News of the Weird

-- Serial killer Coral Eugene Watts, 52, thought to have been put away for life by a Houston judge in 1982, is now scheduled to be released in 2006 because of a drafting error in his plea bargain. (Because of a paucity of evidence about the 13 murders to which Watts confessed, he was allowed to plead to "aggravated" attempted murder and be sentenced to 60 years without parole, but the prosecutor neglected to specify any "aggravated"-type weapon, and an appeals court ruled that only "aggravated" crimes justify no parole; consequently, Watts has been amassing "good time" requiring early release.) (And a judge released accused murderer Corey Pernell McNeil in Newport News, Va., in July because a clerk forgot to sign the victim's death certificate; by the time the error was corrected, McNeil could not be found.)

-- In July, for the second time in a month, a village council in Punjab province approved an abuse of females that had to be stopped by the Pakistan government. Tribal law allows a convict to be pardoned if the victim's family accepts cash compensation, but the council pardoned condemned murderers who agreed to send cash and their eight teenage daughters for marriage to elderly relatives of their victims. Two weddings had already taken place by the time the police halted the deal.

New York University researchers writing in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that sex-abstaining women and women whose partners wear condoms were more frequently depressed and concluded that hormones in semen may enter the bloodstream and pep women up (May). And Concordia University (Montreal) researchers reported that their PT141 drug seems to encourage female rats to solicit sex from males three times as often as they otherwise would and are scheduling human trials (May). And Hebrew Rehabilitation Center (Boston) researchers found that the grain in beer (which men consume far more than women) must be a major reason why men suffer less osteoporosis (July).

-- Prosecutors in Pottstown, Pa., said in May that they thought that some of rap singer Karim Ali Howard's lyrics might be used against him in his upcoming trial for cocaine trafficking. (A sample: "I'm going to sell coke until you call me pope, do dirt until the lord tries to stop me, it's gonna take hundreds of bullets just to drop me.") And in June, Russell Adam Pelletier, 24, was convicted of murder in Louisa, Va., despite arguing that a supposed confession captured by undercover wire was just freestyle verse by Pelletier, who admits he writes misogynistic and violent rap music.

-- Among recent denials of child sex-abuse: Choir official Frank Jones, 51, said he was merely massaging a 13-year-old boy with slippery sports cream and that "My hand slipped" onto a "private area" (New York City, April). And teacher Carl D. Reid, 38, said he had no idea that several female elementary school students of his had crawled under his desk, and that before he knew it, they had put their hands underneath his gym shorts and touched him (Newport, R.I., May).

-- Eleven alleged members of San Francisco's Big Block street gang claimed in a court filing in June that they have a constitutional right to carry guns, pointing to a declaration last year by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft that changed the law. Previously, the Justice Department had thought that Second Amendment rights applied only to state militias, but Ashcroft declared in May 2001 that henceforth, the Second Amendment would be regarded as giving fundamental gun-toting rights to individuals. Nonetheless, in July 2002, the federal judge trying the Big Block gang declined to dismiss the gun charges.

-- The City of New York agreed in July to pay a Sri Lankan-born schoolteacher $50,000 for the "hostile work environment" he encountered in the classroom because of his nationality. The administrators said they couldn't stop students from hassling him because they were emotionally troubled "special needs" students, protected by law.

-- Claudia Huntey, 38, who has suffered from Tourette's syndrome since age 9, filed a federal lawsuit in Denver in April after she was evicted from Torrey Pines apartment complex because her frequent screams during the night disturbed her neighbors. Huntey, whose most frequent symptom is to yell "Fire!" at the top of her lungs, claimed that since those are "involuntary vocalizations" protected under federal disability law, her neighbors would just have to get used to them.

-- The Afkhami family of Gaithersburg, Md., filed a civil-rights lawsuit in July against Carnival Cruise lines, which the plaintiffs said unlawfully denied their right to travel from a Miami port with 160 live bees, in bottles, because two of their adult children on the cruise were practicing alternative medicine involving the bees. The Afkhamis said the rights were denied because of the family's Iranian nationality.

From time to time News of the Weird has reported on the fluctuating value of the late Italian artist Piero Manzoni's personal feces, which he canned in 1961, 30 grams at a time in 90 tins, as art objects (though, over the years, 45 have reportedly exploded). Their price to collectors has varied from about $28,000 for a tin in 1998 to $75,000 in 1993. In June 2002, the Tate Gallery in London excitedly announced it had purchased tin No. 004 for about $38,000. (The price of 30 grams of gold at press time was a little over $300.)

