News of the Weird

Mark Nuckols, a business student at Dartmouth, has begun selling a tofu-like food, Hufu, that is flavored to resemble what he believes is the taste of human flesh. His target audience is those who already enjoy cooking with tofu, as well as any actual cannibals who might settle for artificiality in order to avoid legal problems and logistical hassles. Nuckols said he has never tasted human flesh but based his recipe on cannibals' reported descriptions of the flavor.

(1) In April, according to a New York Times story, when a Japanese art collector sought to choose between Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses to handle a sale (which ultimately brought in $17.8 million) and quixotically asked the two houses to play rock-paper-scissors for the privilege, Sotheby's lost out on the eventual $2.3 million commission by choosing paper. (A Christie's executive quoted one of his 11-year-old daughters: "Everybody knows you always start with scissors.") (2) In July, Lindy Heaster of Woodbridge, Va., was assessed $21,290 for having bought two newspapers. (She was a juror, ordered by the judge in a murder trial to avoid all media coverage. The judge ultimately declared a mistrial over Heaster's gaffe, voiding the conviction of Gerardo Lara and forcing the prosecutor to start all over.)

-- In June, Co-President Stephen S. Crawford of the financial giant Morgan Stanley (who was installed in the job in order to ensure management "stability" during the company's currently shaky status with investors) signed a two-year contract at $16 million a year which allowed him, if he changed his mind, to resign and promptly collect all $32 million. A few days later, he resigned. The "stability" was needed at faltering Morgan Stanley because longtime CEO Philip J. Purcell had just been eased out, but his contract called for $113 million in severance pay.

-- In the course of a rare crackdown on Nigerian "419"/"advance-fee" scams, a Nigerian court in July sentenced a woman to 30 months in jail, plus fines, in a case in which the victim was not a gullible, e-mail-reading American, but a bank. Brazil's Banco Noroeste S.A. was apparently suckered into advancing money for a nonexistent new airport in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, which ultimately cost it $242 million (much of which it later recovered).

-- The Massachusetts attorney general's office said in June that it was investigating whether longshoremen's unions (working the docks in Boston) have for years been putting some members' kids (as young as age 3) on their membership rolls so that they will accumulate seniority and thus be eligible for higher starting pay if and when they worked as longshoremen. (And in India, children as young as 5 are working for police departments, according to a June BBC dispatch, because among survivors' benefits for the family of a police employee killed on duty is that a family member is given a department job, with the workload tailored to his or her abilities.)

-- British biochemist James Shippen and colleague Barbara May created the Indipod, supposedly the first portable toilet made for cars (4-wheel-drive vehicles) and tested it recently by traveling from Scotland to Italy without using any restrooms along the way. The Indipod, to be installed in the trunk, sells for the equivalent of $550.

-- Japanese customers who attempt to eat at one (unnamed) Western-style restaurant in Jilin, China (in the former Manchuria), will be turned away unless they first apologize for Japan's occupation of China during World War II. Japan's Kyodo news service, via a July Reuters dispatch, reported no apologies so far.

(1) Researchers from Technische University in Munich, Germany, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May, found that patients with migraine headaches were helped just as much by acupuncture needles stuck randomly into their bodies as by needles at the precisely prescribed pressure points. (2) A University of Birmingham (England) professor, working from a third-century Greek text of the New Testament's Book of Revelation, found that the number representing the Antichrist is probably not 666, but 616 (in that 616 referred to the Emperor Caligula). (A Church of Satan official in New York had no comment except to say that his church will use whatever number Christians fear.)

(1) Lisa G. Berzins, a nationally known psychologist and expert on eating disorders, was arrested in a West Hartford, Conn., convenience store in July after, according to police, passing out from inhaling the aerosol from three cans of whipped cream. (2) The Virginia Employment Agency, which handles unemployment compensation, announced layoffs of 400 employees in June for lack of work because unemployment is so low in the state. (3) Todd Christian, 26, who flies 40 feet through the air as "Todd the Human Cannonball" for Britain's Cottle and Austin Circus, was fired in June because he refused a training assignment in Brazil, protesting that he doesn't like long airplane flights.

