News of the Weird

Researchers Steven Potter (Georgia Tech) and Guy Ben-Ary (University of Western Australia, Perth) have created a robotic "arm" that makes a painter's rudimentary brush strokes at Ben-Ary's lab, directed over the Internet by its "brain" (composed of 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish) in Potter's lab, according to a July report from BBC News. According to Potter, the brain is not yet classically "intelligent" but does "adapt" (i.e., experience less chaos) and thus strokes more smoothly over time.

In August, St. Louis, Mo., school board member Rochell Moore sent Mayor Francis Slay an open letter, criticizing his school-closing management reforms and advising him that because of his obstinacy, she had placed a curse on him. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Moore's curse was modeled after Deuteronomy 28:21, in which Moses told the Israelites what would happen if they strayed from God, e.g., "The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto Francis Slay ..." (When a former city comptroller later told reporters he thought Moore had "mental problems," Moore allegedly threatened to kill him.)

The 2003 valedictorian of Alcee Fortier Senior High School in New Orleans failed (for the fifth time) the state's mandatory exit exam, and she cannot graduate until she passes (August). And workers tearing down the reactors at the old Hanford, Wash., nuclear reservation discovered dozens of radioactive nests of mud dauber wasps, but so far no wasp had mutated into a monster (August). And the district attorney of Watauga County, N.C., frustrated at the light sentences judges hand down for methamphetamine producers, announced that he will begin to charge defendants instead (via a recent anti-terrorism law) with manufacturing a "nuclear or chemical weapon" (August).

-- New York City's new 16-page anti-terrorist preparedness manual, produced by a consortium of 20 government agencies and released in July, contains such advice as: If you encounter radiation, go outside (if you're inside a building) or go inside (if you're outside a building); Do not accept packages from strangers; If you find yourself holding a mysterious substance, put it down. Also offered is the familiar advice from a generation ago: If you can't get out of a building, "(Duck) under a sturdy table or desk."

-- In March, in Lisbon, Ohio, after William Neville, 30, allegedly tried to get intimate with a woman who had taken out a stay-away order against him, police chased the man out of her home, down the street through the Lisbon Cemetery, until he accidentally got caught in a briar patch.

-- The St. Petersburg Times reported in July that Pinellas County (Fla.) judge Richard Luce was being investigated for losing his temper in May and thus becoming unsuited to sentence convicted attempted-murderer Tam Thane Vo. Luce became angry when he surmised that Vo's mother had raised her hand, middle finger extended, to her forehead in reaction to the verdict, but the mother said she was merely having an adverse reaction to her shampoo.

-- In Kingsford, Australia, in May, Phyllis Newnham, vying for a larger portion of the estate of her late friend Florence Mather, claimed in court that Mather had made out a subsequent, more generous, superseding will but that one of Ms. Mather's dogs ate it (and she produced DNA testing to show that the dog had eaten a mangled document, but it was unclear if that was the will).

At the Amoco station on Route 59 In Spring Valley, N.Y., on June 22, an unidentified man twice jumped on the counter and shouted, demanding that the clerk hand over money, but twice the clerk pushed him off, and the man finally gave up and left. And in August in Delray Beach, Fla., a man tried to carjack Larry Klein, 53, who is disabled, but Klein repeatedly jabbed at the man out the window with one of his crutches, and he finally ran away.

In June, Jacquelyn Allen-MacGregor, 47, a 20-year executive with United Way in East Lansing, Mich., was remorseful after being sentenced to four years in prison for stealing more than $2 million from the agency to buy show horses; said MacGregor, "I do believe that I'm obsessed with horses." And an independent investigation revealed in August that Mr. Oral Suer, the former CEO of United Way of the Washington, D.C., area, had taken $1.5 million in improper payments during his tenure; among the alleged improprieties was that Suer made several annual gifts to United Way in his own name but then collected bogus expenses from the organization to cover the donations.

Robin Wilkinson, a 19-year veteran prosecutor who resigned after being charged with DUI, said her main defense would be that, at the time of the traffic stop, police did not tell her that she had the right to an attorney (Orlando, Fla., August). And an accountant was charged with embezzling $170,000 from his employer (a union local) and explained that he gave it all to a female assistant for three years' worth of oral sex (New York City).

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (65) Parents who on a hot day leave their infants locked in the car (accidentally or for what they believe is only a brief period), resulting in death, as happens usually to underachieving people but which also happened in August to University of California professor Mark J. Warschauer. (66) And the proliferation of Internet pages by penpal-seeking lonely-heart inmates such as Saul dos Reis Jr., who is serving time in Connecticut for a fatal sexual assault on a 13-year-old girl, and who advertised himself (on Inmate.com, before the ad was recently removed) as "enjoy(ing)" "being silly and funny" and who has "many qualities which make me unique."

