News of the Weird

In November, just three days after a published report that lawyers were about to collect $350 million on the settlement for the 1988 Pan Am flight 103 explosion (with another $480 million to come, under certain conditions), two Massachusetts law firms sued the state over the 1998 tobacco settlement, claiming that the $775 million in fees they were awarded by an arbitration panel was not enough. The firms say they are due $1.3 billion more under their original contract, although other law firms in the 46-state settlement so far have accepted the arbitrators' awards. A Massachusetts official said a $775 million fee works out to about $6,300 per lawyer-hour and a $2.075 billion fee to about $17,000 per lawyer-hour.

According to a September safety hearing, British brain surgeon Donald Campbell, 54, crashed his twin-engine plane into a house (he survived, with head injuries) when he ran out of fuel because he miscalculated when converting "gallons" to "liters" (Shoreham, England). And internationally renowned neuroscientist Patricia Goldman-Rakic, 66, was fatally run over in August while jaywalking (and police said the driver was not at fault) (Hamden, Conn.).

In July, a judge relented and allowed Richard Quinton Gunn to act as his own attorney in his aggravated-murder appeal, following his conviction earlier in the year in Ogden, Utah, by a jury that deliberated just two hours. Gunn had confessed, saying he killed his tenant using a crowbar, a butcher knife, a handsaw, a fireplace poker, a 12-inch bolt, a straight-edge razor, an ax, walking canes, a pool cue and a large salad fork.

-- In October, U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger, 76, R-N.C., told the Charlotte Observer that a large part of the stress that ended his 50-year marriage was the entry into the couple's Washington, D.C., neighborhood of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to a building just across the street from the couple's townhouse, which is three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Ballenger called CAIR a fund-raising arm of the terrorist group Hezbollah and said he and his wife were terrified at seeing women "wearing hoods" (perhaps meaning headscarves), moving boxes into the building: "(T)hey could blow (the Capitol) up."

-- Ten days after Jonathon Russell killed three people and himself in a highly publicized workplace-rage incident in Jefferson City, Mo., in July, his mother, Nina Tichelkamp-Russell, filed a worker compensation claim on his behalf, seeking death benefits. Her version of the cause of death, according to what she wrote on the claim, was "by gunfire while on the company clock." (The employer and its insurance company rejected the claim.)

-- Demon Babies: LaFayre Marie Banks, 32, was charged with assault and child abuse in Port Huron, Mich., in May after her 7-month-old baby fell from Banks' second-story bathroom window, suffering severe head injuries. Banks told a police officer that she was bathing the child when "it reared up and went through the window." And in Wetumpka, Ala., in August, Melissa Wright, 27, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for putting her 18-month-old daughter in a hot oven. Wright's version was that the child slipped from her arms, fell to the floor, and rolled into the oven, and then the door closed.

-- Denver Garrett, charged with cocaine possession in Monterey, Tenn., in October, told police he bought it only to keep it off the streets and away from children. And James Howle, 61, and Kevin Williams, 41, stabbed each other in Pomona, Calif., in October in an argument over which of their two unidentified alcoholic beverages tastes better.

Loren J. Adams, 40, was convicted in Indianapolis of distributing obscenity in May, based on a business venture that apparently emanated from his admitted interest in watching scenes of bestiality. Not only did Adams' Web site offer videos of people having sex with horses, snakes, etc., but Adams at one time offered to rent out his 3-year-old Great Dane, Tyson, for others' sex videos. (Tyson was removed from the home, and Adams still faces a civil charge of animal cruelty, according to a September report in the Indianapolis Star).

-- Medicare, facing a precarious financial future, decided for the first time this year that seniors who need motorized wheelchairs (typical price, $5,500) will have to get an in-person doctor's prescription. Medicare paid $289 million for motorized wheelchairs in 1999, but this year, before the rule change, the estimated expense was $1.2 billion. Medicare also revealed that it is spending $600,000 this year to put its 800-telephone number on a blimp that flies over sporting events.

-- The New York Times reported in October that Nabors Industries (operator of oil-well drilling rigs), which in 2001 moved its legal headquarters from the U.S. to Barbados (corporate income tax: 1 percent) and its tax headquarters to a mail drop in Bermuda (no corporate income tax), is now insisting that it receive favored U.S. legal status. Nabors wants to be treated as an American-owned company to get a competitive advantage under the 80-year-old Jones Act that bars non-U.S. companies from working on ships involved in domestic trade.

A 29-year-old, 300-pound man was discovered dead (asphyxiation), stuck in a small bathroom window of his home after apparently trying to climb in late at night when he realized he had forgotten his house key (Paterson, N.J., September). And a 36-year-old, 250-pound man (suspected of being a burglar) was discovered dead (asphyxiation), stuck in a small kitchen window, discovered by a woman who had just gotten up to fix breakfast (Elgin, Ill., October).

