News of the Weird

In July, film director David Lynch announced that he had formed a foundation to raise $7 billion to fund 8,000 Transcendental Meditation practitioners to bring world peace by creating a "unified field" of stress-free brain waves over the Earth (which TM'ers accomplish, as they unironically describe it, by detaching their minds from the "thinking process"). Training expenses have increased dramatically in 12 years, for TM maven Dr. John Hagelin needed only $4.2 million in 1993 to bring 4,000 TM'ers to Washington, D.C., to reduce crime for eight weeks, and TM founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi asked for only $1 billion in 2002 to train 40,000 meditators to calm the world after Sept. 11.

-- In separate incidents on Tuesday, July 26, mothers in Falls Church, Va., and Zephyrhills, Fla., kicked their young sons (ages 4 and 7, respectively) out of their cars on busy highways and abandoned them as punishment for backtalk. Channoah Alece Green, 22, in Virginia even knocked her son down driving off on Interstate 495 as he tried to climb back in. The problem addressed by Lori Heine, 46, in Florida was that her son wanted a McDonald's Cheeseburger Happy Meal when she had already bought him a McNuggets Happy Meal.

-- In incidents two weeks apart in July, men in New York City and Trenton, Ohio, arrived for Internet-chat-room-arranged trysts with "teenage girls" (who were, of course, police officers operating stings), even though they apparently could not find baby sitters. Alan Schaefer, 43, was arrested in Greenwich Village while walking down a street with his 14-month-old son in one arm and holding the hand of a very young-looking policewoman. Would-be Clinton Township, Ohio, politician Hank Hill was arrested when he showed up to meet a "14-year-old girl," and according to WEWS-TV, in his truck were Viagra, condoms, lubricant and his 22-month-old son.

-- In Brentwood, N.H., on July 30, police responded to an emergency call to find an intoxicated man with a padlock around his scrotum. He was taken to Exeter Hospital, and a locksmith freed him. And the day before that, in Worcester, England, Geoffrey Hughes, 51, was given a two-year "anti-social behavior order" in Magistrates Court for a series of incidents, one of which was appearing in public wearing only a hat and, on his scrotum, a padlock.

-- For a six-month period four years ago, government scientists in Florida studied a "miracle" liquid called "Celestial Drops" as a cure for the canker menace that ravages the state's citrus crops. According to a July report by the Orlando Sentinel, the research was recommended by then-secretary of state Katherine Harris, who later said she had learned of Celestial Drops from New York rabbi Abe Hardoon, who is associated with the popularized version of Kabbalah, whose organizers sell its followers ordinary water that is supposedly "blessed" by being stored in a room with sacred texts. Celestial Drops, which was promoted as having "improved fractal design," "infinite levels of order" and "high energy and low entropy," was ultimately revealed by the scientists to also be water.

-- In May, a Philadelphia Daily News columnist described a cattle-call-type ritual at the local airport Sheraton hotel, by which most of the candidates for the city's judgeships in that month's Democratic primary shuffled into a room and offered checks of $1,000 or $2,000 to each of the city's ward leaders for "election day expenses," with each leader accepting the checks of those he would support. At a similar gathering at the Ritz-Carlton, one candidate said, "I thought to myself, 'What if we all just walked out. Refused to pay.' But none of us had the courage."

The Thames Water company succeeded in pressuring artist Mark McGowan to abandon his project at the House Gallery in south London in July in which, to protest society's profligate use of water, he turned on House's faucet and planned not to turn it off for a year (wasting an estimated 3.9 million gallons). And in Chicago, it was only a couple of days after photographer Kerry Skarbakka announced his "Falling" project that he was pressured into abandoning it. Skarbakka said he was awed by the sight of people falling or jumping from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and said he would, in tribute, repeatedly plunge four stories from Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (but was quickly excoriated for poor taste).

-- Reuters reported in July that a court in Macerata, Italy, had scheduled Amelia Cuccioletti's property-rights case for further proceedings at 9:30 a.m. on March 25, 2010. Cuccioletti is 98 years old. (The average civil case runs about eight years in Italy.) And in London in May, lawyer Nicholas Stadlen finally came to the end of his opening remarks for the defense in a creditors' lawsuit against the failed BCCI bank. He spoke for 119 days and referred to files stacked so high that neither side's lawyers could see each other. The plaintiff's lawyer had taken only 73 days.

