Exhibit of Poops Closes After 3-Week Run in Tokyo
A showing of 78 kinds of animal and human dung closed its 3-week run at the Tokyo Science Museum on Thursday after enjoying a good run with loads of visitors and piles of press clippings. “There’s a lot you can learn from poop,” said one organizer, referring to health concerns and ecology. Said a Museum staffer, “[M]ost people are happy just to be able to say they touched the poop.” [Taipei Times-AP, 8-30-01]
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Below the Fold for Sunday
Two former faculty members at the University of South Florida medical school settled religious discrimination lawsuits with the school (which were based on acts by their department’s former chairman); Dr. James Rowsey (an eye surgeon) had so religioned up the department that he was, for example, denying researchers equipment based on admonitions from his wife, whom he considered a prophet, and then pressuring complaining faculty members to actually pray for departmental budget increases. [Tampa Tribune, 9-1-01]
India’s Health Minister C.P. Thakur told the national legislature on Wednesday that it was very important to find recreational alternatives for his countrymen so they wouldn’t procreate so much (referring to the November 1965 power-blackout/sex-surge in New York City) [which Yr Ed experienced, er, the power-blackout part, that is] and agreed to look into supplying gov’t-subsidized television sets to the masses. [The Times of India, 8-30-01]
Editor's Notes (Sunday, September 2, 2001)
* uComics.com sent out a version of the weekly News of the Weird column today [.708] that did not contain source citations. That was an error probably by Universal Press Syndicate, which supplies the column to uComics.com. Yr Ed hopes to persuade uComics to resend it, but that won’t happen before Tuesday. If you’re absolutely dying for a particular citation before then, drop me a line.
Florida Supreme Court Stands Firm on Spousal Privilege
Prosecutors and six Tampa-area juries are pretty clear that Oscar Ray Bolin is a vicious murderer, but on Thursday, the state Supreme Court held, once again, that damaging testimony from his ex-wife ought not to have been used against him, that a new trial must be conducted, and that the families of the 1986 victims have to go through it all over again. The Court said it wasn’t clear that he had waived his privilege not to have his wife’s words used against him. However, here’s what Bolin did: He left a 6-page suicide letter in his cell (suicide attempt failed) containing this sentence: “If there’s anything that you really want to know about, then you’ll haft [sic] to ask Cheryl Jo [the ex-wife], because she knew just about everything that I was ever a part of [and] she knew about all 3 of these homicide [sic] which I’m charged with.” (Cheryl Jo has since died.) That was regarded as insufficient for a waiver. Bolin has been convicted 3 times for each of 2 of the murders, i.e., he has won all 4 of his appeals to the Supreme Court. [St. Petersburg Times, 8-31-01] [The St. Pete Times doesn’t give a url for its archived stories; use the Search feature on the main page, top right, and enter bolin; the first article that comes up is this one.]
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A Remarkable Day at the Baltimore Police Personnel Office
Edwin V. Gaynor, 21, was filling out an application to join the force on Thursday when he came to the standard question of whether he’d ever committed a crime. For some reason, Gaynor answered, Well, yes, and went into detail about a carjacking and two robberies in Texas. The answer drew the notice of detectives down the hall, who questioned Gaynor, got intimate details of the crimes, called police in Texas (Killeen), found out the carjacking was unsolved, found that Gaynor’s details matched the crime’s details, got a search warrant for Gaynor’s home, found lots of relevant evidence, and executed the Texas arrest warrant. Said Gaynor’s mom, “He always wanted to be [a cop].” [Baltimore Sun, 8-31-01]
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An Ohio Man's Inexplicable Solution to Boredom
Jerold West, 65, was arrested on Monday after a nighttime stakeout and charged with littering a downtown alley in Newark, Ohio, off and on for 4 yrs. His craft consisted of clipping pieces of magazines, newspapers, and junk mail and dumping mounds of them around 3rd Street. By a merchant’s count, it required “thousands” of hours to sweep up the messes over the years. And why did he do it? “I guess it’s just a thrill,” he told the arresting officer. “[I]n the evenings [since my wife died], I get bored.” [Columbus Dispatch, 8-31-01]
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Below the Fold for Saturday
