Sunday, December 23, 2001
Good morning.
Below the Fold for Sunday
Wenonah Blevins, 83, the Houston woman evicted in April from her paid-up, $150G home (which was sold out from under her because she owed the homeowners’ ass’n $814), settled with the ass’n on Friday, and got her house back and $300G for her trouble.
In LA, on the I-110/I-105 overpass, a guy shot his wife to death, then himself, then plunged over the rail, hitting a car’s windshield below at 65 mph, killing the driver and wounding a passenger.
Le French street artist “Cho” got a write-up Friday for his project of sticking little flags into some of the multitudes of dog-doo piles on Paris sidewalks (estimated 5,800 tons/yr), then painting around them, er, artistically.
A 66-yr-old homeless man complained to the San Francisco Examiner that the city’s Dept of Aging is asking too much information on the forms it asks its elder-shelter recipients to fill out before they get service; asked he, rhetorically, “We have people who are [age] 97, and they ask them if they are bisexual?”
[Sources: Dallas Morning News, 12-22-01; United Press Int’l, 12-21-01; BBC News, 12-21-01; San Francisco Examiner, 12-21-01]
Thanks So Far This Week to
Tom Race, Julie Cooper, Lee Nichols, Roland Beauregard, Eric Schulke, Lance Spangler, Mark Bina, Elijah Christman, Jonathan Eisenberg, Ronbo Phillips, Ethan Minovitz, Ronda Bumgardner, Roger Leduc, Jeffrey Coleman, Charles Cummins, and the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors (see below)
Saturday, December 22, 2001
Good morning.
A Boy's Dying Wish
Sydney's Daily Telegraph had a long piece yesterday on the “moral dilemma” posed by a 15-yr-old terminally-ill boy who decided the one thing he really wanted to do before he got too far along was to have sex (with another person, a woman). Bottom line was, some people helped him, and he did it, and they kept it from the parents, who would probably have prevented it or been grossed out by it. [Daily Telegraph, 12-21-01]
Story Link
Note to Immature Readers: Here's a Good One
Something called the Gender Sexuality Rights Ass’n in Taipei got in the press today, proposing vast liberalizations of the law, according to its secretary-general, whose name is Wang Ping, and its academic advisor, whose name is Josephine Ho. [Taipei Times, 12-22-01]
Below the Fold for Saturday
An environmental manager in Kagoshima, Japan, was arrested for threatening to cut up a bar owner if he didn’t start separating his garbage accordining to Japan’s strict trash laws.
A Russian court has okayed the ejection of the Salvation Army from the country because it’s a paramilitary organization (use of rank, uniforms), notwithstanding that it has helped 900 social-service programs since it landed in-country in 1992; cynics say it was really because the SA was either too religious or too stingy with bribes.
Chinese University of Hong Kong reported that 1 in 70 adults (16-40) wet the bed more than 3x a week, mainly because of anxiety at work.
[Sources: Mainichi Daily News, 12-21-01; BBC News, 12-21-01; Yahoo-Reuters, 12-21-01]
Friday, December 21, 2001
Good morning.
Christmas Unhappiness
(1) A guy being escorted around the courthouse in Shreveport, La., last weekend so he could post bond on DUI and minor drug charges suddenly attacked the Christmas tree in the lobby and beat it to shreds before deputies restrained and arrested him; deputies still did not have an explanation as of Wednesday. (2) Colin Wood, 30, won an Internet auction (about $500) to spend the next 2 weeks in the Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker (near Brentwood, Essex, England) (10-ft-thick concrete walls) in order to insulate himself as much as possible from this festive season. [Shreveport Times, 12-20-01] [BBC News, 12-20-01] [Link to (2)]
Story Link
The Fast Food Telephone Pervert Is Back (or a Copycat?)
Yesterday’s Indianapolis Star reported that a “police officer” called up the manager of the Arby’s in Noblesville, Ind., said he was investigating a theft by an Arby’s employee, got the female manager to take a certain female employee into her office and stripsearch her while he was on the phone, and then asked the employee pervert-type questions before the manager got wise to the whole thing. [Weirdrangers will recognize this modus operandi from last year in North Dakota and another place in the Midwest that Yr Ed is too lazy to look up, perhaps Milwaukee.] [Indianapolis Star, 12-20-01]
Story Link
Polydactyl Cats in the News
The story broke again in the news this week about those multi-toed cats, started when one owner claimed his, with 23 (cats normally have 18—5, 5, 4, 4, or is it 4, 4, 5, 5?), held the world’s record, and then other people challenged that. It turns out that multi-toed cats are pretty common in Halifax (and Yarmouth), Nova Scotia, and even in Boston, having come in from ships in the 1600s (but not from Europe, where multi-toed cats were mostly exterminated, as witchlike). One cat in Moncton, New Brunswick, was said to have 30. [Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 12-20-01] [Online access by paid subscription.]
