Sunday, November 18, 2001
Good morning.
Wiccans Disrespecting Fire
The fire dept. in Enfield, Conn., had to issue a warning to local Wiccans after a 2nd ceremony fire since August burned part of a bedroom in a house that had been loaned to 2 practitioners to dispel pain from a hernia. Apparently, what you do is write down all the things bothering you on a piece of paper, then roll it up and set fire to it, and the problems go away. [Hartford Courant, 11-15-01]
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Mother Arrested for Trying Out Cutting-Edge Disciplinary Procedure
A 22-yr-old woman was arrested in Fond du Lac, Wis., at a mall this week after she allegedly crammed a jalapeño pepper down her 3-yr-old’s throat. She told police that she understood that spanking was now illegal in Wisconsin but that a parenting-class teacher (and her shrink) told her peppers were a proper technique. (It worked, though; a passerby heard him yell, “No peppa! No peppa! I listen!”) [Fond du Lac Reporter, 11-16-01]
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Great Escape in a Tight Fit
You’ve seen the story before: A highly-motivated jail inmate escapes by squeezing through an impossibly small opening, and there you have Adrian Pellenz, 23 and 5'8 135 lbs, squeezing through a Bartow, Fla., jail window that was 5-5/16 inches wide. Amazing. Except for one thing. He didn’t make it. He got stuck. Adrian, my man, that was too small. What made you think you could get through that? [Tampa Tribune, 11-17-01]
Below the Fold for Sunday
An Islamic court in Katsina, Nigeria, condemned Mr. Sani Rodi to die for the murder of a woman and her 2 kids and will use on him the very same knife he used on the victims; by the way, the “evidence” against Rodi was that the deceased’s family members swore “25 times” on the Koran that Rodi did it.
Jason Dodsworth was sentenced to 18 months for assault in Gloucester (England) Crown Court on Friday, after he partook of the questionable strategy of standing up in court and telling the judge that he also raped the woman in question (even though he had just been acquitted of that charge); the victim went nuts.
[Sources: CNN-AP, 11-15-01; The Times (London), 11-17-01]
Editor's Notes (Sunday, November 18, 2001)
* Yr Ed no sooner finished writing out News of the Weird 720, for delivery next Sunday, when a member of the Board of Editorial Advisors actually advised, reminding me that this item from 720:
“Emma Ness of Fargo, N.D., passed her driver’s license-renewal eye test in September despite the fact that she is so severely vision-impaired that her nurse must drive her around. Ness, 79, said she had 75 percent blockage in one eye, 25 percent in the other, and sees spots in the middle of road signs, according to a report in the Fargo Forum, but bet the nurse that clerks would renew her license, anyway, and they did. (“We’re only human,” said a state transportation official.)”
belongs with this item from News of the Weird 676 (1-21-01): “A 27-year-old blind man was issued a permit to carry a gun, which he says he needs because blind people are vulnerable to robberies (Fargo, N.D.)”
And then, a few days ago, it was Fargo whose a-certain-middle-school’s parents quashed a movie field trip to see the Harry Potter movie, on the ground that it is witchcraft-heavy. Be careful if you’re going through Fargo.
Thanks This Week So Far to
Jeff Dubner, Stephen Dobson, Lori Datko, Jonathan Eisenberg, Lyle Goding, Ann Freitag, J.D. Maddison, William Newport, Reid Stacey, Ronbo Phillips, Ted Hering, James Sloan, Jeff Rose Martland, Manny Encora, Jeremy Scheffee, Scott Zimmerman, Bob Minton, Aaron Zachmeier, Spencer Cordell, Bob Sorem, and Bill Andrew, and the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors (below).
Saturday, November 17, 2001
Good morning.
