News of the Weird

(CORRECTION: Two weeks ago, I mistakenly wrote that Lutherans believe there is only one God, when I should have written that it is the Lutherans' Missouri Synod which believes that (and it was that organization which demoted its radio preacher). I apologize for the error.)

-- In September, Australia's Daily Telegraph reported that the Federal Attorney General's office had ruled that eyesight and medical tests required of flight crews and air traffic controllers could no longer be given because they violate the country's anti-discrimination laws. The Civil Aviation Safety Agency, concerned about physically unqualified pilots, announced immediately that it would appeal the ruling, but the association of cabin crew members, for one, was reluctant to support the appeal because it fears that such medical tests make it easier for airlines to impose weight restrictions on flight attendants.

-- Sen. Jorge Capitanich recently introduced a bill in the Argentine legislature to help restore voters' faith in elected officials to pull the country out of its long and severe economic crisis. (It is a common street scene in Buenos Aires that politicians, once they are identified by passersby, are targets of insults and spitting.) If the bill passes, all congressional and presidential candidates would be required not only to prove they have paid their taxes and to disclose any criminal records but also to submit to psychiatric exams to assure voters that they are emotionally fit to hold office.

A formerly obese woman organized a "million-pound march" for Ottawa in October to protest the Ontario Parliament's proposed funding cutbacks on stomach-stapling surgery. (Attendance was about 998,000 pounds short.) And to protest unemployment in Escravos, Nigeria, in July, about 600 women held hundreds of workers captive inside an oil terminal and threatened to take off their own clothes, which Nigerians regard as gravely shocking. And in Rajasthan, India, protesters opposed to distribution of the allegedly mob-financed movie "Kante" said they would release poisonous snakes into the darkened theaters showing the film.

-- In July, on her return from a frowned-upon pilgrimage with a female friend just after her wedding, Sangeeta Sauda, age 20 and of a Khanjar tribal community in India, volunteered to hold a red-hot iron in her hands in public to prove to her husband that she was still as pure as the Hindu goddess Sita. She passed the test, but police in Indore, watching the ceremony, later arrested Sauda's husband and in-laws for allegedly pressuring her to hurt herself.

-- Among the more daring indigenous national games (from a September ABC News report): fish-fighting in Thailand (just like cockfighting but with specially bred fish in a tank); competitive kite-flying in several Southeast Asia countries (kites with sharp edges for contestants to try to shred opponents' kites); and "pato," which is now played in Argentina with a partially buried ball with handles, but which originally was played by burying a duck up to his neck and attempting to yank it up while on horseback.

-- To battle dry spells in Nepal and neighboring northern India in July and August, dozens of farmer's wives gathered in the fields to perform naked dances at midnight in order to appease Indra, the Hindu god of rain; the women of Uttar Pradesh state in India were less successful, but the 200 Nepalese women who began dancing in mid-August were rewarded with the start of the monsoon season, which soon created floods and landslides. And in Lambertville, N.J., in August, a nude Douglas B. Carroll, 24, was arrested at 3 a.m. and told police he thought running across a bridge naked, really fast, would bring rain; the next night, it rained.

-- Thailand's public health minister issued a warning in August against the growing fad of keeping as pets the large Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches, which are being widely sold for about $1.20 each. According to her, their bacteria- and virus-laden, 2-1/2-inch-long bodies, and very quick breeding ability, make them somewhat unsuitable as pets.

In August, in Goshen, Ind., Chad Hershberger, 45, survived having his skull split wide open by an exploding piece of metal in a septic-tank accident. (He initially remained conscious while being treated for the 2-inch, ear-to-ear gash but later underwent major surgery and lost his left eye.) And in June, a 20-year-old man accidentally fired his spear gun, hitting himself in the head, while fishing near Chania, Crete, but survived despite being in the water for six hours before being discovered and enduring three hours' surgery just to remove the spear (which had entered his jaw and broken through the top of his skull); because the spear passed through a nonactive part of the brain, the man was soon back on his feet with no serious problems.

