News of the Weird

The man convicted of blowing up the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people, lives in relative luxury in a private four-room suite in Glasgow's Barlinnie prison, according to a November report in Britain's News of the World. Abdelbaset al Megrahi, serving a minimum 27-year sentence, has a color TV, VCR, stereo, personal computer, kitchen, floral curtains, framed art and unlimited telephone access. A prison official said the man must be isolated because of the nature of his crime, but that Barlinnie had a limited choice of such facilities.

Britain's Industrial Christian Fellowship of religious scholars complained in September that people's prayers go disproportionately for teachers and nurses and said it would distribute a set of prayers for the underblessed financial sector under the heading "When did you last pray for your stockbroker?" And in November, the Saudi government set new restrictions on the export of sand, fearing that increased needs of its neighbors (in the reconstruction of Iraq and in Bahrain's reclamation projects into the Persian Gulf) will create a shortage.

Joseph Tomaino of Neptune, N.J., won $3 million from a jury because a side effect of penile surgery was an erection that lasted for three days, which an appeals court later found did not interfere with most of his daily activities. (The trial judge, who wanted to give Tomaino even more money, had the case taken away from him by the appeals court in November.) And passenger Ivette Jones, who said she was traumatized in the October Staten Island ferry collision and couldn't sleep because she was so distraught, filed a $200 million lawsuit against New York City, $80 million more than claimed by a woman who lost both legs in the accident.

-- The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune reported in November that a City of Oakland building inspector's employee, fired in February 2002, took a government car (with logo) with her when she left and that no one noticed it was missing for 18 months, until the ex-employee had accumulated $1,500 in traffic tickets. At that point, the owner of the car was called to get the car out of the impound lot.

-- Angela Bridges filed a lawsuit in June against the Washington County (Ga.) Regional Medical Center and a doctor for failing to clean her wound properly. She fell into some shrubbery in her yard in 2002, cut her leg, and reported to the emergency room for cleaning and suturing. Nine months later, another physician found that a small boxwood twig, with five thriving green leaves, had broken through the sutured skin.

-- In October, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on the heated clash in the Twin Cities suburb of Eden Prairie over how much money to spend on a new historic preservation program, which the Star Tribune noted was ironic because the town was nothing more than farms until the 1950s. Said a city council member, "I think an argument can be made that the word 'historic' is being loosely used." And an August Boston Globe story deglamourized Plymouth Rock, supposedly where the first pilgrims stepped in 1620 as they disembarked near what is now Plymouth, Mass. It's just a large rock, kept in an open pen (and was named by TV's Learning Channel as one of America's 10 lamest landmarks).

-- In October, North Korea's official news agency reported that Japan had broken a promise to return five people to North Korea. The five are Japanese citizens who were kidnapped by North Korea in 1978 but released to see their families in October 2002. North Korea's position is that they were released only temporarily and must be returned to North Korea.

-- In November, the town of Bolinas, Calif., voted 314-152 to adopt the following ballot measure (the official wording): "Vote for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful." A San Francisco Chronicle reporter attributed the town's support for it to the fact that its sponsor, artist Jane "Dakar" Blethen, is a beloved, though eccentric, local character.

-- Police in Sandwich, Mass., are so far stumped why Daniel L. Kelleher, 48, was found covered head-to-toe with roofing tar, lying in a water-filled bathtub in a room at the Sandwich Motor Lodge on Nov. 11. Kelleher, a carpenter, apparently purchased the tar and caulking guns, and he had rented the same room a week earlier and left tar in the bathroom, but he has refused to answer detectives' questions.

-- Jason Cody Jones, 27, was arrested in Florence, Colo., in November and charged with suspicion of theft in connection with $110,000 missing this year from J.P. McGill's casino, where Jones was a security guard. Jones called attention to himself by purchasing a motorcycle with 300 $20 bills and a pickup truck with a similar array of small bills, and for spending $35,000 during a six-month period this year while having earned only $6,400.

-- In October, about $450,000 worth of marijuana plants were discovered in a downtown Chicago apartment after police noted an overpowering scent that wafted the length of the building's hallway. They arrested a Navy Pier worker and five students, one of whom voluntarily answered the police knock to inadvertently reveal marijuana plants covering almost every surface in the front room (as well as one room air freshener, which an occupant had optimistically placed near the door).

