News of the Weird

The Jordan River, considered by believers to have been the gateway to the Garden of Eden (and by Christians to have been where Jesus was baptized), is now more than 50 percent raw sewage and agricultural runoff, according to a Middle East conservation group spokesman interviewed by Reuters in June. Together, Israel, Jordan and Syria have diverted away from the river (and then treated) about 90 percent of the water flow over the years for their own uses, though part of Jordan's diversion was to create a clean-water baptismal site for pilgrims (some of whom, nonetheless, still bathe in the greenish, polluted part).

-- In an early-morning shootout on June 4 in the Homewood housing complex in Pittsburgh, two undercover officers and suspect Keith Carter, 19, exchanged a total of at least 103 gunshots and missed every single time. (On the other hand, in March, Regina Jones-Peoples, 30, of Warren, Ohio, survived 18 gunshots, from her neck to her legs, allegedly by her estranged husband, Marcus Jones, 29, on whom police issued an arrest warrant.)

-- In the course of a traffic stop on Interstate 70 in Kingdom City, Mo., in June, Missouri Highway Patrol officers found a 3-foot-long rocket with an electric launcher, attached to an elaborate system of pulleys in the trunk of the car of two men, Michael Ray Sullivan, 41, and Joseph C. Seidl, 39. The rocket, which could probably be triggered from the driver's seat, was found stuffed with methamphetamine, with more (totaling about $145,000 worth) in pipes alongside. The patrolmen who arrested the pair believe the contraption was for quick disposal of their inventory if they got cornered.

-- Ireland's justice ministry proposed rules changes for its prison system in June, banning such "inhumane" treatments as restricted diets and corporal punishment. On the other hand, among the current practices that would soon be prohibited are inmates' bringing in their own furniture, hiring maids, and ordering food and alcoholic beverages, according to a dispatch from Dublin published in The Australian.

-- Officials in Montgomery County, Md., regard the feathery green plant called the mugwort as a weed, an "alien invasive plant," and periodically lament its presence in the county's parks, according to a June Washington Post report. However, local Koreans, who call the plant "souk," consider it a delicacy in seafood soup and rice cakes, and have eagerly been digging it out of the parks for free, except that it is illegal to remove anything, even weeds, from the parks. Consequently, according to the Post, county officials have simultaneously undertaken (a) a pilot program to see if goats could be trained to root out unwanted flora and (b) a stepped-up program to convince the Koreans to obey the law against removing mugwort.

-- In May, Councilman Manfred Juraczka in Vienna, Austria, proposed, in order to alleviate the city's growing problem with pet droppings, to collect DNA samples from all registered dogs so that the soilers can be identified and their owners fined. According to an Associated Press report, a similar proposal was made in Dresden, Germany, in March, and News of the Weird reported another, in 1996, in the English village of Bruntingthorpe, which at the time had a population of 200 people and 30 dogs. (Vienna has about 50,000 registered dogs.)

(1) The support group for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in Nelson, New Zealand, announced that it would support in principle the illness-publicizing International Awareness Day on May 12 even though its members would probably not participate in the commemorative activities because they are often too tired for such things. (2) The Rotary Club of Chatham, New Brunswick, announced in May that the grand prize in its raffle to help build a new environmental awareness center would be a Hummer. (3) Federal agents who were interviewing Gerald T. Williams, 34, about possible child pornography at his home in St. Louis, said that in the course of the interview, a screen saver featuring child-sex images happened to appear on Williams's computer. (Williams pleaded guilty in June.)

Juan M. Puliddo-Castaneda, 24, was arrested just as he was preparing to play a round at the Anchorage (Alaska) Golf Course on June 11. Police said he had just moments before caused a two-car collision that sent five people to the hospital (but not Puliddo-Castaneda, who walked away). Puliddo-Castaneda's passengers said he was speeding because he said he had to make his tee time. And, in June, describing the moments immediately after a serious auto collision the month before on Interstate 4 near Plant City, Fla., victim Tracy Palmer (ankle shattered, lip impaled on her teeth, according to a Tampa Tribune story) said she could hear tires rolling inches from her head as other motorists crept through the four-car wreck in order to be on their way. "People were actually driving between us (victims)," she said.

-- An 82-year-old man who had locked himself out of his still-running car in Glen Burnie, Md., in June, was hospitalized with first- and second-degree burns after attempting to siphon gasoline from the car using an electric vacuum cleaner (a spark from which ignited gasoline vapors). He told police that he wanted to force the engine to stop by removing the rest of the gasoline.

-- In June, community leaders in a largely gay neighborhood in Toronto unveiled a 13-foot-high statue of Alexander Wood, one of their historical heroes, who according to legend had been pressured out of town in the early 1800s over a sex scandal. As the story goes, magistrate Wood, investigating a heterosexual rape in which the victim claimed to have scratched her attacker's genitals, rounded up numerous suspects and zealously examined each for such a scratch. Hence, the statue features a 5-foot-tall image of Wood, seated, "inspecting" a standing man with his trousers down.

