News of the Weird

Yamaha Corp. recently introduced the MyRoom, which is a customizable, soundproof, shed-like structure, with 27 square feet of floor space, for installation inside notoriously crowded Japanese homes, so that a resident can get privacy (or be exiled if he or she gets annoying). The company expects a sales surge in 2006, when Japan's first wave of baby-boom salarymen retire and begin staying home a lot. Yamaha developed the MyRoom concept for musicians to practice in, but subsequently realized that the boxes (which sell for the equivalent of about US$5,500) had a much larger appeal.

-- James Carroll Bayley, 44, pleaded guilty in May to killing his brother, Robert, in an incident in Raleigh, N.C., in which James alleged that Robert had come by, drunk, to retrieve his power drill that James had borrowed. James told the judge that he certainly didn't mean to kill Robert, but had grabbed his gun for protection, then "shot him in the right leg to knock him down." "Then," said James, "after a short time, I shot him in the head to make him dizzy so he would fall."

-- In May, Mr. Oran Ambus was locked in a standoff with the St. Louis dog pound, which was holding his 9-month-old rottweiler. Ambus could pick up the dog any time he wanted, reported KSDK radio, provided he would neuter him, but he refused, citing the Book of Leviticus, which he believes permits animals in heaven only if they are unaltered. (Thus was Ambus' dilemma: Get his dog back unholy or, given the pound's put-to-sleep policy, allow its imminent, but holy, demise.)

-- A man (identified in court papers as John Doe), who suffered injuries and sexual dysfunction 11 years ago when a woman unexpectedly changed positions during intercourse (and fell on him and fractured his penis), was again turned down in his attempt to sue the woman. The Court of Appeals of Massachusetts said in May that it would be impossible for a judge or jury to decide which movements in consensual sex were legally reasonable or unreasonable.

-- The San Diego Union Tribune reported in April that Los Angeles Angels' first baseman Darin Erstad was wearing a leather-pouched "balance necklace" of minerals that (according to the manufacturer) will "achieve alignment of body, mind and spirit" and "address the electro-pollution, toxic vapors, scars, surgeries and traumas to the skin by organizing the quantum nature of man," which are things important to Erstad to avoid the kinds of injuries he had experienced in previous seasons. Erstad said that since he has been injury-free so far in 2005, "it must be working," but the player who recommended the necklace, teammate Steve Finley, is substantially underperforming so far this season.

(1) Julie Atkins, 38, of Derby, England, featured in a May BBC TV documentary on childbirth because her three daughters gave birth last year at, respectively, ages 12, 14 and 16, told the Sunday Mercury newspaper: "I don't care what people say about me. I blame the schools. Sex education for young girls should be better." (2) Tommy Rollins Jr., 26, who police say shot Missouri state trooper Brandon Brashear nine times during a traffic stop (chasing him onto the median of Interstate 470 in Kansas City), told reporters in May, "The society's what caused me to do what I did. Just look at the society we live in." (At press time, Brashear was in critical condition.)

(1) In Eatonton, N.J., in March, a man carjacked a van even though, unknown to him beforehand, it was transporting inmates from Northern State Prison to a highway work detail. (The suspect was arrested after a 70-mile chase.) (2) Washington's King County agreed in April to pay $23 million to Stockpot Soups to relocate to make room for a prospective sewage-treatment plant. Until recently, Stockpot had famously tormented its neighbors most Mondays and Tuesdays (its onion-soup-making days) with a putrid, body-odor-type smell.

-- A reporter for the Elyria (Ohio) Chronicle-Telegram, observing the workings of modern pothole-filling technology for an April story on the local street department, described the "Super-Patcher" machine as releasing a flow of "what appeared to be greasy, black beans" following a "phlegm-textured stream of sticky tar" that "coated the pothole like a pound of snot."