In 2000, News of the Weird reported that a major plank in the platform of a Montana man running for the U.S. Senate was to encourage the space program to build and use an "elevator" to lift satellites into orbit, rather than the far more expensive rocket ships. An October 2003 Associated Press report disclosed that a dozen or more scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory so deeply believe in the elevator that they work on their own time on studying and promoting its feasibility. The elevator would be a cable shaft about 50,000 miles long, lowered to Earth from a conventional spacecraft and docked to a land station. The shaft would be made of "carbon nanotubes" (many times stronger yet lighter than steel), but the main problem is that, so far, science only knows how to make nanotubes a few feet long.

Waiting for a rush-hour bus in East St. Louis, Ill., Emanual Fleming tried to use a pay phone but received a busy signal, then stuck his right middle finger into the coin-return slot but couldn't get it out. With his free hand, he called 911, and ambulance personnel had to take both Fleming and the telephone to the hospital, where, three hours after he got stuck, doctors numbed the finger and worked it out of the slot.

A sophisticated fake-report-card scheme was busted when several students insisted on boosting their D's all the way up to A's, provoking their parents to call the principal to see why their kids weren't on the honor roll (Salem, N.H.). A 43-year-old man said he'd plead guilty in December to his fourth shoplifting conviction in two years, each one involving grocery store pork products (East St. Louis, Ill.). A bank robber who had forgotten to cut eye holes in his mask (and who kept lifting it to peek out) nonetheless escaped with his loot but not before banging into a steel door frame on his way out (Modesto, Calif.).

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

Michael Nelson opened a law firm in an Orlando, Fla., suburb recently (plush leased office space, a Mercedes company car, a letterhead listing law partners) and began soliciting business from drug convicts' families, offering to negotiate reduced sentences for their kin. However, an investigation by WKMG-TV revealed in November not only that Nelson and his "partners" are not lawyers but also that Nelson "practices" only during the day because he returns to a halfway house every night to finish a five-year bank-fraud sentence. (The station also found that business was good, with "hundreds of thousands of dollars" "received or solicited.") Amazed at the station's findings, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons revoked Nelson's halfway-house privilege and began its own investigation.

In July, to increase membership, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Cape Town, South Africa, voted 19-2 to become the Death Penalty Party of South Africa, with a special "lesbigay" subgroup. And in September, the Manitoba government announced it was ordering 40,000 condoms for prisoners in its 10 jails and specified that they be of "assorted flavors" of "strawberry, banana and vanilla" (though shortly afterward, it cut back on the number).

-- During filming in a remote area of Italy earlier this year for the controversial Mel Gibson film "The Passion of Christ," the actor who portrays Jesus was struck during a lightning storm, according to an October report in the trade paper Variety. Also struck was assistant director Jan Michelini, who had been struck by lightning at a previous shoot for the film, in Matera, Italy. None of the strikes created a serious injury. The film's portrayals of Christ and of Jews are expected to make it extremely controversial.

-- Dale Doell's preaching parrot (vocabulary: 2,600 words, many of which form Christian evangelical messages) flew away while at Doell's father-in-law's home in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, in August and is still missing. Doell told a reporter in September that he'd just have to see "what the Lord is going to do" about the parrot, named Solomon.

-- News of the Weird reported in 2001 that some priests in Kali temples in Tamil Nadu, India, still practiced an ancient ritual in which a child was buried alive (for 60 seconds, anyway) as a method of activating the Goddess Kaliamman to bless the child. Indian human rights organizations complained, and this year, in November, a temple priest in Madurai district demonstrated an altered ritual. The Goddess Kaliamman's blessings would be just as effectively conveyed, he said, by having each child (about 60 children, aged 1 to 12) lie down on special leaf mats and having the priest leap over each one.

-- The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in September on what it called increased instances nationwide of black Baptist clergymen consecrating themselves as "bishops," which are not formal Baptist positions and are sometimes assumed against the will of their congregations. The new bishops say the title gives them added credibility, and Baptists' tradition of local autonomy discourages leaders outside the congregation from objecting, but critics say it's just an example of some pastors being caught up in the "celebrity culture."

News of the Weird has reported several times on police officer wannabes who don uniforms and perform free-lance traffic stops (usually limiting their work to merely lecturing the motorists). However, faced with recalcitrant drivers, police imposters Jeremy Lepianka, 22, in Syracuse, N.Y., in September, and Donald Sebastian, 54, in Cleveland, Ohio, in November, took an extra, bold step: They actually called headquarters for backup. In both cases, the incidents eventually led to the imposters' arrests. (Asked for an explanation for his obsession, Sebastian said it was just his way of giving back to the community.)