Stories that Write Their Own Punchlines
Don King was hospitalized briefly in Las Vegas this week from an injury during a bumpy flight from Los Angeles: He was thrown from his seat and hit the top of his head on the ceiling. (Oh, the CAT scan also revealed he has 5 pieces of shotgun pellets in his head, which he said were from a 1959 incident.) [Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11-15-01] LINK
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More People Not Traveling Light
Doreen Beerman, 44, was arrested in Rockland, Maine, after police found 136 live, wet lobsters crawling around her car in a traffic stop for speeding; they had been stolen from a local company. And in Miami, Carlos Rodriguez Avila was indicted this week for allegedly trying to bring 44 Cuban melodious finches past Customs at Miami Int’l, strapped to his legs. [Boston Globe-AP, 11-16-01] [Tampa Tribune-AP, 11-5-01][Link is to 2nd story.]
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There Is No Such Thing as a Sophisticated Convenience-Store Robber
Steven Hebron, 34, is behind bars after Wednesday’s hapless attempt to rob the Citgo Quik Mart in Des Moines, Iowa. He was interested in robbing the clerk only of 7 cartons of cigarettes. He tried to apologize after the clerk locked him in the store. After the clerk mistakenly unlocked the door, he fled (but left his wallet behind). He returned to the store (just as the clerk was giving police a description of the robber, which the robber helpfully tried to correct) and apologized again (and asked for his wallet back). He got caught. [Des Moines Register, 11-16-01]
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Friday, November 16, 2001
Good morning. Here are a few items for today, and I'll try to get caught up by tomorrow.
"Teenage Stunt Goes Awry"
Among the most common stories showing up in News of the Weird over the yrs are those with the above headline. In Wadena, Minn., on Sunday, a 16-yr-old guy lay down in the parking lot of a gas station to pose as victim of a hit-and-run accident while 2 buddies videotaped him. Then an oblivious customer accidentally backed over the guy and killed him. [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 11-15-01]
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"Restroom Professionals" Summit in Singapore
A 3-day conference (“Toilet Summit”) begins Sunday, as 500 specialists sit in on engineering, design, and government-relations exhibitions designed to get the world to pay more attention to public toilets. China is especially interested because it has so far to go to upgrade by the 2008 Olympics. Singapore is viewed as numbah-one in the world in clean, fancy restrooms. [CNN, 11-15-01]
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Updates
Philly city councilman Angel Ortiz not only has been driving without a license for 25 yrs [Weird Planet Daily, 11-8-01], but has 53 unpaid parking tickets (face value: $3G) (half of which he could have fixed with councilman’s-privilege paperwork). As usual with public officials, Ortiz made the story more interesting than it should have been by denying that he knew about the tickets. And Word, the Lhasa apso that was sentenced to death row in 1993 because he was viewed as too vicious [News of the Weird 670] but who has survived in a cage since then as various courts entertained owner Wilton Rabon’s appeals (at a cost to taxpayers of $200G), was spared when Seattle officials agreed to ship him to exile in Arlington, Wash. [Philadelphia Daily News, 11-14-01] [Seattle Times, 11-14-01] [Link is to Ortiz.]
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This Link
is to Rabon.
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Thursday, November 15, 2001
Good morning. Just one more note on the Bush-Gore recount, plus the other news:
Sara Jane Olson Changes Mind Again
The former Kathleen Ann Soliah (the accused 1975 Symbionese Liberation Army bomber) said yesterday that she had decided that she didn’t do it, after saying that she did, after saying that although she said she did, she really didn’t, after saying that she did, after saying that she didn’t. Her defense will be, apparently, that 26 yrs earlier, although all the SLA’ers around her were caught up in their own aggressiveness, she and she alone had the certainty of mind to stand up to all of them and wall off behaviors such as bomb-making and bomb-planting. The Los Angeles trial will include a catfight with Patty Hearst. [San Francisco Chronicle, 11-14-01]
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Man Reports to ER with Coat Hanger in His Throat
There was a logical explanation: At a party, someone slipped a balloon full of cocaine into his drink, he said, and thus he accidentally swallowed it (at least some of the way down), and that the thing to do, obviously, was to fish the bag out with a coat hanger. Police (Wichita, Kan.) went to the hospital to look for the balloon, but there’s nothing on the Wichita Eagle website so far this morning on whether they found it. [Wichita Eagle, 11-14-01]
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One More Angle on the F State Bush-Gore Recount
One of Yr Ed’s favorite political writers Mickey Kaus (www.kausfiles.com) pointed out yesterday that the judge administering the recount last year, the little-bit-sorta-liberal Terry Lewis, might have allowed the overvotes to be examined, too, and not just the undervotes, as Gore had petitioned for. (The recount studies have concluded that Bush would have won anyway if the undervote recounts had proceeded but might have lost by a wide margin if realistic standards had been applied to examining overvotes, such as allowing as valid any votes in which the same voter marked a presidential choice and then wrote in that same person’s name at the bottom, or marked once beside the presidential candidate’s name and once beside his running mate’s name.) Lewis told the Orlando Sentinel that he had a hearing on that issue scheduled when SCOTUS stopped the counting. Of course, that timing would have been more ridiculously impossible than counting all the undervotes by Gore’s self-acknowledged deadline. And of course, Lewis’s authority rested on a Florida Supreme Court decision that basically is itself as unprincipled as the highly-criticized SCOTUS decision that several days later wiped it out.