(1) Thomas E. Mason was charged with robbing the Fortress Bank in Winona, Minn., in June; he was arrested nearby and identified by bank employees, but the main evidence against him was the threatening holdup note, which began, cheerfully, "Hi, I'm Thomas Mason." (2) Henrick Alemba Kutwa, 29, was arrested in Durham, N.C., in June and charged with numerous counts of using stolen credit cards; he was caught when he used one card at a local motel and signed the receipt with his own name.

In April, off-duty San Antonio, Texas, police officer Craig Clancy went into a public men's room stall to answer a call of nature. As he lowered his trousers, his pistol dropped from his waistband onto the floor, firing, twice, with one bullet nicking the leg of a man washing his hands nearby.

Smoke started rising from Israel's finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he was sitting for a radio interview in Jerusalem; he had stuffed his lighted cigar inside a pocket to comply with the room's no-smoking policy (May). In Foreman, Ark., Jeff Foran, 38, suffered facial injuries when he leaped from a fast-moving car to retrieve his cigarette, which had blown out of a window (According to a state trooper, alcohol was involved in Foran's decision.) (May). In New York City, a 28-year-old man fell to his death from a ninth-floor window sill, and police believe a gust of wind might have dislodged him while he was taking a cigarette break from an otherwise smoke-free apartment (March).

News of the Weird has reported several cases of sexual assault that turned on whether a victim's identification of a suspect could be sustained by a description of the assailant's penis. In May 2005, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, physician Anthony DeLuco attempted to defend himself at a disciplinary hearing by proving, via an erection-inducing injection, that his penis was not, as a patient had charged, "crooked." The result was inconclusive, in that his erection curved upward, although not "crooked" to the left or right. (The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons was, at press time, still deliberating his case.)

CORRECTION: Two weeks ago, I confused the size of the base of a statue of Canadian historical figure Alexander Wood with the size of a plaque on the base that featured him "inspecting" a partially naked man. Actually, the base of the statue is about 5 feet high, and the plaque is smaller.

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

A subculture of hip-hop music has developed recently among computer science professionals, who taunt each other in verse much as mainstream rap artists do, according to a June report on Wired.com. "Geeksta" rappers like Ytcracker and MC Plus+ spin verses such as the latter's "I'm encrypting shit like every single day / sending it across a network in a safe way / protecting messages to make my pay / if you hack me you're guilty under DMCA" (referring to a federal copyright law). Explained another, "Monzy": "(I)nstead of boasting about our bitches, blunts, Benzes or Benjamins, maybe we talk about our math skills or the efficiency of our code." A hip-hop journal editor doubted the genre would endure, though, because so far the major artists are males: "You're going to need some females."

-- Andre Guthrie, 22, faced with a special five-year-minimum sentence under the law because he robbed a Sovereign Bank in Lowell, Mass., "while masked," argued to his sentencing judge in June that he wasn't actually in disguise but merely in his transvestite mode ("Andrea Guthrie"), including wig, false breasts, and a fake nose and facial moles. "This is what he does," said Guthrie's lawyer. "This is who he is."

-- Maureen Faibish, the owner of two pit bulls that attacked and killed Faibish's 12-year-old son in June in San Francisco while he was home alone (after Faibish had ordered him to stay away from the dogs and shut him in a room), denied that she was in any way responsible for little Nicholas' death. "It (was) Nicky's time to go," she told the San Francisco Chronicle. "When you're born, you're destined to go, and this was his time."

-- In April, Florida Highway Patrol officers in Miami-Dade County had set up surveillance, including an airplane, to catch a notorious motorcyclist who at least twice before had sped past officers, at speeds up to 140 mph, and escaped. On April 24, he blew by again, going the wrong way in rush-hour traffic, but with the help of the plane, officers tracked him to his apartment and arrested him on six counts. The motorcyclist turned out to be David Carpenter, 24, who was at that time on track to become a Florida Highway Patrol officer, with his physical exam only a week away. (He was advised to forget about the new career.)

-- In February, a Judicial Conduct Board in Pittsburgh filed charges against District Judge Ernest Marraccini, who apparently was upset one day at having to sit as a substitute traffic judge. ("Well, I'm not spending the day here," he allegedly said in court.) To the 30 people waiting to appeal their tickets, Marraccini reportedly said, "Well, then, let's just find everybody not guilty!" When the stunned appellants didn't immediately react, Marraccini said, "I told you you're all not guilty. ... What are you, a bunch of morons?"