Mark Your Calendars: Indonesian police, fearing mass suicides, detained leaders of the Christian "Sibuea" church on Nov. 11 after the world failed to end, as they predicted, on Nov. 10 (Bandung, Indonesia). And according to a November Houston Chronicle dispatch, Catholic priest Alfredo Prado, under accusations of child molesting, fled his church in San Antonio and landed with a doomsday (probable date: late December), Virgin Mary-worshipping cult with, according to the archbishop of San Antonio, a reputation for violence (San Isidro de Grecia, Costa Rica).

A familiar News of the Weird character, the indefatigable gay-hating Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kan., announced in October that he would take advantage of the Casper, Wyo., City Council's earlier decision to allow a religious monument (the Ten Commandments) in a city park by erecting his own religious monument: a statue celebrating the 1998 fatal gay bashing (and descent into hell) of Casper's Matthew Shepard. (A U.S. Court of Appeals had ruled that a city cannot discriminate among religious messages.) The City Council subsequently decided that its Ten Commandments monument was a bad idea and voted to remove it and ban all religious messages from the park.

According to testimony at a disciplinary hearing, British dentist Neville Kan, working on a patient who already owed him the equivalent of US$100, drilled a hole in her tooth and said he'd fill it only if she paid up immediately (Chiswick, England, July). And a 26-year-old man, arrested in an Internet sting trying to meet a "15-year-old girl" (who was, of course, a cop), asked the arresting officer if he'd be released on bond in time to make a scheduled meeting with his fiancee about their upcoming wedding (Fort Worth, Texas, July).

In an October report, the federal government's General Accounting Office revealed that the Pentagon has been lax in monitoring just who was buying its surplus chemical and biological equipment and that such items could easily have found their way to terrorists (and been bought at deep discounts). On the other hand, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency admitted in September that it had been Internet-monitoring a Web cam of a factory on Scotland's Isle of Islay that it said resembled a chemical weapons lab but which turned out to be a whiskey distillery.

Ms. Dorothy M. Death, 91, died in Van Wert, Ohio, in July, but Jon David Died, of Akron, Ohio, is quite alive. (In fact, he accused the county Board of Elections in August of botching papers that he had filed to run for the Akron City Council.) And expatriate American Thomas Frank White, now living in Thailand, was accused by Mexico in May of having had sex with children; to fight extradition, he hired a Thai attorney named Kittyporn Arunrat.

A 27-year-old man, fishing with three friends, choked to death on a 4-inch bream that he had put into his mouth, possibly to imitate a stunt he had seen on television (Palatka, Fla., October). And a man commandeered a fire department rescue boat but then drowned when he leaped overboard while being pursued by police; trained rescue personnel were late arriving at the scene because, after all, their boat had been stolen (Nashville, Tenn., August).

Hearing jeers during a curtain call after his version of the Richard Wagner opera "Tristan und Isolde," director Gerald Thomas dropped his trousers and mooned the audience (Rio de Janeiro). And Lyon, France, bought 10,000 plastic dog droppings to place on the city's sidewalks, hoping they would shock dog owners' consciences into cleaning up after their own dogs. And Naked Lunch, believed to be the country's first stand-alone (not located in a nudist camp) clothing-optional restaurant, opened in downtown Key West.

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

-- For 23 years, Dennis Hope, 55, of Gardnerville, Nev., has operated a business selling people "official" title to land on the moon, Mars and Venus for about $20 an acre. Although others are in the same business, Hope told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in September that he has earned $6.5 million during that period (an average of $270,000 a year). He says his idea was based on something he actually learned in school: that the international Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibited nations from owning celestial bodies but was silent about individual ownership. Hope says he wrote to the United Nations, explained his plan, and asked if they had a problem with it (and no one wrote back).

While recent drastic budget cuts (and the governor's failure to get a tax increase from the legislature) have limited Alabama's Department of Public Safety to placing only five or six troopers on nighttime highway patrol for the entire state, as many as 17 troopers spend all day each Saturday during football season providing security for the state's 10 college teams. The schools agreed in principle to reimburse the troopers' expenses, according to an October Associated Press report, but their policies vary, and the Department has been lax in collecting.

-- Carl Hanson of St. Paul, Minn., actually obtained a U.S. patent (No. 6,457,474) in 2002 for what he described as a new method for treating heart-related chest pain (as reported in August 2003 by Scientific American). Hanson's unique invention: He drinks limeade from concentrate. His patent application said that it worked for him, and he wrote out the required details about the structure of the invention, specifically, to purchase cans of concentrate, add water, stir and introduce the juice into the body through the mouth (although Hanson wrote that his patent would also cover intravenous administration).

-- Researchers at Panasonic's Nanotechnology Research Laboratory near Kyoto, Japan, said in August that they have begun to generate electricity from blood, which they say may eventually yield enough power to produce a human "battery" to run various implanted devices, such as pacemakers. Power is produced by stripping blood glucose of its electrons.