Whatever Happened to the Concept of "Hiding Out"? Police in Edwardsville, Pa., on the lookout for a stolen white car, arrested two men who were busily painting the stolen white car black in the middle of a shopping center parking lot on the town's main street (June). And in Martinsburg, W.Va., following a bank robbery, law enforcement saturated the area looking for the getaway vehicle, a red Jeep Wrangler; the next day, the vehicle was spotted, with a "For Sale" sign on it, in the front yard of a 39-year-old local woman, who police say then readily confessed to the crime (May).

An orthopedic surgeon at Guy's and St. Thomas's Hospital in London was threatened with disciplinary action for racism after he became enraged that none of the recent-immigrant nurses could understand his during-surgery instructions (July). A Brooklyn, N.Y., school official convicted of embezzling millions of dollars in federal education funds is one of seven recently convicted teachers or administrators who are still in their jobs because union-friendly arbitrators refuse to allow them to be fired, according to a New York Daily News report (June).

When a car full of suspected thieves crashed after a high-speed police chase, the one person inside who was well enough to flee on foot did, but made it only a short ways before his prosthetic leg fell off (Englewood, Ohio). Another man on trial for fleeing police in his van allegedly apologized when they caught him, reasoning that he had just bought crack cocaine and wanted to go somewhere to consume it before he went to jail (Rochester, N.Y.) Three obese and unhealthy people filed a lawsuit against McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and KFC for addicting them to unhealthful food (New York City). A 36-year-old woman sued Delta Airlines, claiming agents publicly humiliated her after finding a "sex toy" (that she and her husband had just purchased) vibrating in her checked baggage (Clearwater, Fla.).

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

-- In June, after the British musical group the Planets introduced a 60-second piece of complete silence on its latest album, representatives of the estate of composer John Cage, who once wrote "4'33"" (273 seconds of silence), threatened to sue the group for ripping Cage off (but failed, said the group, to specify which 60 of the 273 seconds it thought had been pilfered). Said Mike Batt of the Planets: "Mine is a much better silent piece. I (am) able to say in one minute what (took Cage) four minutes and 33 seconds."

-- In July, a California Court of Appeal rejected as excessive an arbitration panel's award of about $8,800 per lawyer-hour in fees ($88.5 million total, all from taxpayer funds) "earned" by the attorneys who successfully challenged an unconstitutional state law. Also in July, David L. Brite of California told the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times that the Florida lawyer he had hired to find his step-grandmother's will did only a few hours' work, at most, yet intended to keep $350,000 (a 25 percent fee) because the will turned out to be worth $1.4 million.

In the last four months, residents of four cities have confronted ice-cream truck drivers over allegedly excessive noise and late hours on residential routes, and especially over the repeated playing of "Turkey in the Straw" (although "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" have also been mentioned). Drivers were ticketed in Brunswick, Ga., and Hartford, Conn.; a protest was being organized in Green Bay, Wis.; and in London, England, about 50 ice-cream truck drivers blocked a downtown street, blaring their theme music at full blast, in protest of the city's clamping down on their licenses.

-- The Pain of Performance Art: The annual "Fierce!" festival in London in May featured Mr. "Franco B" lightly slicing up his abdomen and keeping the wounds open for six hours, inviting patrons to observe the blood in order to "re-examine their own notions of what's beautiful and what's suffering." And in May, the Artspace gallery in Sydney, Australia, featured artist Mike Parr having his only arm nailed to a wall, for 36 hours, to show "the possibility of confloating the body." And performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli chopped off a pinky finger in June at a festival in Cali, Colombia, to symbolize the nation's loss after a popular politician was recently kidnapped by the revolutionary group FARC.

-- Russia's Culture Ministry changed its mind in April and decided to take Kasimir Malevich's 1913 "Black Square" painting off the block for an impending auction. Officials at the Gelos auction house in Moscow expected the 21-square-inch work (which is, in fact, only a black square) to bring in from $2 million to $10 million.

-- For three months this spring, New York City's New Museum of Contemporary Art displayed Belgian artist Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca," a room-sized mechanical rendition of a human intestine, which at announced times would take food input and process it into various components just as the body does, including the final waste product, which was then scooped up by an attendant and flushed. Said a German curator, Delvoye's "strength" "lies in his ability to engineer conflict by combining the fine arts and folk art, and playing seriousness against irony."

-- While health insurance plans have long been cut back drastically all over the country, the self-funded insurance of the county employees of Niagara County, N.Y., reimbursed more than $1.25 million since 1999 for its workers' purely cosmetic face peels, breast implants and liposuction; taxpayers finally realized what was going on when property taxes shot up by 20 percent this year. And San Francisco elections supervisor Tammy Haygood was fired in April for cost overruns and irregularities but continues to fight for her job so that her husband can maintain his transsexual treatment under the city government's liberal employee health-care plan.