Below the Fold for Friday
Police in Lake County, Fla. [where Yr Ed attended high school] said a 21-yr-old guy, drag racing at 100 mph, accidentally rammed his mother’s car, killing her.
The British Medical Journal reported that Chinese and Japanese die of heart attacks disproportionately on the dreaded 4th of the month, even with other major factors controlled for, and concluded that gloom can be an independent cause.
A 39-yr-old woman, who had to leave her job at Rogers Sugar in Vancouver, British Columbia, when she got grossed out by the company’s rat traps, was turned down for worker compensation because her psychological paralysis was “outside the [worker compensation] plan.”
A judge in Manitoba acquitted a guy of rape after the victim testified that she was an acquaintance, did not escape from him when she had the chance, and failed to bite him during oral sex because “I’m not like that, I’m not a person who likes to be rude.”
[Sources: Washington Post-AP, 12-20-01; Daily Telegraph (London), 12-21-01; Vancouver Province, 12-20-01; Winnipeg Sun, 12-20-01]
Thursday, December 20, 2001
Good morning.
Jack Schreiner Is an Innocent Man
Contrary to what was posted here on 11-25-01 (and contrary, therefore, to “facts” reported in NY newspapers that week), Jack Schreiner, 30, is not a bank robber. He did not rob a Chase Manhattan branch in Queens and then return several days later to open checking and savings accounts. He was misidentified by bank personnel, and police have dropped all charges. The real robber is still at large, but Schreiner, a refrigerator repairman, says he isn’t angry. [New York Post, 12-19-01]
Story Link
Calif. Physician Pulls an O.J.
Petaluma, Calif., physician Louis Pelfini, 65, is totally free after a prosecution witness screwed up so awfully that the prosecutor had to drop the charges even though he still thinks Pelfini killed his wife in 1999. A coroner’s office doctor was somehow caught on tape rehearsing his testimony that would probably have locked in the case against Pelfini, but some of the dialogue made clear that the coroner-doctor intended to stretch the truth. [Ed.: The cool thing for Pelfini to do would be to promise to go after “the real killers.”] [San Francisco Chronicle, 12-20-01]
Story Link
The F State
In addition to two high-profile firings (the police chief in St. Petersburg, who offended black residents by defending the use of massive force to subdue any suspect acting like an “orangutan” and the University of South Florida engineering professor Sami al-Arian, the Palestinian activist who has been quite loose of tongue in condemning the supporters of Israel): (1) A judge in Miami ruled that a daughter can sue her mother for permanent injuries caused by the mother’s traffic accident while daughter was just a fetus. (Feminists went nuts, arguing the mom’s absolute right to do what she wants with her own body.) (2) The nation’s largest funeral-home operator came under investigation yesterday because of allegations that it had dug up bodies in a Broward County cemetery in order to make room for fresh, new-fee-based customers. [Source for (1): Tampa Tribune-AP, 12-20-01; for (2): Miami Herald, 12-20-01] [Link is to (2).]
Story Link
The F State (more)
(3) The Indonesian housekeeper of the Saudi princess [see yesterday’s Weird Planet Daily, below] has decided to sue the highness. (4) Sec’y of State Katherine Harris and her sisters were socked with a $222G legal bill yesterday, based on their speciously losing lawsuit several months ago charging other family members with cooking the books in her late father’s estate-portfolio. (5) More details of the charges against the Tampa Bay-area judge Charles Cope [News of the Weird 713] were revealed yesterday. While at a conference in Carmel, Calif., he not only used a found key to allegedly try to get into the hotel room of a woman and her adult daughter at night, but he had earlier allegedly tried to kiss the daughter on the mouth and fondle her. [(3) and (4): Tampa Tribune, 12-20-01; (5): St. Petersburg Times, 12-20-01]
Below the Fold for Thursday
70 elementary school kids protested the Price George, British Columbia, school board decision to eliminate recess from the school day [recess?] and send everyone home 15 minutes earlier; there is not enough money to hire recess monitors.
New age healer-author Dr. Harold H. Bloomfield was arrested in Del Mar, Calif., on allegations by 6 female patients that he practiced a little knockout-drop therapy and fondled them.