Victor Robinson was charged with murder in Miami in April after he allegedly told police he roughed up his 8-month-old son to stop him from crying so that he wouldn't grow up "to be a punk." And in May in Rockville, Md., a 12-year-old girl formally acknowledged at a hearing that she had fatally stabbed her 15-year-old brother during a dispute over whose turn it was to use the phone.

Three teenagers with paintball guns terrorized kids on a playground until they fired into the wrong group of kids, one of whom returned fire with a real gun, wounding two paintballers (Pittsburgh). An expert in workplace violence for the Hawaii state government was allegedly roughed up by his supervisor in a policy dispute (Honolulu). The government of India's West Bengal state began distributing copies of the venerable Kama Sutra sex guide to teach prostitutes creative ways to give pleasure to clients without AIDS-risky penetrative sex.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- Wired magazine reported in August that an order screen at the big e-mail spammer, Amazing Internet Products, was left unsecured and was hacked into recently, revealing not only an inexplicably large sales volume (6,000 orders in four weeks for $50 Pinacle cream that promised to increase penis size by up to 3 inches) but some prominent, should-know-better customers, such as the manager of a $6 billion mutual fund in New York City. Wired (and earlier, Salon magazine) reported that AIP's two principals are a 19-year-old high-school dropout and chess vagabond and a 20-something former head of a neo-Nazi outfit.

-- The Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune reported in August that the local superintendent of schools, Wilfredo T. Laboy, had recently failed (for the third time) the basic English proficiency test required of all teachers in the state. (English is Laboy's second language.) The state education commissioner said that Laboy was doing "an excellent job" but that he was still going to have to pass the test (a test which Laboy called "stupid").

Reuters reported in June that would-be painter Rainer Herpel, 51, of Bad Ems, Germany, was finally speaking again, after having remained silent for the last 29 years as a reaction to his father's disapproval of art as a career. Herpel lived with his mother, spent most of the time alone in his room concentrating on his paintings, only occasionally ventured outdoors, and came out of his shell only when his father passed away. Said Herpel, "All great artists were outsiders (probably meaning "different from us") before they had success."

CBS News reported in June that few states have complied with the Brady Bill requirement to list all people involuntarily hospitalized for mental illness on the FBI computer database used for gun purchases, with the result that 2.7 million people should be barred from buying guns for that reason but only 90,000 are. And in Hawera, New Zealand, a 25-year-old sex worker ("Brooke") at a massage parlor set the town abuzz in July by advertising that she (who recently gave birth) would (presumably for an additional fee) allow her customers to consume her nutritious breast milk; the director of the local breastfeeding advocates, La Leche League, said she was concerned that Brooke's baby was getting short-changed.

-- Omorotu Francis Ayovuare, 55, a professional surveyor from Nigeria, has filed 72 employment discrimination complaints against British companies in the last five years, with only two minor victories to show. According to a report in London's Daily Telegraph in June, Ayovuare has cost responding employers and the government the equivalent of nearly US$1 million to deal with him before employment tribunals. One panel ruled in 2001 that Ayovuare, who is "impressive on paper," keeps applying for jobs beyond his level of practical experience.

-- A longstanding rumor on the inner-city "street" held that the federal government actually created AIDS for the purpose of keeping African-Americans' population down and the community weak, but now a man of impressive credentials has made the accusation in court. Boyd Graves, 50, a black AIDS activist who is also a Naval Academy and law school graduate, filed the lawsuit in San Diego in July, accusing the government of illegally withholding the documents that Graves is certain will prove the government engineered the whole thing and is suppressing the cure.

-- The family of teenager Amy Woods, who was left brain-damaged when hit by a car seven years ago in Springfield, Mass., will finally get to trial in their lawsuit, which names not only the driver who hit her but also a driver who didn't. Roger O'Neil, a repairman for the NYNEX telephone company, had just stopped on a residential street and courteously motioned Woods and a friend to cross in front of him, but as soon as Woods cleared O'Neil's van, a less courteous driver smashed into her. Woods' family said that if a driver wants to be courteous, he must be responsible for knowing that crossing the street would be safe.

-- Juries of Their Peers: In June, a judge in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, rejected the request of a 15-year-old boy, on trial for beating another teenager to death, for a jury composed entirely of teenagers. At the other end of the spectrum, a 13-year-old boy, on trial in April in Inverness, Fla., for fondling a classmate, demanded that he be tried as an adult in front of an adult jury. (He was quickly convicted). And in Santa Ana, Calif., in June, Antonio Nunez, 16, convicted for violent crimes (kidnapping, shooting at police) that he committed at age 14, was sentenced as an adult to five life terms (one of them without possibility of parole) plus 121 years.

