News of the Weird

-- The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concluded in May that Costco Wholesale Corp.'s firing of Kimberly M. Cloutier for refusing to stop wearing an eyebrow ring at work constituted religious discrimination in that Cloutier is a member of the Oregon-based Church of Body Modification. The church says piercings and tattoos "are essential to our spiritual salvation." Based on the EEOC ruling, Cloutier, 27, of West Springfield, Mass., filed a federal lawsuit against Costco for not "accommodating" her religious practice, as required by law.

-- Police in Modesto, Calif., arrested Kelli Pratt, 45, in October and charged her with domestic abuse after she, enraged by her husband's refusal to have sex, allegedly held him down and bit him so viciously and so many times that his severely ripped-open skin was ripe for the bacterial infection that killed him six days later. Kelli suffers from multiple sclerosis and often uses a wheelchair; husband Arthur, 65, had recently been hospitalized for diabetes. Said an arresting officer, "(Kelli) refused to wash up (before we videotaped her), so she basically looks (on the tape) like a vampire with blood all over her face and teeth."

A man accidentally killed his 14-year-old son with a crossbow when he mistook the boy for a deer (Adamsville, Ohio, October). A man accidentally shot his adult son with his Father's Day handgun (which the son had loaded before gift-wrapping) (Coraopolis, Pa., June). Mothers in Jackson, Wis., and Port Richey, Fla., shot their sons (ages 9 and 10, respectively) with BB rifles in object lessons taken too far (August; September). A man accidentally fired his hunting bow, driving an arrow into the skull of his 11-year-old daughter, but she survived (Muncie, Ind., September). An 8-year-old boy was taken away by child welfare officials in September after his stepfather shamelessly admitted that he had used a stun gun on the boy for being late for school (Sweeny, Texas).

-- Otis Stansbury, 34, of Long Eaton, England, filed a lawsuit in August against door-to-door salesman Jay Sims and his company, Accident Group, whose business is helping customers in personal-injury lawsuits. Sims had just left the Stansbury home (after failing to sign them up) when, according to the lawsuit, he attempted to catch a ball among kids playing in front of the Stansbury home, slipped, and fell on top of 6-year-old Yohan Stansbury, sending the boy to the hospital with head injuries.

-- Cherise Mosley, 19, filed a lawsuit against the Aaron Family Planning Clinic in Houston in August, seeking damages for the abortion it performed on her two years earlier when she was a minor. Mosley admits that she produced a false ID card at that time, showing that she was over 18, for the express purpose of receiving the abortion without having her parents notified. Now, Mosley apparently regrets the abortion and claims the clinic should have detected that her ID was false and thus notified her parents, who, Mosley believes, would have talked her out of the abortion.

-- Josephine Bailey filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in August, two years after her 22-year-old son staggered out of Rick's Pub in Hurricane, W.Va., after a night of drinking and, according to police, collapsed under an idling 18-wheeler across the street, shortly after which he was run over and killed when the driver pulled away without noticing him. Ms. Bailey, who is suing Rick's owner and the trucking company, had said earlier that she couldn't believe her son would do such a foolish thing: "He'd never put himself in that kind of predicament."

-- In a decision hailed by animal-rights activists, District of Columbia judge Frederick Weisberg in July sentenced John Hardy, 49, to prison for assaults he committed during a domestic altercation, which broke out when Hardy and his wife were scuffling and ended when Hardy's pit bull became excited, provoking Hardy to fatally stab him. Weisberg sentenced Hardy to three months for assaulting his wife and 24 months for the attack on the dog.

-- Decisions announced one day apart in September: Toronto prosecutors dropped the public nudity charges against seven men who marched naked in a Gay Pride parade, concluding that it would be impossible to convict them, in that they were wearing shoes. And the Washington state Supreme Court dismissed voyeurism charges against two men who had been convicted of shooting "upskirt" photos of women in public, concluding that the state peeping-tom statute applies only to victims who have an "expectation of privacy" because they are in secluded places.

Linda Henning, 48, went on trial for murder in Albuquerque in September, charged as being the dupe and accomplice of cancer-curing, 2,000-year-old guru Diazien Hossencofft in the murder of his wife, the late Girly Chew Hossencofft. Henning was described by longtime friends as exceptionally level-headed, right up until the day she met the charismatic Hossencofft, after which she became "crazy as a loon," according to one, in that she believed that reptilian aliens were ready to take over the world, using cryogenic pods. (She wrote that reptilian George W. Bush maintains his human visage through "the use of magnetic fields to create holograms.") Hossencofft has since come clean about his frauds, but Henning apparently continues to believe.