-- In March, Fremont County (Mont.) officials passed a resolution prohibiting "the presence" of grizzly bears within the boundaries of the county. And in May, a Magistrate Anurag Rastogi of the Gurgaon district near New Delhi, India, issued an order forbidding the assembly of four or more pigs. (Both the Montana resolution and the Indian order had other sections directed at any humans responsible for introducing the animals into public space, but the above provisions stand alone, seemingly directed at the animals themselves.)

St. Petersburg, Fla., police arrested Calvin Calhoun, 25, Lavance Palmer, 22, and Kelvin Charles, 22, in July and charged them with using a stolen credit card in a ticket-scalping scheme. The men, from Miami, bought 180 Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball tickets for a weekend series against the Seattle Mariners, intending to resell them, but there was almost no demand because attendance at Devil Rays' games is among the poorest in the major leagues, and in fact there were 127,000 empty seats for the four games.

In April in Fayetteville, N.C., Shirley Brigman Turriff, 63, was sentenced to six years in prison for embezzling $1.1 million from the law firm for which she had been office manager (Anderson Johnson), which had hired her shortly after she had been convicted for embezzling from her first employer. Anderson Johnson was fully aware that she was an embezzler when it hired her because one of its lawyers had defended her in that earlier case.

In January 2001, News of the Weird reported that a 6-year-old boy had been removed from his mother's home in Champaign, Ill., because she insisted on continuing to breastfeed him. A judge later released the boy back to the mother, and in July 2002, the woman, Lynn Stuckey, 34, appeared on an ABC's "Good Morning America" videotape showing that she is still to this day breastfeeding him (every two weeks or so). Stuckey continues to call it "a perfectly normal practice": "We are your standard middle-class American family, and we're not doing anything wrong."

A 26-year-old woman was charged with attempted murder for a vicious knife attack on her 25-year-old boyfriend that resulted in the nearly total mutilation of his buttocks and rectum (Carrollton, Ala., June). A 21-year-old disgruntled construction worker was charged with the pickax slaying of his loud-mouthed foreman (New York City, April), and another recently fired construction worker was charged with attempted murder for shooting his former boss in the chest with a 3-foot-long spear gun (Miami, April).

Also, in the Last Month ...

A 13-year-old boy was arrested after he allegedly pulled out a gun and robbed a convenience store of just a sex magazine (Martinsburg, W.Va.). Police officer Thomas Richmond applied mouth-to-snout CPR and revived an apparently dead pit bull that had been hit by a car (West Bridgewater, Mass.). A man in his 20s, identified only as Mr. Hsu, was rushed to a hospital from an Internet cafe‚ suffering paralysis after what was believed to be three consecutive days of playing a computer game (Chungho City, Taiwan). A 34-year-old man on his maiden sky dive let out a joyous whoop at 9,000 feet, which dislodged his false teeth, which fell and could not be found (Addison, Vt.).

-- Despite a warning label reading "Do not use indoors because of flammability" on its carpet adhesive, the Para-Chem company was ordered by a jury in Akron, Ohio, in July to pay $8 million to two professional installers who were severely burned in an explosion when they tried to use the product indoors. One juror told the Akron Beacon Journal that he and his colleagues felt the warning did not go far enough in convincing the installers not to use the product indoors.

-- A whole class of New Bedford, Mass., middle-school students was recommended for blood tests in July after officials learned that, in May 2001, a now-retired seventh-grade science teacher had pricked the fingers of about two dozen of the students to make sample blood slides, using the same needle (though he wiped it with alcohol between uses). Officials thought the risk of infection was low but had no explanation how a veteran science teacher could stray so far from contemporary blood-safety procedures.

A paper by psychologist Michel Lariviere for Correctional Services of Canada concluded that most guards don't respect inmates (which inhibits rehabilitation efforts) (May). A $4 million study by University of Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions revealed that employees are much more likely to call in sick if they have drunk alcohol the night before (May). A Harvard School of Public Health survey found that people report more noise and other disruptions in binge-drinking college neighborhoods than in other neighborhoods (July). An Iowa State University study found that TV viewers had a harder time noticing the commercials on shows containing explicit sex than on other types of shows (June).

-- The owners of Los Angeles' Westwood Village Memorial Park (resting place of Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin and Frank Zappa) have asked the county to allow them to build a 463-casket mausoleum on formerly open space in the park that is very close to residential property, thus potentially disturbing both neighbors worried about spirits in their back yards and solemn park visitors, who may be exposed to screaming children and barbecue smoke. (And in June, bowing to strong opposition, the operators of Dublin, Ireland's most famous cemetery (Glasnevin) withdrew a proposal to add income by building 11 luxury townhouses on its grounds.)