-- Rap as a Second Language: In a June copyright infringement case, British High Court judge Kim Lewison ruled against the composer of the 2001 song "Burnin'," explaining that he could not help Lewison because he did not know what certain lyrics meant (such as "shizzle my nizzle"). The lyrics, said the judge, although written in a form of English, were "for practical purposes a foreign language" and therefore, he could not be sure whether the borrowed use of the lyrics impugned them.

Several times since 1999 News of the Weird has run stories of incidents in which someone telephones the manager of a fast-food restaurant claiming to be a police officer and asks the manager to strip-search one of the employees while the caller listens to the episode on the phone. (Police later concluded that the calls were hoaxes for sexual gratification.) In July, police in Panama City, Fla., arrested supermarket supervisor James Marvin Pate, 36, on the complaint of a local woman who reported a similar situation. At least one of the calls in the previous incidents (in Wisconsin, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana and West Virginia) had been traced to a telephone in Panama City, but there were no suspects in those cases until Pate's arrest.

The District of Columbia government's inspector general reported in April that D.C.'s child-support office had been sitting on nearly $3 million in long-overdue, already-collected distributions to custodial parents and that several ranking officials in the office had long known about the delay (a problem apparently caused by incomplete records in "thousands" of cases). (Roscoe Grant, the deputy director of child-support enforcement in the District, himself resisted supporting two out-of-wedlock children until ordered by courts in 1998 and, regarding a 20-year-old son, 2002.)

In June, a federal judge unsealed the results of an investigation into Pennsylvania State Police misconduct, listing 89 incidents, including one involving a trooper in Rockview, Pa., who was accused of defecating on another trooper at a party, of inserting a carrot into his rear end and eating part of it, then passing gas and shooting the carrot out. And in July, New York City's deputy police commissioner, Frederick J. Patrick, was arrested and charged with taking $113,000 from an office charity fund and using it to pay jailed inmates to make calls to sex hotlines, which Patrick then allegedly listened in on for his own gratification.

Recent Provocations Leading to Murder: (1) Wouldn't give him back his New York Yankees cap (Kenneth Ware, 45, allegedly stabbed his brother to death, Brooklyn, N.Y., July). (2) Parked his truck on top of a man's septic tank and wouldn't move it (Chad Landreth, allegedly shot the driver to death, Samsula, Fla., June). (3) Argued over who should feed the couple's goats (Pearl Lynne Smith, 47, allegedly shot her husband to death, Eldon, Okla., June).

Norway repealed its law that barred intoxicated persons from voting in elections. And Justice Barrington Black had to recuse himself from a "dangerous dog" case when he learned that his own dog appears in the background in a video for the defense, frolicking in a park with the defendant-dog (London, England). And Cambodian police detained (on a charge unrelated to hygiene) a prominent, 81-year-old Buddhist guru who has preached for 60 years that religious purity requires that no water ever touch his skin or hair (Phnom Penh).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

-- The Future of War: Although India and Pakistan have backed off of their recent potentially nuclear confrontation over Kashmir, computer hackers from both countries have stepped up their wars against each other's government Web sites and networks, according to a July Washington Times dispatch. Retaliating against increased hacking that accompanied the attack on India's parliament in 2001, Indian hackers unleashed the annihilating Yaha virus, which has been answered by a massive flood of Pakistani attacks (at about seven times the Indian attack rate), which has provoked Indian hackers to consider an even-more-devastating Yaha virus.

-- As straphanger Joyce M. Judge, 42, stared out the window of the Boston subway car during morning rush hour on July 30, she started dripping profusely, and a minute or so later, a baby fell out from underneath her skirt and slid around on the car's floor. According to witnesses (some of whom vomited at the sight), Judge at first acted as if nothing had happened, then finally picked up her newborn, declined the help of passengers, nonchalantly continued the ride, and left the train at the next station (stopping only to pick up the placenta when it fell to the ground). She subsequently reported to Boston Medical Center, where the baby was in good condition (and where the mother was referred for a mental health evaluation).

-- According to Houston newsletter publisher and devout Catholic Hutton Gibson, there was no Holocaust; Pope John Paul II is an imposter and a "Koran kisser"; and the church is doomed because, among other things, masses are no longer conducted in Latin. According to a July Houston Press profile, Gibson, 84, believes there is a worldwide plot that began with the 1960s' changes in the church imposed by the Vatican Council, and he is using his 600-reader newsletter to get the word out, even though the Press compares him to the paranoid lead character in the movie "Conspiracy Theory," which starred Mel Gibson, who happens to be Hutton's son. Said Hutton, "I figure that as long as there's one (true) Catholic in the world, (the church) hasn't finished."

-- David Mitchell, 35, was arrested in June in Omaha, Neb., on charges of false imprisonment and making terroristic threats, accused of having locked up his wife, Polly, every time he left the house over a two-year (and maybe longer) period. He was always with her in public, and intimidated her from reporting him. David had always had only a cell phone so he could take it with him when he left the house, but he had recently gotten a home phone for Internet access, allowing Polly to call her sister one day when he was out.