News of the Weird reported on the annual Gotmaar festival in Pandhurna, India, in 1989, describing how, despite the village's increasing modernization, its work comes to a halt after the first full moon in September, with males dividing into two groups to gather rocks and throw them at each other, attempting to injure as many people as they can. (At sunset, they stop, nurse the wounded, and return to normal life.) Apparently, the festival continues with equal vigor, despite attempts in recent years to make it less violent. In September 2002, participants again rejected safety rules, and 550 were wounded, some seriously.

Terry Devine jumped on a motorcycle immediately after receiving his driver's license in Greymouth, New Zealand, in September and sped off at almost 100 mph; his biking experience lasted about 45 minutes, until police caught him, and his license was suspended. And to address a self-described "mid-age crisis," Jim Zimmerman of Saginaw, Mich., bought a Harley-Davidson in September, even though he was 60 years old and hadn't been on a bike in 30 years; 10 seconds into his first ride, he slammed into a utility pole and broke several ribs, and shortly afterward sold the bike.

-- Cases Closed, Less Paperwork: A man fleeing police in a stolen car leaped from it as it headed for a wall, but tripped and was pinned under it and fatally run over (Los Angeles, April). Terrance Claybrooks, 27, with a lengthy record and running from police, hid inside a friend's ice-cream truck freezer, but suffocated on carbon dioxide fumes from the dry ice (Nashville, June). Edward McBride, 37, fleeing police after a burglary, drowned in the Arkansas River, weighted down as he was with about 50 pounds of stolen cameras (Tulsa, Okla., August).

Researchers writing in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine reported that putting duct tape over a wart for six days makes the wart easier to remove than does the standard practice of freezing it. And German inventor Matthias Knigge said he has developed a desk with an inflatable airbag, for office workers looking for a quick nap (Hamburg). A nude male jumped onto the ice at a National Hockey League game, but immediately slipped, hit his head, and knocked himself out cold (before coming to and being carried out on a stretcher) (Calgary, Alberta). A cattle truck crashed, killing the driver and nine cows and injuring four other cows so badly they had to be euthanized (as opposed to the 16 surviving cows, which were loaded onto another truck to continue on to a slaughterhouse) (Marietta, Ga.).

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

-- University of Wisconsin-Madison veterinarians said in September they now have the technology to detect the fraudulent use of three udder-enhancing schemes employed on show cows at dairy exhibits. Forty percent of a cow's grade is on how full, symmetrical and smooth her udders are (but unlike in, say, human beauty contests, cow udders are important only for their financial, milk-producing potential). Tests of the milk can detect whether saline was injected into the udder, and ultrasound can reveal whether the udder has received isobutane gas "foamies" or a liquid silver protein that does for the udder what Botox does for human wrinkles.

-- In recent months, at the same time that the Bush administration was mobilizing support for a military invasion of Iraq, other administration representatives were working with Iraq (and Iran, Libya, Sudan and the Vatican, and against almost all of the U.S.'s traditional allies) to resist United Nations worldwide support of "reproductive health services" (including abortion), sex education (except "abstinence") and gay rights. One critic called it "pervers(e)" to blame Iraq for "unspeakable acts of terrorism" while joining them "in the oppression of women."

(1) A Mud Puddle (in the shape of Buddha's footprint, attracting pilgrims to Thailand's Pungna province and "guarded" by a frog whose skin is being fondled by people searching for lottery numbers) (September); (2) a Potato (in the shape of the Hindu god Ganesh, attracting pilgrims to a private home in Bombay, India) (September); (3) An Outline in a Dead Tree Trunk (in the likeness of the Virgin Mary looking down at her baby, attracting pilgrims to the property of nonbeliever Bill Gaede in Fresno County, Calif.) (September); (4) the Condensation on a Greenhouse Wall (in the image of the Virgin Mary, attracting pilgrims to a private home in Ile-a-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan) (September).

-- In September, Washington state Sen. Joe Zarelli acknowledged to The Columbian newspaper that he had collected $12,000 in unemployment benefits in 2001-2002 without declaring that he was also being paid $32,000 a year as a senator, but he blamed the state bureaucracy for not catching him and explaining to him why that was wrong. Sen. Zarelli said he "had no clue" that he was supposed to report his legislator's salary (which would count against any benefits he might receive) and said he thought the reason the Employment Security agency was after him was because he is a Republican.