A Springfield, Ill., lawyer was unsuccessful in his petition to the judge to have his client tried for DUI-reckless homicide under a false name (in that the jury just could not be fair if it knew her real name, which is Doris Lush, and in fact, she was convicted) (May). Another woman who might have a similar problem: Denise Coke, 25, charged with possession of 33 pounds of cocaine (Roseville, Mich., May). Not so troubled: Mr. Emmanuel Innocent, charged with attempted murder in a bar fight (Ottawa, Ontario, May).

"Fool for a client" Timothy Daniel, 25, who had fired his lawyer and defended himself on a murder charge in Columbus, Ohio, was found not guilty by a jury in May (though the judge sentenced him to five years in prison for being a felon in possession of a gun). (News of the Weird reported in 2003 that Jonathan Harris, representing himself, not only beat a murder rap in Philadelphia, but also prevailed as his own counsel in two felony trials, and then taunted the prosecutor for threatening to bring additional charges.)

(1) In the course of accusing her estranged boyfriend of killing her miniature collie in New York City in March, according to the New York Post, a woman said the man was fond of having the dog watch while the couple had sex. (2) In the course of investigating sex-crime charges against former Citrus County, Fla., judge Gary Graham, investigators said a former girlfriend reported that Graham was fond of having her dress as a little girl, with hair in pigtails and freckles painted on her face, according to a May Tampa Tribune story.

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

Willie Windsor, 54, of Phoenix has for several years lived as a full-time baby, wearing frilly dresses, diapers and bonnets, sucking on a pacifier, eating Gerber cuisine, and habitually clutching a rag doll, in a home filled with oversized baby furniture. According to a long Phoenix New Times profile in June, the diaper is not just a prop. Windsor said he worked hard to become incontinent, even chaining the commode shut to avoid temptation, and the reporter admitted feeling "disconcert(ed)" that Windsor might be relieving himself at the very moment he was describing his un-toilet training. Apparently, Windsor's brother, ex-wife, girlfriend and a neighbor tolerate his lifestyle (though no girlfriend has yet been willing to change his diapers). Windsor is a semi-retired singer-actor and said he's been celibate for nine years.

-- After a passer-by found two kids (ages 12 and 6) dragging suitcases along a rural road near Marshfield, Mo., in June, prosecutors charged their mother, Roxanna Osborne, and her boyfriend, Timmy Young, with child abandonment. The kids said their mother had awakened them, given them $5 each, and told them to pack up and leave. The kids told police that the two adults are drug-users.

-- In June, prosecutors in Porter County, Ind., were deciding whether to file charges against the parents of a 17-year-old boy after, according to police, they had beat him up because he had refused to let his sister and her friends borrow his underwear when their own clothes got wet while they were swimming. After initially rebuffing his sister, the boy had moved all his undergarments to his grandparents' house for safekeeping, but a confrontation with his parents ensued.

-- Brian F. Monfort, 27, was arrested in Springfield, Ohio, in April and charged with child enticement based on an arrest report noting that twice, in January and March, he had approached children and paid them money (up to $40) to insult him for being fat, supposedly as a tactic to inspire himself to lose weight.

-- In 1999, Orange County (Calif.) Sheriff Michael Carona and his former chief assistant Donald Haidl deputized 86 untrained civilians, at least half of whom were their friends or family or political contributors, giving them badges and in some cases gun permits and limited arrest powers, according to a May 2005 Los Angeles Times report. Some of the 86 volunteers are still "on duty," and the sheriff did not begin to dismiss some "deputies" until a state law enforcement organization continued to complain that the deputies were not qualified for police work under state law.

-- While virtually every town along the nearly 20 miles of the Long Beach Island, N.J., seashore has signs warning beachgoers of the dangers of rip tides (according to a June Asbury Park Press story), Long Beach Township does not. Even though experts say that most summer visitors are ignorant of the powerful currents and how to cope with them, Township Attorney Richard Shackleton said posting such helpful warnings may hurt local taxpayers. Shackleton explained that a town generally has no legal duty to warn swimmers of natural conditions, but that once a town attempts to warn, judges and juries will too often find the warnings inadequate and permit a swimmer (or his survivors) huge damages.

-- Newsweek named Hillsborough High of Tampa, Fla., the 10th "best" high school in America in May, but as the St. Petersburg Times pointed out the next day, the school got a "D" grade from the state in the most recent evaluation (based mostly on its failure to improve the progress of struggling students), as well as a substandard federal evaluation (based on such criteria as whether low-income and minority students improve). Newsweek's sole criterion for "best" is what percentage of students volunteers to take Advanced Placement exams.

