News of the Weird

-- A ruling last year by the Oregon Supreme Court is finally having a major negative impact on police, according to a July Los Angeles Times dispatch. The court had ruled that all lawyers, including prosecutors, must obey the state bar association's nearly absolute prohibitions against deceit, meaning that law enforcement cannot engage in "undercover" and "sting" operations (which involve tricking suspects). Already, one child-pornography investigation has been shut down because prosecutors could not administer a case in which police caught pedophiles by pretending online that they were underage.

-- Film turned up in July of tourist boat operations near Cape Jervis (near Adelaide), Australia, which ferried visitors so they could stand on a dead whale and watch great white sharks munch off the carcass; some tourists even posed for vacation photos petting the preoccupied sharks on the head (briefly). The local environmental minister said he was appalled and would ask for legislation "to protect people too stupid to protect themselves." (Obviously, News of the Weird is opposed to this type of legislation.)

-- The San Francisco Chronicle reported in July that the new dog catcher for San Mateo County will be paid $250,000 a year, more than twice what San Francisco's dog catcher receives and much more than Gov. Gray Davis or San Francisco mayor Willie Brown are paid. Said a county executive, "I hope we have the happiest and healthiest animals in the world because that's an awfully heavy price to pay."

In July, a man who has served time for fatal bombings was convicted of attempting to firebomb three Montreal coffee shops because the owner refused to give them French names. Protestors broke windows at the Tennessee capitol in Nashville in July, furious that legislators might adopt a state income tax. Three New Mexico regulators reported receiving death threats in May during the Public Regulation Commission's deliberations over whether to change the telephone area codes in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

-- The then-executive director of the Tampa, Fla., Make-a-Wish Foundation pleaded no contest in March to grand theft charges for misappropriating almost $20,000 that had been donated for dying children; she served three months in jail, and is now on house arrest, and with an order to repay $6,500. In June, she filed a lawsuit against the foundation demanding back pay and unused vacation and sick pay dating from the date of her firing in June 1999 and demanded a court order restoring her as the foundation's executive director. Her first name is Delores, and she uses the surname of her husband, the lawyer who filed her lawsuit, Jack W. Crooks.

-- Sherman P. Hawkins' impressive application for the vacant position of director of the Montana Department of Corrections was turned down in July by the governor, despite Hawkins' 28 years' experience in the department and his master's degree in administration. As the governor noted, however, Hawkins' 28 years were as "inmate," in that he is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife.

-- Virginia Green, a patient in the August (Maine) Mental Health Institute and who was convicted of bludgeoning her 75-year-old mother to death in 1996, had filed a lawsuit alleging that the facility's 8 a.m. wakeup policy violated her rights and ordering that the institute be instructed to permit her to sleep until 11 a.m. (In June, the Maine Supreme Court turned her down.)

-- In June, the Ontario Court of Appeal reinstated DUI charges against Christopher Dominski, finding that his right to be notified that he can have an attorney present under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was not violated. According to court records, when a police officer asked if he would like to call an attorney, Dominski responded, "Yeah, whatever," which a trial court thought indicated ambiguity but which the appeals court said was a sufficiently serious question and answer.

-- In June, the city education commissioner of Berlin, Germany, publicly suggested that the pro soccer league bar players from spitting on the field and especially their increasingly popular habit of clearing a nostril by pressing a finger against the opposite nostril and blowing, saying such behavior sends the wrong message to kids. Several players immediately defended the right to blow: Said one, "We can't carry a packet of hankies on the pitch."

Strongsville, Ohio, lawyer Daniel Todt killed his wife and two children in June as the government closed in on him for what prosecutors described as a series of outlandish attempted frauds. The Todts (both lawyers) were a traditional, middle-class, community-involved family except for one thing: Todt believed that in the 1940s, Mr. Thor De Allah Kahn from the planet Atlantis met top Earth officials and left with them securities (to improve the planet's welfare, in one instance for reconstruction in the Philippines) in staggering amounts (e.g., $33 billion, $13 billion), which Todt very earnestly and naively tried to present to many banks in several countries for payment, even after U.S. Treasury officials warned him they were worthless. Todt had also painstakingly explained his theory in various venues (e.g., local bar association, the Securities and Exchange Commission), usually to open-mouthed silence.

Detroit police arrested five suspects in connection with the robbery of a McDonald's restaurant in June, shortly after they made their alleged getaway; they appeared to have rehearsed the robbery, but inside the car, one of the men discarded his bandana by tossing it out the window, where it inadvertently snagged on the radio antenna and acted as an identifying flag for police chasing the car. And Elizabeth McDonald, 24, pleaded no contest in June to robbing the VFW hall in Medina County, Ohio, where she used to work; she was wearing a mask, but it did not disguise her waist-length red hair, which was instantly recognizable by at least one former co-worker.

News of the Weird loves stories about haggis, the Scottish meal that some people believe is the world's most disturbing formal dish (aesthetically, because of its gray color, and flavorfully, in that it typically is a pudding of sheep organs, suet and oatmeal, boiled in the animal's stomach). In May, police in Manchester, England, reported they were investigating an attack against the house of a Scottish woman, age 45 (and who has been living in England for 35 years), as a "hate crime," in that a haggis was thrown through her window. A police spokeswoman said the haggis had been "taken away for examination."

After an emergency airlift for treatment, a man survived his "attack" by an already-dead (but venom-retaining) timber rattlesnake that "bit" him while the clumsy man was mounting the carcass on a board (Quincy, Ill.). Iranian officials found a smuggler with 3.5 pounds of opium in his belly, said to beat the old world's record of 2.4 pounds (Kenarak, Iran). Nurses and doctors were among the 400 attending the unauthorized, drug-drenched, deafening rave party at Paris' Sainte Anne psychiatric hospital, whose patients were said to be oblivious of the commotion in that most had been heavily sedated for the night. A water heater at a shopping center video store exploded, rocketing itself through the roof, over a Taco Bell, and landing in a Pizza Hut parking lot in the next block (Burien, Wash.).

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

-- 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/.)