Murderer Ronald Wayne Frye was executed in North Carolina yesterday (despite a last-minute challenge based on evidence that his lawyer was a big lush during the penalty phase of his trial). [Tampa Tribune-AP, 9-1-01]
On Wednesday, preliminary-hearing dates were set in Bartlesville, Okla., for both Douglas Dean Bryant, Sr., 39, and Douglas Dean Bryant, Jr., 19; dad is charged with rape of a girl, 14, and son is charged with rape of a girl, 15, in separate incidents. [Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, 8-30-01]
Some stories happen more often than readers expect, but a few happen with shocking rarity, such as news that a UC-Berkeley fraternity house caught fire on Tuesday (damage $10G) because of faulty wiring on the marijuana grow-lights. [Fremont Argus, 8-31-01]
Flesh-Eating Bacteria Passed by a Fart
The mighty Chicago Tribune would not take a definite stand, but Chicago’s Channel 5 News team did: Two women undergoing C-section births at Evanston Hospital on July 31 received the necrotizing fasciitis bacteria from an OR surgeon when he cut the cheese. The Tribune did not draw the ultimate conclusion, reporting simply that the bacteria were present only in a surgeon’s gastrointestinal tract, were not present in a throat culture, and probably entered the patients’ scalpeled opening via the “airborne” route. Channel 5 News said, well, what’s left after all that besides a fart, especially if you’re heavily gowned and gloved and masked? The two women, their babies, and the surgeon have all been treated and are believed to be out of danger. [NBC5.com, 8-27-01] [Chicago Tribune, 8-28-01] [This link is to the NBC5 story]
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This Link
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You Mean It's Not Just a Bar?
Two teenagers (age 16, 18) were arrested for burglary Wednesday in Covington, Ky., after entering a building through a second-floor door in the back. They had looked around, gone downstairs to a bar area, tried to loot the bar’s vending machines, and rummaged around for more booty until rudely interrupted by a member of the Covington police. If the young men had entered through the front door instead of the back door, they would have been able to see the sign out front identifying the building: “Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 1.” [Kentucky Post, 8-30-01]
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Below the Fold for Friday
The West Baton Rouge Parish (La.) sheriff’s office planned an elaborate sting on Wednesday, to pick up 150 on-the-lam criminals by the familiar ruse of inviting them all to a (fake) party with big giveaways, and when they show up, to cuff them; Baton Rouge has smarter criminals than anyone suspected because not a one of them fell for it. [MSNBC-TheNewOrleansChannel.com, 8-30-01]
Emergency crews responded to a Cessna that landed at Calgary Int’l Airport on Thursday and taxied off the runway into some tall grass; they found no emergency but rather that the pilot had needed to relieve himself and didn’t think he could make it to a terminal. [Edmonton Journal, 8-30-01]
Several insurance companies in France have begun offering compensation to parents of kids who get bullied in the schoolyard; no one covers stolen lunch money, but eyeglasses that get slapped off one’s face, and mugging-worthy designer clothes, are covered. [Tampa Tribune, 8-30-01]
The Doctrine of Arson and Nakedness
The property-eschewing religious sect Doukhobours make News of the Weird from time to time, especially the breakway Freedomites, who go about it directly when they are in worship mode: They burn the property, and they yank off their clothes. Mary Braun, 81, is on trial (though it may be over by today) for setting fire to a college building in Nelson, British Columbia. Her rap sheet for this type of thing is pretty long, and she hunger-strikes in jail, and it appears that this was just another one of her revelations. And, as soon as she heard the police and fire truck sirens, she of course shed her clothes in order to be ready, and she has not redressed since then, even for court (though the staff have thrown a coat over her from time to time). [Canoe-Canadian Press, 8-29-01]
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The Chalupa Robber Is Back with a Vengeance
One of our endearing stories of 2001 occurred in June when Mr. Lakount Williams, 17, robbing a Taco Bell drive-thru window (on a bicycle), delayed his getaway by pausing to order a fresh chalupa. (Cops got him a couple of minutes later, and in fact, because Williams had a pellet gun on him, one policeman shot Williams in the leg.) Well, Tuesday night, according to police in Fort Worth, Tex., Williams went nuts at home and stabbed his mother and 2 young sisters at least 8 times each and is now sitting in jail facing 3 charges of attempted murder. [MSNBC-KSAS, 8-29-01]