-- After a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show proclaimed the use of Premarin vaginal cream and Preparation H on her face to smooth out wrinkles, Baltimore's WBAL-TV did a follow-up with local doctors, who generally agreed that the ingredients might work but were nonetheless harmful to facial skin. Said female Maryland gynecologist Terry Hoffman, "Personally, if something is meant for my 'hu-ha,' I don't think I'm going to put it on my eyes."

-- (1) Michael Lewis, 27, decided for some reason to fire his pellet gun at a .22-caliber bullet lying on a picnic table to see if he could hit it. He did; it exploded; and some of the bullet fragments lodged in his groin. He was hospitalized at Salina (Kan.) Regional Medical Center in March. (Police said alcohol was not involved, leaving "judgment" as the likely explanation.) (2) Justin Mitchell Oaks, 21, and his wife were miraculously uninjured after Oaks inadvertently drove their Toyota Corolla underneath an 18-wheeler on Interstate 10 in Tucson, Ariz., in April, got stuck, and was dragged 800 feet before the truck could stop. (Alcohol was not the problem here, either, but rather a cell-phone conversation.)

-- Christopher Lamping, 20 at the time, was arrested for DUI in Indiana, Pa., in March, after he leaned on the horn repeatedly through three light changes because the car in front of him would not go through the green lights. The car in front was a marked Indiana police cruiser whose officers were talking to a man on the sidewalk, and after hearing enough of Lamping's horn, one officer walked over and noticed Lamping's odor of alcohol. According to the Indiana Gazette story, Lamping later explained that he "just didn't think of" driving around the stopped car.

Australian Jo Lapidge is the latest to offer a toilet training system for cats, according to a May Reuters dispatch. Her Litter-Kwitter is a four-step process to accustom the cat to relieve itself over a toilet bowl: (1) a red toilet-seat "disc" on top of cat litter; (2) the red-seat-and-litter device placed on top of the bowl requiring the cat to jump up to use it; (3) a yellow-seat disc without litter but with a small hole so that the water below is not prominent; and (4) a green-seat disc with a larger hole. Lapidge said it took eight weeks to train her cat, Doogal, even with his problem of climbing voluntarily into the bowl from time to time to play.

The following people accidentally shot themselves recently: Accused taxicab robber Rodriguez Massett (in the foot, while running from police) (Roswell, Ga., May). Convenience store clerk Bunny Nat (in the hip, while adjusting the "protection" gun he carries in his waistband) (Des Moines, Iowa, April). A 21-year-old man (who, while horsing around, fatally believed an "unloaded" gun could not also have a bullet in the chamber) (Tacoma, Wash., April). A 16-year-old boy (in the leg, while aiming at a snake in his yard) (Port Wentworth, Ga., June). Kole Eugene Maxwell, 18 (shot himself three times during one session of cleaning his 9mm pistol) (Centre, Ala., May).

In an era of tight education budgets, one category of Texas school spending seems unrestrained, according to a May Houston Chronicle story: high school football stadiums. More than 20 new or planned facilities ("gridiron cathedrals") resemble those of professional teams, with luxury suites, plush locker rooms and weight rooms, or even climate-controlled indoor practice facilities. The $20 million stadium in Denton, Texas, which includes a $900,000, three-story scoreboard with instant replay, is barely better than the state-of-the-art fields in Waco, Southlake and Mesquite, but may not hold up to the $27 million facility in Round Rock. Critics bemoan the terribly misplaced priorities, but defenders say the stadiums may eventually pay for themselves and that construction bonds are more accessible than the tax money necessary to raise teacher salaries.

-- Russian "astrologist" Marina Bai has filed a lawsuit in the Presnensky district court in Moscow against the U.S. government's NASA, claiming that her business will be ruined if the agency is allowed, as planned, to crash a rocket into the Tempel 1 comet on July 4 to see what can be learned from the experience. Bai said the collision will "interfere with the natural life of the universe," which will in turn harm her "system of spiritual values," and she seeks 8.7 billion rubles (about US$311 million, which is the reported cost of the entire mission).

