News of the Weird

-- July marked the appearance of a glossy, 32-page publication, Mainline Lady, funded by the Health Ministry in the Netherlands and designed to resemble a newsstand fashion magazine, for the purpose of helping drug-addicted women feel better about their health and appearance. Included are articles on rejuvenating heroin-ravaged dry skin, putting on weight, and disguising needle marks with makeup, as well as an upbeat horoscope column tailored to the everyday problems of drug addicts.

-- In 1993, John and Narda Goff's 10-year-old daughter was sexually molested by a man using his finger for penetration, an attack which at the time was, under Ohio law, merely "assault" and not "rape." The Goffs campaigned and finally persuaded the Ohio legislature in 1996 to broaden the law to include any forced penetration. In July 2001, the Goffs were charged with violating that very law, having impregnated the same daughter in 1998 with stepfather John's sperm (using a syringe), allegedly because Narda is infertile and the couple wanted a baby "together." (Actually, according to the daughter, John Goff was sexually molesting her before that, even during the time the Goffs were crusading for a stronger rape law.)

-- Max & Mina's kosher ice cream parlor in Kew Gardens Hills, N.Y., was featured in a July Jewish Week piece, bringing readers up to date on the many offbeat flavors the store makes (all rich in butterfat but meeting various Jewish dietary standards): "lox," "corn on the cob," "horseradish," "peanut butter and jelly," "beer and nuts" and "campfire delight" (principal taste: baked beans). The store also once made (but has discontinued) a "broccoli" ice cream.

-- A 30-year-old patient was awarded $2.1 million by a jury in Spokane, Wash., in January after evidence that neuropsychiatrist Donald Dudley (who died before trial) tried to chemically erase part of the man's brain and turn him into a trained killer. And in June, a medical board in Ontario found psychiatrist Raymond Danny Leibl guilty of "disgraceful" conduct in treating a 53-year-old woman by disciplining her like a baby, giving her sodium amytal with vodka to improve her memory, and having her call him "Mommydaddy Ray." And in May, a medical board in Oklahoma removed plastic surgeon Scott Gilbert's license after evidence of several lapses of care, including the use of wood screws and Superglue on patients.

-- According to a June report in Britain's The Guardian, at least two schools in Belgium's Limburg province will begin serving a kind of very-low-alcohol beer in public school cafeterias beginning in September, in an effort to wean kids aged 3 to 15 from sugary sodas and fruit juice.

-- The Washington state board charged with evaluating college-degree programs last year approved a bachelor's and master's degree curriculum in "astrological studies" for the Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences in Seattle. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, only 20 of the 31 initial enrollees made it through the first year. Said Kepler president Enid D. Newburg, "Most people weren't used to a college level of study." Said one student, who said she is a veteran of an honors program at the University of Texas, "(T)he faculty at Kepler just blows away any of the professors I had (in Texas)."

-- At the Innovate 2001 expo in London in July, British inventor David Morrow introduced "Consent Condoms," designed to protect men from charges of date rape in that each condom comes with a fingerprint-sensitive tab of paper on which the man's partner can acknowledge that the act is consensual. Morrow says the fingerprint is more reliable than oral assent and that, unlike a signature, is deliverable while the partner is in the throes of ecstasy. (Among Innovate 2001's other exhibits was the "Ice Baton," billed as a "natural way" to relieve hemorrhoids.)

-- Singapore's Straits Times reported in July that the health office in Muar, Malaysia, had shut down a food stall and arrested its proprietor because he was boiling dirty underwear in pots with food, which he said, according to legend, improved the taste of the food. Said a health official, "(T)his is an untrue belief and must be stopped."

-- In July, Greg Daniels, 51, said he will challenge the Austin, Texas, police department's towing of his cars, arguing that just because he happens to own about a dozen cars, which he parks in the street in front of his house and uses in rotation, doesn't mean that any of them is junk (which is what he has been cited for as police tow the cars away). Daniels, who told the Austin American-Statesman that his cars are always legally parked, was forced to buy some of them back once after the city confiscated them. He says he's just not ready to settle down with just two or three of his favorites.

-- Richard S. Markey, 44, convicted in Hartford, Conn., of defrauding investors of $4.8 million, wrote U.S. marshals in April that he thought he had presented a strong case for his innocence and that therefore he wouldn't be reporting to prison as scheduled on May 2, but rather was going to a relative's place near Syracuse, N.Y., and that if he didn't hear anything more from the marshals, he would consider the case closed. (He did hear from them; they looked him up and re-arrested him. During his trial, Markey had described himself not as a "person" subject to the laws of the U.S., but as a "sovereign," and besides, he claimed the charges had to be dismissed because the prosecutor had spelled his name in all-capitals on the indictment.)

-- In 1997 News of the Weird reported on two mid-career professionals (a nurse and a lawyer) who had made new beginnings as "pet psychics," who charged $40 a half-hour to help on relationship problems between owners and pets by conversing directly with the animals about their problems (even though some pet-clients are handled only by phone). In a June 2001 story, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel profiled pet "intuitive" Carol Schultz, 35, who does paw-readings and counsels pets that suffer trauma, such as the three-legged cat feeling guilty because he was inadequate at litter-box-burying, and the dog that felt trapped inside a cat's body (who "had some issues," Schultz said, because his name was Duke).

-- A 22-year-old man was killed when he stopped his car in traffic and walked back to the driver behind him to express his road rage, and was fatally hit by a driver in the next lane (Columbus, Ohio, May). A 19-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin, notorious for playing fire-related pranks on his friends, was killed after apparently starting a prank fire that destroyed his apartment (May). An 18-year-old man was killed when three sticks of dynamite that the man habitually carried around (for no apparent reason) in a backpack exploded (Winnemucca, Nev., June).

-- Three men and a woman hoisted a homeowner's entire metal, two-car garage onto their pickup truck and attempted to drive off with it before abandoning it in the street when the structure broke (Detroit). An Oklahoma State University research team said its sliced peanut butter (wrapped in plastic sleeves like single-slice cheese) would be on grocery shelves in U.S. test markets soon. Political correctness hit India when authorities in Jammu and Kashmir banned the word "widow" for fear it would further upset women whose husbands have died in recent separatist battles (approved: "wife of late (name)"). A barroom gunfight was averted when an inebriated man, waving a pellet gun in his prosthetic arm, watched as the arm came off and fell to the floor (El Paso, 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/.)

-- 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/.)