News of the Weird

-- Two professors recently quit West Virginia University in protest of its new-agey Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health, an anxiety-reduction study organization named after a welder whose epiphany "catapulted him from a routine life of stress and insecurity into a state of deep peace, hopefulness, security and clarity." According to one professor in attendance at a recent Banks conference in Seattle, a Banks speaker presented photographs of "ice crystals formed in the presence of positive thoughts and (ice crystals) formed in the presence of negative thoughts," and then noted that the negative-thought ones "weren't as pretty," and then remarked, "I'm not a scientist myself, but this looks like evidence to me."

-- Rev. Jamyi Witch, a Wiccan, was appointed in December as one of the two official chaplains at the Waupun (maximum security) Correctional Institution, Waupun, Wis. She won the job over nine rivals despite the fact that only 30 of the 1,200 inmates are of Wiccan denomination and despite the fact that Wicca does not preach fear of eternal damnation, which many regard as a crucial message for that population.

According to the attorney for several Benicia (Calif.) High School students suspended for toilet-papering the school in November, principal Robert Palous, in meting out the punishment, described the kids' actions as the school's own World Trade Center attack. And in an October Associated Press story about turning the Miami house in which Elian Gonzalez lived into a shrine, one visitor said, "To us, (the day that Elian was taken away) was almost equivalent to the Twin Towers day." And in November, outgoing Frederick, Md., Mayor Jim Grimes, who for months had been trying to prevent the local newspaper from getting an arrested prostitute's files publicly disclosed (allegedly to protect some friends), reacted to a judge's finally releasing them by saying: "I absolutely feel that the same thing that happened at the World Trade Center has hit me. I was terrorized (by The Frederick News-Post)."

-- The city council of Edmonds, Wash., voted recently to toss out a 60-year-old, cheap-looking totem pole that had been donated to the city, but before it got to a landfill, demolition company employee Sydney Locke plucked it out of a trash bin and took it home. City officials for some reason resented Locke's action, and have filed a lawsuit against Locke to regain legal ownership of the totem pole, though not because they have found a use for it but rather to make sure it gets to and stays in the landfill.

-- According to a November Los Angeles Times report, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has issued 5 million "smart cards" to permanent residents since 1998 (containing all the unique personal information now being discussed to improve security against terrorism) but has not yet acquired any machines that can read the cards. Among other INS problems: INS's fingerprint system has been, and is still, unconnected to the FBI's fingerprint system; and its electronic database to track foreign students, created following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, now covers students in only 21 colleges.

-- To resolve a problem unknown in American governments, state authorities in Queensland, Australia, decided in October that local bureaucrats were taking too much time to process applications to open legal brothels and thus decided to adopt a fast-track program to jump-start the industry. The state government announced it would appoint an independent official to get more brothels up and operating, thus stymieing town officials who are opposed to having them in their neighborhoods.

-- In August, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection pleaded guilty to two felony counts, acknowledging that the agency itself had polluted the city's water (and that of Westchester County) with mercury and the suspected carcinogen PCB that leaked for years through its water-circulation equipment. According to testimony in federal court, the agency had known of several dozen leaks since 1988 but disregarded them. In one incident, six pounds of mercury was left in the system three years after the agency promised to clean it up, and the deputy director's excuse was that the area involved "is dark and is difficult to see."

-- A September Associated Press review of Department of Agriculture records revealed that more than 60 percent of federal farm subsidies given out last year went to just 10 percent of farmers, almost all of them well-to-do in the first place. Among the recipients were farms owned by David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson and basketball star Scottie Pippin. Asked one farmer, "Why are we giving millions of dollars to millionaires?"

In Singapore in September, Shahul Hameed Kuthubudeen, 17, had agreed to a favorable sentence on his conviction for obsessive hand-kissing of girls: He had been enrolled by his family into a religious school in India to break him of his habit, which in the latest case involved seven counts of extending his hand to girls, receiving her hand innocently in his, and then kissing the back of her hand repeatedly while refusing to let her go. Two weeks after the schooling was arranged but before he had left town, Kuthubudeen was arrested again for a similar attack on a 16-year-old girl in an elevator.

