News of the Weird

According to a September BBC report, police in South Korea are investigating some of the 22,000 complaints made already this year by computer gamers that characters and property that they have acquired in such all-consuming games as "EverQuest" and "Ultima Online" have been stolen by hackers and sold to other gamers to make their own playing more successful. Experts say such theft of "intangibles" should be punishable by law, but the value of the stolen property might be inconsequential, except to those players whose entire lives revolve around a game and for whom the acquisition of a character or property might have involved hundreds of hours of playing.

In September in Pinson, Ala., Joseph Logan, 46, was arrested for assault just after watching Alabama's 34-31 football loss to Arkansas on TV, which Logan took pretty hard. He started ranting, slamming doors, and throwing dishes into the sink, and it was at this point that his son, Seth, 20, chose to ask Dad innocently if he would help him buy a car, at which point Dad grabbed a gun, put Seth in a headlock, and fired a bullet near Seth's ear. Said a sheriff's deputy, "I know we take football serious in the South, but that's crossing the line."

In August, U.S. Customs confiscated an SUV being used to smuggle Mexican immigrants into the country, but later admitted that their thorough search of it had overlooked a 13-year-old girl hiding inside; she was discovered 42 hours later. And in July, Adrian Rodriguez was imprisoned (but released by an appeals court a month later) because Mexican authorities found 33 pounds of marijuana that U.S. Customs had failed to find in a vehicle it had just sold to him at auction. That was the third time recently that someone had bought a vehicle from U.S. Customs that contained overlooked marijuana and for which the purchaser spent at least some time in prison (in one case, one year) before things were straightened out.

-- Former Ball State University student Andrew Bourne, 23, and his parents filed a lawsuit in September against the school and the manufacturer of its aluminum football goal posts. Bourne suffered a broken leg and vertebrae when, during a raucous end-zone celebration after a 2001 victory over the University of Toledo, students pulled down the goal posts, hitting Bourne.

-- John Clayton III was awarded $1.5 million by a jury in Greensboro, N.C., in September based on injuries he suffered as a passenger in a car whose driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. The car Clayton was a passenger in was a police car; he was being brought to the station on an outstanding arrest warrant when the officer-driver hit the brakes. Clayton claimed the sudden stop caused him "back problems."

-- Kevin Presland was awarded about the equivalent of US$150,000 by a judge in Sydney, Australia, in August because the Hunter Area Health Service psychiatric hospital released him too soon in 1995, after which he killed his brother's fiancee. This was not a lawsuit by the victim's family against the hospital; this was a direct payout to Presland, whose injury was that he was made to suffer temporary prison conditions after his arrest (he was acquitted because of his psychosis), whereas if he had never been released, he would have experienced only psychiatric-hospital conditions.

-- Former Kansas City Royals coach Tom Gamboa filed a lawsuit in September against a fan who attacked him during a September 2002 baseball game in Chicago, and also against the ballpark's (U.S. Cellular Field's) security firm and its concessionaire. (However, several days after the initial attack, Gamboa had told the Associated Press, "The fault is with the two people (the fan and his minor son) who did it. I'm not one who looks to (spread) blame. It's nobody's fault but the two idiots who did it.")

A trailer full of toilet bowls, which accidentally came unhooked and overturned on Interstate 88 near Colesville, N.Y. (June). A trailer full of compressed paper and sex toys (including whips, plastic breasts and blow-up dolls), which spilled onto the northbound M6 highway near Castle Bromwich, England (June). And two tractor-trailers full of honeybees (80 million on Interstate 95 near Titusville, Fla., in April, and another measured at 500 beehives of "thousands of bees each" on Interstate 435 near Claycomo, Mo., in June). (Most of the bees were recovered by using smoke to put them temporarily to sleep.)

In an August story about the driving record of U.S. Rep. Bill Janklow of South Dakota (who had just killed a motorcyclist in a collision), the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported that Janklow's defense (that he had to swerve to avoid another vehicle) was the same one he had used for each of three previous collisions (one swerve was for an animal, not a vehicle), and that in none of the four instances was there any corroborating evidence of the other vehicle or animal.