Below the Fold for Thursday
A San Francisco PD motorcycle cop had a Fire Dept. Toys for Tots van towed while it was receiving collections; expired plates are expired plates.
The jungle hideout of the late Pol Pot (a tons-more-maniacal killer than Osama bin Laden) is the latest remnant of evil to be suggested for conversion to a tourist resort (about 200 miles north of Phnom Penh).
Research from Prof. Daniel Langleben (U. of Penna.) shows brain scans effective at detecting even compulsive liars (who are so smooth, they defeat polygraphs) because the attempt to suppress what is known to be true causes actual changes in the brain.
The cause of death of a 45-yr-old man (Morristown, Tenn.) was a Halloween stunt in which a buddy coated him with orange spray paint from his head to his knees (Goldfinger-like).
A Texas state trooper managed to arrest 2 drunken drivers from the same car on the same stop last week (Denton, Tex.); just as he was processing the drunk driver, the drunk passenger staggered back to the car and tried to escape but was captured after a wild chase.
[Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, 11-14-01; Yahoo-Reuters, 11-12-01; New York Post, 11-12-01; Knoxville News-Sentinel, 11-12-01; Denton Record-Chronicle, 11-12-01]
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
Good morning. Clearing out some news from the last day or two:
Diabetic German Judge Sues Coca-Cola; Didn't Know It Was Bad for Him
In Essen, Germany, Hans-Josef Brinkmann, 46, sued Coca-Cola (but only for about $5G), claiming the company should have put a warning on its product, “not for long-term consumption.” He had a 2-bottle-a-day habit for many years and figures that that had something to do with his having been diagnosed with diabetes in 1998. [The Times of India-Agence France-Presse, 11-14-01]
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The Desperation of U.S. Intelligence
It was only in The Times of London, and it was unsigned, and the sources weren’t much identified (though they were named), but it says there that the FBI is exploring once again whether to use psychics, to help predict where the next terrorist attack is coming from. A previous program, at Stanford Research Institute, was closed in 1995. The upscale name for the work is “remote viewing,” but one critic says it might as well be “psychic dowsing.” [The Times (London), 11-11-01]
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Undignified Death
The report in the Omaha World Herald on Monday was too brief to answer all the questions, but apparently a 22-yr-old woman and her sister were driving so fast in a Home Depot parking lot that when the car accidentally hit a light pole, the driver was killed, and according to the police report, the 2 women had been “laughing and talking” right up to the impact. [Omaha World Herald, 11-13-01]
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F State Speeders Fall for Hair Dryer
School crossing guard Dale Rooks, tired of seeing cars zoom past his elementary-school crosswalk in Pensacola, wrapped some electrical tape around an old hair dryer and started pointing it at the cars. “It’s almost comical” how people instantly think it’s a radar detector and slow down, said Rooks. [WKMG-TV (Orlando)-AP, 11-13-01]
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Latest Cat-Hoarding Story (Yawn)
(Newport News, Va.; look it up if you want to) [Oh, there was also one reported on Sunday from Reading, England (60 animals, mostly cats, and 2,000 cans of pet food).]