-- In September, the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, daily newspaper Al-Watan reported that the father of a prospective bride (whose future husband had not yet met her) had established a new dowry-collection strategy by demanding that the prospective husband pay the equivalent of US$300 just to take a pre-wedding glance at the bride (fully clothed, of course).

-- Among the themed funeral settings available for families recently at U.S. mortuaries (at $1,000 to $3,000) (according to a September Associated Press report): bales of hay, wagon wheels, cacti, a cowboy boot and a plastic horse (for the loved one who was rodeo-oriented, at the Palm Mortuary in Las Vegas), and "Big Mama's Kitchen," with Crisco, Wonder Bread and fried chicken (for the loved one who was a fan of lavish feasts).

-- In August, computer technician Goran Andervass received the equivalent of US$100,000 as settlement of his wrongful-firing lawsuit against Riksbanken, the Swedish national bank, over a 2001 incident that began when a colleague, meeting with him in his Stockholm office, ostentatiously passed gas. Andervass became very upset and started shouting at the man. Supervisors cautioned Andervass, who began a downward emotional spiral and began to take abundant sick leave, leading to further sanctions and eventually to his dismissal.

-- Among the 15 "worst" actual jobs in science (from the October issue of Popular Science): (15) counting fish (one by one, for hours) that swim by dams in the Pacific Northwest; (11) the only two government bureaucrats whose job is to convince Americans of the merits of the metric system; (7) researchers who reach into a cow's rumen to pull out and analyze the stomach contents; (4) mosquito catchers who endure up to 15 bites a minute on three-hour shifts and hope not to get malaria; (3) researchers who extract sperm from animals for study or artificial insemination (and extracting from a pig is much preferable to extracting from a bull); and (1) "flatus odor judges" working for gastroenterologist Michael Levitt, who feeds subjects pinto beans, then gathers gases in plastic collection tubes direct from the source, and then has judges sniff as many as 100 samples, rating them for strength.

Cyril Kendall was easily convicted in August in New York City for swindling the American Red Cross and another organization out of $160,000 for family grief counseling over a "son" who "died" in the World Trade Center attack. There are no official records that the son ever existed, although Kendall presented some documents that government experts termed poor forgeries. The grief counseling ($425 an hour) was spent entirely at a "company" that did not exist but of which Kendall admitted that he was the sole employee (thus paying himself to counsel himself and his family).

In September, a committee of Milwaukee's city council approved the application of a strip joint (Club Paradise Gentlemen's Club) to also become a "center for visual and performing arts" (the same designation as the Milwaukee Art Museum) by the simple act of placing several pieces of upscale artwork on its walls. Such a classification would allow liberalization of the club's alcohol permit. (However, by the time the matter came to the full council, the public had heard about it, and the club withdrew the application.)

Daniel Smith, 45, written up for traffic violations after a minor accident in Independence, Mo., in November, became the latest person to take seriously the idea that he could assert a "copyright" over his name and expect the police (i.e., the taxpayers) to pay him $500,000 per use for writing his name on the traffic tickets (plus $1 million as a late fee if the government didn't pay in 10 days). Smith refused to take his license back from the officer until he was issued a "receipt," which he pointed out earned him another $500,000.

The Moscow State Circus, touring Britain in July, told reporters its insurance companies had instructed trapeze artists to wear hard hats during their performances, to comply with European Union safety rules. And Beaufort County, S.C., adopted a policy in August that, for two-semester high school courses, a student who fails the first semester would automatically receive an encouraging "62," no matter how low his actual score.

The unsuccessful explanation Michael Schoop, 53, gave the judge for having child pornography on his computer was that he inadvertently downloaded the images while searching the Internet for asparagus recipes (Oakland, Calif., October). And the explanation of the mother of a Brainerd (Minn.) High School cheerleader (who was suspended for allegedly offering $50 to have another cheerleader beaten up): "They don't like each other. (The other girl) is a snot, and my daughter can be a snot, too" (October).

Lawyer Christian Gauthier was referred for disciplinary investigation because, while defending a client accused of killing a police officer, he was overheard singing the Bob Marley song "I Shot the Sheriff" during a courtroom break (Montreal, Quebec). A 15-year-old burglary suspect in lockup was also charged with theft for ordering $42 worth of adult movies on the jail's cable television hookup (Woodstock, Ill.). The eventual winner of the race for president of the Marietta, Ohio, City Council was arrested on the morning of the election on a misdemeanor delinquent-taxes warrant.

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