News of the Weird reported in December that Inga Kosak had won the first World Extreme Ironing Championship in Munich in September, based on running a course through several stations (e.g., up in trees, in the middle of streams) and ironing a designated garment. An October Wall Street Journal story shows the "sport" as growing in prominence. South African Anton Van De Venter, 27, broke the high-altitude record in August by ironing his national flag at the 20,000-foot summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, while nude, in freezing temperatures (quote: "I came, I saw, I pressed a crease"), and British diver Ian Mitchell sawed through ice in Wisconsin in March and submitted photos of himself in a wet suit "ironing" (with a Black & Decker Quick 'n' Easy) a shirt that was braced against the underside of the ice.

A deep-sea research voyage in June, jointly run by Australia and New Zealand scientists, discovered what The Age newspaper called an 1,800-species "freak show" of bizarre creatures (their condition caused in part by the extreme water pressure, which may be hundreds of times greater than at the surface). Examples include: the fangtooth (teeth, longer than its head, would puncture its brain if not for special tooth sockets); the viperfish (whose head is on a hinge); the coffinfish (with a glowing "sign" on its head to attract prey and the ability to swallow large quantities of water to avoid predators); a squid with one big eye (for offense) and one small one (for defense); and the snotthead, which was not described.

-- A 17-year-old boy, after receiving a free Krispy Kreme doughnut at an Erie, Pa., store promotion, stepped back in line for another but was refused. According to the Erie Times-News, he returned a few minutes later with a McDonald's sack over his head and asked for a doughnut but was again refused. Then he fell to the floor and flailed his arms and legs, demanding another free doughnut, and was cited by police for disorderly conduct.

-- In Edmonton, Alberta, in July, Anthony Alan Burton pleaded guilty to a 2002 robbery that went down this way: He had wrapped his head in gauze, covered his face with silicon putty and rouge (and oversized glasses), grabbed a Samurai sword, walked into a Jehovah's Witnesses hall, and screamed, "I am the evil that you have read about! This is the face of evil!" He was in the middle of collecting cash and credit cards from everyone when the police arrived. (A psychiatrist had testified that Burton had run out of medication several days before.)

The Oklahoma treasurer released a list of unclaimed property that included the refundable $100 utilities deposit paid by accused terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui when he lived in the state to attend flight school. And a delay on a London underground train was caused when an apprentice driver fainted while listening to his instructor describe vasectomy surgery that had developed complications. And Family Christian Stores, the largest Christian retail goods chain in the U.S., announced it would begin opening on Sundays.

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

Renewing a debate, Czech scientist Jaroslav Flegr reported in September that human infection by Taxoplasma gondii (to which cat owners are vulnerable as they clean litter boxes) tends to make women "reckless" and "friendly" and men "jealous" and "morose." Though any mammal could pass the toxins, cats that handle dead birds, bugs or mice rather easily pass it in their stools, though only for a few days after their first infection. (A 2001 report by researchers from Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland had suggested that such infections might even cause schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.)

For a September report, an LA Weekly writer hung out with Benji Breitbart, 20, Doug Marsh, and several other "Disneyana enthusiasts," who spend hours nearly every single day at Disneyland; have almost total recall of the park's history and culture; rabidly collect memorabilia; and preach with intensity on which aspects of today's park Walt Disney would not have approved. DE's usually wear Disney-themed clothes; use the pronoun "we" as if the park were theirs; and are dismissive of the obsessives of "Star Trek." ("Trekkies are devoted to some stupid pop-culture fad," said Marsh, but "Disney fans believe in the magic.") Why, Breitbart was asked, was Disney such a central force in his life? "I tried to figure that out. I just ended up with no answers."