-- Medell Banks, a retarded, poor black man from Butler, Ala., is serving a 15-year sentence for manslaughter as a result of his confession that he killed his newborn baby in 1999, despite strong evidence that there was never a baby in the first place. While in jail in an earlier incident, Banks' estranged wife claimed she was pregnant, hoping for lenient treatment, but refused to be examined except cursorily by a local doctor who said he thought he heard a fetal heartbeat. When Mrs. Banks' "baby" vanished, authorities assumed it had been born and killed. (Mrs. Banks had been sterilized four years earlier, and doctors say she remains sterile.) (In August, a state appeals court ordered a new trial for Banks, but he remains in prison through the obstinacy of the district attorney, Robert Keahey.)

-- From the Bozeman (Mont.) Chronicle, 9-24-02: "A caller reported at 7 p.m. Sunday that a man was holding a knife to a woman in a car parked in the Albertson's parking lot. Officers responded and determined that the woman was actually using the man's knife to clean her teeth."

-- From the Orem, Utah, Daily Herald, 9-4-02: "Orem police officers responded to a report of someone seeing a man dragging a woman into a residence.... The woman explained that she had been 'playing hard to get' and had been running around until her boyfriend could catch her, and he then played like a caveman and dragged her into the house, (a police) spokesman said."

-- From the August 2002 Alta, Utah, town newsletter (as featured in the Salt Lake Tribune): "July 14: At 12 p.m., the deputy on duty responded to a report of a man chasing a moose in Albion Basin. It is suspected that this is related to a subsequent report of a moose chasing a man."

"Shy," "brilliant" (according to colleagues) neurologist Joseph James Warner was arrested in Gainesville, Fla., in August (following a domestic altercation) and charged with illegally storing numerous human heads, brains and other body parts in his home. Warner was teaching at the University of Florida but was immediately fired because the body parts belonged to the school's lab and could not be lawfully removed. A former girlfriend called the Warner home a "hellhole" because of the organ-containing tanks and jars strewn around the house, and a St. Petersburg Times reporter said many of Warner's co-workers described him as a "deeply troubled man."

As News of the Weird has reported, sometimes workers accidentally fire their nail guns into their heads, and often they survive just fine, thanks to skilled surgeons (and luck). In August, Denver firefighter David Lilja's gun kicked back, propelling one 3 1/2-inch nail through his jaw and another through his cheek, but they missed vital parts (except for an artery, but the position of the nail kept the artery from hemorrhaging); he's fine now. A few days later in Santa Clarita, Calif., an errant nail went through construction worker Jorge Hernandez's eye socket, into his brain, but he remained conscious and didn't realize what had happened until he looked into a mirror; he's fine, too.

Swaziland's King Mswati, who decreed last year that virgin girls proudly wear wool tassels signifying their purity, was sued by the mother of his prospective 12th wife, objecting to the king's "authority" to snatch girls from their families (His father had 125 wives.) (September). And British composer Mike Batt (who issued, as a song, a minute's worth of absolute silence) caved in, paying off the estate of John Cage (composer of "4'33"" -- 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence) in a copyright settlement (September). And the Raelians announced they had implanted several cloned-human embryos and that they fully expect the first to be born in early 2003 (July).

A 12-year-old boy drowned because the 10 people on the river bank watching him flail away wouldn't budge until the boy's father raised the rescue price to the equivalent of $1,100, but by then it was too late (Henan province, China, July). The education commissioner of Nova Scotia announced a new high-school graduation system, with some graduates receiving specially marked diplomas noting that they never passed the mandatory literacy test. A Norwegian environmental research group said the chemical pollutants PCBs, drifting northward, might be responsible for recent strains of polar bears born with both male and female sex organs.

A 55-year-old condemned murderer-drug dealer, who suffered a heart attack just as the hangman's noose was placed on his neck, was revived, hospitalized and rescheduled for execution (Khomeini Shahr, Iran). A 25-year-old man in scrubs was arrested at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and charged with sexual assault for fondling women after telling them that he was a "lactation consultant." And at a meeting on Oct. 8, citizen J.T. James angrily threatened to initiate a lengthy recall campaign against all five Salinas, Calif., city council members, apparently unaware that all five are up for re-election on Nov. 5. And Montana Republican U.S. Senate candidate (and former salon owner) Mike Taylor angrily withdrew from the race after his Democratic opponent ran attack ads that Taylor said made him look gay.

(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/.)