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (67) The usually elderly, momentarily confused driver who intends to stop but mistakenly slams on the gas pedal, often resulting in major destruction, such as the 82-year-old Rochester, N.Y., woman who plowed into nine new cars at a Hyundai dealership in September. (68) And the marijuana entrepreneur, with plants and grow equipment throughout his house, who nonetheless calls police in to report a relatively minor crime against him, such as the Victoria, British Columbia, man who in August insisted police come see the video he made of a break-in of his car but was oblivious of his home's powerful marijuana smell.

On Oct. 29, thousands of rush-hour riders had to be rerouted on New York City commuter trains as firefighters tried to free Edwin Gallart, 41, whose arm got stuck in one train's toilet when he reached in to retrieve his fallen cell phone. (Ultimately, the toilet had to be ripped out.) And the next day in South Philadelphia, a 25-year-old man who had apparently been indecently exposing himself to girls and women in the neighborhood for several weeks, tried it one time too many and was chased by "20 to 30" girls from St. Maria Goretti High School, caught, roughed up, and held for police.

Catholic priest Antonio Caetano apologized for hitting a parishioner on the head when she would not leave after her daughter was denied a place in Sunday school because she registered too late (Souto Redondo, Portugal). The city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, installed 10 surveillance cameras to help combat pilferage at a municipal dump. Vegetable grower A. Duda & Sons introduced a product 15 years in the making, to delight Bloody Mary fans: celery stalks that are hollow in the center (Oviedo, Fla.).

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

In October, West Point, Ky., hosted 12,000 visitors for the weekend Knob Creek Gun Range Machine Gun Shoot, billed as the nation's largest, with a separate competition for flame-throwers. Especially coveted is "The Line," where 60 people (waiting list is 10 years long to be admitted) get to fire their machine guns into a field of cars and boats, and during which a shooter might run through $10,000 in ammunition. Among the champions: Samantha Sawyer, 16, the top women's submachine gunner for the last four years. One man interviewed by the Louisville Courier-Journal said he met his wife at a previous Shoot, knowing that "if she could accept flame-throwing as a hobby, she could accept anything." Said another: "This is one of those times when you know this (the U.S.) is the greatest place on Earth."

-- A senior Vatican spokesman, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, told a BBC Radio audience in October that condoms are useless in preventing the spread of HIV (because the virus seeps through the porous latex) and therefore should not be used, even in AIDS-wracked Africa, where as much as 20 percent of the population is reportedly infected. The World Health Organization denounced Trujillo's claim but said it had heard similar Catholic Church messages in Asia and Latin America.

-- In October, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration's inspector general released questions from the final exam for airport screeners, designed to measure the crucial, intensive training that the screeners had just completed. One question: "How do threats get on board an aircraft?" The supposedly challenging answers: "a. In carry-on bags; b. In checked-in bags; c. In another person's bag; d. All of the above." If that is too difficult, the inspector general also complained that 22 of the exam's 25 questions were repeats from previous exams and that some test-takers were briefed in advance.

In September, customs officials in Amsterdam stopped a Nigerian man trying to enter the Netherlands with a suitcase containing 1,500 to 2,000 baboon noses (which some people use in traditional healing, but which were in an advanced state of putridness). And in Jupiter, Fla., in October, yet another part-time professional clown pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography; David Deyo, 43, a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher, appeared often in the community as "Noodles the Clown."

-- According to a lawsuit by paraplegic Steve Winter, 41, of Mesa, Ariz. (reported in September by the Arizona Republic), the Veterans Administration reneged on a 1983 promise that if he agreed to let them test electrode therapy on him (to stimulate his neurological system), and the process failed, doctors would remove the implanted electrodes. While the therapy started well, the effects wore off after a few years, and Winter, exasperated, left the program. He claims the VA basically disavowed him for the next 15 years, refusing even to examine him to find the remainder of the 180 electrodes, which pose serious risks of infections, which already have necessitated 30 surgeries in the last 10 years.

-- In July, the state of Kentucky sent a check to the state's American Civil Liberties Union chapter for $121,000 as costs awarded in a 2000 lawsuit in which the state was forced by a court to remove a Ten Commandments monument from state Capitol grounds. According to a Louisville Courier-Journal report, that brings to nearly $700,000 that the state has been forced to pay the ACLU in the last 10 years as costs for challenging various unconstitutional moves by the state.

Police officer James Marriner, 43, appeared at a hearing in Brisbane, Australia, in September on 15 counts related to sexual harassment of members of the Bible-based community he lived in near Ipswich, Queensland. Among the accusations: Marriner had requested nude photos, confidential sexual histories, and pubic-hair samples from well-meaning community members who had conscientiously agreed to help the local police crack a "pedophile ring" (which apparently existed only in Marriner's mind). Reportedly, being a police officer in such a sheltered community was a high-status job that gave him unusual powers of persuasion.