-- Former Broward County (Fla.) librarian William Coday's online personal ad touts his multilingualism, world travels, compassion, and love of Keats and baroque music. The ad does not mention that he was convicted of murdering his 1978 and 1997 girlfriends, both with hammers, and that he is in jail awaiting a jury's decision whether he gets death for the latter crime.

-- Leslie Collard, 42, arrested in May in Providence, R.I., for offering an undercover officer a tandem prostitution deal that included her 19-year-old daughter, was asked before the arrest if that meant the mother and daughter would serve him at the same time. "No," she said (according to the officer), "I have morals, because she is my daughter. My daughter will do you first."

-- Pull Their Parenting Licenses: David and Guadalupe Mata were arrested for allegedly chaining their 21-year-old daughter face up on her bed, to keep her away from the married man she had been seeing (Fullerton, Calif., July). A mother and stepfather were charged with duct-taping her 12-year-old son to a lawn chair so he would get sunburned as punishment for sassing her (Hamilton, Ohio, May). Gary and Kathleen Rabatin and their teen-age kids were charged with possession of marijuana, with the parents admitting pride that the kids smoke at home rather than on the street (and dope was found in every room in their house) (Levittown, Pa., June). Sedrick Lamont Curtis, 28, and Shakima Lewis, 25, were charged with forcing their adolescent kids into sex shows in their home, at which they charged clients $10 to watch (Gary, Ind., May)

According to an Agence France-Presse report of a United Nations officials' meeting with Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe in April (concerning how undemocratic the country's last election was), Mugabe allegedly exploded when scolded by a U.S. representative: "Well," said Mugabe, "I don't think George Bush won the U.S. election, but I accept (it)." And in Lumberton, N.J., in July, Michael J. Devine, 36, captured in a stolen truck after a police chase, denied he was trying to escape; he said that he couldn't stop because the truck contained a bomb that would explode if his speed dropped below 55 mph.

Shemuel Nahum Ben Yisrael (formerly, James Christopher) filed a $10 million lawsuit in June against the city of Beaufort, S.C., and its mayor, police and sheriff's department, for an unlawful arrest in 2000 and for generally harassing him. According to the police chief in Yisrael's hometown of nearby Yemassee, Yisrael keeps buckets of paint and urine handy at his home so that, when law enforcement officers come for one of their frequent arrests of him (mostly for trespassing), he can douse himself so as to make the officers' jobs harder.

Latest Bright Ideas: According to an indictment obtained by the U.S. Department of Justice in May, Christopher Lee Jones of Pembroke, N.C., recently publicly attempted to sell 100 stolen Social Security numbers by eBay online auction and tried to enhance their value by specifically suggesting that bidders use them to obtain credit cards. And Tony Alston, 26, and April Lynett Smith, 20, were arrested after a brief police chase following their alleged robbery of a Compass Bank in San Antonio, Texas; police caught them easily because their getaway vehicle was a rental U-Haul truck with a speed governor that the company routinely equips the truck with to slow it down.

A 13-year-old boy was struck and killed in the street while playing "chicken" with a neighbor driving a go-cart (Lithonia, Ga., March). And a 17-year-old boy was struck and killed while playing lie-down-on-the-highway "chicken" at 11:30 p.m. (Crescent City, Calif., June). And a 44-year-old woman was struck and killed by an Amtrak train as she drove through a railroad crossing busily conversing on her cell phone (Little Rock, Ark., June).

County officials charged the Dance Place studio (Safety Harbor, Fla.) with pressuring 30 elderly customers to sign 328 separate contracts for dance lessons, totaling $3.5 million (including selling one woman $257,000 worth over a three-week period) (July). While laid-off workers of Global Crossing Ltd. (one-time value: $54 billion) try to recoup some of the $32 million in severance pay they lost by the company's bankruptcy filing, the Los Angeles Times reported that company founder Gary Winnick continues his historically detailed, $30 million renovation on the $94 million mansion he purchased before the collapse (July).

A Muslim housewife in Florida filed a lawsuit after the state revoked her driver's license because she insisted that her identification photo reveal only her eyes (because of her niqab veil) (Winter Park, Fla.). A 19-year-old man fatally overconsumed in a contest to see who could eat the most salt (Tamluk, India). A 20-year-old man was arrested after making 1,100 calls to 911 over a two-day period, attributing his behavior simply to boredom (Gainesville, Fla.). A court in Iran denied Mohammad Khordadian travel privileges for 10 years because he formerly taught Iran-disapproved dance lessons while living in Los Angeles (Tehran).

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