-- In July, a jury in Los Angeles awarded Robert Johnson, the former "chief physician and surgeon" at California State Prison at Lancaster, $1.6 million in compensatory damages for age discrimination after he had been forced to retire in 2001 at age 80. Most of that award represents future salary for Johnson, signifying that the jury perhaps accepted trial testimony that Johnson was fit to continue in his job until the age of 96.

Adam Tyson, 18, Jason Krueger, 20, and two pals were hospitalized in Clermont, Fla., in July with severe bee stings after imprudently deciding to vandalize a beehive colony in an orange grove; their truck got stuck in the sand just after they had set 50,000 bees swarming. And in July in Sparta, Wis., Darkalena Large, 43, insisted that she and her car were fine, but police arrested her anyway on suspicion of drunk driving after finding her in the car, which was stuck on a curb with one tire missing and the wheel's rim badly mangled (and recently on fire, according to a witness). Also, a nearby resident brought over part of the rim, which had been broken off and propelled into the air and through his second-floor window.

Among the more astonishing repeat stories in News of the Weird are reports of people who had somehow managed to swallow their toothbrushes. The Saudi Press Association reported in January that doctors at King Abdul Aziz Hospital in Taif had removed a toothbrush from the stomach of a 70-year-old man (who claimed to have accidentally swallowed it 22 years ago). And in July, the Associated Press reported that a Taiwan surgeon had removed an eight-tooth, accidentally swallowed lower denture from the bronchial tube of a 45-year-old man. The man said he had misplaced the denture three years ago and had been looking everywhere for it.

Erik K. Low, 37, was convicted of manslaughter in Salt Lake City in June for fatally shooting a friend who had just moments before given him a "wedgie." And Judy Castillo-Thomas, 29, was actually acquitted of manslaughter in July in Brooklyn, N.Y., even though she admitted accidentally stabbing her husband to death after he had beat her and taunted her for having buttocks that were "too small."

-- London's Sunday Times reported in July that Prime Minister Blair had spent the equivalent of about $3,300 on makeup and makeup artists over the last six years, and according to campaign disclosure statements reported by the Boston Globe in May, U.S. Rep. Steve Lynch of Massachusetts spent $2,506 on makeup services only in the previous eight months.

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

In July, after word got out that the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" could be fitted with an online update to make some of its scenes explicitly sexual, an 85-year-old grandmother in New York sued the company, Rockstar Games, for having failed to rate the game AO (adults only, age 18 and up) to take account of the modification. However, Florence Cohen apparently freely purchased the M-rated version (age 17 and up) for her then-14-year-old grandson, even though it invites players to murder, steal and engage in gang violence and attacks on police. She complained only when she found out that the M version's unexplicit sex and partial nudity could be made explicit.

(1) In July, as teams of poverty-stricken soccer players from around the world showed up in Scotland for the "Homeless World Cup," immigration officials denied entry to players from Kenya, Zambia, Burundi, Cameroon and Nigeria because they lacked funds for lodging and meals during the tournament. (2) In March, when Knoxville, Tenn., prosecutors ordered 582 parents of chronically truant students to a meeting to advise them of their responsibility to get their kids to school, 241 failed to show up.

-- Scientists at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh announced in June that they had drained dogs' blood from their bodies, filled them with a replacement fluid, and then revived them by successfully reinfusing blood three hours later, thus creating for a time "zombie" dogs. During the three hours, the dogs were clinically dead, with no heartbeat or brain activity, but after reinfusion and electric shocks, they came back to life, normal with no brain damage. (Not all dogs made it back, though.) A spokesman said the technique could be tried on humans within a year.

-- In this year's Maccabiah Games in July in Tel Aviv, historically open only to Jews and Israelis, the 84-kg. weight class of Greco-Roman wrestling was won by Mohammad Babulfath, an Iranian-born Muslim who wrestles out of Sweden. Maccabiah authorities attribute their admission error to the inartfulness of their announcement on a wrestling Web site, phrased as an "invitation" to Maccabiah, which led Babulfath and two non-Jewish teammates to believe that they had been formally invited to compete. Once they showed up, Maccabiah officials decided to let them wrestle.