The latest upskirt-shoecam photographer was sentenced in Toronto, but he had already been dealt justice just before his arrest, when the victim’s boyfriend, figuring out what he was going on, walked up and clipped him on the chin.
Police in Richmond, Va., say towing company employee Joseph Thomas Johnson, 33, is the one who took rapper Missy Elliott’s 2001 Lamborghini (price: $330G) for a joy ride in October, during which he ran over a stop sign and crashed, inflicting about $161,000 worth of damage.
[Sources: Vancouver Province, 12-19-01; San Francisco Chronicle-AP, 12-20-01; Toronto Sun, 12-19-01; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12-19-01]
Wednesday, December 19, 2001
Good morning. The Submit News page on this website is still down. If you use it, your message may be delivered to the Great Beyond, apparently. Please send me news and tips to Newsweird@aol.com. Plus, the entire site will still be running slow from time to time over the next two weeks.
Implantable ID Chips Just a Few Months Away
Applied Digital Solutions (Palm Beach, Fla.) said it will sell human-implantable chips with space for about 60 strands of information starting in about 90 days, but only in South America; in the U.S., it still needs FDA approval, which it might get by mid-2002. Right now, only some livestock have the chips (and, of course, Prof. Kevin Warwick of Reading Univ. in England; see News of the Weird 700, 7-8-01), and some Alzheimer’s patients have ADS’s bracelets. [Los Angeles Times, 12-19-01]
Story Link
More Stalkings
(1) Ms. Sonoko Furukawa, 40, was shipped to the Big House yesterday for 2 yrs after conviction in Fukuoka, Japan, for stalking her boyfriend’s girlfriend (and, boy, was Furukawa’s husband mad; he’s a judge on Fukuoka’s High Court). She sent life-threat e-mails; made 1,200 of those uniquely-Japanese, silent hang-up calls to the girlfriend’s husband; and distributed fliers at the girlfriend’s son’s school. (2) More effective was Ms. Robin Kelly, 43 (aka the stripper Ruby Tuesday), who sat for a preliminary hearing in Ventura County, Calif., on Monday for the world-class job she did on newspaper editorial cartoonist Jim Day, with whom she had a 7-yr affair that he bailed out of recently. She set up a website and posted all their old S&M photos, along with his driver’s license and a map to his home, and his colleagues at the Las Vegas Review-Journal were grossed out, and certainly stopped shaking his hand, anyway. [Mainichi Daily News, 12-19-01] [Ventura County Star, 12-18-01] [Link is to latter story.]
Story Link
Below the Fold for Wednesday
Cloyd Dull, 49 [who facially resembles his name], was arrested for DUI in Lorain, Ohio, with a blood-alcohol reading of, er, well, actually, uh, .532; said an officer, “In my 22 yrs, the highest than I can remember is probably a .40.”
One of the Yale Divinity School deans, Ralph William Franklin, is expected to resign this week over charges that he mismanaged the school budget, including paying for a lot of clearly personal things, in “flagrant violation” of his contract.
Saudi princess Buniah al-Saud, 41, was charged in Orlando (where she is in school) with seriously roughing up her Indonesian housekeeper.
Mayor Koleen Brooks [Weird Planet Daily, 12-2-01] was given another chance yesterday by the Selectmen in Georgetown, Colo.; she can stay on if she starts to act civil and there’s no repeat public baring of the mayoral chest (Brooks, 37, used to be a stripper).
[NewsNet5.com (Cleveland), 12-18-01; Hartford Courant, 12-18-01; Tampa Tribune-AP, 12-19-01; Denver Post, 12-19-01]
Tuesday, December 18, 2001
Good morning once again. The problem last week was that tons of content on the uclick servers in Boston was being transferred to uclick servers in Kansas City. Still not working, as of this morning, is the Submit News page on this website. Please send me stories and tips at Newsweird@aol.com, but they’re working to fix the Submit News page right now. (Plus, it's slow as hell loading this morning, so maybe it's not all right yet.)
