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

-- Military researchers will soon try to combine the two awfullest smells ever engineered, in an attempt to develop the ultimate nonlethal weapon, a magnificent stink bomb. According to a July report in New Scientist, the winning stenches (excrement and rotting foods/carcasses, with each technologically "improved" to even fouler levels) would be mixed, with the result a fetidness so overpowering that not only would it disperse people in a panic, but would also act on brain tissue in the same fear-provoking way that other unrecognizable stimuli do.

-- In July, the city council of La Verkin, Utah, passed an anti-United Nations ordinance (soon to be copied by the city council of Virgin, Utah) that not only prohibits the municipal government from recognizing any UN activities but also requires any private citizen engaged in such activities to file an annual report with the city and to post a sign on his property informing the neighbors.

-- So powerful is the fear by Los Angeles high school administrators that were they to select a single valedictorian for a school, it would hurt other students' feelings, that Granada Hills High had 44 valedictorians this year, Chatsworth High 31, Cleveland High 20, Monroe High 17 and North Hollywood High 10, according to a New Times Los Angeles report in July. Said one dissenting teacher, sarcastically: "If one person got very, very good grades and was singled out as valedictorian, we might be saying they are better than other kids. And we can't have that."

In May, two anti-discrimination bills were voted out of the Illinois House; the bill prohibiting public establishments from discriminating against motorcyclists passed, 111-0, and the bill prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians passed, 60-55. Also in May, the Washington state legislature's student anti-bullying bill was stalled by lobbying from Christian conservatives, who believe the law would make it harder for them to scold gay and lesbian schoolkids for their "immoral" lifestyles. And in documents turned up earlier this year in a lawsuit, the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company was revealed to have begun a marketing campaign in the early 1990s in San Francisco directed at homeless smokers and gay smokers, and to have called its program "Project SCUM" (which it said referred to "subculture urban marketing").

-- In filing her April lawsuit in Tacoma, Wash., against the Tahoma Veterinary Hospital, Michelle Ford made it clear that she expected a jury award equivalent to that for the loss of a human family member, though the "wrongful death" in this instance was that of her beloved 220-pound Saint Bernard, Elizabeth, who died during her third-time Caesarian-section procedure (from which 15 puppies resulted). And in May, a judge in Northampton, Mass., dismissed Lamar Peoples' lawsuit against Massachusetts Electric Co. after his cat, Venus Viola, was electrocuted on an uninsulated company wire; Peoples was demanding $250,000, which is the value of the good luck he said the cat was expected to bring him, but the judge shipped the case to small claims court.

-- Australian judge Brian Herron awarded Arthur and Filommena Raso and their two children about $85,000 in damages in March when they suffered food poisoning, apparently after eating pork purchased from a local wholesaler. In addition, due to special demand by Arthur Raso, the judge awarded about $1,200 additional for the unusually large number of rolls of toilet paper the family says it went through because of diarrhea from the tainted pork.

-- In March, twice-convicted murderer Kenneth Williams, 21, filed a lawsuit against the prison system in Arkansas (his current residence), demanding his right to be placed on death row. The prison, noting Williams' violence and history of escape attempts, had transferred him from death row to its maximum-security lockup for its most problematic cases. Williams says the deprivation of "rights" has caused him mental, emotional and physical distress, and besides, he hasn't tried to escape in over a year (even though he killed a man during that escape).

-- 21st Century Russian Technology: Russian inventor Dmitry Zhurin (or his colleague Sergei Lykov, depending on the news source consulted) told reporters in February that he has introduced a working model of a talking vodka bottle that proposes toasts (roughly translated: "Another round, then?" and "To our beautiful women"). Periodically after the initial unscrewing of the cap, a louder cacaphony of voices is heard. The battery doesn't last long after its first use, but then, as Zhurin points out, neither usually does the vodka.

-- A Decatur, Ga., company that makes ecosystem-preserving, concrete artificial reefs for fragile areas in the world's oceans has also finished about 60 jobs in a side business: mixing cremated ashes into the concrete "reef balls" so that, as the company's owner describes it, the deceased can spend eternity among marine life rather than on a plot of land with dead people. Costs range from $850 (being part of a community reef) to $3,200 for your own reef ball; the balls are then donated to government reef projects, with about 30 so far off the coasts of Florida.

News of the Weird has reported previously on realistic-looking urine delivery devices that some men use to defeat drug tests by yielding either another person's urine or synthetic urine. In March, Donald Paul Edwards Jr., 27, was charged in Columbia, Mo., with "possession of a forging instrumentality," which is a crime normally reserved for counterfeit currency plates; Edwards possessed a "Whizzinator," a plastic penis that authorities say he was using to fake (i.e., forge) his drug test. And in a May police report, a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter noted that an attempt to use such a fake device in that city by Donald C. Milligan Jr., 36, failed because, as the reporter wrote, "(T)he plastic prosthetic didn't fool a Cuyahoga County probation officer, who was trained to observe the sights and sounds of urination."