-- A Philadelphia firefighter was hospitalized in critical condition, and his wife and their three children injured, in Atlantic City in June after an accident at the Steel Pier amusement park. The five were in a ride car on the Big Splash, where after a descent, the car was to slide into the water at a high speed and soak everyone, but apparently the park workers on duty had either forgotten to put water in the basin or had not noticed that it had all drained out.

-- Poor Candidates for Rehabilitation: Paul Meeter, 21, just released from jail in Elk Grove, Calif., in June on traffic charges, was arrested a few hours later and charged with smuggling out the orange jumpsuit he had been wearing while behind bars. And a 15-year-old boy, who had a juvenile-court hearing on a theft charge in Macon, Ga., in July, was accused of stealing about $600 from the blind snack bar operator in the lobby of the courthouse.

-- In Lebanon, Ohio, Donna Rose, 39, pleaded guilty in June after being accused by prosecutors of allowing an older man to have sex with her then-15-year-old daughter. Rose's behavior came to light when the man was arrested, at which time he produced a note, signed by Rose, which he apparently believed would absolve him. The note read: "(Curtis Lee Barnes) always had and will (have permission to have sex) until she is 18 or until they break up." (Barnes was convicted earlier, and both he and Rose were designated as sex offenders.)

-- Disbarred lawyer Robert M. Short, who was convicted in June for stealing $439,000 from his former Vienna, Va., law firm and who had been on the lam for two years, received a suspended sentence from Circuit Judge Leslie Alden (except for four months in jail), in part based on his promise to pay restitution of $245,000 to the law firm. However, Short's offer was to pay it at a rate of $50 a month, which, without interest, would take 408 years to pay off.

High school basketball coach Drew Sanders, 49, was arrested in New York City in July in connection with his method of inspiring two of his summer-program players not to miss free throws. Sanders was charged with more than 20 instances of spanking the boys' bare buttocks for missed shots. And the New York Post, citing a school system investigator, reported in April that high school teacher Rhianna Ellis, 25, had gotten pregnant from an affair with one of her students but had nonetheless later graded the boy a barely passing "65" in her social studies class, due to his laziness and tardiness.

The Chicago Tribune reported in June that a man waiting for a train at the Sox/35th Street station on the South Side had been taken to the hospital after a train knocked him unconscious as he bent over the rail platform looking for the cell phone he had just dropped. And WSB-TV reported in June that a man had been hospitalized in Forest City, Ga., after, according to a witness, attempting to repair a speaker wire by using, in some undisclosed way, a .22-caliber bullet. "At some point," the station reported, "the man ended up with a piece of wire in his neck."

News of the Weird has reported on Americans singularly obsessed, beyond all distraction, with the alleged illegality of U.S. income taxes. In July, an Australian family was convicted in Melbourne of defrauding the Tax Office, after converting its farm in Victoria into the "Principality of Ponderosa," claiming it was an independent kingdom that owed Australia nothing for its income from polystyrene box manufacturing. Virgilio Rigoli and his sons (including "Little Joe," 25) had issued a Declaration of Independence in 1994 and required passports for anyone crossing the border "from" Australia. According to their lawyer, what initially angered the Rigolis was the Department of Agriculture's bulldozing a crop that had become infested with a pest.

(1) The Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in Alameda County, Calif., with more than 5,000 windmills producing pollution-free electricity for 120,000 homes a year, was challenged by environmentalists in July because an estimated 1,700 to 4,700 birds a year get chopped up by the turbines, including birds of dwindling species. (2) In June, two employees of North Carolina People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were arrested for illegally dumping 80 carcasses of euthanized dogs and cats into trash containers at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Ahoskie. (PETA condemned the dumping but defended its use of euthanasia. However, a North Carolina county health director said she had understood that PETA would work harder to find animals homes before resorting to euthanasia.)

An official monitor in the online role-playing game Second Life told BBC News in April that he knows of spouses of game players who have actually paid money to online-game detectives to learn whether their mates are committing "virtual adultery" with other players' characters in the course of the game. (Second Life encourages players to create a character and live out a made-up existence, which can of course include having an affair with another player's made-up character.)

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

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.)