Free Rodney Yoder!
An update on forcibly-confined psychiatric patient Rodney Yoder, 42, runs in this morning’s Chicago Tribune, and once again, Yr Ed’s blood boils. Bad things about Yoder: He’s extremely irritating; he’s served time for two domestic assaults; he has been diagnosed with “delusional disorder” yet refuses medication. However: He’s been locked up in Chester, Ill., for 10 yrs; he’s been examined by only 1 shrink all that time; he wrote a series of “threatening” letters to public officials only (he said) as a tactic to get transferred to a federal prison, which would have released him by now (tactic failed); and besides, “delusional disorder” is none of anybody’s business unless the gov’t can prove that the person is a substantial threat to himself or others. And here’s the kicker, ladies and gentlemen: This guy would have been released long ago under Florida's comparatively intelligent mental-health system! Take that, Illinoisans! Lagging behind Florida! [Chicago Tribune, 9-16-01]
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Speaking of Delusions . . .
London’s Daily Telegraph today reports on Viennese shrink Gerald Pohler’s specialty: getting patients to come to grips with their deep-seated fears of keeping a tidy house. He does “coaching,” with his housecall therapy service, to help people shed their negative feelings about cleaning. “Perhaps when we were young,” he said, “we were forced to clean. We had to clean our room and perhaps we didn’t do it right, our parents were not satisfied, and so on.” Cleaning, he said, “can also be a way to a higher consciousness.” [Daily Telegraph, 9-16-01]
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Drinking Beer and Cleaning Snake Cages Don't Mix
Snake-hoarder (24 in his basement) Timothy Friede, 33, was hospitalized in intensive care in the Milwaukee area Wednesday night after being bitten. For some reason, he and his buddy thought it was a good thing to do, after having thrown back a few brews, to go down in the basement and for Friede to clean out some of his cages. He was bitten once by an Indian cobra, but shrugged it off, amidst criticism from his friend for his recklessness. He was then bitten on the finger by an Egyptian cobra, whereupon his friend had had enough and called an ambulance. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 9-13-01]
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Judge Rules Fraud in Bankruptcy Case, But Petitioner Stays in Character
As a fan of Andy Kaufman, Yr Ed has a soft spot for people who take on edgy personas and then stay in character, no matter what. Edgar Dale Allen, 70, petitioning a judge in Los Angeles to grant him bankruptcy protection, was turned down in a decision reported in the L.A. Times today because, according to the ruling, he lied to the judge, lied to investors, lied to his in-laws, and lied to his former employees, in the course of defrauding investors of possibly several million dollars. Allen explained the various whoppers (e.g., being on a CIA mission in Laos, being a war hero, having a U.S. Congressman wear his name on a POW bracelet, being ransomed over to Henry Kissinger for $1M in gold, being a Harvard Law graduate) by blaming the judge’s ignorance of the insurance business; he called the judge’s inferences “the biggest joke . . . in America.” [Los Angeles Times, 9-15-01]
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Below the Fold for Saturday (September 15, 2001)
A magistrate imposed a community-service sentence on Jason Walker, 30, Loughborough, England, who was caught with 145 protected wildlife eggs; Walker said collecting them was a hobby he had adopted as a kid in order to keep out of trouble. [London Daily Telegraph, 9-15-01]
Milwaukee high school math teacher Danny Lee Carter, 52, was arrested for possessing a homemade tape featuring sex between two students (girl, 16; boy, 18); he said he showed interest in the tape so as to strengthen the teacher-student bond with the 18-yr-old. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 9-14-01]
Texas inmate Harold Laird was recaptured after a brief escape from prison in Beaumont; he had crawled to freedom through a pipe containing electrical wires, after leaving (just like the movies) a dummy in his bed. [Dallas Morning News-AP, 9-14-01]
Bullfighter “Pedrito de Portugal” was arrested in Moita, Portugal, for defying national law and actually killing the bull (and being wildly applauded for doing so); unlike Spain, Portugal mandates its bulls be slaughtered afterward. [London Daily Telegraph, 9-15-01]
Editor's Notes (Saturday, September 15, 2001)
* To no one’s surprise, this has been the slowest week for weird news in Yr Ed’s 14-yr history in this racket. Fewer journalists to report it, less newspaper space to run it, fewer undistracted perpetrators to commit it, and, most important of all, fewer readers with time or patience for any news other than The News. That is as it should be, but Yr Ed nonetheless marches on.