According to a police report in the Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal, a Dutchess County sheriff's deputy arrested a 40-year-old woman on March 21 and charged her with allowing her 14-year-old son to take nude pictures of her and to post them on the Internet.

A year ago, News of the Weird reported that Japan's Kazutoyo "The Rabbit" Arai (weight: 101 pounds) was the toast of New York's Coney Island, having beaten the 400-pound American champion for the annual Nathan's international hot-dog-eating title, 25 (in 12 minutes) to 16. On July 4, 2001, "Hungry" Charles Hardy, a large man from Brooklyn, improved the American record to 23 but could only finish third, behind Arai (31) and the new champion, another slim Japanese man, Takeru Kobayashi, whose astonishing 12-minute total (buns and all) was 50.

The North Carolina Senate passed a funeral home regulation bill that included a prohibition against cussing in the vicinity of a corpse. And Tennessee officials agreed on the need for Spanish-language civics education after a Hispanic illegal alien, asked to show ID in applying for a driver's license, naively offered up a copy of his deportation order (Nashville). And a man's kitchen exploded when he turned on the oven to heat lasagna, having forgotten that a July-4th-partying friend had hidden his illegal firecrackers there several hours earlier (Kansas City, Mo.). And a motorist seriously choking on a hamburger, inadvertently gave himself a life-saving Heimlich maneuver when, having lost control of the car, he smashed into a utility pole and was thrust forward against the steering wheel (Leesburg, Fla.).

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

-- According to the annual report on estimated accidents in the home, from Britain's Department of Trade and Industry and detailed in a June issue of New Scientist, three dozen people were sent to the hospital for injuries associated with teapot covers; about 165 for injuries from placemats, about 330 from toilet-paper holders, and about 13,000 from vegetables. However, sponge-related accidents fell from 996 the previous year to 787, and only 329 injuries from meat cleavers were reported. [New Scientist, 6-9-01]

-- Ms. Vermont Elaine Beverly, 47, is likely the only imprisoned murderer in the United States who earns a full salary and benefits as an ordinary state employee, according to a June Associated Press dispatch. Because Beverly (who has served 10 years of a 15-year sentence) scored high on a state test and because the Alabama Vocational Rehabilitation Office is required to hire high-scorers, she spends days on the job and returns to her Birmingham cell at night. Much of her salary is remitted to the state, but she retains full health insurance and retirement benefits. [Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer-AP, 6-27-01]

-- In Draguignan, France, a 62-year-old woman identified only as Jeanine gave birth to a boy in May, after in-vitro fertilization. She is not the oldest woman to give birth, but she is the oldest to give birth using sperm from her own brother. The two hid the brother's identity from doctors so they could qualify to receive their 80-year-old mother's estate, which would have gone to others if the siblings had been childless. The couple also had a backup plan, with the brother's sperm being used to produce a daughter with a California woman, and both children now live with the siblings. [Reuters, 6-21-01; New York Post, 6-24-01]

Alejandro Toledo was elected president of Peru in June despite his campaign explanation that the reason he once failed a drug test was because he had been kidnapped by intelligence agents and force-fed cocaine. And Harvard medical school professor Dirk Greineder was convicted in June of murdering his wife, despite his unwavering explanation that the reason the couple's blood was all over him was because they both coincidentally came down with nosebleeds on the morning of the wife's death. And a 39-year-old motorist in Bismarck, N.D., stopped in May by police for having illegal tinting on her truck's windshield, told them it must have been the work of a free-lancer who broke in and tinted the windows without her knowledge. [New York Times, 6-4-01] [New York Post, 5-21-01] [Bismarck Tribune, 5-18-01]

-- In a December 2000 incident, a man in Dakota County, Minn., decided to bludgeon to death (beneficently, he apparently thought) an already slightly wounded German shepherd/husky mix dog. Neighbor John Christoffel intervened during the bloody sledgehammer assault, imploring the man to stop and ultimately pulling a gun on him, but it was too late to save the dog. Prosecutors later filed a felony gun-threat charge against Christoffel (and threatened two more charges) while the dog-hammerer himself received only a misdemeanor citation for animal cruelty. (After community protests, the prosecutor reduced Christoffel's charge to a misdemeanor also.) [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 4-23-01]

-- Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies arrested Steven Smiley, 39, in March and charged him as the one who, just acting on his "fascination with explosives" (as one deputy described it), released plastic trash bags filled with helium into the air, with burning flares and explosive powder attached, so that when the flare burned out, the bag would explode like a small bomb. Smiley apparently had no idea where the bags would land and, according to deputies, didn't seem to care. One, however, landed on the roof of a sheriff's substation three miles from Smiley's home and exploded, but no one was hurt. [Edmonton Journal-AP, 3-17-01]