-- According to two maintenance workers on duty in Cleveland's Carver Park Estates in September, James Black, 49, either boldly or obliviously dragged a dead, bloody body out of his apartment house in broad daylight and laid it on the ground in plain sight of the two men, then calmly went back inside and emerged with a mop, which he used to swab blood from the sidewalk. The incredulous workers immediately called police, who arrested Black and the next day charged him with aggravated murder.

-- In June, a judge in Washington, D.C., sentenced Bernard Johnson to 12 years in prison for shooting D.C. Police Det. Anthony McGee three times. However, the judge immediately suspended five of the years, and of the remaining seven, five were mandatory for merely carrying a firearm during the crime, leaving the add-on punishment for actually shooting the cop to two years, or eight months per bullet hole.

-- The July amateur wrestling match in Tbilisi (former Soviet republic of Georgia), between Dzhambulat Khotokhov (123 pounds, from Russia) and Georgy Bibilauri (112 pounds, from Georgia) ended in a draw, and afterward, both wrestlers broke training briefly for ice cream and cake to celebrate Bibilauri's birthday. Bibilauri is now 5 years old; Khotokhov is 4.

-- A man fled the motor vehicles office in Leesburg, Va., after a September incident in which he, silently and calmly, presented a DMV employee with a postcard photograph of a banana being shot by a bullet, and the legend "banana=DMV." The man then hurried out, and when several employees got to the parking lot in pursuit, there were bananas strewn around the lot but no one in sight. Said the Leesburg police chief, "This (man) is a different (kind)."

-- After a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge, FBI agent James Hanson III paid a $105 fine and $12,000 in restitution to the Barbary Coast hotel in Las Vegas for a May incident in which he, for some reason that he has yet to make public, fired two shots from his service weapon at a lobster in a walk-in cooler. It was a late-night incident, with no one in the vicinity, but Hanson was captured on a surveillance tape. Hanson was in Las Vegas for an accounting seminar.

-- In August, around the time that the Ten Commandments monument was moved out of the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery because of a federal judge's ruling that it was too much of a religious statement for government property, Ms. Blanca Castillo petitioned county commissioners in Fort Worth, Texas, to remove a statue in front of the county's administrative building because it was insulting of religion. The offending statue, of a sleeping panther, struck Ms. Castillo as too paganistically feline, and therefore "sinister," and she recommended a statue of something else, such as a steer.

Kevin French, 46, pleaded guilty to shooting his neighbor in the head with an air rifle because he mowed his lawn too often (Elmira, N.Y., April). An inmate (unnamed in an internal report by a psychiatric prison) went into a violent rage and took a therapist hostage after fellow prisoners laughed at his drawing of "toilet paper" in a game of Pictionary (Abbotsford, British Columbia, July). Walter Travis, 68, was arrested for shooting a neighbor several times after the neighbor's dog pooped on his lawn (Indianapolis, August). Danny Ginn, 46, was arrested for commandeering a garbage truck at gunpoint because he was tired of the truck's driver using Ginn's driveway to turn around in (Bedford, Ky., August).

A 26-year-old man will be hospitalized "for months" in Illawarra, Australia, following an August accident that authorities speculate might have been inspired by the film "Jackass." The man was apparently walking across a room with a lighted firecracker between his posterior cheeks when he slipped and fell backward to the floor. The explosion resulted in a fractured pelvis, severe genital burns, hemorrhaging from the buttocks and ruptured urethra, leaving him incontinent and sexually dysfunctional.

Extreme body-piercing in Arizona was a subject fit only for the alternative newsweekly New Times Phoenix in 2001, but in August 2003, Tucson's mainstream press (Arizona Daily Star) followed an 18-year-old man, who was having four modified deep-sea (8-gauge) fishing hooks threaded into his back so that he could be hoisted toward the ceiling and suspended for 20 minutes of what the man said was the worst pain he'd ever felt (for the privilege of which he paid $150). Said the piercing shop's wrangler, Chris Glunt, "For some it's like a spiritual thing. I've suspended to clear my head. You can focus and concentrate on where you stand in life."