A 16-year-old boy was sent to Sherman Hospital in Elgin, Ill., in September with second-degree burns after he and two pals started playing a game in which each would splash gasoline on their shorts and set themselves on fire before rolling on the ground to try to extinguish the flames. One of the boys told police they agreed to three rounds each as sort of competition.

James Scott Woods, 26, was arrested in Mount Carmel, Tenn., in July after police were called to a house on a robbery complaint. Officers could not find evidence of the robbery and were inclined to let Woods go but on a hunch discovered a half-ounce of marijuana, plus a pipe and $187 cash, tucked into a fold of Woods' stomach. (A few minutes later, Woods was also charged with tampering with evidence when he allegedly broke his handcuffs and tried to swallow the marijuana.)

Nature 3, Humans 0. Rodrigo Vazquez's mobile home in Rockingham County, Pa., and a vacant house in Homestead, Pa., were nearly destroyed in August when gas appliances ignited the owners' pest-control foggers. And Larry Goble's house caught fire (before a neighbor helped extinguish it) after an accident started by Goble's attempt to burn a wasps' nest on an outside wall (Corn Fork, Ky., July).

The large health insurer AmeriChoice Corp. (under investigation in New York and New Jersey in recent years) was criticized for giving away chickens in poor neighborhoods to get people to switch their Medicaid coverage to the company (Brooklyn, N.Y., August). The Springfield, Fla., city commissioners voted to accept as many as 15 new police cars for free provided that the North Carolina company that supplied them could plaster them with ads (August). And the trade journal Advertising Age reported in September that Island Def Jam music company is actively considering selling product placements in the lyrics of some of the company's artists' recordings. (Current product mentions in lyrics are believed to be uncompensated and at the whim of the artist.)

Montana's Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate Stan Jones said the reason that his skin is blue, probably permanently, is because he had been drinking a homemade silver solution favored by some libertarians to guard against illness. Surgeons reattached a man's upper lip after friends found it on a street after it had been severed in a fight (Wellington, New Zealand). Canadian Football League running back Ron Williams and six teammates made a group "fair catch" of a woman who jumped from the fourth floor of a burning building (Edmonton, Alberta). Among the volunteers on the re-election campaign of imprisoned former U.S. Rep. James Traficant is Leo Glaser, a remorseful juror who helped convict Traficant of racketeering and who now believes he was innocent (Girard, Ohio).

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

-- England's Mentorn production company announced in September that it was finalizing a deal with Channel 4 TV in London for a series in which a terminally ill man would volunteer for what Mentorn called the "ultimate makeover" (the postmortem reconstruction of his body in "plastination," to demonstrate how changes could have improved the quality of his life). Among the possibilities: adding ribs, making knees back-bending, adding a back-up heart, and redoing the trachea to better keep food out. The show would be staged by artist Gunter von Hagens, whose Body Worlds exhibit consists of vivid dissections and reconstructions of body parts.

-- Police in Irvine, Calif., told the Los Angeles Times in September that, based on a recent crackdown, they were stunned at the high number of abuses of handicapped parking placards. Among those caught were a teenage girl parked at a Weezer concert three months after her grandmother died and who with a straight face said that she was her grandmother ("So you're 80 years old?" asked officer Kyle Oldoerp) and a woman who said she thought she had inherited her late husband's parking privileges as part of his estate.

Among those who accidentally shot themselves recently: Police Lt. Walter Warot (carried gun in waistband, shot in buttocks) (Woonsocket, R.I., August); a 43-year-old man (gun in waistband, shot fatally) (Ventura, Calif., September); a 43-year-old man (carjacker, carried gun in his pants) (Detroit, September); and an 18-year-old man (shot in the hand) (Artesia, N.M., September). Also, three Montanans were on the list: Undersheriff Mike Dominick (gun caught in holster) (Missoula, August); a 19-year-old gang-member suspect (gun in waistband) (Great Falls, April); and a 22-year-old man (gun in waistband, shot off right testicle) (Great Falls, May).