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Mega-Packrat Evicted from Home in D.C. Suburb
Fairfax County, Va., has a Hoarding Task Force because the problem with noncommercial junk warehouses (i.e., super-cluttered homes of packrats) is apparently out of control; there are 40 open cases now, and about 100 will be handled this year. The Washington Post gave full coverage to friends’ attempts to clean up the 2-bedroom, $166G home of Cheryl Herring, 41, after she let it get uninhabitable and was moved out by the gov’t. Ordinary floor-to-ceiling clutter is okay, said Herring, but even she says, Don’t go in the basement. “I’m not Martha Stewart,” she said. “If I want to live in a firetrap or a dump, it’s my business.” [Washington Post, 8-29-01]
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Below the Fold for Thursday
A 26-yr-old man was arrested in Muncie, Ind., on Tuesday after he pressured a 13-yr-old boy, who was a stranger to him, to let him cut his hair so it could be given to cancer patients (a claim that police believe is bogus). [Muncie Star Press, 8-29-01]
A 43-yr-old man bled to death very quickly in Hillsborough, N.C., after his Colt semiautomatic (that was between his legs as he sat in his car) accidentally fired, into a femal artery. [Raleigh News & Observer, 8-29-01]
The newly appointed president of California’s Board of Education, Reed Hastings, was revealed to be a principal in the online movie rental site Netflix, which reportedly carries such softcore porn as “Barely Legal.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 8-29-01]
Three of the 4 men wanted for burglary of a Sullivan County, Ind., veterinary clinic (to get the trendy, opiate-like drug OxyContin) are still at large; and anyway, they mistakenly instead took the entire supply on hand of Oxytocin, which is merely a hormone used to induce labor. [Indianapolis Star, 8-25-01]
Editor's Notes (Thursday, August 30, 2001)
* Yesterday’s story on the Pickering, Ontario, testicle-ripping woman was updated here yesterday in mid-day and has a link to a richly-detailed story. The first version on this site yesterday was sparse of detail.
* And Yr Ed promises to look into the report from Chicago’s Channel 5, out of Evanston hospital, that the flesh-eating bacteria was spread to two women undergoing C-sections when one of the surgeons passed it on via, er, intestinal gas.
An Ontario Woman Who's Nobody to Mess with
Yr Ed dislikes stories in which the central characters’ names are withheld, but this story was all over the news in Toronto yesterday, so here goes: Guy in Pickering, Ont., comes home a little late after a night with the boys, and the live-in squeeze gets in his face, and pretty soon they’re at each other pretty good, and ultimately he gets taken to Pickering Ajax Hospital after she tears off his scrotum with her bare hands. Details as they become available. UPDATE: He's Barrington Wynn, 46; she's not his squeeze but his actual wife, Donna Crichton. She's now mortified; he largely forgives her and doesn't want her prosecuted. [Toronto Star, 8-29-01]
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Police Return Man's Lost Wallet, Then Arrest Him
An honest citizen in Watsonville, Calif., found Ricardo Landecho’s wallet (containing $2.3G) on Saturday and handed it in to police, but Landecho would have been far better off if a less ethical citizen had found it. After a computer check, police found Landecho’s driver’s license had been suspended, so they called him up and watched him drive up and park across the street to come get his wallet. A search of the car revealed lots of marijuana and suspected methamphetamine and cocaine. Also, he was on parole at the time on drug charges, so he was jailed without bail. [San Jose Mercury News, 8-28-01]
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Thief Makes It a Little Too Easy to Get Caught
Patrick Michael Penker, 54, pleaded guilty Tuesday to various fraud counts (involving at least $1M) in federal court in Lubbock, Tex., schemes which came to light only when a Lubbock banker recognized one of Penker’s alias businesses (the law firm “Dewey, Cheatham and Howe”) as straight from a Three Stooges show. [Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 8-28-01]
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The Most Hapless Criminals
Two guys stole a pair of Agway lawn tractors from a store in Athol, Mass., Sunday night and are still at large. They were moving the 300-lb. behemoths down the local railroad tracks (probably because they thought it would be easier to avoid being seen) when a you-know-what came along, and the men didn’t have enough muscle to move them off the tracks in time, and that was the end of that, except they did escape. [Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 8-28-01]