In November, the decayed body of a man who apparently died three years ago at age 46 was found in his apartment in Warminster, Pa. While this genre of news stories occurs often enough to be regarded as No Longer Weird, this story is different because of the number of people who had an opportunity during those three years to discover the body but did not. The regular postal carrier; the postal service supervisor; at least one neighbor; village officials who towed the man's car for expired registration; the condominium association president; the police (who received many calls from various people suggesting that something was amiss in the apartment); the condo association management company agent; and a sheriff's deputy (delivering a foreclosure notice, which he merely tacked up on the door) all failed to inquire seriously about the whereabouts of the resident or about the odor emanating from the apartment.

Fulton County (Ga.) police said the only reason Derrick Van, 36, got caught at all was because he dropped some coins in the course of a November home burglary. When he reached to pick them up, he locked eyes with the homeowner, who was hiding under a bed. Though the homeowner was originally hoping that Van would just leave, when their eyes met, he felt threatened and fired his .357 Magnum, wounding Van badly and sending him to the hospital.

A court in Sweden ordered a certified sperm donor to assume parental rights just because the lesbian couple he assisted have split up and the child needs support (about $265 a month more) (Orebro, Sweden). Yet another Swedish court, hearing a case of four teen-agers who threw a cake at King Carl Gustaf, found them guilty of high treason (but ordered only a fine, of about $370 each) (Stockholm). Police chased down and arrested a 42-year-old man suspected of shoplifting six packages of corn removers from a Wal-Mart, an easy collar because his corns slowed down his getaway (San Diego). Florida judge Joyce Julian, 44, was arrested at 2 a.m. at a resort's conference center after she, intoxicated and nude from the waist down, verbally challenged security officers and then fled (Amelia Island, Fla.)

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

-- The man appointed by the governor of Texas as the state's director of homeland security in the U.S. war on terrorism, David Dewhurst, is also a candidate for lieutenant governor, and his recent patriot-themed campaign ad featured a large U.S. flag with a smartly dressed soldier standing in front of it. However, it was later discovered that the soldier in the photograph was not an American but a German soldier in a Luftwaffe uniform.

-- In Cleveland, police charged Joshua Brissett, 19, with fracturing the skull of his 5-month-old boy, and prosecutors say he likely was trying to pound or mash the head so it would be more like the shape of his own head. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History (questioned by Channel 5 News) said that some ancient cultures engaged in head-shaping, to help a child grow taller.

An 18-year-old student at the University of Arkansas fell to his death in October from a fifth-floor ledge, where he had gone to light up because he lives in a smoke-free dorm. And in November, a Greyhound bus capsized about 50 miles south of Phoenix, injuring 33, when a passenger fought the driver for control of the steering wheel at 70 mph, stemming from his frustration at not being able to smoke on the bus. And in October, early in the Afghanistan fighting, one of the first Taliban soldiers to become a prisoner of war had left himself vulnerable when he departed his post near Deshitiqala in order to buy cigarettes (and he was captured by the Northern Alliance).

-- In October, jurors in Austin, Texas, rejected the request of convicted child molester Milton Wayne Somers, 45, to be released as no longer posing a threat to kids, instead sentencing him to life in prison. Somers' main argument for leniency was that, a year ago, apparently annoyed at his uncontrollable love for little girls, he stuck a shotgun between his legs and blew off his testicles (and then he reloaded and shot himself again, for good measure). He said he is not dangerous because he has no sexual impulses, but his ex-wife said that Somers told her his self-castration was just a ploy to stay out of prison.

-- In an Ontario Provincial Police raid near Brechin in October, authorities seized 20,000 marijuana plants, but only a few samples were kept as evidence, with the rest hauled away to a landfill via 50 truck-trips. However, the word quickly got out, and a gold-rush of prospectors swarmed over the dump, taking away as many of the decaying plants as they could, until police were able to close it off. Several dozen people were said to have grabbed some of the trees, but only six were caught and arrested.

-- Paul Claren, 52, a psychiatric nurse at an Ohio state hospital in Akron for 18 years before he was fired, was himself ordered to a similar facility in November with diagnoses of paranoia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, after he shot out the home windows of several ex-co-workers he didn't like.