-- Rhonda Nichols, 40, filed a lawsuit in April against a Lowe's Home Center in Alton, Ill., seeking a minimum of $50,000 for injuries she says she suffered when a bird about the size of a pigeon flew against the back of her head while she was shopping in the store's outdoor gardening department. According to the lawsuit, the bird caused injuries to her head, brain, neck, muscles, bones, nerves, discs and ligaments, and led to the loss of neurological functions and cognitive skills. Said a Lowe's assistant manager, "It's an outside garden area. What are we supposed to do?"

-- The courts of Madison County, Ill. (near St. Louis), have a reputation in the legal community as friendly to plaintiffs who sue companies, and thus attorneys are eager to find lawsuits to file there. (Rhonda Nichols' lawsuit against Lowe's, above, is an example.) In 2002, lawyer Emert Wyss conceived a Madison County lawsuit on behalf of a client against a mortgage company for collecting what he thought were bogus fees on real estate transactions. Wyss' litigation stimulus (he received a referral fee and was part of the lawsuit) proved too clever: The litigation team strategically added a local title company as co-defendant, only to discover that the title company is owned by Emert Wyss. Thus, in a rush to litigate in Madison County, Wyss had actually sparked a lawsuit against himself. (He eventually withdrew from the team.)

-- In May, backhoe contractor and part-time sculptor Ricky Pearce created a 17-foot-high, 40-ton concrete figure of the legs of a reclining woman in a grassy lot between two churches in a quiet neighborhood in Henderson, N.C. The legs, bent at the knees, noticeably parted, and accompanied by landscaped foliage "strategically placed" (according to a report from WNCN-TV in Raleigh), are supposedly in tribute to Marilyn Monroe. Asked one neighbor, "Why do they (sic) just show the legs?"

-- The project Sleeping With the Enemy, at the Jack the Pelican Presents gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y., involves two gay Israeli artists (Gil and Moti) who have recently dated dozens of local Arab men and who announced in May that they are ready to select one of them to seduce, with the idea that their tryst take place at the gallery as a statement on defusing Arab-Israeli hostilities.

-- In May, at the annual spring auction at Christie's in New York City, Massachusetts artist Tom Friedman managed to sell a piece consisting of an ink squiggle on a 12-by-18-inch piece of white paper (described in the Christie's catalog as "starting an old dry pen on a piece of paper"). It was sold for $26,400, according to a Washington Post report. Friedman was less successful in offering a 2-foot white cube that contained, on one surface, a tiny speck of his own feces, for which he expected an opening bid of $45,000, but got no takers.

Computer repairman Dennis Avner of Guatay, Calif., is perhaps the world's most extreme variation of a "furrie" (a person who adopts the persona of an animal). Avner has tiger-stripe tattoos covering most of his body, dental implants sharpened to points to resemble tiger teeth, and metal-stud implants around his mouth to hold his long, plastic whiskers. He has had ear and lip surgery to make his head more cat-like and wears special contact lenses to make his eyes appear as ovals. He told the San Diego Union Tribune in May that Guatay folks are mostly tolerant of him but that he nonetheless has decided to relocate to Washington state.

(1) In April, a federal appeals court, following an in-depth hearing, turned down a challenge by the J.M. Smucker Co., which had unsuccessfully tried to patent its frozen Uncrustables sandwiches by claiming they are legally unique because the edges of the bread are pinched together to hold the peanut butter and jelly in. (The U.S. Patent Office had apparently realized that lots of mothers routinely make pb&j sandwiches in a similar manner.) (2) And in April, an arbitrator ruled that Painesville, Ohio, police officer Stuart Underwood could not be fired merely for having sex while on duty because he was on his break at the time and kept his radio on to listen for emergency calls.

(1) A man who decided to wear a Pluto dog mask to rob a Gordon's Mini Market in Cranberry, Pa. (near Pittsburgh), was unsuccessful, forced to flee empty-handed when the clerk could not bring himself to stop laughing at the disguise (March). (2) KPRC-TV in Houston reported in April that kidnappers broke into Nora Montoya's home, duct-taped her, and were ready to take her away, but apparently got scared and merely left a note at the scene demanding $2,000, promising to come back later to pick it up (but they didn't).