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Latest Fatal Religious Messages
The Jehovah’s Witnesses couple Larry and Constance Slack were arrested in Chicago and charged with first-degree murder in the death of their 12-yr-old daughter, who was being punished by Larry for being “uncooperative” about an errand. The punishment, ordered by the Holy Bible, itself, called for “40 lashes minus one, three times,” which Larry interpreted to require use of a one-inch-thick section of rubberized electrical cable. And the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the appeal yesterday from ex-Mormon Ronald Lafferty, who killed his sister-in-law and niece in 1985 on orders from God. [Chicago Sun-Times, 11-13-01] [Arizona Republic-AP, 11-13-01] [Link is to Chicago story.]
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This Link
is to the Utah story.
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Below the Fold for Wednesday
Everyone got all fertoutst at Coffee Time Donuts in Toronto on Monday when a cleaning lady spotted a 10-inch cylindrical object covered in black tape in a men’s room, and the bomb squad was summoned; it was one of those Swedish Erotica models.
A 16-yr-old boy in Dublin, Ireland, with a rap sheet 57 items long and 22 more on the way, was lucky to get bail on the current charges, but then he looked that gift horse in the mouth and violated his terms of release, so he’s in for a while.
Speaking of which, Curtis Sears was jailed over the weekend on DUI charges (Lebanon, Ohio); he’s already got 18 DUI convictions.
Bob Rowan, 49, was displeased with the 21-clinton display at the Boulder Public Library gallery [Weird Planet Daily, 11-9-01] and so stole the exhibit late last week (“El Dildo Bandito Was Here”) before turning himself in to police and giving up the loot; the problem was the adjacent U.S. flag exhibition at the Library, which he thought needed to be protected from the clintons.
[Sources: Toronto Star, 11-13-01; Irish Independent, 11-12-01; Newsnet5.com (Cleveland), 11-11-01; Rocky Mountain News, 11-12-01]
Editor's Notes (Wednesday, November 14, 2001)
* “Man fined for putting fake news online” read the headline on the story moved by CNETNews.com yesterday, but it only referred to a fake press release that drove a company’s stock up. Yr Ed wants it applied to those who make up the “darwin awards” Internet passarounds [not the work of www.DarwinAwards.com, which is first-rate] that usually commingle ripped-off NOTW stories with tall tales.
Tuesday, November 13, 2001
Good morning. Today, Yr Ed revisits one of the stories he least believed when it originally hit the papers, until he checked it out; there’s possibly another guy in the news for something related.
Pumping
Ananova.com ran a story yesterday, purportedly from the Thai newspaper Thai Rath, reporting the accidental death of a man whose “friends” rammed an air hose up his orenthal and inflated him (as a joke). Yr Ed has no idea whether that story is real or not (I’d guess “not”), but just FYI: (1) the “darwin awards” passaround [not anything from DarwinAwards.com, which is legit] of a few yrs ago, whereby the guy inflated himself, was surely a made-up story; (2) NOTW has reported a couple of legit stories of “pain therapy” by, er, licensed U.S. health professionals, involving ozone pumped like that; and (3) as of February 2000 (but not now), there was a website of air-pumping fetishists who shared their experiences in words and pictures. (At that time, Yr Ed wrote, in Backstage at News of the Weird .107, “According to the anonymous proprietor, pumping, or ‘belly inflation,’ is ‘the introduction of air into the colon, with the intention to produce temporary, very noticeable, distention and enlargement of the belly.’ Why? ‘I know in my own case that I have always had a desire to have a bloated, round belly,’ that certain scenes of men with round bellies were ‘stimulating to me.’ Also, ‘it just feels good.’ Tool of the trade: a variable-speed aquarium pump.” That url [which was an AOL member’s page] is closed, and if the page has moved, it’s not obviously findable on Google.)
Breakthrough for Sedentaries: "Thinking About Exercising" Works!