For a September story in the Daily Nebraskan, University of Nebraska junior Dustin Rewinkel proudly and patiently explained to a reporter the secrets of his success in stealing street signs in the city of Lincoln (bragging that with basic tools, he could grab a sign in minutes and in fact had "more than a dozen" already). Not surprisingly, Lincoln police read the article, got a search warrant for Rewinkel's apartment, recovered 13 signs, and charged him on suspicion of possessing stolen property.

In Easton, Pa., in July, Robert M. Peters Sr., 47, became the latest man to be acquitted of indecent exposure by persuading a jury that his penis is too small to have been seen by the complaining witness. A woman testified that she had seen "3 inches" of erect penis beyond the bottom of his shorts while he was working in her home, but via photographs and a brief trouser-dropping in the courtroom, Peters convinced the jury that he is very modestly endowed and that she must have seen something else, such as a fold of fat on his 312-pound body.

A 22-year-old student from Saint-Denis, on the French island of Reunion, trying to get a better position for taking photographs of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano, got too close and fell in, to his death (August). And a 47-year-old man in Camp Verde, Ariz., who was apparently reaching up a utility pole to illegally hook up power to his business after having had it cut off for nonpayment, was electrocuted (July).

-- In September in East Finchley, England, Daniel Wade, 37, his wife, Eti, and their two sons began a project "to challenge or confirm notions of the middle-class family and domestic space": They opened their home to about 50 strangers every Sunday so people could walk through their house and observe their typical behavior (eating, arguing, sleeping, watching TV). According to Wade, this would help the visitors contemplate the modern family.

-- Two hunters on a remote mountain in northern Sweden in October came across an installation of 70 pairs of shoes filled with butter, according to an Associated Press report. Artist Yu Xiuzhen was attributed as the probable creator, in that he had staged a similar display in the Tibetan mountains surrounding Lhasa, China, in 1996. (A non-art-appreciating official in Sweden was more concerned about getting the shoes down before the butter rots.)

-- In April, according to Uganda's prison service, 15 inmates escaped near Kampala after allegedly having weakened the jail's walls and cell bars by months of urinating on them. Also in April, The New York Times reported that a pest-control professional in Stockton, Calif., had developed a new termite-detection method that relies on locating concentrations of methane gas that are expelled because of termites' high-fiber (i.e., wood) diet. And in October, a tipsy undersecretary in the Philippine government apologized after inadvertently urinating in the rear of President Arroyo's plane during flight, in an area he mistook for a restroom.

White man Theuns Prinsloo, 22, won the Mr. Africa pageant, causing an organizer to gush, "He epitomizes a young African in Africa today" (Johannesburg, South Africa). A 39-year-old man was arrested for bank robbery 10 days after making a successful escape on an oversized tricycle (Woodbury, N.J.). And a 24-year-old gun-toting man was arrested after smashing his tricycle into a car, being knocked to the ground, and then stealing the car (Salem, Ore.).

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

As of mid-October (six months after the so-called fall of Baghdad), nearly one-fourth of U.S. troops in Iraq still had not been issued life-saving Interceptor ceramic body armor and were using comparatively porous Vietnam-era flak jackets, according to an Associated Press report quoting congressional sources. And a few days later, responding to an alarming United Press International report, the government abruptly stepped up money for medical treatment of Army reservists and National Guardsmen who had been wounded in Iraq but were being warehoused at Fort Stewart, Ga., sometimes for months, because, allegedly, preference was being given to active-duty soldiers.

Mr. Ashrita Furman, 48, claims the world record for breaking world records (81, 20 of which are still recognized by the Guinness Book), demonstrating extraordinary but fanciful skills, such as the fastest mile run while balancing a bottle of milk on his chin, unicycling backward for 53 miles, and pogo-stick jumping (3,647). According to a June New York Times profile, Furman is a celibate bachelor with few possessions and lives quietly in an Indian-American community in Jamaica, N.Y., whose residents are spiritually guided by guru Sri Chinmoy. He said he would go the distance in the Nov. 2 New York City Marathon not by running but by skipping.

German law requires a divorcing couple to equalize pensions, and thus it is common for an ex-husband to pay part of his pension to the wife. However, not only do the payments continue if she remarries, but in September, administrative judge Bernhard Wanwitz ruled that if she dies, the ex-husband has to continue the pension payments to her widower (Mainz, Germany). And it was not until September that the German government ended a longtime loophole that allowed citizens to continue to collect welfare benefits while living abroad, as in the case of "Rolf J.," 64, who lives in Miami Beach because he said living in Germany fueled his clinical depression.

