News of the Weird

-- Dr. Rogerio Lobo, chairman of the ob-gyn department at Columbia Medical School, told reporters in October that he almost withheld publishing his findings (in a current issue of the prestigious Journal of Reproductive Medicine) because they were so improbable. His team found that random groups of South Korean women had almost double the success rate with in-vitro fertilization if they had been prayed for by a group of Americans than if they hadn't been. Lobo said there was probably some variable he had not accounted for, but he could not imagine what it might be.

-- The show-business newspaper Variety reported that a group of big-name Hollywood writers had been convened in early October at the behest of the U.S. Army to take advantage of their creativity in trying to predict terrorist scenarios in America that might be planned by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. Among those in attendance were the writers of the movies "Die Hard" and "Delta Force One," but also the writers of "Grease" and the TV show "MacGyver."

Arrested for public urination (Bowling Green, Ohio, September): Mr. Joshua Pees. Escaped from the same prison for a third time (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, October): Mr. Richard Slippery. Pleaded guilty after being caught at bank fraud (Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation, S.D., July): Manuel Fool Head and his wife, Sandra Fool Head. And in July, the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Andre Johnson on drug charges, calling the warrantless search of his apartment illegal; the police had broken in, citing an emergency exception to the warrant requirement solely on the basis that Johnson's street name, Earthquake, made it obvious that he is too violent to have to wait on a warrant.

-- Detrick Washington, 25, was jailed for six days in San Francisco in August on a parole violation after he almost single-handedly prevented the armed robbery of his concert-promotion business receipts and possibly saved his own life. Two robbers had threatened to kill the people in Washington's loft if he didn't turn over the cash, but Washington grabbed one of the guns and shot one robber dead (and another person shot the other robber dead). Washington was jailed because, as a parolee, he is prohibited from handling guns. After an investigation, and community pressure, Washington was released.

-- In September, Paragon Gaming of Las Vegas signed an agreement to build a casino on the land of the Augustine Band of Cahuilla Mission Indians, in order to take advantage of the exemption of tribal land from state regulation. The entire Augustine Band of Cahuilla Mission consists of Maryann Martin, age 36, and seven kids.

-- Switzerland jeopardized its renowned reputation for noncontroversy in August when it submitted for world-record consideration a cherry-spitting launch of 82 feet, allegedly beating the old record (held by American Rick "Pellet Gun" Krause of Arizona) of 74 feet. (Pellet Gun is married to the women's champion, Marlene "Machine Gun" Krause.) Switzerland's bid is controversial because it uses more-spitting-friendly pits, plus, in Switzerland, distance includes the two-foot follow-through area, whereas other world-record spits were measured from the point of release.

-- In a conference paper delivered in August, Professor Patricia Simonet (Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, Nev.) reported that dogs make a fourth distinctive sound pattern (besides bark, growl and whine): an idiosyncratic "pant" that is unmistakably joyous and playful and which is observed in such activities as tearing up a flower bed or looking back over his shoulder when he's outrunning his master at play. Simonet found that the "pant" was a series of sounds too subtle for most humans to pick up in the everyday commotion, but that when she played the sound for 15 puppies, all moved immediately to a toy area and began to frolic.

-- In July, Sarasota (Fla.) County Sheriff's Deputy Tim Czachur drove his cruiser to a familiar spot beside South Oxford Drive in Englewood to take a turn watching for speeders. The patrol car immediately rolled into a neatly created hole about 5 feet by 5 feet, which was disguised by someone's having laid palm fronds and oak branches across it. Said Czachur, "Someone must have been ticketed and got upset."

In August, Passaic County (N.J.) prosecutors filed a forfeiture action against the Craftsman turbo twin-cylinder riding lawn mower belonging to Carmin Ezzo, 45, who is crippled (spinal meningitis) and allegedly uses it for mobility when he feels the need to get out and flash neighborhood women (and, in the latest case, to attempt to flee police after flashing). According to police, Ezzo also has a home-based scheme, too (except that few fall for it anymore), of eliciting sympathy from women by pretending to be injured, and when a woman comes in to help him, he is nude.

Aug. 30 was a remarkable day at the Baltimore Police Department personnel office. Edwin V. Gaynor, 21, was filling out an application to join the force when he came to the standard question of whether he'd ever committed a crime. Gaynor decided to be candid: Well, yes, he had, and he went into detail about a carjacking and two robberies in Texas. The answer drew the notice of detectives down the hall, who questioned Gaynor, got intimate details of the crimes, called police in Texas, found out that the carjacking was unsolved, found that Gaynor's details matched the crime's details, got a search warrant for Gaynor's home, found lots of relevant evidence, and executed the Texas arrest warrant. Said Gaynor's mom, "He always wanted to be (a cop)."