Researchers from Cleveland told a Society for Neuroscience meeting on Sunday that their study found muscles strengthened 35% and 13%, respectively, among groups that failed to exercise two muscles but imagined they did (versus 0% and 0% by control groups). [Yahoo-Reuters, 11-12-01]
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Below the Fold for Tuesday
Arrested in Pearl River, La., for murder of his girlfriend’s 14-month-old daughter: Christopher Wayne Davis.
Rich kid Daphne Abdela, 19, serving a 10-yr sentence for a 1997 thrill killing in New York City, waxing philosophical to the New York Post: “I’m sure that God has a plan [for me] and that in some weird way, [the murder] was part of it.”
RCMPolice in Vancouver issued a warning to the guy who broke into a weather station and stole tools: The dome through which he broke in is “bathed in radiation” and could result in “permanent damage” to “eyes and testicles [soft tissue].”
A Protestant teenager in North Belfast is no longer with us after his pipe bomb, which he was winding up to throw at police, blew up in his hand.
[Times-Picayune, 11-11-01; New York Post, 11-11-01; Yahoo-Reuters, 11-12-01; New York Times, 11-13-01]
Monday, November 12, 2001
In addition to the weird news, Yr Ed summarizes the F State vote-counting story that’s all over the news this morning, and apologizes for an error yesterday; and begins today permanently listing the Board of Editorial Advisors at the bottom of the weekly Weird Planet Daily column.
The F State Vote Consortium Says Bush Still Wins
Since Yr Ed is based in the F State, Weird Planet Daily (and its predecessor Backstage at News of the Weird) has been trying to decipher the post-mortems on the 2000 election for you, and the final shoe fell this morning with the “Consortium”’s [NY Times, Wash. Post, Wall St. J., others] releasing its research, which is somewhat more thorough than the earlier Miami Herald research but comes to basically the same conclusion: Bush would still have won Florida unless “overvotes” [punch/checkmark Gore and write his name in, which disqualifies your ballot] had been counted (which Gore/Boies never asked for). Even with all of the dimpled chads, Gore would have lost. What neither study directly addressed was that, almost certainly, more voters for Gore than Bush stepped into the booths last Nov. 7 but that Bush had a larger number than Gore sophisticated enough not to screw up their ballots. For instance, the Consortium guesses that Gore would have won the state by several thousand votes were it not for the confusing 2-page ballots in 2 counties (a conclusion reached by assuming that most of those who voted for victorious Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson but who double-voted for president actually meant to vote only for Gore). [St. Petersburg Times, 11-12-01]
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The Wages of Ignorance in South Africa
Sexual assaults against kids has almost doubled in 2 yrs, topped off last week by the, er, well, never mind what topped it off because it’s too gross, but the fact is, according to an official in Durban: “There is a belief across South Africa that a virgin will cure a man of HIV or AIDS. We have no idea where this idea has come from, but it has been around for a few yrs and has certainly taken hold.” So the belief is exactly 180 degrees off from the reality: Virgins now get infected by these HIV-positive men. [London Daily Telegraph, 11-11-01]
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Aiding Terrorism in Eagan, Minn.
Police picked up 2 guys and 2 teenage girls Saturday night after they were found with about $2.5G worth of shoplifted Nicorette gum from at least 1 Walgreen Drug Store. One man said he had been recruited by someone in NYC to steal the stuff so it could be shipped to Pakistan to help terrorists. [St. Paul Pioneer Press, 11-11-01]
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More News Feminists Won't Like
Research in the journal Neuron last week reported that the sight of a beautiful woman triggers in hetero males’ brains a pleasure response similar to what food or drugs triggers. Said lead researcher Hans Breiter, “This is hard-core circuitry. This is not a conditioned response.” [Fox News, 11-9-01]
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Below the Fold for Monday
King Mswati III of Swaziland bowed to pressure and fined himself 1 cow for having taken a 17-yr-old fiancee (which would be illegal, assuming he and she were, er, sexually active, after the King’s 5-yr moratorium on sex for teens).