-- The Latest Results From America's Pre-eminent Lawyer Enrichment Program (class-action lawsuits): (1) In a $350 million settlement between AT&T and customers overcharged on telephone leases, lawyers get $84 million, and customers get back $15 to $20 each (December). (2) In a recent settlement between Sears and customers with improperly done wheel balancing, lawyers get $2.45 million, and customers get $2.50 a tire. (3) In a $3.7 million settlement between televangelist Jim Bakker's Praise the Lord Ministries and 165,000 defrauded Christians, lawyers get $2.5 million, and each victim gets $6.54 (July). (4) In a settlement of price-fixing charges against cosmetics manufacturers and retailers, lawyers get $24 million, and each customer gets a free cosmetic (July).

-- ABC News reported in May that it is not illegal in Massachusetts for a man to take surreptitious photographs of his adult daughter in the family home, even though in "hundreds" of the photos, she is nude or partially nude. The Easthampton, Mass., woman was 19 when she moved back into her old bedroom, where her father had been keeping electronic equipment, but later got a tech-savvy friend to examine a camera and computer. The parents are now divorced, but since the father committed no crime, he got to keep the photos.

-- On July 31, a jury in Miami concluded almost simultaneously that a subsidiary of the Chevron Texaco corporation breached a contract with a local company, Apex Development Corp., yet caused Apex not a penny's worth of harm, and yet still had to pay Apex $33.8 million in "punitive" damages. (Apex had charged that Chevron Texaco backed out of a contract to build "express lube" sites after Apex had already built them.)

-- A Rough Summer for Weird India: (1) Doctors at Burdwan Medical College and Hospital reported that black ants were crawling out of the left eye of an 11-year-old boy (June). (2) Six members of a family hanged themselves on a hillside near Tirupati, but the bodies were not discovered until the odor wafted into a nearby village (July). (3) After doctors in Angara found 15 students unconscious following a lightning strike, they covered the bodies in cow dung as per a traditional remedy; 13 recovered within a few hours (but not even cow dung could save the other two). (4) Doctors at Burdwan originally diagnosed parasitic flies emerging from the penis of a 13-year-old boy while he urinated, but doctors at SSKM Hospital in Kolkata disputed that (June).

-- Police, having knocked on a door in Woodlawn, Ky., in June, pursuant to a neighbor's noise complaint, inadvertently stumbled across an apparent family-run retail drug business when three teenagers eagerly answered questions about the marijuana plant viewable from the front door. According to police, the kids invited them in and proudly showed them the entire elaborate hydroponic operation. The mother, Bernadette Dusing, 42, was at home at the time, but according to police, remained silent.

-- In April, apparently dissatisfied with the many dictionaries on the market, the Republican-controlled Oregon House of Representatives passed House Bill 2416, whose sole purpose was to define "science" ("the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the universe and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories"). A commentator for The Oregonian newspaper speculated that the sponsor, Rep. Betsy Close, believes that the definition will somehow halt recent successes by the state's environmental activists.

(1) Most recent mother to fall asleep next to her infant child and accidentally roll over and smother it to death: a 20-year-old woman in Pontiac, Mich., in July. (2) Latest convicted slum landlord to be sentenced (90 days) to live in her own dilapidated, roach-and-rodent-haven apartments: Sandra O'Neale (Los Angeles, July). (3) Latest enrollment figures in Florida's statewide program allowing high school students to take physical education courses by computer: 614. (Administrators say they can detect any student cheating; critics don't think so.)

A July Associated Press dispatch from Jerusalem reported that a 32-year-old woman accidentally swallowed a cockroach and then, after trying to dig it out with a fork, swallowed the fork. Dr. Nikola Adid of the Poria Hospital in Tiberias, Israel, had to remove both items.

(1) The Baltimore Sun (May) and The Wall Street Journal (July) reported on the handful of schools (most prominent, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and University of Texas at Dallas) that vie for supremacy in intercollegiate chess and engage in annual recruiting battles to sign up established chess masters with cushy scholarship offers. (2) And in April, the Saxonia Globe Snippers of Germany beat a British team, the Black Dog Boozers, to win the World Marbles Cup in Tinsley Green, England; the winner of the match is the first team to knock 25 of a circle's 49 marbles out.

A van and an SUV, both transporting undocumented aliens, collided, injuring 28 (Blythe, Calif.). A woman saved her drowning daughter in a backyard pool by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which she said she couldn't have performed if she hadn't seen it on "Baywatch" (Brooklyn, N.Y.). A 37-year-old man, having reported to a hospital emergency room with a knife penetrating his brain, waited, conscious, for six hours while doctors planned the complicated surgery (which was successful) (Wellington, New Zealand).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)