Surgeon Brigitte Boisselier has come a long way since being mentioned in News of the Weird in 1998 about her plans to clone humans (at the then-price of $200,000 each). Her mission is still part-spiritual (she's a bishop in the Raelian religion, which posits that Earthlings came from extraterrestrial DNA and which requires cloning to advance the species), though she recently shut down her human-cloning lab in Nitro, W.Va. (funded by a wealthy former state legislator who offered $500,000 to have his dead infant son re-created, but who later disavowed the project), and has been investigated concerning another rumored lab near Syracuse, N.Y., which the Food and Drug Administration has questioned as possibly violating federal law.

A man's pit bull was eaten by the other pet in the house, the man's 200-pound Burmese python (Merced, Calif.). A 73-year-old man who had spent about $12,000 on driving lessons and received his very first license five months ago had his license revoked for DUI (Ipswich, England). An Albuquerque Police Department night-patrol helicopter crew came under criticism for landing behind a Krispy Kreme store to pick up a box of donuts to take to the stationhouse. A funeral home dumped a body bag containing the corpse of a 74-year-old man on his girlfriend's front porch after she balked at paying the $1,200 cremation fee (Cross Timbers, Mo.).

-- An October issue of Moscow Times profiled Ms. Galine Sinitsyna, 40, who is unemployed (formerly, a firing-range instructor), supports a teen-age son, and feels her job prospects are dim. She is a few months too old for the military but would really like to become a government sniper in Chechnya, which she has heard pays about $60 a day plus a per-kill commission. She said she has tried to take the high moral ground in her job search, turning down a very lucrative position as a contract killer for the mob. She said she was inspired by tales of a unit called the White Stockings, female snipers who fought for Chechnya in 1994-'96.

-- According to a September report in the London Daily Telegraph, former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (who occasionally ate his enemies until he was deposed in 1979, after a career of reportedly ordering about 100,000 murders) is said to be encouraging his 48 children around the world to go restore the family home in the village of Aura as a monument, although he himself is not expected to leave his exile in Saudi Arabia. A few weeks earlier, according to a San Francisco Chronicle dispatch, the 62 now-impoverished children of the late Central African Republic emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa (who had similar proclivities for murder and cannibalism), are seeking permission of the government to turn the former family home into a tourist attraction.

Wal-Mart reported that nearly 5,000 lawsuits were filed against it last year (a rate of about one every two hours, with jury verdicts coming in at a rate of six a day), making it the second most-sued entity in the country after the federal government, according to an August USA Today story. Suing the 4,300-store company is so lucrative for lawyers that the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA) sponsors a seminar exclusively on Wal-Mart issues, and private attorneys sponsor the Wal-Mart Litigation Project to trade trial techniques and information about the company. (Demonstrating that it does not long hold a grudge, Wal-Mart pharmacies continue to participate in the ATLA members' health-insurance prescription plan.)

-- Jeffrey Jacobitti, 49, was arrested by police in Keansburg, N.J., on July 5 after he drove up to two women and a 12-year-old girl and apparently illegally wiggled his tongue at them. The deputy police chief said the wiggling, in his opinion, was harassment that conveyed a threat: "(The wiggling) crossed the line, especially with the juvenile."

-- Canadian authorities, working with New York City police, arrested Patrick Critton, 54, in September and said he is the man who skyjacked an Air Canada plane to Cuba in 1971 and has been on the run ever since. Critton's whereabouts (in Mount Vernon, N.Y., where he was working as a schoolteacher) were discovered when a law enforcement official had the bright idea to enter "Patrick Critton" into an Internet search engine.

-- In August, a sheriff's lab crew in West Bridgewater, Mass., managed to get a record of the fingerprints of suspected drug-dealer Francisco Sanchez, 21, despite the man's having strategically bitten his fingertips bloody while waiting for the crew to arrive; a person's prints go "pretty deep," said an officer. And the month before, in Lewiston, Maine, a 17-year-old boy, who had been arrested earlier in the evening for assault at a convenience store, escaped briefly by chewing through the metal chain of his handcuffs.

-- A mom (school principal) and dad (sheriff's sergeant) were charged with making their son sleep outside and dumping dog feces in his knapsack for his failure to do errands (Los Angeles, September). A mom and dad were charged with tying their son down at night, with a hog ring on his penis, to curb his masturbation habit (Pryor, Okla., September). A former British army sergeant was charged with repeatedly punching and kneeing his son after the kid, as is his regular pattern, once again beat Dad at Monopoly (London, September).

