Accused Perverts' Simplistic Defenses
Gregory Blackstock, 45, went back to court in Nashua, N.H., on Thursday and asked a judge to toss out his conviction for molesting two 10-yr-old girls, pointing out that the girls’ testimony was merely that he touched their “privates,” which they then identified by drawing circles on a female body, and that their circles were so large that they “encompassed stomach, groin, legs, and genitalia,” said Blackstock’s lawyer. The judge said he’d get back to him on that. On the other hand, Kimble McLain, 42, won his argument when a judge acquitted him in Moline, Ill., on Wednesday. McLain, as Chuckles the Clown, had worked a Wal-Mart with his genitals clearly visible, but convinced the judge, why, he had no idea his zipper was down all that time, until someone told him. [Nashua Telegraph, 9-7-01] [Worcester Telegram and Gazette-AP, 9-6-01] [Link is to the Blackstock story]
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Fremont's Mad Bomber Gets 32 Mandatory Yrs
Rodney Blach, 54, who said a Christian transformation (it was on 4-7-97 at 11:02 a.m. PST, in case readers want to check their diaries) put him on a mission to expose and bomb Fremont, Calif., officials who were protecting a local drug operation in the nearby hills, aided of course by black helicopters, was sentenced last week. No person was injured by the bombs. Blach remained defiant to the end, as did his lovely wife, Penny, who shares his views completely and vows that “He will never, ever give up.” Said Police Chief Craig Steckler, one of the bomb targets, “I’d like to see him act [that arrogant] in state prison.” [San Jose Mercury News, 9-5-01]
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Porn, the Ultimate Tranquilizer
The Thorupgaarden nursing home in Copenhagen, Denmark, caused a stir last week by telling reporters that it regularly dispenses pornography on its in-house TV channel because it relaxes patients (even some women) like drugs do, but is healthier, cheaper, and easier to administer. [Bucks County Courier Times-Globe and Mail (Toronto), 9-6-01]
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Below the Fold for Sunday
Lennie Pitsenberger and his brother were arrested in Mentor, Ohio, driving a stolen truck, and they ultimately gave up to cops that they had stolen another $150G worth of vehicles; they came to cops’ attention only because Lennie had succumbed to road rage and tossed a cup of soda and ice at a passing car. [NewsNet5.com (Cleveland), 9-6-01]
Shoe Fetishist Still Loose in Pittsburgh
Two women in separate incidents reported being accosted on Thursday by a man who took one of their shoes off and deeply and dramatically sniffed it, before fleeing. No injury was reported, and police say no law was broken, but they still want to talk to the guy. Pittsburgh women planning on wearing black slides are advised that they may want to rethink. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9-7-01]
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Internationalization Proceeds Apace
Tokyo District Judge Shu Shibata ruled on Friday that the man who got beat up in a 1998 fight had to bear 20 percent of the responsibility himself because he provoked it with a middle-finger salute; the nature of that gesture, Shibata said, must be acknowledged in Japan, “although it is not as common as in the U.S.” [Japan Today, 9-8-01]
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Below the Fold for Saturday
Connecticut state Rep. Kevin Ryan, freshly sentenced to 4 months’ hard time for recidivist DUI, said he can very well serve his constituents from the hoosegow and doesn’t intend to resign. [Hartford Courant-AP, 9-7-01]
Stanford U. medical professor Simon Stertzer, who just closed on the deal to buy the nude/strip Palomino Club in North Las Vegas, said he plans to funnel all the profits into his research on cardiovascular medicine. [Las Vegas Sun, 9-6-01]
An Oklahoma City jury recommended that Keith LaJuan Jones, 44, convicted in a road-rage dragging incident that seriously injured his victim, serve the next 750 yrs of his life behind bars, to which the judge then added 300 more. [Daily Oklahoman-UPI, 9-7-01]
In a science experiment, up to a million British schoolkids jumped up and down for a minute yesterday at 11 a.m. (6 a.m. EDT), expecting that their combined 2 billion joules of energy would produce at least a Richter-3 earthquake; no results so far. [ABC News-Reuters, 9-7-01]
Disabilities-Act Shakedowns in South Florida
The Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale) found that one guy in a wheelchair, and his two South Florida lawyers, have been making a nice living carpet-filing lawsuits (nearly 200) against businesses whose shops are not quite in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (typical “settlement,” $3.5G). Now, Yr Ed is opposed to businesses ignoring the law, which is now 11 yrs old, and likes the idea of private lawsuits over hiring massive numbers of federal inspectors. However, the law office of one of this guy’s lawyers is itself (according to the Sun-Sentinel reporter) woefully out of ADA compliance, and the law was intended to be enforced by regular customers so the guy’s 23 identical lawsuits in July against strip clubs was a bit of a stretch. The serial plaintiff is Carlisle Wilson, 51, who certainly has reason to be angry at someone, in that he was paralyzed as a teenager when he swan-dove from a rooftop into a swimming pool that wasn’t quite deep enough. [Tampa Tribune-Sun Sentinel, 9-7-01]