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Below the Fold for Wednesday
A federal judge in California said Anna Nicole Smith and the other characters in the fight over J. Howard Marshall II’s $1.6B estate will have to come testify on December 11 before he can get to the bottom of things; she lost in Texas but won in the bankruptcy case on which this current appeal is based. [Houston Chronicle, 8-28-01]
The U.S. Dept. of the Interior flagged the Fresno (Calif.) municipal landfill for the Nat’l Register of Historic Places on Monday before someone realized the landfill is also on the Superfund list of wretched environmental dumps; yesterday, Interior said, er, Never mind. [New York Times, 8-28-01]
An accomplished Florida marine biologist, on holiday at the Rio Grande Gorge (Taos, N.M.), fell in and died after entering a restricted area to get a better look. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 8-29-01]
The F State’s notorious “butterfly ballot” will be used in November, on purpose, for Cincinnati City Council races because 26 candidates are running, and they have to get them all on facing pages. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 8-29-01]
Editor's Notes (Wednesday, August 29, 2001)
* Apparently, several visitors to this site every week are disappointed by the underperformance of the Search feature. Well, if the NASDAQ were at 5,000 these days, we’d have done that sucker up by now into the world’s best. However, the plans for upgrade are more modest now, and visitors are urged to please forgive and to be content with whatever yield you get. If you really, really need a specific story from a past News of the Weird, write me.
Hawaii Brothers Offer to Stand In for Polygamist Tom Green
Loren and Lesley Hardy were arrested Thursday on some sort of threat charges by police in Provo, Utah, after they had traveled from their homes in Hawaii to attempt to comfort (perhaps, to service) the several wives of freshly-convicted polygamist Tom Green. One Hardy said the men were ambassadors from the kingdom of God and were there to help, although he added that they practiced “free love with an edge to it,” according to Green’s attorney. [Honolulu Advertiser, 8-26-01]
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New Hampshire Pilot-Businessman Takes the Only Way Out
On Saturday, one day after his estranged wife got a restraining order against him, business consultant Louis W. Joy II took his single-engine Socata Trinidad up and kamikazed the family home, destroying it and him. The wife and kid weren’t there, but he might have known that. A former neighbor in Delaware said Joy was “very strange, kind of weird,” and stayed inside his house so much that people thought he was probably in the witness protection program. [Boston Herald, 8-26-01]
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News of the Day from the APA
The American Psychological Association is meeting in San Francisco right now, with thousands of academics and practitioners vying to tell everyone what they know, so the news around there is bound to be pretty interesting this week. Well, here’s one: Donald Gieck of the U. of Wyoming presented his paper finding that, the more that men have to drink, the more they go for attractive-but-STD-risky women; when they’re sober, they’re more concerned about safe sex. The condition is called “alcohol myopia” in the literature. [United Press International, 8-27-01]
Below the Fold for Tuesday
A Catholic nun was attacked by 2 pit bulls in Philadelphia when she tried to pull them off of her own Jack Russell terrier; she was bitten a few times but is in not-bad shape. [St. Petersburg Times, 8-26-01]
A judge on Japan’s 2nd-highest court was sentenced to probation-only for patronizing 3 14-yr-old schoolgirl prostitutes in Tokyo. [Tampa Tribune, 8-28-01]
For the second time in a month, an F-State mother was arrested for locking her kid in a commercial storage locker; the previous case, near Orlando, was while the mother was at work, but this one, in the east-coast town of Stuart, was just so she could buy booze and go bowling. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 8-28-01]
Cook County (Chicago) police announced with great fanfare that they had just arrested their 100th Internet sex sting-ee; Mr. Menno Blom, 23, had flown all the way from the Netherlands to have sex with a 14-yr old Chicago girl [Ed.: Wasn’t the word a few yrs ago that all kids in the Netherlands were having sex all the time anyway?] [Chicago Tribune, 8-27-01]
Editor's Notes (Tuesday, August 28, 2001)
* Netsurfer Digest (www.netsurf.com/nsd/nsd.07.27.html#BEZ5) “reviewed” this site (well, not Weird Central) last week in the context of comparing it to ThisIsTrue.com, with the only reference being that Yr Ed’s is “the biggie in this field.”