Oregon Public Radio reported last week on The Pink Pistols, a gay-oriented gun-owners’ group advocating that “armed gays don’t get bashed.”
While police were raiding a drug house in Gainesville, Ga., last week, a 37-yr-old woman called and attempted to negotiate a deal whereby she would give 8 prs of underwear (new, she claimed) for some meth, but it was unclear whether it was men’s or women’s.
Melvin Burkhart, 94, passed away Thursday near Tampa, where he had retired after his carnival career as the “Human Blockhead” (being able to hammer a spike into his head through a cavity behind his nostril).
[Sources: IOL-Agence France-Presse, 11-11-01; Oregon Considered transcript, 11-8-01; Gainesville Times, 11-9-01; Tampa Tribune, 11-10-01] [Link is to Pink Pistols.]
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Editor's Notes (November 12, 2001)
* Yesterday’s gratuitous headline on the fake-wine story overreached to the point of inaccuracy. The Catholic Church prescribes wine-wine, not grape juice-wine. The weekly News of the Weird columns endure several edits; this daily stuff goes out on the fly. I apologize for being wrong (but not necessarily for offending people).
* There was a story out of Chicago yesterday about encouraging the possibly-demented to self-test via touch-tone phones (e.g., “If the following sentence makes sense to you, press 1"). Yr Ed says think of the possibilities for self-testing weirdos: "Using your touch-tone phone, enter the number of cats in your house, followed by the pound sign" or "If you've just robbed a bank, and want an estimate of your chances of success, enter the number 1 if you still have your wallet on you; enter the number 2 if you wrote your holdup note on something that didn't have your name on it; enter the number 3 if you remembered to put your mask on before you entered the bank" etc.
* The site of “Islam Q&A” is http://65.193.50.117, and if you click the Link below, it’ll take you to yesterday’s question, which has to do with whether testicle hairs have to be shaved, too (courtesy of Paul Music).
* A more extensive list of Islam Questions and Answers, from another source: http://www.binoria.org/q&a/restricted.html [Link is to the 3rd paragraph.]
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More Editor's Notes (Monday, November 12, 2001)
* In the New York Times this morning is (1) a piece on London’s Private Eye satire rag (which has long run weird news in “Funny Old World”) (and the Times says the editor acknowledges that some facts are too good to check, which Yr Ed has found to be the case with regard to some of the weird news in FOW) and (2) a piece on writer Robert Olen Butler’s website by a member of the NOTW Board of Editorial Advisors (who, as is the case with all other members of the NOTW Board, does not necessarily agree with anything Yr Ed writes and undoubtedly is appalled by some of those things).
News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors
Senior Advisors Jenny T. Beatty, Gaal Shepherd Crowl, Paul
Di Filippo, Geoffrey Egan, Sam Gaines, Ivan Katz, Barbara
McDonald, Matt Mirapaul, and Jim Sweeney.
Chief Correspondents Paul Bogrow, Bob Brown,
Michael Colpitts, Lance E. Ellisor, Harry Farkas, Leslie Goodman-Malamuth, Fritz Gritzner, Ginger Katz, Wolf Kirchmeir, Myra J. Linden, Bob McCabe, Victor McDonald, Kerry O'Conner, Jerry Pohlen, Yvonne Pover, Larry Ellis Reed, Tom Slone, H.Thompson, Bruce Townley, Barbara Tyger, and Elyse Verse.
Sustained Excellence in Weird-News Reporting: Gary Abbott, Bob Bayer, Dave Beck, Paul Blumstein, Rob Borosak, John Cieciel, Roger Gulbransen, Peter P. Gunther, Herb Jue, Scott Langill, David Lips, Joe Littrell, Steve Miller, Paul Music, Christopher Nalty, Joel O'Brien, Allen Pasternak, Jason Rule, Lee Sechrest, Rob Snyder, Maurine Taylor, Marty Turnauer, Willard Wheeler, Mark Weiss, Jerry Whittle, and Peter Wolf.
©
2001, Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