News of the Weird reported in 2000 and 2003 on the proposal for a space "elevator," which its champions believe will be a way to place missiles into orbit at about 5 percent of current cost. The elevator would be a 60,000-mile-high flexible shaft, tethered to Earth, made of super-strong "carbon nanotubes," allowing objects to be raised and lowered within it. Supporters believe development is progressing, even though the longest nanotube so far produced is about 5 feet long. In May 2005, Bremerton, Wash., entrepreneur Michael Laine announced he would open, as LiftPort Nanotech, a nine-person factory to make nanotubes in Millville, N.J., and pronounced the project on target on a 13-year timetable.

Thor J.S. Laufer, 42, charged with theft of tools and furnishings from several construction sites in Port Washington, Wis., in January, told a judge that he stole a wide range of items in order to disguise the fact that the only things he really wanted from the thefts were doorknobs. Police said he had dozens of them in what he called his personal collection. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 1-19-05]

Recurring Themes: A 19-year-old man in San Jose, Calif., became one of the latest to pay the ultimate price for attempting to clear a jam in a wood chipper by stomping down on the debris with his foot (November). And Albania's most wanted criminal, Riza Malaj, fatally underestimated the length of fuse he would need while dynamite-fishing for trout near Tirana (April). And a Salem, Ala., man became the most recent to fatally miscalculate the danger in trying to steal copper wire from inside an electrical substation (March).

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

The agency that oversees Spain's stock market announced that it will implement a rule starting in July to require each director of an exchange-listed company to disclose not just names of family members but of any other "affectionate relationship," straight or gay, that the director may have. The purpose is to help monitor insider trading. (Also, in Nanjing, China, municipal officials were ordered in May to disclose any extramarital affairs, as a way of reducing officials' payoffs to mistresses, according to Xinhua news agency.)

-- Aberdeen, Wash., fourth-grader Tyler Stoken was suspended in May for a week for balking, on a statewide test, at composing a short essay on what would happen if, one day at school, you "see your principal flying by a window." Tyler, reportedly a good student, said he thought any passage he wrote would be making fun of the principal, which he refused to do. The principal subsequently viewed that as insubordination (perhaps because it also lowered the school's overall score) and suspended Tyler, but the superintendent later apologized.

-- Official guidelines issued in May by Britain's Joint Council on Qualifications, directed to agencies that administer high school and junior-high standardized tests, call for students to receive extra points on the test if they have experienced pre-exam stress due to selected circumstances: death of a parent or close relative (up to 5 percent extra), death of other relative (up to 4 percent), death of pet (2 percent if on exam day, 1 percent if the day before), witnessing a distressing event on exam day (up to 3 percent), just-broken arm or leg (up to 3 percent), headache (1 percent).

-- Among the most striking federal government "pork" grants funded in November was $1.5 million for a new bus stop (several times more than the typical cost) in front of the Anchorage (Alaska) Museum of History and Art. To replace the current kiosk, the city's transportation director said he imagines a generous upgrade, including perhaps a heated sidewalk to deal with the snow: "We have a senator (Ted Stevens) who gave us that money, and I certainly won't want to appear ungrateful."

-- An undercover sheriff's deputy (whose name was not disclosed in a May news report) filed a lawsuit recently against the Florida Hospital in Orlando because, he said, when he went for a shot of pain medication in his hip in October 2000, he was injected instead with what appeared to be cosmetic makeup glitter. The deputy said a four-inch mass was removed and appeared to contain specks of green and red sparkle, and that pain at the site continues.

-- Police in Springfield, Ore., charged Pamela Ann Hemphill, 51, with theft in April after she allegedly snatched neighbor Walter Merritt's Charles Schulz-signed, original Peanuts cartoon strip, locked herself in a bathroom, removed her clothes, got under the shower, wet the cardboard thoroughly, and finally flushed the pieces down the toilet. Hemphill declined to explain; Merritt said he had no clue as to motive; and the Springfield News reporter has not yet followed up on the story.