* Speaking of which, two weeks ago, Tim Wyatt (a long-ago Correspondent) of the Dallas Morning News reviewed a bunch of sites, including this one, generally favorably, though he called me a former “history” professor. He did mention you all by name, though, calling you a “dedicated group of Weird Ones” who make sure I don’t miss the good stuff. [Dallas Morning News, 8-16-01]
Celebrating Anorexia
Health professionals have become concerned about the recent proliferation of websites reciting the mantras of, and giving tips on, anorexia. Some “anas” are in it because they think they look better being just skin and bones (one wrote, “More than ANYTHING, I want my hipbones to stick out”); others view anorexia as gaining control of one’s life from that evil witch called “food.” Criticism or suggestions that they get help usually provoke defiance. Unfortunate quote (from a pharmaceutical exec and former ana): “Oh, these sites turn my stomach.” [Philadelphia Inquirer, 8-25-01]
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In Pursuit of the, er, Vertigo Geyeri
Britain’s Forestry Commission has cleared 1,000 trees in order to make an Ice Age snail safe inside a 4-acre preserve. Possible problems: (1) The snail measures about a millimeter in length; (2) a researcher saw one from the area in 1994, but no one has seen anything since. [Daily Telegraph, 8-27-01]
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Woman Wins $1.25M for a Rough Airline Flight
In spite of the Warsaw Convention limitation on compensation (to physical injuries only), a federal jury in Billings, Mont., gave her a big award on Thursday for “post-traumatic stress” because the judge had earlier ruled that changes in brain activity were enough to be a physical injury. It was pretty easy to be stressed on that flight, what with the engine trouble, and a Delta flight attendant did allegedly tell the woman that they were doomed, and nearly everyone in the cabin was in fact throwing up. On the other hand, the woman had a pre-existing problem with depression, and it’s pretty hard to believe that “brain activity” was what the Convention signatories had in mind for “physical injury” when they signed the dotted lines in 1929. [Billings Gazette, 8-23-01]
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Editor's Notes (Monday, August 27, 2001)
* The problems with Yr Ed’s CompuServe.com e-mail address get more acute every day. Inevitably, some messages will be lost on the box, so readers are requested to use either the Submit News screen on this website or Newsweird@aol.com until further notice. Thank you.
* For the latest on the Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences in Seattle [News of the Weird .705], see the Seattle Weekly story on it, available at the Link at the end of this paragraph.
* The story out of “Arkansas City,” originated by the "EAP," about the woman killed when she leaped out of her car’s sun roof because she thought the Rapture was underway, which zillions of people have mailed me in the last few weeks, is of course a made-up story. For more information, see the story by Yr Ed’s favorite urban-legends buster, www.snopes.com/religion/rapture.htm
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Cumulative Thank Yous for the Week
Bob Sorem, Drew Rogge, Walter Ford, Robert Wagman, John Kazalia, Norma McDonald, Bruce Tennant, Bob Rosenthal, Scott Jennings, Kathy Adams, Jeff Rose-Martland, Jane Rosenthal, Tom Keane, Stephanie Naylor, David Pimm, John Glauner, Craig McAdie, Art Kamlet, David Gilder, Gary Goldberg, John Witherspoon, Jan Lewis, Jen Campbell, Brad Windle, Paul Nieuwland, Frances Bell, Jimmy Reynolds, Geoff Mathews, Mark Burch, Mike Morton, Roland Beauregard, Larry Lennhoff, Leslie Goodman-Malamuth, Joe Littrell, and the News of the Weird Senior Advisors and Chief Correspondents.
©
2001, Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