More Adventures in Bad Parenting
Jimmy Elrod, 36, and his wife Denise, 38, and Robert Crane, 37, all of rural Pryor, Okla., were arrested last Saturday and charged with numerous abuses of the Elrods’ adopted son, 8. According to police (based on what Denise told them), the kid was frequently tied down at night for the express purpose of preventing him from masturbating. Also, sometime in the last 6 months, the men placed a hog ring on the boy’s clinton, and it remained for about a week, piercing the skin. [KJRH-TV (Tulsa)-AP, 9-13-01]
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Was Murderer's Death Sentence Based on His Love of Satan?
James Martin Kipp, 43, is on death row in California but now challenges the sentence as tainted by the prosecutor’s continued reference to Kipp’s Satan-worshiping. Kipp, who has a long rap sheet, has said Satan is his only “savior,” and now wonders why the jury might not have taken him seriously when he expressed remorse for his murder. (Speaking of remorse, inmate Kipp also wrote a letter to his girlfriend describing his continuing desire to rape women and kill their boyfriends.) He is the son Mary Still Smoking (of the Blackfeet Tribe). [The Recorder (San Francisco), 9-13-01]
No Longer Weird
The latest set of incidents of vandalism of street art exhibits is taking place presently in Houston, involving life-size cow statues. But never mind Houston because it has been going on in various cities over the last 15 months, and everywhere the street exhibits appear, they get stolen or abused, and everywhere they will soon appear, they will soon get stolen or abused. [Houston Chronicle, 9-11-01]
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Below the Fold for Thursday (September 13, 2001)
A rather strict mom and dad (respectively, a school principal and an L.A. Sheriff’s sergeant) were charged with abuse of their teenage son, involving allegations of severely regulating his bathroom usage, making him sleep outside, and dumping dog poops into his school knapsack (as punishment for his having neglected to pick up after the dog). [Los Angeles Times, 9-12-01]
Editor's Notes (Thursday, September 13, 2001)
* The relatively silly stuff that forms the basis of News of the Weird is in short supply these days. Perhaps that's just because reporters and editors are too busy with the important stuff, but perhaps it's due at least a little bit to some sobering up since Tuesday by many of the judgment-challenged people who sort of glide through life seemingly on a mission to create nourishment for News of the Weird. If the latter: Our loss is society's gain.