-- Police in Casselberry, Fla., arrested a 29-year-old woman in August and charged her with leaving her kids, age 12 and 8, locked inside her storage locker all day while she was at work; she pointed out that it was one of the larger lockers on the lot (at 12 feet by 20 feet), but still had no plumbing or ventilation, and the temperature was more than 100 degrees inside. Then, less than three weeks later and 130 miles away in Stuart, Fla., a 30-year-old woman was arrested for doing the same thing, except that her reason was merely so she could buy liquor and go bowling.

Jerold West, 65, was arrested in August in Newark, Ohio, after a nighttime stakeout, and charged with littering a downtown alley off and on for the last four years. His craft consisted of clipping pieces of magazines, newspapers and junk mail and dumping mounds of the confetti around Third Street. By a merchant's count, it required "thousands" of hours over the years to sweep up the messes. West, trying to explain himself to the arresting officer, said, "I guess it's just a thrill. (I)n the evenings (since my wife died), I get bored."

Terry Bennett failed to show up for his trial in Edwardsville, Ill., on Sept. 17 (for home-repair fraud) but called the courthouse with a good reason: that he was helping out at the World Trade Center rescue site and could not get back to Illinois. However, a court employee found problems with his story: (1) Caller-ID fixed Bennett's call as local (he said it had been "forwarded" by his wife, despite the fact that the court employee heard, "Terry! Telephone!"); (2) Bennett first said he flew to New York (but all planes had been grounded at that time); (3) then he said he rode in a van with some local people whose names he did not know; (4) no background noise was heard from the "rescue site" (because, Bennett said, all the workers were asleep); (5) he didn't know where at the site he was working (except that it was "down off the main drag"); (6) Bennett was sighted at home by the Belleville News-Democrat during that time (except that Bennett said he was merely Bennett's identical-looking cousin).

News of the Weird reported in July that the Washington state board charged with evaluating college-degree programs had approved bachelor's and master's degree curricula in "astrological studies" for the Kepler College in Seattle. Then, in August, the Astrological Institute (Scottsdale, Ariz.) became what is believed to be the first astrology school to be approved by the vocational schools' national accrediting board, paving the way for its students to receive loans and grants from the U.S. Department of Education. (The latter accreditation means that a school's teachers are "qualified" and that students can generally get the jobs that the school says they can get.)

Rita Ohlsen, 77, completed her 12,000th consecutive workday for packaging manufacturer Pactiv Corp. having never called in sick, a streak more than four times longer than Cal Ripken's baseball record (Belvidere, Ill.). A Wisconsin Ethics Board representative publicly frowned on state Rep. Tim Hoven's setup to sell shirts out of his office, embroidered with the logo of a pro-liquor lobby group. Two weeks after the World Trade Center attack, and as U.S. military forces were amassing in the area, Afghanistan officials formally asked Pakistan if its teams could compete in October's big Quaid-e-Azam cricket tournament. John Yount was hauled off to jail in the middle of his wedding ceremony when police realized that a recent judicial domestic-abuse stayaway order, petitioned for by his bride, was still in force (Meadville, Pa.).

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

-- Two former faculty members at the University of South Florida medical school settled religious discrimination lawsuits with the school in August, lawsuits based on acts by their department's former chairman, Dr. James Rowsey, an eye surgeon of some note. Rowsey had practiced such faith-based governance as denying researchers equipment based on religious admonitions from his wife, whom he considered a prophet, and then pressuring complaining faculty members to actually pray that the university administration will increase the department's budget.

-- In September, King Mswati III of Swaziland, faced with a dramatic AIDS epidemic, ordered all teen-age girls to abstain from sex for five years and to wear tassels of green and yellow to make it easier for men to avoid them (under threat of a fine, for man and woman both, of either one cow or about $250). Married teens are exempt but must wear tassels of red and black.

The recently retired Quacky the Clown (Jacob L. Tarner, 53) was arrested in August and charged with molesting a 10-year-old girl last year in his vehicle, which was just over the Michigan side of the Indiana state line; in Indiana, the maximum sentence is 45 years, but in Michigan, he faces life. However, a judge in Moline, Ill., acquitted Chuckles the Clown (Kimble McLain, 42) in September; he had performed at a Wal-Mart with his genitals clearly visible but convinced the judge that he had no idea that his zipper was down until someone told him. And Smiley the Clown (Christopher Bayer, 29) dutifully reported back to jail in Riverhead, N.Y., in August when his bail was revoked on child-molesting charges because a judge had misread state law by releasing him.

-- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in July that a woman had commenced lawsuits against the Atlanta Braves and outfielder Andruw Jones for an injury to her head from a ball Jones had flipped into the stands. Jones said he was doing what many players do as a reward to spectators by tossing a ball, caught for the third out in an inning, to the usual crowd of begging fans. Said teammate Brian Jordan, "We're trying to give people souvenirs and now some lady wants to sue."

-- In July, the parents of the late University of Florida student Matthew Kaminer filed a lawsuit against the Eckerd drugstore chain and the manufacturer of the powerful painkiller OxyContin, after Kaminer died of an overdose of the drug that a friend of his had stolen from an Eckerd store. The parents claim that Eckerd should have protected its supply of OxyContin better so their son never would have been tempted to ingest it.

-- In April, police in Carmel, Calif., arrested Pinellas County (Fla.) Circuit Judge Charles Cope (who was in town for a judicial conference) after he allegedly opened a locked hotel room door at 1 a.m., occupied by two women he had met earlier in the day, and tried to enter. Cope, who headed his court's family-law section at the time, said the whole thing was a "huge misunderstanding," but the adult woman and her mother said they believe Cope found or took their key during their earlier conversation. In September, after deliberating on a plea bargain for several months, Cope refused to take it, and prosecutors added battery and other charges.

-- In July the Mississippi Court of Appeals overturned a divorce court decision, ruling that Alice Susan King and Jack Bodne should stay married because all King did was prove Bodne was rude and unkind, which is short of the legal standard of "cruel and inhuman." King said she could no longer tolerate Bodne's crude jokes, cussing, and other behavior that humiliated her.

-- In August, a Florida court of appeals heard arguments on a third contempt-of-court order by Palm Beach judges against a lawn care company owned by a cast of characters resembling that in a Carl Hiaasen novel but including superstar New York lawyer David Boies, who has been supplying legal firepower, unsuccessfully, against a rival lawn care firm (whose owner represents himself in court). Boies' company, Nical, alleged that rival Scott Lewis broke a 1996 contract, and things have gone back and forth since then, with a second Nical owner apparently violating multiple court orders. Besides Boies, Nical's owners are a convicted top-drawer Miami marijuana smuggler and the frisky ex-wife of a Guatemalan textile manufacturer (a woman who was described by one California clothing buyer as a "sex nazi" because she used him as her "sexual tool" in exchange for overlooking various invoices).

-- With female undercover police officers roaming downtown Cincinnati in July looking for him, Anthony Searles, 42, was arrested after allegedly tossing his saliva by hand on the clothed backside of one of the officers. Someone, allegedly Searles, had been tossing spit at well-dressed women on the street for several days before that. A detective guessed that it was a "sexual fetish," noting Searles' long sex-offense arrest sheet. And in Dallas, police admitted in June they still had no leads in capturing the serial arm-biter/licker who has been preying on women off and on (13 reported attacks) for nearly a year.

In July, airport security guards in Tampa busted illegal Peruvian immigrant Maria Riano after she had approached a Continental Airlines counter to buy a ticket to Newark, with eight bulging duffel bags behind her. Apparently new at the smuggling game, Riano froze on the standard airline-traveler question, "Did you pack your own bags?" When she snapped, "Why do you need to know that?" airport security was summoned and found about $25,000 worth of shoplifted upscale clothing in the duffel bags.

-- In July, a jury in Boulder, Colo., quickly acquitted Patrick Murphy, 50, of harassing an unhygienic dog owner whom he had videotaped at a school park failing to pick up behind his dog. Murphy is a dog-droppings activist and, in addition to video cameras, has recently used global positioning satellite equipment to show that, at one time four months ago, there were 663 piles in the park. Murphy had been on the issue for more than five years before moving into electronic strategies.

The sheriff's office apologized to Adelberto Ruiz Hasselmyer for mistakenly arresting him, a 5-foot 8-inch, 360-pound black man, who was somehow confused with fugitive Jorge Adaberto Ruiz, 5 feet 4 inches, 150 pounds, white (Orlando, Fla.). The Thorupgaarden nursing home said it regularly shows pornography on its in-house TV channel because it relaxes patients (even some women) as effectively as drugs, but is cheaper (Copenhagen, Denmark). A jury recommended that Keith LaJuan Jones, 44, convicted in a serious road-rage dragging incident, serve 750 years, and the judge added 300 (Oklahoma City). Michael McMillian, accused of DUI, sat patiently on the stand while his lawyer reached over and removed McMillian's glass eye in order to undermine the arresting officer's claim that McMillian had appeared "glassy eyed," but the judge convicted him anyway, saying the other one was glassy, too (Philadelphia).

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