(1) Japanese scientists (Yokohama City University) said in September that they had created tumor-suppressing nerve stem cells that reverse the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in rats. (2) Wake Forest University researchers said in April that they had created a 700-mouse colony that could survive any number of direct cancer-cell injections. (3) University of Pittsburgh researchers said in April that they had developed a gene therapy in rats to restore surgery-damaged nerves needed for erections. None of the therapies has yet been successful with humans.

A 69-year-old man, on the job as an employee of a surveying company, stuck his head up from a manhole in the driveway of a residential development and was fatally hit by an SUV (Greenwich, Conn., September). A 16-year-old boy died from a punch in the chest during a game in which schoolboys take turns smacking each other to see who is the toughest (San Jose, Calif., July). A man lost control of his car and crashed into the O.R. Woodyard Co. funeral home and died at the scene (Columbus, Ohio, August).

Canadian military police seized 983 marijuana plants being grown by squatters on an active, 17-square-mile artillery range (Nicolet, Quebec). On the first day of a Philippine citizens' group's campaign to expose government officials who spend public funds on their mistresses, more than 500 tips came in to its hotline. And the New York Post revealed that among the 10 highest paid New York City municipal employees were three school psychiatrists and a gym teacher.

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

Hurricane Isabel roared through Virginia Beach, Va., in September, inflicting serious property damage, despite public calls for prayer to keep it away by prominent resident Rev. Pat Robertson, whose Christian Broadcasting Network is headquartered there. (In 1998, Robertson condemned the city of Orlando, Fla., for sponsoring a Gay Days festival, and warned that the city could be torn up during the subsequent hurricane season, as God punishes those who promote homosexuality. Instead, the first hurricane of that season (Bonnie) made a direct hit on Virginia Beach.)

Alongside recent weight-loss and body-part-growth mass e-mails have been messages of Robert Todino, 22, of Woburn, Mass., who uses the spam (100 million messages so far) to locate time-travel hardware to buy because of his need to revisit his childhood, during which he believes a woman drugged him and implanted a device to give her followers the ability to monitor his every move. According to an August Wired magazine story, Todino has earnestly been seeking an "Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement" and an "AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor," among other gadgets, but that "the conspiracy" has subverted his attempts to acquire them.

The school district based in Elgin, Ill., decided in August that, although four new schools that cost $40 million were ready to be occupied, the district has no money to operate them and that they will thus stay locked up for the entire school year, at least. And a September General Accounting Office report described (based on undercover work in seven states) the customer-friendliness that motor vehicle offices display when people try to obtain driver's licenses fraudulently; clerks routinely give "applicants" back their bogus papers (instead of confiscating them) and cheerfully instruct them exactly how to "correct" the applications to assure that they'll get that license on the next attempt.

-- A July Wall Street Journal report revealed that some women's clothing stores in Tehran, Iran, do a brisk backroom business in tight, colorful, sheer, form-fitting robes that are severely frowned upon by the conservative Islamic government, which prescribes the formless hijab robe. One clerk showed one that was actually a "paper-thin beige tunic made of stretchy material with two slits on each side," "with a matching tank top." Other popular robes make strategic use of zippers for women who have to convert their flashy clothing into something conservative in a hurry.

-- In September, religious fundamentalists brawled in Brooklyn, N.Y., when the locally dominant Satmar sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews moved aggressively against slightly less-ultra-Orthodox Jews who were using a loophole to be able to push baby strollers and wheelchairs around during the Sabbath, when such activity is prohibited in public. "The (Satmars) were like animals," said a security guard who witnessed the incident. (The "eruv" loophole allows such labor inside a symbolic wall, which the more liberal ultras had constructed with sticks and string.)

-- State and local law-enforcement officials met in Salt Lake City in August to discuss the growing and seemingly intractable problem of the radical, Mormon-based polygamist community that reaches from Hildale, Utah, to Colorado City, Ariz., and which has been denounced by mainstream Mormons. Issues included not just religious freedom and forced marriage for young girls, but the $5 million annually in federal benefits that go to polygamist wives who say they are "single" mothers on their welfare applications.