Justin Breakspear, 18, was arrested in Framingham, Mass., in May and charged with illegal possession of three firearms, one of which was a .380-caliber pistol; police said it was unlikely Breakspear would claim the pistol is not his, in that on his hip is a tattoo of an exact replica of the gun. And in Glens Falls, N.Y., in May, Jason McClaskey, 25, on house arrest, was admitted to a hospital in Valhalla, N.Y., with burns over 60 percent of his body; police said McClaskey might have tried to burn the monitoring device off of his leg (though McClaskey said he was merely lighting his grill, even though it was 6 a.m., and there was no charcoal on the grill).

In May, retired obstetrician Parviz "Peter" Modaber, 73, was ordered by a judge to stay out of Clarke County, Va., following his fourth conviction for taking bags of garbage from his home near Charles Town, W.Va., and dumping them along a highway in Clarke County, though court records described by The Washington Post indicated that Modaber had done it many more than four times. Modaber's attorney said the doctor held an intense grudge against the state for having suspended his license during the 1980s and that bucolic Clarke County just happened to be near his home. Modaber had been sentenced three times to a total of 540 hours of picking up litter, but a vigilant citizen caught him dumping again less than six months after the third conviction.

Goat-hoarding continues as an occasional obsession, with a woman in Saarburg, Germany, evicted in June for sharing her home with 43 goats, and a man in Aiken, S.C., charged with animal cruelty in May for cohabiting for seven years with 200 goats in a house whose walls were gnawed away and which contained 3-foot-high hay stacks saturated with manure and urine. And in June, Kentucky officials selected, as the test site for its terror-emergency procedures, the state's goat show in Erlanger. Said a state Homeland Security official, "We try to focus on what really matters to Kentucky."

In June, 13 Cuban refugees in a boat fashioned from a 1949 Mercury taxicab were intercepted by U.S. authorities about 20 miles from their destination of Key West, Fla. Based on current policy, the 13 will probably be returned to Cuba. However, in March, Cuban Luis Grass, and his wife and 5-year-old son, part of groups that had been turned back in two pontooned-car attempts, in 2003 (1951 Chevy truck) and 2004 (1959 Buick), sneaked across the U.S. border in Brownsville, Texas. Since they actually made it to American soil this time, they will probably be allowed to remain.

A sheriff's spokesman in Gastonia, N.C., said a local police officer, summoned to a hit-and-run scene, accidentally ran over the victim (though investigators later concluded that he was already dead) (June). In Fort Worth, Texas, an intoxicated woman involved in a collision got out of her car to investigate and was killed when a beer truck accidentally rammed one of the cars into her (and the truck driver, too, was found to be intoxicated) (January). In Brownsville, Texas, a 29-year-old man working at a silo accidentally fell in, quickly sank into the 20-foot pile of grain, and suffocated (April).

In May, Canada Post notified Christine Charbonneau in Orleans, Ontario, that its letter carriers would probably stop delivering directly to her house because its steps were each 30 cm high (about 12 inches), and regulations require Canada Post to climb steps no more than 20 cm high. Charbonneau said no one else has complained about the steps in the 17 years she has been there, including her now-77-year-old mother-in-law (who takes oxygen through a tube in her nose).

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

Sonette Ehlers of Kleinmond, South Africa, recently invented a tampon-like sheath that she says will reduce the disturbing number of rapes that plague that country, but local anti-violence leaders are skeptical, as well as alarmed. The device folds around the penis with microscopic hooks and, once engaged, requires medical intervention to remove. (It may also incidentally inhibit the transmission of HIV.) Critics call it impractical (since one must be worn constantly) and barbaric, and a distraction from other solutions to the rape crisis. The devices are expected to be available in pharmacies starting in July, for 1 rand each (about 15 cents).

-- Registered sex offender James Andrew Crawford, 35, was arrested in May in Perris, Calif., after having camped for two weeks in a theater line that was waiting for "Star Wars: Episode III" to open. According to a Riverside County deputy sheriff, Crawford was in violation of a state law that requires sex offenders to notify the government if they adopt a new "domicile" for more than five days.

-- In June, Marc Ferrara, 43, was convicted in Jersey City, N.J., in the 1982 hammer-beating death of his girlfriend, but perhaps because of testimony that the victim had hit Ferrara first, the jury found him guilty only of aggravated manslaughter instead of murder. However, unknown to the jury, the state supreme court had ruled in 1993 that the manslaughter statute in effect in 1982 was subject to a five-year statute of limitations (since changed), which meant that Ferrara could not be convicted, and, thus, he walked free.

-- Dog owners trying to place their pooches with a day care service are encountering screening processes that resemble those for child admissions at elite preschools, according to a May Wall Street Journal report. Urban Tails, in Houston, requires a four-page "dog personality profile" and an evaluative "peer session" with other dogs. Dog Day Afternoons Country Day Prep in Boston requires two letters of reference, a seven-page application, and an "interview." After her "Ghillie" was turned down by one service, a woman acknowledged to the reporter that maybe her dog is "not gifted."