-- In New York City in August, businessman Herbert Black sued socialite Denise Rich (ex-wife of the Clinton-pardoned Marc Rich) for nonpayment of fees he said he earned by saving her nearly a million dollars annually as a personal financial adviser. Included alleged savings were: $125,000 in flowers (by having fewer deliveries to her apartment when she wasn't at home); $30,000 by changing the payment plan for her yoga instructions; and $52,000 in "dog maintenance" (mostly by giving away her two oldest dogs, which were so feeble that they had to be pushed by sitters around Central Park in an $8,000 baby carriage).

-- Business was booming in August for unlicensed street dentists in Lahore, Pakistan, according to a New York Times reporter, who witnessed several patients' gruesome sidewalk experiences (forced on them because one-third of Pakistanis earn less in a month than even the lowest-priced licensed-dentist procedure). Tools of the trade include ordinary pliers, wire-cutters, metal files, a container of moonshine (to rinse tools off) needle-point probes (to inflict a distracting pain elsewhere in the mouth), and a red plastic sheet (so the blood won't stand out so much). Also plentiful in the street-dentists' "offices": dust and vehicle exhaust.

-- According to the Beijing Morning Post, the government in Chengdu, China, shut down a food-processing plant in August after discovering that workers routinely pulled the bones out of chicken feet with their teeth. Workers first boiled the feet in water, then made three slits in the foot with a knife, pried open the skin with their fingers, and removed the bones with their teeth. The fastest workers could go through a foot every five seconds.

-- In Meriden, Conn., in August, music store owner Jeff Caillouette, 35, was charged with sexual assault for allegedly forcing a then-15-year-old employee to let Caillouette spank him, supposedly as punishment for various workplace mistakes. At one point, when the kid caught Caillouette in a lie, he requested and received permission to spank the boss, which he did at first while the boss was clothed but later on his bare buttocks. During the time of the alleged assaults, Caillouette was the band director at a local high school.

-- In August, the historic Shugborough Home (Staffordshire, England) announced a job opening for a hermit to live temporarily in a cave on the grounds (running water not available) and scare away trespassers; an administrator was said to be astonished at the large number of applications. Also in August, the Landmark Trust, which manages the remote Lundy Island off the southwest coast of England, announced a job opening for a shepherd for the island's 600 sheep and various rare wildlife; the island receives birdwatchers but has no nighttime electricity.

In Albuquerque, Darcy Ornelas, 31, was arrested in July after a car crash that killed her 4-year-old son. According to police, Ornelas had several drinks at a party but refused advice not to drive home. She fastened her own seatbelt but not the kid's, and then, in her Nissan 300 ZX, she became involved in a road race to prevent a Mustang from passing her, continuing to speed up and cut in front to frustrate that driver. After the fatal crash into a utility pole, Ornelas implied (according to police) that she had been concerned about being upstaged by another sports car.

Cheverly, Md., juror Levon Adams, 25, skipped out during deliberations in a September carjacking trial, and when sheriff's deputies brought him back to the courtroom the next day, he told the judge that he left because the other jurors were becoming aggressive with him. Adams told the judge that he was the only holdout against a guilty verdict and told the jurors that no matter how much evidence there was against the defendant, he could not convict him because Adams was not present at the scene of the crime and thus did not actually see the defendant do it.

The annual late-summer arrival in Boulder, Colo., of 4,000 starlings has once again drenched a 128-unit mobile home park with droppings, but city regulations prohibit even shooing the birds away. (And the Whole Foods Market company was hit with an animal-rights boycott in September after a dead mouse was found in its Boulder warehouse, showing that the company might not be using rodent-friendly catch-and-release traps). And the Telluride, Colo., Town Council brought in a shaman in August to rid the chamber of bickering among council members. And several city officials in Santa Cruz, Calif., sponsored a marijuana giveaway at City Hall in September, to protest federal crackdowns on the medicinal use of marijuana by local citizens.