-- In August, bookstores began selling Revolve, a glossy, 392-page softcover title that directs a thought-by-thought rendition of the New Testament to its target audience of teenage girls, alongside text on typical teen-magazine subject matter such as beauty, fashion secrets and dating. (For example, proper etiquette, according to Revolve founder Laurie Whaley, requires the boy to initiate a relationship: "There's no indication from Scripture that Mary Magdalene ever (called) Christ.")

-- Florida wildlife officials, suspecting that Israel A. Cervantes was illegally shooting at deer from his car in the Ocala National Forest in August, asked to inspect his home freezer for stored meat, and, professing innocence, Cervantes agreed. There was no deer meat, but apparently Cervantes forgot about the pound of marijuana in the freezer, and he was arrested.

-- William Penny was arrested in Greenwood, Ind., in August, putting a halt to his alleged identity-theft business. He was caught because, three times in a three-day period, he had aroused suspicion of several people in a neighborhood by approaching a certain ATM on foot, carrying a motorcycle helmet, donning the helmet as he neared the ATM's camera, making a withdrawal (with someone else's ID, allegedly), walking away, and then removing the helmet.

(1) "Man With Ear Ache Gets Vasectomy" (an August Reuters dispatch from Rio de Janeiro about a patient who answered the wrong doctor's call at a clinic and endured the procedure because he thought the ear inflammation had deep roots). (2) "Groups Fight Over Fate of Feral Chihuahuas" (an August Reuters report on 170 wild Chihuahuas taken from a breeder in Acton, Calif., and ultimately given to one animal rescue outfit rather than another). (3) "Woman With No Baby Given Caesarean" (a September Melbourne (Australia) Herald Sun report on an overweight woman who went into cardiac arrest at a hospital after telling doctors she was pregnant, motivating them to try to deliver the baby in case they couldn't save her). (She survived; the baby never existed.)

The Danish beer company Carlsberg announced it was relocating a plant from Stockholm, Sweden, to Gothenburg because there was too much uranium in the spring it uses near Stockholm. And the interior minister of the Netherlands, citing public concern, proposed to ban police officers from coffee shops that also legally sell marijuana. And authorities in Putnam County, W.Va., announced that someone had broken into a sheriff's deputy's home while he was away on vacation and set up a methamphetamine lab.

Furious at a rush-hour accident that blocked traffic in the Boston suburb of Weymouth, motorist (and software engineer) Anna Gitlin, 25, went ballistic at a police officer and then allegedly bumped him with her car, screaming, "I don't care who (expletive deleted by the Boston Globe) died. I'm more important" (June). And Joseph DiGirolamo, 43, distraught over domestic problems, allegedly barricaded himself inside an ex-girlfriend's home in Boston and hurled household items (TV set, room air conditioner, broomstick, a pot of boiling water) at police officers, threatening to kill them, before he was subdued (May).

A 20-year-old man was killed in Denver during afternoon rush hour on Sept. 1 when he jumped from a car going about 40 mph; according to friends, he had been planning a nonfatal jump for a while because he wanted to endure some trauma in order to muster the courage to get a tattoo. And a 15-year-old boy in Maryland Heights, Mo., who had been demonstrating his pain tolerance by clobbering himself on the head with his skateboard, invited a pal to take a shot, too; the first blow knocked him out, and he died four days later.

A 47-year-old man was arrested for allegedly trying to steal a woman's backpack, his 177th arrest (Boulder, Colo.). A 36-year-old man was captured by a SWAT team after holding off police for 10 hours in a hotel room, in an incident begun when he threatened to kill hotel workers because there was no ice (Houston). And absolutely no one voted in a school board election in Mississippi County, Ark., on Sept. 16, not even Carl Miner, who was the only person on the ballot.

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