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Self-Esteem Movement Is Back
California state Sen. John Vasconcellos is at it again with a bill (expected to pass easily) to require training probation officers (of juvenile clients) in identifying and dispensing self-esteem (“personal security, selfhood, affiliation, mission, and accomplishment”). If we don’t do that, he said, “[The clients] are going to come back and beat us up again.” Vasconcellos disagrees that his movement is in any sense “revived”: “We’ve managed to take an obscure, thought-to-be-weird notion and make it mainstream.” [See Editor’s Notes, below] [San Francisco Chronicle, 9-7-01]
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Killing People (in an Environmentally Friendly Way)
A German researcher is working on explosives (for weapons and rocket boosters) that do not pollute, replacing metal and chlorine-based chemicals with equally lethal blasts of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon. Said another researcher, “All you get from [grenades made from] these materials is [hot] air.” [Sydney Morning Herald, 9-6-01]
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Below the Fold for Friday
Theodore Frank, 65, descended to Hell Wednesday (heart attack while on California’s death row for raping, pliers-mutilating, and murdering a 3-yr-old girl); he had been in the midst of a lawsuit arguing that his excessive stretch on death row amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. [ABC News-AP, 9-7-01]
Rikers Island (N.Y.) corrections officer Anthony Lopez apparently had one fight too many with the missus, having ejected her from the family car on the way home from a party Tuesday morning; she called the cops and blew the whistle on Anthony’s computer, which she knew was bursting with child porn, and he’s in big-time trouble. [New York Post, 9-5-01]
The University of Bonn needs better PR [anybody but Marina Ein, that is] after highlighting alumnus Joseph Goebbels in its latest ad campaign; he is identified as “philosophy student,” “friend of Hitler,” and “propaganda minister.” [Sydney Morning Herald-London Daily Telegraph, 9-6-01]
Editor's Notes (Friday, September 7, 2001)
* Yr Ed’s longtime position on this self-esteem stuff, above, is that while all ne’er-do-well’s certainly lack self-esteem, attempts to supply dosages of it via public policy in a society so saturated with competition as this one will be ripe for News of the Weird for a long time to come.
* From time to time in print and online, wacky stories run under the credit “Wireless Flash.” Occasionally, Yr Ed likes the stories and tries to find out more about them, but always comes to a dead end fairly quickly. So it was heartening to find, in a story last weekend in the Myrtle Beach (S.C.) Sun News, that WF’s recent story, of the guy who had shot and killed Bigfoot and had the carcass in his freezer, was actually done up by a WF “reporter,” who had checked out the story before running it. Of course, the source was lying through his teeth, and WF didn’t try to verify anything. But at least WF isn’t just a variation of Weekly World News’s reporting by imagination. [Sun News, 9-2-01]
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Gov't Helps Child-Killer Sue
Britain’s Legal Services Commission granted imprisoned murderer Shaun Armstrong, 39 (victim was 3 yrs old), legal aid for his lawsuit for about $25G against the buddy to whom he confessed. Armstrong wants his letters back, claiming he has a privacy right to his confession (which reads, quaintly, “Yes, I’m responsible for the crime, but please don’t tell anybody.”). [The Independent (London), 9-6-01]
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Schools Worse Than You Think in Chicago
The Sun-Times issued a massive report this morning on teachers’ test scores and found one teacher who passed only 1 of 25 competence tests, another who was 0-for-21 (including 0-for-9 on “basic” tests that are geared at a 9th-grade level), and another who was 1-for-16. In all, 67k teachers took 166k tests, with 5k teachers flunking 1 or more. [Chicago Sun-Times, 9-6-01]
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Your Elected Representatives
Georgia state Rep. Dorothy Pelote of Savannah, addressing her chamber during opening prayer ceremony on Tuesday, told colleagues that she indeed has The Shining and in fact did catch a glimpse of Chandra Levy’s dead body in a ditch but didn’t get a chance to speak with her. House Speaker Tom Murphy probably spoke for many of his colleagues when he professed to reporters that he didn’t hear what Pelote said (though he was standing right there). [Macon Telegraph, 9-5-01]
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Procreation in the News
On the Reuters wire yesterday was a report that a town council member in Inari, Lapland (Finland) (pop. 7,366), was hustling to up the birth rate, vowing to give up his career if the town’s women would produce at least 80 babies next year and 85 the year after that. And then the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated federal inmate William Gerber’s lawsuit over a prison’s stopping him from mailing his sperm to his wife (so as to produce a kid like himself, a three-time loser in on firearm, terroristic threat, and narcotics violations). [Reuters, 9-5-01] [San Francisco Chronicle-AP, 9-5-01] [Link is to latter case.]