Calif. Utilities Regulation Is in Great Hands
Yesterday, Public Utilities Commissioner Henry Duque testified that, yes, he bought 700 shares of Nextel while he was a commissioner, but that he didn’t really know what line of business Nextel was in (though he said, and this is a quote, now, “I thought, gee, that may have something to do with telephones”). So a guy who buys a company on blind faith and who can’t be sure what business “Nextel” is in is one of the people in charge of utilities for the great state of California. [San Francisco Chronicle-AP, 12-18-01]
Story Link
The Power of Faith
John and Patricia Foote, operators of the Tile-Crete tiling company in Delaware, Ohio, in 2000 with a bank balance of $402, woke up one day, and the bank had transferred $251G to them. To their credit, they tried to get the bank to fix the error, but the bank said it must have been an anonymous donor, and furthermore, they spent nearly all of it on grants to church-related causes. But spend it they did, because “We thought God had somehow given us that money.” In federal court last week, prosecutors decided not to go after them for bank fraud. (God evidently wasn’t enamored of their tiling work because Tile-Crete is out of business.) [Columbus Dispatch, 12-15-01]
Seems Harmless, But Yr Ed Doesn't Like His Chances
David Megarry Jr, 39, was in court in Worcester, Mass., last week because he’s coming off his 18-yr sentence for raping a kid, and the state wants to impound him further as a dangerous pedophile, but his big public-relations problem now is that he really wants to be Sandy-Jo Battista, which is his transsexual name. He offered to get castrated to reduce his sex drive (but of course that was on his agenda, anyway) and move out of state, but the smart money is against him. [Boston Herald, 12-16-01]
Story Link
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.
The people on this list do not necessarily agree with Yr Ed’s opinions and in fact are probably appalled by some of them from time to time.
F State Client Lies, Lawyer Screws Up
On Friday, a jury in Miami awarded a woman $20.9M in an auto crash.
Although the crasher denied he was talking on a cellphone at the time of
impact, surprise phone records showed that he was. The jury may also have
upped the damages after listening to the crasher's lawyer argue that the
victim, at age 79, shouldn't get very much money because, after all, she's
old and (partly due to the accident) in poor health and thus not expected to
live all that long. [Miami Herald, 12-15-01]
Elsewhere on Planet Earth
A Tokyo hospital official was ordered by a court to pay about $2,350 to a
colleague whom he had verbally besmirched at a board meeting last year, for
100 straight minutes and using the words "idiot" or "moron" 74 times in the
process.
Judge Gabriel Hutton, 69 (of England's Gloucester Crown Court), granted a
rape defendant a new trial on his lawyer's petition accusing Hutton of
dozing off twice during closing arguments, even though Hutton said he
believed he was conscious the whole time.
Hon. Nair Xavier introduced legislation in Brazil's Congress to require
actors always to use condoms in explicit sex scenes in movies and on TV.
An Associated Press report on Sunday pitied Mexico's poor plastic surgeons,
who are getting killed more frequently these days by drug dealers, either so
they won't squeal about ID-changing face jobs or because they screwed up a
drug king's mug or his girlfriend's breasts.
[Sources: Mainichi Daily News, 12-18-01; Daily Telegraph, 12-18-01;
Yahoo-Reuters, 12-17-01; San Diego Union Tribune-AP, 12-16-01]
Below the Fold for Tuesday
A friend of basketball star Allen Iverson claimed in a lawsuit on Friday
that he had the presence of mind in 1996 to enter into an oral agreement
with Iverson that they would split 25-75 all the royalties ever to emanate
somehow from the nickname "The Answer," which he says he gave Iverson.
A lawsuit against Wal-Mart in Columbia, S.C., was disclosed on Friday,
accusing the store of not acting properly after a 10-yr-old girl was fondled
by an employee; the manager allegedly merely gave the mother a $25 gift
certificate to forget the whole thing.
Authorities in Brownsville, Tex., still don't have independent evidence that
Juan Martin Medrano killed anyone, though he has confessed to 32 murders;
Medrano said on Friday from jail that, man, he never killed those people,
that it was the potential book contract talking.
A 48-yr-old Univ. of South Florida classics professor went nuts on Sunday at
a Budget Truck Rental office when they didn't have the F-150 she had
reserved; she screamed her favorite word and beat a computer monitor into
submission with a phone until it fell to the floor in a heap.
Linda Fairstein said she'll retire on Feb. 1 as NYC's top sex-crimes
prosecutor. [Ed.: A NYC S&M community leader said recently Fairstein told
her that the concept of "consent" in S&M is meaningless if it involves an
act that, in Fairstein's opinion, one human shouldn't be doing to another
human.]
[Sources: Tampa Tribune-AP, 12-18-01; Nando-AP, 12-15-01; Dallas Morning
News-AP, 12-16-01; Tampa Tribune, 12-18-01; New York Times, 12-18-01]
Monday, December 17, 2001
Oy, gevalt! When we last met on this page seven days ago, I thought I would miss one day of uploading stories. It turns out that everybody at uclick (the company that operates this site) suspected we would be disabled for a while except for the guy I get all my information from, who thought it would be one day. But I'll be back up tomorrow morning.
©
2001, Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