(1) The Florida Supreme Court in March disbarred attorney David A. Barrett for violating the state's professional conduct code, including paying for an assistant to attend a chaplain's course at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital in order to offer prayers in the rooms of accident victims and solicit business for Barrett. (2) In County Cork, Ireland, in December, Dane Ring, 13, was suspended from school for two days after he ignored what schoolboys know is the cardinal rule of bodily functions, which is to never admit that you're the person, in a crowded room, who just passed gas.

-- (1) A man identified as David Connor (by Boston police) or Timothy Connor (by Providence, R.I., police) was arrested after allegedly robbing the Beacon Hill Wine and Spirits in Boston in April of about $1,000, and according to the surveillance video, he appeared to ask for a head start of "60 seconds" before police were called and then to shake the clerk's hand as if cementing the agreement. (2) In May, Jim Stelling, the Republican Party chairman in Seminole County, Fla., won a lawsuit for defamation against an intraparty official who had accused him of being married six times, which Stelling said he found particularly insulting, since he "believe(s) in family values." Stelling said he has been married only five times. (The judge ruled that Stelling was not defamed enough for money damages.)

-- Among official job-title changes implemented by the Scottsdale, Ariz., school district this year, according to a February Arizona Republic report, were those for receptionist (now, "director of first impressions") and school bus driver (now, "transporter of learners"). Said Superintendent John Baracy, "This is to make a statement about what we value in the district. We value learning." Said the new first-impressions director, "I think it's classy. Everyone wants to be important."

(1) In April, police in Buffalo, N.Y., said Thomas L. Hunter, 55, ran off with a case of brandy from the Eastside Liquor store, but during the getaway, he dropped the case, and bottles shattered. He was arrested when he returned to the scene of the spill and started sucking up brandy with a straw. (2) At a train station in Ogori, Japan, in May, a seeing-eye dog apparently misunderstood a spoken command and led a blind couple off of a platform and tumbling onto the tracks. The couple and the dog had been headed for a workshop for assistance dogs.

Four former patients of clinical psychologist Letitia Libman sued Delnor-Community Hospital in Geneva, Ill., in March and April for malpractice, including claims that Libman's hospital treatments for neurological disorders included tarot cards, love potions, DNA-based hexes, and patient nudity and self-mutilation. Libman also allegedly bragged of her travels among space aliens. In May, the lawsuits were amended to include Libman herself as a defendant, a move that the plaintiffs initially resisted because they feared Libman's witchy retribution.

-- Former caddie Gary Robinson recently filed a lawsuit against pro golfer Ms. Jackie Gallagher-Smith, claiming he was made an "unwitting sperm donor" in their brief romance since he believes it was he who fathered her child born in March. His lawsuit is for intentional infliction of emotional distress, which is the same claim that has been successful in the early stages of another lawsuit, reported in News of the Weird in March, in which a male doctor in Chicago sued a female doctor who had his child during their affair. (Gallagher-Smith maintained that her husband is the father, and DNA tests cannot be forced on a married woman in Gallagher-Smith's home state of Florida.)

-- Most of the seemingly inexhaustible telephone harassers reported in News of the Weird through the years have been Japanese men and woman, scorned in love or business, but American Timothy John Campbell, 45, was arrested in Atlantic, Iowa, in May and charged with stalking a woman by, among other tactics, telephoning her as many as 3,000 times a month. The victim was a waitress at a bar patronized by Campbell but said she ignored his overtures.

Police in Hackettstown, N.J., charged Juan Vargas, 29, with public intoxication at a Dunkin Donuts shop after spotting him speaking into his wallet as if it were a cell phone (February). And in Danbury, N.H., in March, Steven Metallic, 39, was arrested after a two-hour standoff in which he filled his mother's home with propane gas and threatened to blow it up. Metallic finally fell for a police ruse when they pretended to leave; officers who remained behind captured Metallic tiptoeing out of the house.

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