-- Methamphetamine Blues: Dentists interviewed for a June New York Times story said they are increasingly seeing patients who are addicted to the caustic methamphetamine chemicals and who demonstrate "meth mouth" in which healthy teeth turn grayish-brown and (according to the Times) "begin to fall out, and take on a peculiar texture less like that of hard enamel and more like that of a piece of ripened fruit." (And in March in Carthage, Tenn., Scott Stewart was sentenced to eight years in prison for running a home meth lab, despite his insistence that his goal was mainly to ensure that his meth was "safe" from the harmful chemicals other makers were putting into their products.)

-- Among the accusations against Glenn Marcus, 52, arrested in New York City in May for allegedly detaining women and torturing them as sex slaves, are that he forced one of his victims to also create a Web site for him to market his sex photos and another victim to operate the Web site for up to 10 hours a day.

-- Chinese men smoke cigarettes at twice the rate U.S. men do, according to a June dispatch from Guiyang by Toronto's Globe and Mail, and that includes an estimated 60 percent of male Chinese doctors, with about 90 percent of the men believing that smoking is either not harmful or actually healthful. Implicated in these beliefs is the government, whose cigarette monopoly sells 1.8 trillion units a year (at the equivalent of about 25 cents (U.S.) a pack) and apparently disseminates its own feel-good messages about smoking (e.g., that it enhances brain function, relieves schizophrenia, reduces the risk of Parkinson's disease), despite also requiring small health warnings on the package.

-- The Continuing Campaign to Make Sure No One Is Ever Offended: Organizers of the June 28 re-enactment of the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, near Portsmouth, England (in which Britain's Admiral Nelson soundly defeated French and Spanish ships), have decided to remove all references to the defeated nations, calling the mock battle one between the "red" and the "blue," so as not to offend visiting dignitaries.

(1) The South Carolina House's Judiciary Committee, voting in mid-April on two bills to upgrade the crimes of, respectively, gamecock fighting and spousal abuse, from misdemeanors to felonies, passed the former but tabled the latter for the remainder of 2005. (2) Jerry Adams, deputy finance commissioner of Tennessee, was stranded for 13 hours in an elevator in the state Capitol in May without the use of the emergency telephone because the phone's line had been disconnected over the state's nonpayment of the bill.

Adventures in Foil: Anthony Hudson, 43, a former city council candidate and a host of a cable TV program, was arrested in a disturbance in Akron, Ohio, in April; he was covered in silver Mylar foil, wearing an athletic supporter over his trousers, and calling himself the "King of Egypt." And housing authorities in Sacramento, Calif., ordered the D'Souzas on Timberwood Court to take down the sheets of aluminum they had placed around their home to stop the neighbors from allegedly bombarding them with radio waves, which they say had given them headaches, lupus and other illnesses. A Code Enforcement spokesman said there was also foil aplenty covering the inside of the house.

In May, sheriff's deputies in Albuquerque arrested four men on drug-trafficking charges with the inadvertent help of the 2-year-old son of one of the men, according to an Albuquerque Journal story. The father had accidentally locked his keys and his son inside his Cadillac SUV, and the boy had used the OnStar emergency button, which generated a phone call to the sheriff, and deputies arrived to find the father still pleading for his son to unlock the door (which OnStar eventually opened electronically). Deputies became suspicious at all the late-night hubbub and in a consensual search of a nearby trailer belonging to another of the men, found 1,700 pounds of marijuana.

Latest Toilet Litigation: Scott A. Keller filed a lawsuit in March against the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, claiming he was seriously injured when a wall-mounted toilet at a rest stop collapsed, sending him to the floor, causing whiplash and other injuries to his neck and back. And John Jenkins, 53, filed a lawsuit in Morgantown, W.Va., in June against the general contractor Chisler Inc. and another company, claiming that a portable toilet at a construction site exploded while he was using it (due to leaking methane gas underneath, which his cigarette ignited). Jenkins said he suffered severe burns to his face, neck, arms, torso and legs.

Michelle Alabaster, 36, of Bexleyheath, England, finally prevailed in May, nine years after filing her lawsuit against her then-employer for having (illegally, she contended) awarded her vacation pay at the rate she was making on the date of her application for vacation instead of the rate she was making on the last day before vacation. Her total winnings: the equivalent of about $495, including interest. But more money was at stake in the battle in New York between Nicholas Purpura, 62, and his ex-wife, Barbara, who married in 1983 and have been fighting over millions of dollars since their 1988 divorce. The New York Post reported in March that the case is "lurching to an end." Four of the judges who heard earlier parts of the case have since died.

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