News of the Weird

-- Both the U.S. and Afghanistan might seem to be heeding President Bush's call to act normal during these times of strife: Just a few miles up the road from the anthrax-shuttered National Enquirer offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., officials of the brand-new National Croquet Center staged a two-week series of matches in October, preparing for its grand opening in January. And Afghanistan's application to play in a prestigious cricket tournament in Pakistan, beginning about the same time as the U.S. bombing, was accepted (but the Afghan team eventually lost). Said one Afghan player, "Sport and war are two different things."

-- Susan Heitker and Matt Glass staged a week-long anti-logging protest in Vinton County, Ohio, in August, sitting on a platform they had constructed in two stately trees near a patch of forest to be cut, but the state Department of Natural Resources got in the last lick. The two were arrested for trespassing; the two trees (not part of the forest to be cut) were chopped down, also, on the grounds that they contained the protesters' fingerprints and thus would be needed for trial evidence; and the state billed the two protesters $152 for the cost of chopping down the two trees.

London's Goodfellows company made the news again in September by selling two more whimsical insurance policies: model Claire Roe's coverage (for about $350 a year) against loss of beauty ($170,000 payout), and the male strippers troupe Dreamboys' coverage (premium, about $15,000 a year) to pay off if their genitals are injured by fans ($1.2 million coverage). Among the firm's most popular policies: the Alien All Risks package (about $400 a year for $1.7 million coverage) for being abducted or impregnated by an alien, which Goodfellows has sold to 40,000 people. (Fifteen thousand women bought Y2K immaculate-conception insurance in 1999, fearful they would be called upon to give birth to the messiah.)

-- With great fanfare on Aug. 27, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared the Fresno (Calif.) municipal landfill an historical landmark on the National Register because of its pioneering methods of disposal. Later in the day, the department came to realize, thanks to its environmentalist critics, that the landfill also has a long-standing spot on the Superfund list of the worst-polluted land in America, and on Aug. 28, the department rescinded its order.

-- More Government Procreation Policies: In September, a pro-population town council member in Inari, Lapland (Finland), vowed to give up his political career if only the town's women produced at least 80 babies next year and 85 the year after. At the other end of the spectrum, India's Health Minister C.P. Thakur told the national legislature in August that the key to halting procreation was finding recreational alternatives and agreed to look into the cost of government-subsidized television sets.

-- In July, the Bloomington, Ind., City Council voted to renew Brown's Wrecker Service's towing contract, even though it had proposed to raise the per-car charge to the city from $8 to $20, and even though Joe's Towing (the city's heavy-truck contractor) proposed to tow cars at zero cost to the city. Also in July, it took a court injunction from a judge in Sacramento to stop California prison procurement authorities from awarding a sweetheart contract for peanut butter and jelly to a supplier who charges $175,000 a year more than its competitor; the prison skirted low-bid rules by claiming an "emergency" in that the higher-priced company's PB&J was necessary to prevent inmate riots.

-- England's Wolverhampton Art Gallery reopened in September (after extensive remodeling) with the exhibit "Fluid," composed entirely of artists' works that featured human bodily liquids. Included were a brilliant red and yellow abstract photograph by Andres Serrano (mixed blood and urine); Mona Hatoum's representation of the flow of her food during the hours following a meal (including photographs from her own intestine-invasive procedures); and testaments to sperm and sweat, among other subjects.

-- Austrian artist Wolfgang Flatz's July performance ("Meat") in Berlin came off as scheduled despite an attempted court injunction by a 13-year-old girl, who said the exhibit was too gross. Flatz suspended himself from a crane, crucifixion-style under a bloody sheet; then a helicopter lifted a dead, headless cow that he had packed with fireworks. The cow was dropped onto an abandoned building, blowing it up. (Previously, Flatz has been a human doormat, a human dartboard and a human bell.)

Julie Gable, 43, filed a $100,000 lawsuit recently against the police department of St. Pete Beach, Fla., because it continues to employ community service officer Michael Mehill, 54, who Gable says has been stalking her for 10 years, the last few with the full knowledge of the chief. The chief even allegedly found one of Mehill's notebooks, in which was written very detailed descriptions of his stalkings (e.g., "(August 5, 1998) At 1343 (hours), (Gable) was on a lawn chair, red halter top, white shorts. Waiting for someone?"). Gable said Mehill has an uncanny ability to arrive on the beach, with video camera, minutes after Gable does.

Au pair Ildiko Varga, 25, on the run and wanted for trashing an employer's home and mistreating the toddler in a New York City suburb, was finally caught when she stopped a police officer on the street to show him the article the New York Post had written about the crime and to ask him if he thought she had a good case for a slander lawsuit. And Rikers Island (N.Y.) corrections officer Anthony Lopez apparently stepped over the line when he ejected his wife from the family car during a fight on the way home from a Labor Day party; furious, she called the police and told them about Anthony's computer, which she happened to know was loaded with child pornography, and he was arrested.

In August 2001, News of the Weird reported that amateur British rocket scientist Steve Bennett was continuing to develop the spaceship (capsule made from a cement mixer) and booster that would launch him 10,000 feet up in a test flight for a much more ambitious expedition (an exercise in instant death, according to several engineers who learned his plans). On the other hand, amateur Brian Walker of Bend, Ore. (who has gotten rich as a designer of aeronautical toys), told London's The Independent in October that he was about a year away from launching himself 35 miles up in his homemade ship and booster. Unlike Bennett's work, Walker's has the support of several aerospace engineers and Mercury 7 astronaut Gordon Cooper.

The South African government provided its 100,000 census takers with generous supplies of condoms, fearing that urges would be harder to control as counters went inside people's homes. Barry's Underground tavern near Omaha went up for sale; it had been built in 1961 by dairyman J. Gordon Roberts as a bomb shelter for 250 head of his cattle. Jorge Briceno, head of the Colombian FARC rebels (who by government compromise control a swath of land the government cannot encroach on), has decided that all 15,000 of the residents of the village of Vista Hermosa must be HIV-tested because he read graffiti on a local wall about one resident's having AIDS. Doctors at University Hospital (Cardiff, Wales) removed a regular-size toothbrush from Vania Lucchesi's stomach after she tripped while brushing and swallowed it.

-- 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/.)