-- In September, Australia's National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre identified a problem that was serious enough that it felt it had to issue a warning, mainly for partygoers in the "club" scene: There is no physiological benefit, the Centre said (and maybe a great harm), in trying to revive drug-overdosers by administering ice-cube enemas.

-- In a recent government raid on a Colombian rebel compound, authorities recovered a videotape apparently made at a Christmas party of the violent National Liberation Army (ELN) and released it to TV stations in September. Among the scenes on the tape was a mock beauty pageant featuring giddy male rebel soldiers, in bikini bottoms and with sashes across their chests, strutting along a makeshift catwalk, with tongue-in-cheek narration by a ski-masked emcee who playfully chides the contestants. Interspersed, however, were non-humorous scenes of kidnapped Colombians being held for ransom.

-- In September, Ohio's state medical board charged family practitioner William J. Stefanich, 78, with negligence after investigations of two patient complaints, including one by a female hemorrhoid-surgery patient who was later told in an emergency room visit that a wide area of her anal canal had been removed and her anal opening sutured closed. Stefanich disputed the diagnosis.

-- Alleged Gambino family strongman Thomas "Huck" Carbonaro was convicted in October in New York City of plotting to kill turncoat Salvatore "Sammy Bull" Gravano, evidence of which included reference to Carbonaro's tattoos: (on his stomach) "Death Before Dishonor" and the three-monkeyed "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil" and (on his lower back) "Rats Get Fat While Good Men Die."

-- John Edward Knowles II, 45, was convicted in October of the attempted murder of two Shasta County, Calif., sheriff's deputies, based in part on a surreptitious jailhouse audio recording, in which he admitted the crimes and lamented his failure to achieve a longtime dream. Knowles, who, after the shooting, had stolen his sister's car (which made it easier to catch him), said on the tape: "I always wanted to be on the FBI's top 10 Most Wanted list. I would have made it if (my sister) hadn't woke up and reported the car stolen."

-- In Sparks City, Nev., during the summer, City Attorney Chet Adams, perhaps influenced by the legal challenges to the Alabama courthouse monument displaying the Ten Commandments, ordered an employee to scissor out "God" from the town's Sept. 11 "God Bless America" signs around City Hall. (Mayor Tony Armstrong, among the many baffled by the newly anonymous blessing, immediately bought more "God Bless America" signs and posted them, himself.)

-- In September, a British government-funded charity, Family Planning Association, distributed a cartoon booklet teaching the joys of masturbation to a target audience of 9- to 11-year-old girls. Also in September, the British teen community-service organization Connexions distributed a primer on marijuana smoking printed on a poster resembling a package of rolling papers. And the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor this semester offered another edition of its sociology course, "How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation" (but its creator said "initiation" is a sociological term and does not refer to initiation of straight students).

People Who Recently Failed to Get Out of the Line of Their Own Fire: (1) Jonathan Rodriguez, 17, Newark, Del. (a home-invasion suspect who batted on a door with the butt of his handgun, which fired into his groin; July). (2) Joshua Michael Short, 18, Houston (got up from a table at Memorial City Mall food court and bumped the gun that was in his waistband, firing a round into his buttocks; July). (3) Detroit police officer Michael Allen, 22 (tried to cram his gun under the front seat of his car at a Canadian border-crossing, but it discharged into his leg; July).

Raymond Garfield Gordon, 23, who was scheduled to be a contestant on the "Canadian Idol" TV show, was arrested in August after an alleged public-masturbation spree, during which at least once he, nude, followed a woman and implored her, "Look at me. Please look at me." And police in Barcelona, Spain, arrested a man in August whom they thought was the serial mugger (19 victims) whose modus operandi included, most of the time, telling the victims that he knew what he was doing was bad and that they should spit on him (and, according to an officer, several did).

A San Francisco Giants fan was killed at Pacific Bell Park on Sept. 17 after his sunglasses fell to the ground during a game and he hit his head after falling from a light pole trying to retrieve them. And a 17-year-old girl accidentally fell to her death after sitting on a 15th-floor ledge, to which she had retreated to get away from cigarette smoke during a party (Strathclyde, England, May). And in October, the family of a 61-year-old man had their lawsuit reinstated for his May 2000 wrongful death, which occurred when he fell on a defective stairway into the basement of the Wells Funeral Home (Stanton, Ky.).

-- The Colorado prisons' inspector general's office said that because of the state's new no-smoking law, inmate profits of 450 times costs can be made on contraband tobacco, vs. typical profits of eight times costs on contraband cocaine. And the chief of a remote Fiji mountain village agreed to apologize for his ancestors, who killed and ate British missionary Thomas Baker in 1867 after Baker innocently pulled a comb out of the then-chief's hair. And 750 students in two Paris high schools went on strike after their principals decided to strictly enforce French law banning smoking in the schools.

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