News of the Weird reported in 1989 that 31-year-old swimsuit model Chanel Price, landing by helicopter at a Malibu, Calif., St. Patrick's Day party to deliver a singing telegram, acknowledged guests' attention by waving, which cost her a thumb and finger in the helicopter blades. In September 2002, 16-year-old Mexican singer Ricardo Abarca suffered a similar fate waving to fans after landing at Guatemala City, Guatemala, airport, but doctors were able to reattach two of his three severed fingers.

Executed for the 1992 murders of two little girls was Rex Mays, whose biography included part-time work in the Houston area as Uh-Oh the Clown (Huntsville, Texas). State officials cited the Key West (Fla.) municipal incinerator for briefly gagging its neighbors when it burned nine tons of contraband Miami cocaine and marijuana that had been improperly prepared for disposal. A government trade official in Iran complained that his nation's annual caviar exports are down two-thirds (to 10 tons) because of post-Sept. 11 cutbacks in first-class air travel. And European researchers found that children exposed to dirt and dust have much lower rates of asthma than kids in cleaner environments.

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

-- Among the personal items that former Tyco International chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski bought and charged to the company (without authorization, said the company in September) were two New York City apartments ($24 million), a Boca Raton, Fla., house ($29 million), furnishings and renovations ($14 million), a travel toiletries box ($17,000), an umbrella stand ($15,000), a shower curtain ($6,000) and a pincushion ($445), along with half the $2.1 million tab for a 40th birthday party for his wife (a former waitress at a restaurant near Tyco headquarters in Exeter, N.H.). (The party, at a Sardinian resort, featured Stoli vodka loaded into a statue of a man so that it could be poured out to guests through his penis.)

-- The National Post (Toronto) reported in August on the $12,000 (U.S.) executive seminars given by the local management firm Case Solutions, centering around its clients' using customized Lego blocks to build quixotic designs as metaphors for their companies' opportunities and problems. For example, one executive made an octopus with a hard hat and holding a skeleton to show himself as a multi-tasker; the hard hat supposedly represented problems from the past, wrote the Post, while the skeleton was said to symbolize his tendency to protect himself from sales quotas. Said one Lego fan, "(People) use the Legos to make a statement that they might not have been able to make before."

Robert Bouslaugh dropped out of the race for sheriff in Durango, Colo., in September after he, wearing a dress, allegedly shot a man to death after the man stole his purse as he was leaving an adult bookstore; Bouslaugh said he was "working undercover" but did not elaborate. And the district attorney in Oshkosh, Wis., Joe Paulus, was beaten in the September primary after an audio tape surfaced of him bragging that he had had sex in his office with five women (but which he later denied as just "boy talk" during a night out). And the German Green party, which provided the margin of victory for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in September, drew 8 percent of the vote with such campaign billboards as the one for gay rights featuring a male couple and a female couple holding their respective partners' nipples.

-- In August, a jury in Sarasota, Fla., awarded a 59-year-old woman $2.1 million from surgeon Holly Barbour for a faulty face-lift and neck-lift. According to testimony, Barbour had offered the patient a discount operation (at $7,500) because Barbour had previously worked only on eyes and wanted to expand her practice to faces. Barbour's surgery took 10 hours (twice the norm) and left the patient with a lump on her face that made a popping sound when she blinked.

-- Vince Dominach, the county economic development director in Easton, Pa., who was in trouble in June for $1,388 worth of personal calls on his government phone, told reporters that the problem stemmed from a hectic period in which his wife and he had become sexually involved with another couple. And Jeremiah Frank Dubois, 24, pleaded guilty to rape in August in Raleigh, N.C.; police said he told them the reason he did it was that his wedding day was approaching and he wanted one last fling before then.