-- Buffalo Bills running back Travis Henry was sentenced in November to 100 hours' community service after pleading guilty to attempted sexual misconduct with a 15-year-old girl, but the court then assigned him to Buffalo's St. Augustine Community Service Corp., where most of his duties will consist of counseling youth.

Mr. Tom Leppard, in his late 60s and having retired after 28 years in the military, lives alone on Scotland's Island of Skye (about 125 miles from Glasgow), after having spent about $9,300 to tattoo leopard spots all over his body and be outfitted with fangs by his dentist so he will look the part of the leopard he so admires. Leppard told Britain's Daily Record in October that after he retired, he "couldn't mix with ordinary people" and now spends weeks at a time without seeing anyone except for the periodic trips he makes by canoe to pick up supplies.

Avant garde British artist Damien Hirst, who first made News of the Weird with his exhibit of a dead sheep, skinned and suspended in formaldehyde, saw his brand-new installation at London's Eyestorm Gallery go missing briefly in October. The work is a collection of found objects recovered from an artist's launch party (cigarette butts, beer bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers, etc.), and a cleaning man mistook it for the nightly garbage and tossed it out. Gallery officials re-created it later by referring to a photograph of the exhibit to get the exact placement of the items.

A coroner's inquest fixed the cause of a 14-year-old girl's death as hitting her head on a concrete piling after she fainted at gross photographs in FHM magazine (Harrogate, England; September). The father of a high school football player was accidentally killed by a blast from the cannon that the team uses to celebrate touchdowns (Trenton, Mo.; September). A 35-year-old man died while practicing archery in his back yard when his cesspool collapsed underneath him, creating such a cave-in that it took 18 hours to pull the body out (Huntington, N.Y.; September).

Radio personality "Dave the Dwarf" Flood, 37, filed a federal lawsuit to overturn Florida's ban on dwarf-tossing exhibitions in bars, as an unconstitutional restriction on his freedom (Tampa). British police proposed a register/database to keep tabs on troublemaking children, down to age 3. Several female cheerleaders were suspended from the squad for their onfield banner calling on their football team to "rape" the Eaglecrest High Raptors (though they claimed they didn't mean it that way) (Denver). An 8-year-old boy saved his teacher's life with the Heimlich maneuver, which he learned merely from having read about it in his mother's day-planner (and he said he was prepared to do a tracheotomy with a pen knife if that hadn't worked) (Issaquah, Wash.).

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

-- Ultra-Orthodox Jewish authorities ruled in October that their priests could not ride on airliners taking off from Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv without getting into hermetically sealed body bags for the few moments that the plane passes over the cemetery in Holon (reasoning that impurities emanating from the cemetery had to be blocked out). El Al said it wouldn't permit passengers, for safety reasons, to wrap themselves like that, but Swissair announced it would make a slight route adjustment so that its planes could avoid the cemetery.

-- Pennsylvania state Rep. Jane Baker, 56, said she will run for a second term next year even though she told a jury recently that injuries from a traffic accident had left her largely cognitively disabled. Baker, who lives near Allentown, said she "needs help with reading and understanding material and carrying on conversations" due to head injuries and told the jury that in fact she is "virtually unemployable" except for her position in the Legislature. (The jury awarded her $2.9 million in November.)

A couple in their 70s were recovering in Wythenshawe Hospital (Manchester) after severely overdosing on pills because, they said, their neighbors' kids had long been behaving too rambunctiously. And a judge at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court told John Bushnell, 75, that he had best relocate after finding that, for 40 years, he has been guilty of tacky, petty harassment of his neighbors, out of inexplicable hatred. ("Dying-looking git," "creepy-looking Jesus," "first-class s-house" and "humpty-backed bastard" are a few of his epithets.) And the manager of a senior-citizens home was convicted of gross negligence at Chelmsford Crown Court for her longstanding obsession with making sure her clients were sufficiently hydrated (except that she went too far, sometimes pouring massive amounts of water down their throats, to the point where two of them died).

