News of the Weird

Tensions are brewing in the family of Zell Kravinsky, 48, and his psychiatrist-wife, Emily, over what she believes is his excessive altruism, according to an August profile in The New York Times. Kravinsky is not just a passionate philanthropist (from his fortune in commercial real estate), but such a strict utilitarian that he says he would sacrifice his one good kidney (he's already donated the other one) if it were needed by someone doing more social good than he. "No one should have two kidneys," he says, "until everyone has one." He said he cannot value his own kids more than anyone else's, a point that has angered his parents and caused Emily to threaten divorce and two friends to abandon him.

A 31-year-old Philadelphia government employee's surgery is just a radical example of how obsessed some women are to wear excruciatingly painful, but fashionable, shoes, according to an August Wall Street Journal report. For about $10,000, the woman had one toe shortened and another straightened so that now she can wear today's ever-pointier, open-toed pumps. Among podiatrists' other remedies: narrowing of the nails; collagen injections to pad the soles of the feet; and a $225 "foot facial" scrub. But when a Moline, Ill., woman told her more traditional podiatrist that she needed corrective toe surgery, the doctor said, "No, you need different shoes."

The New York Times reported that activists working to encourage organ donations deplored the recent shortage of superior young organs for transplant, in large part because murder and traffic fatality rates have come down (August). And Texas public schools raided the budget to buy state flags for every classroom in order to comply with this month's inauguration of required student pledges of allegiance to Texas (August). And one of the apparently most pressing needs in Varallo, Italy, was addressed when the city council began subsidizing half the cost of Viagra tablets for its residents (August).

-- Broward County, which was one of the "ground zeros" during Florida's 2000 presidential vote-counting problems, mistakenly failed 6,559 public middle-school students in June due to what it later called a computer error. A school official called the total count of students affected "a small number."

-- Single-engine pilot Michael Grumbine flew at barely tree-top level over La Serna High School in Whittier, Calif., in May, to drop anti-abortion leaflets to students (containing a hip reference to the then-hot movie "The Matrix: Reloaded"), but in mid-flight he accidentally stuck his hand into the propeller blades, severing two fingers and sending the plane into a fall, where it crash-landed, injuring Grumbine.

-- Authorities in Phoenix decided to hold the city's loudest July 4 fireworks show this year adjacent to the complex that houses a Veterans Administration medical center and the state's military retirement home, even though some residents of the facilities still suffer battlefield-acquired post-traumatic stress disorders. (However, the facilities reported no adverse incidents.)

-- Sewage-treatment officials in Pittsburgh, wanting to lure crowds to a June showing of their new facilities, thought the best way to attract people was to offer them a picnic of free hamburgers and hot dogs to accompany the demonstration of state-of-the-art raw sewage disposal. (About 300 people attended.)

-- In March, the double life of wealthy Tampa construction magnate Douglas Cone, 74, began to surface when, following the death of his socialite wife, Jean Ann (with whom he lived Thursdays through Sundays and had three kids), he quickly married his socialite paramour Hillary Carlson (with whom he lived in a second mansion 20 miles away as Donald Carlson, Mondays through Wednesdays, and had two kids). Cone's money (donated in both his names, though "Mr. Carlson" never appeared in public) and the women's tireless community service made the "four" of them prominent figures in Tampa. (The consensus among families' members is that Hillary knew; Jean Ann might not have; and friends and associates did not.)

-- Wilbur Daniels, 67, faces sentencing in September in Washington, D.C., on his 2002 conviction for defrauding the Dupont Park Seventh-day Adventist Church of $1.3 million, which, as church treasurer, he might have taken in a sincere attempt to invest the church's money in what turned out to be a Nigerian Internet scam. Prosecutors said Daniels' earnestness was demonstrated by the fact that he also lost his own life savings in the deal.

An inmate tried to escape in August from the parking garage of the jail in St. Charles County, Mo., by dashing through a fire exit door; he seemed unaware that immediately beyond the door was a brick wall, and after the collision, he was taken to a hospital with head injuries. And in Tampa, Fla., in August, one man was arrested and several others sought in a labor-intensive burglary of a Sports Authority store; police estimate that the crew spent a week digging an elaborate 40-foot-long tunnel underneath the store, and once they finally surfaced inside, they apparently got only about $3,500 in athletic shoes and Tampa Bay Bucs jerseys before an early-arriving employee called police.

-- The federal government settled with two prestigious Chicago hospitals in July (Northwestern University's, University of Chicago's) and filed a claim against another (University of Illinois'), on charges that the three improperly moved their own patients up the national organ-transplant priority list; one UI official allegedly told a doctor that favoring its own patients was "the Chicago way." And in August, the conviction of a Dallas bookstore manager became final, for selling obscenity in the form of adult science-fiction comic books; the sales were to adults in an adults-only section, but the prosecutor's main argument about the books's alleged "danger" was merely that comic books are an art form of general appeal to children.

In July, a Los Angeles Times reporter, citing "scientists and others who study the problem," wrote that as many as 10,000 auto collisions since 1985 have been caused by "unintended acceleration" (e.g., hitting the gas pedal instead of the brake, accelerating in a mistaken gear). Recent news stories suggest this problem is particularly acute with (and perhaps even largely confined to) senior citizens. In July and August alone, at least nine seniors (aged 71 to 90) caused unintended-acceleration collisions in Florida, Georgia, California, Massachusetts, Illinois and Tennessee, in addition to the July Santa Monica, Calif., farmer's market incident in which an 86-year-old man killed 10 people because he was unable to move his foot to the brake while traveling nearly three blocks.

-- Tony Martin (introduced in News of the Weird in 1999) is one of Britain's most prominent criminals, sentenced to six years in prison for defending his property by shooting one burglar to death and wounding another. He was turned down for early parole in 2002, and also for a trial home visit in July, on the official ground that he continued to pose a threat to burglars. However, he was granted parole by statute in August and now must prepare to defend a civil suit by the surviving, limping burglar, Brendon Fearon, who claims the gunshot permanently disabled him. In August, London's Sun newspaper surreptitiously videotaped Fearon walking without a limp and effortlessly bicycling and climbing stairs.

A judge in North Platte, Neb., willingly accepted the defense of a 45-year-old inmate on work-release that the reason he had alcohol on his breath was that he had eaten a homemade burrito whose ingredients had been dipped in beer. And Jeremy Bamber, convicted years ago of killing five family members, filed a lawsuit against four surviving relatives for conspiring to deprive him of "his share" of the family estate (Wix, Essex, England). And the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board turned down the petition for asylum by a Venezuelan woman, who claimed she needed to stay in Canada because back home, she would be persecuted for being too fat.

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

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.)