-- Federal law guarantees every child a public education, no matter how extensive his special needs (or how costly), but Massachusetts could not find any school to take Nathan Vincent, 15, at any price because of his severe physical and intellectual limitations and a self-mutilation problem, until one in New Hampshire accepted him in April after a 10-month search. During the 10 months, according to an April Boston Globe story, the state picked up the bill for him to stay, without schooling, at Children's Hospital in Boston, which came to $619,000, or the equivalent of the annual salaries of a dozen teachers. [Boston Globe, 4-24-01]

-- In May, according to prosecutors in Vancouver, British Columbia, Mr. Sukhjinder Singh Dhillon, his mother and his sister administered a severe beating to the man's wife in January because they were angry at her for being such a failure, primarily because she had so far given birth to two girls and no boys. [National Post-Vancouver Sun, 5-29-01]

-- Passed away in April in Long Beach, Calif.: Carolyn R.S. Posthumus. Arrested in January for possession of marijuana in DeKalb, Ill.: Mr. Marjuan Fleming. Sentenced for rape in April in Providence, R.I. (after telling the judge that he fantasizes about having sex with unconscious women): Kevin M. McWeeney. Announcing the unpopular decision in April that his Crow Tribe office in Montana would lay off 25 percent of the workforce because of rising expenses: Mr. Leroy Not Afraid. Pleaded guilty to a charge of possession of child pornography, Stewartville, Minn., May: Mr. Ronald Kummer. [Indianapolis Star, 4-18-01] [DeKalb Daily Chronicle, 1-20-01] [Providence Journal, 4-17-01] [USA Today, 4-20-01] [Minneapolis Star Tribune-AP, 6-1-01]

News of the Weird reported in February that Phillip Buble's father had just been convicted, in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, of attempting to murder Phillip by smacking him in the head with a crowbar because Phillip would not stop his public displays of affection with his dog-"wife" Lady, a mixed breed. (Phillip is a "zoophile" and considers himself married to Lady "in the eyes of God.") In March, Buble gave a 30-minute presentation to a state legislative committee urging (unsuccessfully) that they not pass a pending anti-bestiality bill; Lady had to wait for him in the car because dogs are not allowed in the chamber. And in April, Buble was fined $50 for having an unlicensed dog (not Lady, though Lady is also unlicensed, but she was not caught). [Bangor Daily News, 3-27-01, 4-27-01]

Ron Pollock and his sister Natalie, both 50ish, filed a lawsuit in April against a radio station in their hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, because it declined their suggestion for a program on Jewish issues, despite the station's having a similar program on Christian issues. The Pollocks are well-known in Winnipeg because of a series of lawsuits after a cable TV channel in the 1980s canceled Natalie's dance show on the basis, according to the Pollocks, that her large breasts called undesired attention to the show. (The Pollocks later discussed the controversy on various U.S. TV talk shows, including the Jenny Jones show, during which Natalie got into a shoving match with another large-breasted woman, who, according to Natalie, "banged me with (her fake breasts) in my eye.") [National Post, 4-4-01]

-- Latest Industrial Accidents: A 45-year-old bakery worker was killed when his head and shoulders got trapped in a dinner-roll-making machine (Bridgeport, Conn., April). A 54-year-old man was killed when he got caught in a factory pasta-making machine (Chester, Vt., February). A 43-year-old New York City municipal environmental worker had just cleared debris from the mouth of a large reservoir drain but then could not get out of the way fast enough and was sucked down the drain 200 feet to his death (March). [New Haven Register-AP, 4-29-01] [Burlington Free Press, 2-17-01] [MSNBC-AP, 3-3-01]

A Malaysian education official, wary of the teacher shortage, urged female teachers to plan any pregnancies so that babies are delivered during school vacations. A man notified a convenience store clerk in person that he would be back in a half-hour to rob him, then loitered outside the store for 30 minutes before returning and robbing him (Covington, Ky.). Five employees at a religion-run reformatory were arrested for having troublemaking students stand in a manure pit (Monticello, Mo.). Salt Lake City Winter Olympics officials said that music with sex, drugs or violence in the lyrics would not be permitted during snowboarding competition, even though such music is standard for many of that event's competitors. [Japan Today-Reuters, 6-26-01] [Cincinnati Enquirer, 6-24-01] [Associated Press, 6-29-01] [New York Times, 6-28-01]

Thanks this week to Albert Clawson, Joe Schwind, Larry Clunie, Jonathan Rowe, David Cyr, Jeremy Dickson-Smith, Jeremiah Puddleduck, Mark Lidwell, Joel O'Brien, Henry Wehman, Larry Manofsky, Mike Reynolds, Robin Olson, Bill Landenberger, Roger Brown II, Sean Smith, Dave Beck, Graham Thomas and Mike Quinn, and to the News of the Weird Senior Advisors and Chief Correspondents.

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