News of the Weird

-- Those dreading the legal morass of casualty claims emanating from the Sept. 11 attacks will be even more disturbed knowing the current status of claims emanating from the 1993 World Trade Center basement truck-bomb attack. As of Sept. 11, according to an October National Law Journal report, pre-trial discovery was still taking place on "hundreds" of 1993 claims (personal injury lawsuits and property-damage and business-interruption claims) pending before a New York state judge, including at least one on behalf of Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm most devastated on Sept. 11.

-- One notable consistency between the Clinton and Bush administrations is that the Department of the Interior still is not certain how to remedy what federal judge Royce Lamberth has called the government's squandering of more than $10 billion in Indian trust funds (payments for grazing, mining, logging and oil-drilling on Indian land) that it was required to manage starting in 1887. In 1999, the department said it was unable to examine some trust fund records because they were filed in decrepit rooms with so much rat feces as to be hazardous. In October 2001, a status report was prepared for Lamberth, but various department officials declined to sign it because of a lack of confidence that it was truthful.

In July, Mattie Charlene Dyer, 70, married Yang Yukun, 71, in Calgary, Alberta, and settled down there; the bride is an American-born teacher who speaks only English, and the groom is a retired pipefitter who had lived all his life in Beijing and speaks only Chinese. The marriage is "hard to explain," said Dyer, but there is "an electricity (and) a magnetism between us." And in August, according to a New York Times profile, medical student Casey Moss, 22, and Kara Price, 16, held hands for the first time following a two-year "courtship." The Tennessee couple, who long ago had pledged to each other, is said to be representative of a growing number of conservative Christians who not only say no to premarital sex but say no to premarital romance.

-- In June, indecent-exposure arrestee Scott Matthew Brackett, 39, had just been booked and bailed out on one nude excursion through an apartment complex in Broken Arrow, Okla., when he was picked up on a second foray. According to the police report, Brackett said that since the authorities were still investigating the first charge and told him they wouldn't finalize their report for two more days, he figured that he had "two extra days of freedom" until a recommendation would be made on that first charge, and thus, he "just went out to celebrate (by taking his clothes off in public again)."

-- According to a dispatch from Nigeria reported in the Cape Argus (Cape Town, South Africa), Ms. Amina Haruna, 22, of Gusau, Nigeria, was turned down by a Muslim court in August in her quest to divorce her husband, Malam Hassan Mujahid, on the apparently sole ground that his penis is too large for her. The court ruled that it could not determine, even after examining doctors' reports on the couple, whether the size discrepancy was sufficiently great to make the couple incompatible.

-- In July in a Suffolk County (Mass.) court, Dr. Marcos Ramos, 59, was convicted of 13 counts of indecent assault on female patients and sentenced to at least six years in prison. His lawyer, Willie J. Davis, had hammered the theme to the jurors that Ramos' gratuitously giving patients breast exams, even though they were unrelated to any medical condition relevant to their cases, was the right thing to do "because you never know when (cancer) is going to appear."

-- Gail M. Follis, 35, was charged with attempted robbery of a convenience store in Elkhorn, Wis., in August after an employee spotted her toward the back of the store carrying a rifle and attempting to put on a ski mask. According to the clerk, Follis said she knew the situation looked bad, but that she had just come in from skeet-shooting (hence, the gun) and just wanted to buy some beer (though beer sales were prohibited at that time of the morning).

-- Bad Memory: In July, a 15-year-old student in Kansas City, Mo., who had previously told police that he and his 29-year-old teacher had been having sex, took the witness stand at a preliminary hearing and said, actually, he also could not remember if he had sex with the teacher or not: "I have a pretty bad memory." And in June, the landmark $3 billion lawsuit victory in Los Angeles by ex-smoker Richard Boeken against Philip Morris was undoubtedly aided by Boeken's testimony that he did not remember any persuasive health warnings against smoking before the 1990s.

According to an August profile in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, local resident Tom Cagley, 66, has chronicled the life of his 21-year-old son, Nick, by making journal entries in writing every day since the day he found out his wife was pregnant (8,019 consecutive days, in 62 spiral notebooks, totaling 7,412 pages and, he estimated, 3 million words). The elder Cagley said he realized that he had not spent enough time with his five children from an earlier marriage and wanted to make sure that didn't happen with Nick (who, while generally appreciative of Dad's effort, admitted that he has not been very interested in reading the journals).

News of the Weird reported in April 2000 that Prince Jefri (brother of the Sultan of Brunei, the oil-rich country on the northern coast of Borneo) had been busted by the sultan down to an allowance of only $300,000 a month, because he had been wasting the family's money (allegedly, $15 billion) in his role as the country's finance minister. In August 2001, Jefri's vast collection of consumer goods (10,000 items, including hundreds of cars, 17 airplanes and several yachts, one of which he named "Tits," with twin dinghies named "Nipple 1" and "Nipple 2") were sold at auction (for a mere $7.8 million). Until two years ago, the sultan was the world's richest man, but his fortune is believed to have shrunk to about $10 billion.

In a road-rage chase that ended when the pursuing car wrapped itself around a tree, its driver and the front-seat passenger who egged him on were killed, and the driver being chased (who stopped twice to attempt to apologize but was threatened and cursed and so kept on driving) was unharmed (Clearwater, Fla., August). And a 19-year-old man became the latest wild-cruising teen-ager to die by sticking his head out the passenger window at the wrong moment (utility pole) (East Meadow, N.Y., September).

A medical examiner said the man who pushed his already-strangled wife off a hotel balcony did not then commit suicide by leaping but actually just clumsily fell right behind her, to his death (Nashville). The British government aborted its study of whether mad-cow disease can spread to sheep after it realized it had been mistakenly studying cow brains for five years instead of sheep brains. Two Floridians filed a $1.1 trillion lawsuit against Osama bin Laden for scaring them (Fort Pierce). Prosecutors revealed that a quirk in state law means that Dr. Dirk Greineder, recently convicted for murdering his wife, nonetheless remains as administrator of her estate for their three children, who are the wife's beneficiaries (Wellesley, Mass.).

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

-- 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.).