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Below the Fold for Thursday
The Archbishop of Calcutta said Mother Teresa underwent the pretty drastic remedy of exorcism in 1997 because she was having trouble sleeping, but the Vatican said her sainthood application was still on track. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 9-6-01]
Latest death by “lighting a match in the dark to check whether there is oil in the tank”: Donnie Gene Graham, Leavenworth County, Kan. [Lawrence Journal World, 9-6-01]
Least Dignified Death
A 35-yr-old man, practicing archery in his backyard in Huntington, N.Y. (Long Island), suffocated when his cesspool collapsed underneath him, and all efforts by rescuers to go toward the body merely caused the hole to widen and the quicksand-like pool to spread. It took 18 hrs before they finally dug it out. The deceased was a DEA agent. [New York Times-AP, 9-5-01] [The link is to another version, because the Times requires registration.]
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Longest Musical Performance Gets Underway
Last night in Halberstadt, Germany, an organist was supposed to have kicked off a performance of radical composer John Cage’s “Organ 2/ASLSP” (the acronym somehow being derived from “as slow as possible”), which was written for 20 minutes, but thanks to technology and imagination, will be performed by these guys over a period of, er, 639 yrs. The purpose is to contrast the piece with the frenzied pace of modern society. [Yr Ed has previously reported on a lengthy Cage piece, but that covered maybe 24 hrs. Cage passed away in 1992 so we can’t ask him what he thinks of all this.] [BBC News, 9-4-01]
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"Bronco"-Riding 3-Year-Old Kids: Legal in the U.S.
A report on 50th annual Okeechobee (Fla.) Rodeo over Labor Day weekend illuminated the practice apparently popular at many rodeos around the country: “mutton busting,” in which kids as young as 3 are dressed like ‘pokes, placed on top of frisky sheep by their Good Ol’ Boy dads, and turned loose in the pen just like the grownups on their buckin’ broncs. Winner this time: Dillon Grillo, age 3, who stayed on for 3.96 seconds before being dumped on his butt. According to everyone interviewed for the story, the kids seem to love it. [St. Petersburg Times, 9-3-01]
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Pravda Seems to Be Going Overboard
We bit when the Russian paper’s English-language website published the story (with photo) of the plastic surgeons who had grown a penis on a guy’s arm (for subsequent implanting) [Weird Central, 8-6-01], but now they’re getting carried away. In a less-detailed story yesterday, it reported constructing a new nose (old one bitten off by a dog) from a guy’s buttocks in the city of Krasnodar. Yr Ed thinks we’ll give these Pravda [literally, “truth”] stories a rest for a while. [Pravda, 9-4-01]
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Below the Fold for Wednesday
Michael McMillian failed to beat his DUI rap in Philadelphia last week; he sat patiently on the stand while his lawyer reached over and removed McMillian’s glass eye in order to defeat the arresting officer’s claim that he was “glassy eyed,” but the judge merely mused that McMillian’s other glassy eye was real. [Philadelphia Daily News, 9-1-01]
Timothy James Vagi, 42, was arrested in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Sunday after he commandeered a backhoe at 10:40 p.m. and started to demolish a nearby Walgreen’s drug store, claiming (as his only explanation) that he was on the job and that that was his assignment (though he was actually between construction jobs). [St. Petersburg Times, 9-3-01]
Serial Bad-Loser Pummels Kid for Beating Him at Monopoly