-- It Must Not Be Difficult to Fly Cessnas: In a widely reported incident in June, an apparently intoxicated 20-year-old man with seven hours' student flying time stole a single-engine plane in Danbury, Conn., and joyrode for three hours before landing in White Plains, N.Y. However, a week before that, a 14-year-old boy, who, according to police, had never flown before, stole a Cessna in Fort Payne, Ala., took it up for about 30 minutes, and touched down and took off again, before landing hard on a road (but suffered only cuts and bruises).

-- Two Middle-Eastern Women's Need for Speed: (1) A 27-year-old Saudi woman, Hanadi Zakaria al-Hindi (whose countrywomen are not permitted to drive cars), was granted a commercial pilot's license in June after flight training in Jordan and returned home to fly for Saudi Prince al-Walid bin Talal's company. (2) Ms. Laleh Seddigh, 28, won Iran's national championship car race in March after becoming the first woman allowed to compete against men in any sport since Iran's Islamic Revolution. (In the winner's circle, Ms. Seddigh put on a scarf and draped a cape over her tight-fitting uniform.)

-- The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's lab in Vista, Calif., reported in April that it had received for testing 17 600-gram bricks of what it determined to be cocaine, but that on closer inspection, only the outsides of the bricks were of cocaine. Inside each brick was 500 grams of heroin. Officials guessed that the ruse was to fool transporters, who typically charge more to ship heroin than cocaine.

According to an Associated Press report, Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick told a middle-school class he was visiting in April that the U.S. Congress is different from the Texas legislature, in that in Washington there are "454" members on the House side and "60" in the Senate. (The real numbers are 435 and 100.) And The Kansas City Star, reporting in May on a Missouri legislative debate on the Confederate flag, quoted Rep. Jim Avery as stating that the 1803 Louisiana Purchase involved a fight with France over the territory: "Well, we fought over it. We fought over it, right? You don't think there were any lives lost in that? It was a friendly thing?" (It appears well-settled in history that the Louisiana Purchase was just a land deal.)

According to police in Shreveport, La., in June, Jared Gipson, 24, had entered Blalock's Beauty College looking to rob the place but left (according to a Shreveport Times reporter) "crying, bleeding and under arrest" after the 20 students and teachers (almost all women) wrestled him down and attacked him with curling irons, chairs and a table leg, as well as their fists. Manager Dianne Mitchell had led the charge, tripping Gipson as he headed out the door, then yelling "Get that sucker!"

Gary Moody, 45, was arrested after being pulled by police from a tank underneath a women's outhouse in a park near Albany, N.H., in June. A teenage girl had reported that when she went to use the facility, she saw Moody, standing in the muck below the hole, staring up at her. News of the Weird has reported on others discovered in similar circumstances (and who typically wear raincoats and waders and stand patiently, waiting for a user): in Horsetooth National Park in Colorado in 1998; near Peterborough, Ontario, in 1995; at a state park near Hamden, Conn., in 1990; and near Durango, Colo., in 1990. According to Moody's arrest report, his explanation (which is a familiar one for these situations) was that he accidentally "dropped" a "ring" into the toilet and had to go looking for it.

Lawrence Brown, 91, was arrested in June after an armed standoff with police, who said he was operating a drug market out of his home in order to, according to one officer, "supplement his Social Security income" (Chicago). Dorothy Densmore, 86, was arrested in May for having called 911 20 times in a 40-minute period to complain of poor pizza-service delivery and then biting the officer who came to question her (Charlotte, N.C.). Vera Tursi, 80, who uses an oxygen tank and a walker, was nonetheless arrested in June and charged with running a prostitution service out of her apartment in a low-income project (Lindenwold, N.J.).

A 21-year-old student at University of Tennessee-Chattanooga died after pulling her car into a garage and closing the door behind her but leaving the engine running while continuing a long cell phone call (February). A 54-year-old man in the Tokyo suburb of Musashimurayama became the latest person to be killed by a suicide jumper's inadvertently landing on him (December).

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

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.)