-- Naturists Robert and Christine Morton finally achieved closure in October in their longstanding quest to be able to bring their three kids to the clothing-optional Hippie Hollow park, near Austin, Texas, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected their appeal challenging the park's anti-nudity rule for children. The state and county agencies that run the park, which is open to everyone (including, presumably, well-behaved voyeurs and pedophiles), had ruled that nude children were especially vulnerable, but the Mortons, oblivious of the danger, had insisted on frolicking nude as a family.

-- An October Associated Press dispatch from Pittsburgh reported that some local parents had recently held chicken pox "parties" for their kids, in which one kid with a current outbreak would be mingled with other kids so as to infect them, too, so that (after a week's discomfort) they would acquire lifetime immunity. These parents apparently want their kids to avoid standard immunizations because of the side-effects.

-- In August in Bartlesville, Okla., Douglas Dean Bryant Sr., 39, and Douglas Dean Bryant Jr., 19, were charged with rape in separate incidents; Dad's alleged victim was a year younger, at age 14, than the son's. And in August in Tylertown, Miss., David Earl King, 66, and his son, Nathan Paul King, were convicted of sexually molesting the same 14-year-old boy and received prison sentences of 36 years and 18 years, respectively.

-- In October, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Antonio Contreras' appeal, thus ending his lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, in which he claimed that he was fired as a forklift operator despite his federally protected disability, which he says is "sexual dysfunction." Contreras said he used to have sex five times a week but that injury has limited him to twice a month and that that is the reason Suncast Corporation of Illinois no longer thinks he's a good worker.

-- Katherine Norfolk, 19, and her parents filed a lawsuit in September for about $250,000 against Hurstpierpoint College (West Sussex, England), claiming it did not instruct her well enough in Latin, causing her to score too low on exams to get accepted at Oxford, thus ruining her career and diluting the "earning power" that comes with a degree in Latin.

Jeffrey J. Harris, 39, was arrested at halftime of the Florida high school football game between St. Petersburg and Clearwater in October when he created a loud scene by blocking his two kids (starters for Clearwater) from entering their locker room (which is located in a public place with many students and parents mingling around outside). Harris was mad about something that happened in the first half and ordered the kids to immediately strip off their uniforms in a public display and to come home with him. The kids tried to rejoin their team, and when Harris intervened and struck a martial-arts stance, police arrested him.

Another of those guys who enlist in wartime and then don't much keep up with the news turned up in September in the Guatemalan jungle, just across the border from his native El Salvador, surprised to learn that the 1969 war (El Salvador invading Honduras) ended 32 years ago, about 100 days after it started. Salomon Vides, 72, was further driven into hiding because he often heard gunfire over the years, but rescuers noted that he was living in an area popular with hunters. Reporters noted that Vides looked authentically out of the loop, for example, having a tough time with the concept of a pop-top soda can.

-- A man inadvertently shot and killed his 23-year-old son on a hunting trip while the son hid behind a log, holding up a dead squirrel and making barking sounds (even after the son had been warned by the family many times to cut out the pranks) (Galien, Mich., September). And a 25-year-old man who had parked on railroad tracks to scare his girlfriend and then chased after her on foot was killed when he ran back to the car to move it (after hearing a horn) and was crushed by a passing train (Houston, July). And a 19-year-old college student was killed when he slid down a library chute that he thought was for books but which was a garbage chute dumping straight into a compactor (Sewanee, Tenn., October).

Motorist Jerry Ross pleaded guilty to hit-and-run charges after he collided with a slow-moving train, then extricated his car despite its having been mangled, and then drove off (Augusta, Ga.). Greg Bonnett filed a lawsuit against a strip club after a dancer took too wide a swing from a pole and smacked him in the face with her leg, breaking his nose (Port Moody, British Columbia). A 58-year-old man died of kidney problems resulting from his 1966 gunshot wound from University of Texas Tower killer Charles Whitman, thus bringing Whitman's death toll that day to 15. Bruce Menia was served an eviction notice by his apartment-house landlord because of numerous complaints about how loud and "disturbing" his snoring is (Albany, N.Y.)

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