News of the Weird

-- On July 21, police arrested a squatter couple who had boldly commandeered an unoccupied (but definitely not abandoned) house in isolated Tunbridge, Vt., and had begun elaborately remodeling it, in keeping with their professed beliefs that property should be shared rather than privately owned. Jeremiah Sturk, 38, and Rene Hunt, 26, had torn out some walls, ripped out some plumbing, and were starting to redo a bathroom (financed by selling some of the house's antiques) when the owners arrived from their principal home in Massachusetts. Said the arresting officer, of the couple: "(They're) definitely (people) with a different mindset."

-- IBM said its "artificial passenger" dashboard device might be on the market in three years, thus helping to make highways safe from dozing drivers by, among other things, shooting a stream of cold water into the driver's face. According to a July issue of New Scientist, when the device detects drowsiness, it launches into jokes and other conversation and automatically rolls down windows, sounds an alarm and changes radio stations, among other things.

-- The city of Cascavel, Brazil, recently enacted a law banning office gossip by municipal employees. Punishments include reprimand, mandatory sensitivity training and dismissal, in order to protect government workers whose reputations are degraded by rumor and innuendo, especially by newly hired workers who express contempt for incumbents.

-- Three Pennsylvanians were killed in separate fireworks mishaps on July 4 (in Butler Township, Altoona and Wilkes-Barre). A 21-year-old soldier was shot to death in Huntsville, Ala., early on July 5, allegedly by the man the soldier asked not to launch fireworks nearby. A 46-year-old man was killed in Spanish Fork, Utah, on July 4 when a fireworks stand toppled over and crushed him. A mother and three children were killed in a fire in Houston on July 4 that a relative said was spread by fireworks. An off-duty police officer was beaten and sent to the hospital in critical condition on July 4, allegedly by two men who objected to the officer's request to stop launching fireworks near kids (Jersey City, N.J.).

-- Tatsumi Orimoto, according to an April report in London's Observer "a grand old man of Japanese contemporary art," said he will be working his signature piece of performance art off and on until the day he dies: "Bread Man" (in which he roams a city's streets with a half-dozen baguettes wrapped tightly around his head to pay homage to the Christian homily of "bread means body").

-- Several days after Moema Furtado's exhibit opened in March, municipal officials in Knoxville, Tenn., told her to remove her installation of thin-latex likenesses of large pieces of pulled human skin hanging from walls and ceiling, which she said were testaments to the horrors of the Holocaust. City official Mickey Foley said that the exhibits reminded her too much of huge, used condoms and that East Tennessee was not ready for that kind of art.

-- In June, playwright Bob Ernst suffered a setback at his final dress rehearsal for his work, "The John," which was being staged entirely inside a basement men's room at Maritime Hall (capacity: 20 seats) (story: a middle-aged theatergoer meets "Death" in a men's room during an intermission of "King Lear"). Ernst had rented the space, but the only Maritime supervisor with keys to the "theater" had taken the day off for his birthday, and when the room was finally opened, Ernst realized that it had not been cleaned in a while. Nonetheless, the show went on.

-- Among the Cold War intelligence ideas of the mid-1970s was the British MI5 agency's proposal to station gerbils at airport terminal gates, in the hope that they would exercise their ability to detect passengers who were unusually sweaty, in that such passengers were disproportionately likely to be spies entering Britain. MI5's director-general during that time, Sir Stephen Lander, speaking at an intelligence agency conference in June, said the idea was abandoned when the agency realized that lots of people who go up in airplanes sweat.

-- Kevin Erwin was charged with rape, kidnapping and assault in Canton, Ohio, in June, based on his allegedly acting out on his female "sex slave" whom he had met over the Internet. Faced with imminent arrest, Erwin smugly showed police a signed contract, in which the woman had agreed "to freely give myself to Kevin L. Erwin as a personal slave and life mate" and "to make myself sexually available to Kevin at all times." (She also agreed to divorce her husband and marry Erwin and to pay Erwin $100,000 for "alienation of affection" if she ever broke the contract.) The prosecutor said the woman was coerced.

-- London's Steve Bennett continues his quest to become the world's most successful amateur rocket engineer, with all systems go for launching himself into space in a "test flight" (to an altitude of 10,000 feet) in 2003 on a venture that most professional engineers called foolhardy, according to a June story reported by the BBC. The more that is known about Bennett's mission (e.g., he recently said it would be a rocket capsule made from a cement mixer, with modest installation and a small computer), the more rocket scientists believe his launch will result in instant death. However, the louder the criticism, the more certain of himself Bennett professes to be. He still rejects conventional preparations such as wind-tunnel tests and g-force tests: "That is what the test flight is for," he said.

-- According to the account of police in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in June, Darryl Owens, 33, may be the least intellectually equipped bank robber of 2001 so far. He walked in to a Huntington bank as it was opening at 9 a.m. and approached a teller, demanding money in a threatening manner; the teller told him to go back and get in line with other early-arrivers. Owens threatened a second teller, who then pulled out a large wad of money and laid it on the counter for him, and Owens took about half and fled. Before police arrived, Owens walked back into the bank, laid the money on the counter, and asked for a $45 money order. The teller, thoroughly confused, told Owens to get out of the bank, which he did, leaving on the counter his entire stash. Police chased down Owens' car a few blocks from the bank and arrested him.

-- More Penile Clashes With Nature: In June, two fishermen bled to death in Papua New Guinea's Sepik River after pirhana-like fish, attracted by the men's urine streams, attacked the source with their razor-sharp teeth. And two weeks later, a 63-year-old peasant squatting to answer nature's call in a field near Lorica, Colombia, was bitten on his penis by a poisonous Mapana-tigre snake and was rushed to a hospital (where he arrived with the snake still attached because he feared trying to dislodge it); he is recovering satisfactorily.

-- St. Louis Alderman Irene Smith, reluctant to yield the floor during a filibuster against a redistricting plan, took a restroom break at the podium, shielded by aides holding up a quilt. A man seated in a hillside cafe‚ quietly playing dominoes was knocked unconscious by a wandering cow that fell through the roof (Nevsehir, Turkey). The Transport Minister in Abuja, Nigeria, Ojo Maduekwe, pedaling to the weekly Cabinet meeting to promote greater use of bicycles in the traffic-snarled city, was accidentally knocked into a ditch when hit nearly simultaneously by two passing buses. A 39-year-old man was arrested at a store in Plainville, Conn., after surveillance cameras caught him three times urinating, apparently deliberately and inexplicably, on the back of a man's trousers.

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

-- 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/.)