-- Raymond Leopold, who was the "Winston man" model in cigarette ads from 1978 to 1980, filed a federal lawsuit in Little Rock, Ark., in April, demanding $65 million from R.J. Reynolds because he is so torn up with remorse and stress at the role he played in creating smoking-related illnesses in people who were influenced by his ads.

-- Former University of Hong Kong graduate architecture student Francis Frick, 34, said in May he would resist being sent back to the United States, despite the school's having kicked him out for lack of progress. As his Ph.D. dissertation last year, Frick submitted a blank piece of paper (his only UHK thesis product), calling it an example of his "quantum arcology," which focuses on nonverbal creativity; he said he plans a legal challenge to the school because his adviser failed to understand Frick's approach.

-- In September in Carlisle, Pa., Gordon Neal Diem was convicted of several charges in connection with an alleged attempt to lure two teenage girls (one being merely a police officer posing as one online) to a motel room for sex, but according to him, everything he did was part of his life's dedication to finding and stopping adults who sexually abuse children. The 60 items of bondage and sex toys he had on him (and the Viagra tablets) were merely props, he said, to make him look like an authentic pervert, and a child-sex photo he had "helps motivate" him in his work, he said.

White supremacists Leo Felton, 31, and his girlfriend Erica Chase, 22, were convicted in July of plotting to blow up landmarks around Boston that had significance for Jews and blacks so that a "racial holy war" would erupt. Chase dressed demurely during the trial, hiding her numerous Aryan tattoos (including "white power" on her toes). Felton has attributed his anger and aggression to the fact that he has a black father (and white mother, and both were civil-rights activists), and courthouse observers speculated that Chase's distancing of herself from him during the trial reflects her growing ambivalence about his heritage.

No Exit Strategy: David Christopher Lander, 51, was arrested in Gainesville, Fla., in July, locked inside the Infiniti car he was burglarizing; while inside, he had accidentally triggered the car alarm, which automatically locks the doors. And in September, Andrew Birch, 21, was arrested in Renfrew, Scotland, after becoming wedged in the window of the car he was climbing through in order to (according to authorities) steal. (Alcohol was involved in both incidents.)

In August, a federal judge in New York rejected the Tommy Hilfiger company's lawsuit against the makers of Timmy Holedigger perfume for dogs, which Hilfiger had said was a threat to its trademark in that consumers were likely to confuse the two products. (The Holedigger people also make Pucci dog cologne but haven't yet heard from Gucci.) Still unresolved, however, is AOL Time Warner's lawsuit, to protect the trademark of its magazine Entertainment Weekly from a ranting, urban hip-hop-culture startup called Niggertainment Monthly, whose Yonkers, N.Y., founder said he was forced to pull 700,000 copies from newsstands when the lawsuit was filed in April.

Lutheran minister David Benke, the main voice on the church's national radio show, was demoted in June solely because he spoke at an all-denomination prayer service in New York City just after Sept. 11; Lutherans are strictly against praying with "pagans" because that would imply that there is more than one God. And ex-con and illegal Iranian immigrant Peyman Bahadori, who works (illegally, of course) as a private investigator in Colorado Springs and who was pursuing another Iranian man (who turned out to be a legal resident), was charged with impersonating an immigration agent after he harassed the man in August; Bahadori somehow persuaded four Aurora, Colo., police officers to help him in his pursuit of the man.

Reuters reported that a 40-year-old Yemeni man named Yahya, who had left his wife of 15 years because of her screaming, married a deaf-mute woman (Dhamar province, Yemen). Beckman Research Institute investigators working with genetically engineered flies converted them temporarily from heterosexual to homosexual by merely turning up the temperature past 86 degrees (Duarte, Calif.). The latest person to be killed by a flying cow was a 54-year-old truck driver, who crashed after another driver knocked the cow into his truck on U.S. 160 (near Kayenta, Ariz.). A 43-year-old man was charged with kidnaping his wife and roughing her up during an argument about whether to attend church (Salt Lake City).

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