Editor's Notes (Wednesday, September 12, 2001)
* As the nation came to a halt yesterday to absorb the biggest news story in nearly 40 yrs, remarkably little Other News was committed, and what there was had a hard time rising to a level of importance that a newspaper employee thought to write it up and upload it. One story, that moved on the Agence-France Presse wire about two hrs after NYC was hit, quoted several West Bank Islamic fundamentalists joyfully reporting that they are being overrun with teenagers volunteering to be suicide bombers (but, since the story was written shortly before the attack, specifically mentioning Israel as the preferred target). It is well known now that among the paradise-type things the martyrs are taught await them in heaven is the fabled “70 virgins,” and a news story from the early summer (but appearing only in a Hebrew-text Israeli newspaper) reported that one such recently-dead martyr had attempted to reconcile the promise with the reality that he would be blown up by his own bomb: He had carefully wrapped his clinton, to keep it intact for the virgins. Here is a use for Mr. John Edward, the trendy psychic: Go do some shows from PLO land, channel some martyrs, and report back to the current candidates: “Ain’t no virgins, fuggedaboutit!” [Agence-France Press, 9-11-01]
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Crime-Fighting by Googling
Canadian authorities, working with New York City police, arrested Patrick Critton, 54, on Saturday and said he is the man who skyjacked an Air Canada plane to Cuba in 1971 and has been on the lam ever since. Critton’s whereabouts, in Mount Vernon, N.Y. (where he was working as a schoolteacher), were found when someone had the bright idea to enter “Patrick Critton” into an Internet search engine. (News reports did not reveal which search engine.) [Globe and Mail, 9-10-01]
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The Upside and the Downside of Being an Earwig
The current issue of the journal Nature gives the good news and the bad news about the penile condition of the earwig [for the nonbiology-oriented, “dark and slender nocturnal insect of the order Dermaptera, having horned pincers at the rear that can rise up like a scorpion’s”]. Bad news first: The organ is thin and brittle and frequently breaks off (penis ends found inside various females). Good news: Earwigs carry a fully functional spare. [Nature, 9-13-01]
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Undignified Deaths
The father of a Trenton, Mo., high school football player was killed accidentally by a blast Friday night from the cannon the team uses to celebrate touchdowns. [Washington Post-AP, 9-10-01] And a 52-yr-old, Purcellville, Va., horseback rider, who fell when distracted by a bee sting, was accidentally and fatally run over by a neighbor who was driving to assist her. [Washington Post, 9-8-01] And a 19-yr-old, East Meadow, N.Y. (Long Island), man became the latest wild-cruising teenager to die by sticking his head out the passenger window at the wrong moment (utility pole). [Newsday, 9-10-01] [Link is to last story]
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Below the Fold for Tuesday (September 11, 2001)
Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi, wooing the Western Hemisphere countries of St. Vincent, Grenada, and Dominica, reportedly offered to buy all the bananas they can grow, at above-market prices. [BBC News, 9-10-01]
On-the-run au pair Ildiko Varga, 25, wanted for trashing a home and mistreating the toddler in a New York City suburb, was arrested by the NYPD when she stopped an officer on the street to show him the article the New York Post had written about the crime and ask him if he thought she should sue for slander. [Newsday-AP, 9-9-01]
Cumulative Thank Yous for the Week
Paul Ratliff, Richard LeComte, Christopher Agnew, Paul Music, Leslie Goodman-Malamuth, Christopher Kent, Roger Strong, Chris Freeman, Riley Knight, and the News of the Weird Senior Advisors and Chief Correspondents.
Tobacco Settlement Lawyers Continue to Rake It In
It’s bad enough that the amount of work they do for the money is trivial, in the sense that most of it is just cut-and-pasted from the original states’ filings. And it’s worse than that because the only lawyers who get selected to do the “work” are friends of the governors. But then, there are the actual amounts of money. The official arbitration panel formed by the tobacco companies’ settlement of state lawsuits made another handout Friday (funded entirely by the companies, but still—), awarding the lawyers who managed to get their names affixed to the documents in Michigan $450M. (In March, California’s lawyers got $637M, and the total for the 8 state awards made in 2000-2001 is $1.720B.) [Wall Street Journal, 9-10-01] [Link for WSJ subscribers only]
Idi Amin Said to Be Rebuilding the Family Home
The Ugandan dictator who proudly ate his enemies until he was deposed in 1979 (after ordering around 100k killings) is said to be encouraging his 48 children around the world to go restore the family home in the village of Aura, although he is not expected to leave exile (in Saudi Arabia), himself. Life is good, apparently, as he is reported to be even more obese than before. [London Daily Telegraph, 9-10-01]
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Below the Fold (Monday, September 10, 2001)
If you thought the Afghanistan Taliban was bad, the Lashkar-e-Jabbar radicals in Kashmir today begin instituting their on-the-street punishment for women appearing in anything other than head-to-toe burqas: acid in the face. [London Daily Telegraph, 9-10-01]
©
2001, Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