About a month ago in this space, a guy on parole in Reading, Pa., was shipped back to the slammer for roughing up his girlfriend, with the occasion being that she was beating him at Monopoly, and you know Yr Ed doesn’t like to repeat stories in News of the Weird (because there’s no need to). But now comes the case of a former British Army sergeant who confessed yesterday (it not having been a holiday there, and the courts being open) to repeatedly punching his 13-yr-old son and then kneeing him, for the same reason. And, it turns out he’s a recidivist at bad-losing at Monopoly, so much so that his wife once threw the game out but that he retrieved it and continued cajoling the boy and his 11-yr-old sister, but they both habitually won the games. [Daily Telegraph, 9-4-01]
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"God Told Him to Go to a White Neighborhood and Cause Trouble"
That was the relayed explanation of a Fort Mitchell, Ky., police sergeant after 23-yr-old Aundre Black (who is) was subdued after shoplifting, vandalism, and a suburban parking-lot chase in which at least 12 vehicles were struck and officers from 4 jurisdictions participated. [Kentucky Post, 9-3-01]
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The 26-Year Contraceptive Dress
London textile artist Susie Freeman, 45, introduced the formal evening gown at Glasgow’s Lighthouse exhibit, containing more than 6,000 contraceptive pills (enough to last for 26 yrs), in part to contrast it to a used IUD, which also allegedly provided birth control for 26 yrs. [Glasgow Evening Times, 9-3-01]
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Editor's Notes (Tuesday, September 4, 2001)
* Yesterday was Labor Day in the U.S. Not only were most of the official institutions that produce weird news closed, but most of Yr Ed’s Board of Editorial Advisors also took the day off. We can only hope that those residents of Planet Earth who are the most prone to commit weird news will be back at work today.
"Good Book" Saves Kid's Life
In North Fort Myers, F State, a 39-yr-old woman, who had already shot her 6-yr-old son to death, fired a shotgun blast at close range at her 16-yr-old, but he survived, with the brunt of the blast being absorbed by the Holy Bible he was carrying. A while later, police wounded her in a shootout; they found her anti-depressant medication but otherwise had no motive for her behavior. [Tampa Tribune-AP, 9-2-01]
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The Man Who Wanted to Be Like Dennis Rodman
William Hill, 31, told reporters last week that he felt fine after surviving nearly-fatal endocarditis (bacterial attack of a heart valve) facilitated, doctors believe, by his numerous body piercings that he acquired mainly because he was a fan of Dennis Rodman. Hill, a Chicago machinist and father of 3, has slurred speech and will need medication for the rest of his life, but says the good lesson for his kids is, “Be yourself.” [Chicago Sun-Times, 8-31-01]
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Below the Fold for Labor Day
Municipal clerk Anne Frank filed a lawsuit against Greenwich, Conn., for back pay owing to her boss’s having had an 11-yr affair with his secretary, which caused the secretary to pass down so much work (to free herself up for trysts) that Frank had to work uncompensated overtime to do it. [Providence Journal-AP, 9-1-01]
Responding to certain, er, nighttime noise complaints, the chief environmental official in the city of Stockport (Greater Manchester, England) last week publicly urged residents to try to be quieter while in the throes of passion. [Glasgow Herald, 8-31-01]
Manchester Univ. historian Merryn Dineley certainly knows what will get world press: He announced he’d start selling an historic-recipe beer in the Orkney Islands (Scotland) that was flavored with a trace of baked animal droppings. [Globe and Mail-Reuters, 9-3-01]
Cumulative Thank-Yous for the Week
Jeff Rose-Martland, C.L. Johnson, Roger Strong, Harold Ferber, Michael Lewyn, Leslie Goodman-Malamuth, Ken Edelstein, Greg Cupp, Eddie Lehman, Alec Batchelor, Wally Stone, David Cronin, Alia Khan, John McCarron, Ronbo Phillips, Jonathan Eisenberg, Chris Atwell, Stephanie Naylor, John Glauner, Bob Allender, and the News of the Weird Senior Advisors and Chief Correspondents.
©
2001, Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
