News of the Weird

Even though India now has 80,000 licensed dentists, nearly 100 "street dentists" continue to operate in dusty, open-air "offices," performing extractions and "fitting" used dentures for, typically, 1 percent to 2 percent of what a licensed dentist would charge. One patient of practitioner Mahender Singh, observed for a June dispatch from Jaipur in The New York Times, was "spitting streams of blood into the gutter" after removal of an incisor that, said Singh, "was not working right" and "kept turning left and right when he ate." Singh uses anesthetic but said some patients still pass out from the pain.

-- A French bus line filed an unfair-competition lawsuit against a group of cleaning ladies in Moselle, who used to be customers but who recently began car-pooling to their jobs across the border at European Union offices in Luxembourg. Transports Schiocchet Excursions wants the ladies fined and their cars confiscated. And in Tokyo in July, a group of French-language schoolteachers filed a lawsuit against the city's governor (asking the equivalent of almost $100,000) for his having denigrated the French language, calling it a "failed international language." Said Malik Berkane, head of a French school in Tokyo, "(I)t's unacceptable for him to insult French in this way."

-- In Kyrgyzstan (and some neighboring Central Asian countries) the pre-12th-century tribal custom of "ala kachuu" continues, in which a man reduces the time and expense of courtship by riding up on horseback to a woman, snatching her up, and taking her to his family home, where his relatives (and sometimes hers) prepare her for marriage. According to an April New York Times dispatch from Bishkek, more than half of wives are acquired by ala kachuu (although the term can also mean a more-benign "elopement"), and even some of the snatched wives eventually "consent" to the marriage. Ala kachuu has been illegal for years, but the law against it is rarely enforced.

-- First prize in the youth division of the Fourth of July parade this year in Haines, Ore., went to three kids, all aged 9 and 10, who dressed as large, shelled insects (actually, in inner tubes covered by garbage bags), pushing huge rubber balls coated in sand, dirt and dead grass, according to the Baker City Herald. (Yes, the parents had conspired with their kids to dress them up as dung beetles!)

-- The Living Word Tabernacle in Waverly, Ohio, terminated the membership of Loretta Davis recently, according to a July report by WCMH-TV in Columbus, because she had stopped paying her tithe. Davis' contributions ended in January after she was hospitalized the first of 15 times this year for congestive heart failure. The church's founder said non-member Davis could still attend, but Davis' daughter said, "In the time of (her) need, (the church) should be caring, supporting, asking what she needs, help her if she needed help." (When healthier, Davis was donating $60 a month out of her $592 Social Security check.)

Citing the high quality of the workforce in Ontario, Toyota decided recently to build a second plant in the province (this time in Woodstock) even though Ontario was offering only about half the subsidy offered by Mississippi and Alabama to build the plant in one of those states. According to a July Canadian Press story, a trade association executive said the industry had learned from Nissan and Honda, which had found the workforce in the U.S. South to be often untrained and illiterate, and that, in Alabama, trainers had to use pictorials to teach some workers how to use the equipment.

-- Incompetent Home Improvement: A bee-plagued homeowner in northwest Tucson, Ariz., attempting to "frighten the bees off" (according to a fire department spokesman) by lighting a small fire in the attic, inadvertently ignited insecticide vapor, with the resulting blaze causing about $100,000 damage to the roof (March). And a woman in Mecklenburg County, N.C., attempted to chase snakes out of a couch on her front porch by dousing the nest with lighter fluid, but then an accidentally dropped match set a fire large enough that she had to jump out a window to safety (June).

-- Fetish du Jour: In July in Exeter, England, Paul Pennington pleaded guilty to engaging in sexual activity in a public restroom, while incidentally dressed in a baby diaper, bib and girl's dress and carrying a baby bottle (but also wearing a stuffed bra). And Sean Kelly, 35, was arrested in Sebastian, Fla., in July, and charged with fraudulently attempting to obtain health-care services after he showed up at a clinic complaining of back pain but dressed in a baby diaper (which he eventually "loaded," demanding a change). And Calvin Milo Alvarez, 30, was arrested in Fayetteville, Ark., in May on a child pornography charge after he was found by police, arguing with another man at an apartment house, with Alvarez dressed in a baby diaper and bleeding from the mouth.

-- Britain's Church Mission Society, with 200 missionaries around the world, decided recently that a place that needs one the most is the town of Telford, England (population 150,000), where fewer than one in a hundred residents attends an Anglican church. (Said a CMS spokesman, "These days the CMS goes to the hard places and takes on the hard cases.") (The Church of England might have a larger problem, according to a July survey by Bangor University researchers: 3 percent of its clergy doubts the existence of God, which works out to nearly 300 non-believing ministers.)

-- A growing number of historical sites in Mecca (perhaps even including the home of the Prophet Muhammad) may soon fall to urban renewal as developers plan skyscrapers with stores and condominiums, according to a July Reuters dispatch. (Ironically, many devout Wahhabi Muslims support the demolition, hoping to prevent people from worshipping such "sacred" buildings instead of concentrating on their proper duties in Islam. Those Wahhabis view only the Grand Mosque, which is the destination for the annual hajj pilgrimages, as untouchable.)

-- The New Born Fellowship Christian Center in Rochester, N.Y., recently adopted a several-weeks-long "Spiritual Warfare" theme that featured its pastor, Warren Meeks, delivering sermons while in military fatigues (and asking congregants to wear fatigues, too), to battle the spirits opposing U.S. troops overseas and those challenging American youth with drugs and gangs. Meeks also brought in an Army missile, to help with the message, according to a report on WHAM-TV.

In June, the Arab Balad party went to court in Haifa, Israel, challenging ultra-nationalist Jews of the Gush Katif settlement, who are virulently opposing the government's mandatory withdrawal from Gaza. However, the Balads' complaint has little to do with sovereignty or religion. The party has for years used orange as its organizing theme color and filed the lawsuit to make the upstart Gush Katif stop using orange in its own materials.

The bodies of Kentucky State Reformatory inmates Avery C. Roland, 26, and Michael Talbot Jr., 24, were found in a nearby landfill the day after they went missing in July; a Department of Corrections official said they had probably hidden inside a garbage truck without realizing that, to prevent escapes, the prison requires that garbage be compacted twice before it leaves the grounds. And four days apart in July, two 19-year-old men (in Sheboygan, Wis., and Louisville, Ky.) fell to their deaths while car-surfing at high speeds. (According to a witness, the Sheboygan man's fatal fall came shortly after he yelled to his driver, "Is that all you got?")

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

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.)