At Crunch Time, It's Good to Be an Amish
Cambridge, Ohio, Amish man Norman Byler, 69, was charged with raping 2 girls in his extended family (ages 3 and 5) multiple times (one had been seen bleeding by a non-Amish neighbor), but on Tuesday a judge and prosecutor accepted a deal in which he pleaded to 5 lesser counts and was sentenced only to 5 yrs of counseling, primarily because his brethren said their way of dealing with Byler was more effective than the Ohio justice system’s. They said they’ve shunned him, and anything beyond that would be useless. [Philadelphia Daily News, 9-19-01]
Story Link
Police Crisis in Thailand
Interior Minister Purachai Piamsomboon issued protective cups (described in the press as “boxes”) to Bangkok police officers this week after waves of laid-off female workers from a textile plant stepped up their street protests by breaking through police lines, using the technique of squeezing cops’ testicles. A deputy police commissioner had been hospitalized last weekend with a severe scrotal injury. [Straits Times (Singapore), 9-19-01; Scottish Daily Record, 9-21-01]
Self-Service in Sexual-Abuse Compensation
A report on Tuesday’s Reuters wire out of Stockholm described how a kid who was molested by her stepfather might eventually have to pay herself off. She won a judgment of about $20G from him. He can’t pay. In that case, she gets the judgment paid from a special gov’t fund. He’s then liable to the fund. The couple divorced, and the mother is liable for half of his debts. Mother refuses to pay the $10G to the gov’t. When mother dies, the girl inherits the estate, including the debt. [Excite-Reuters, 9-18-01]
Story Link
Life in the F State
An elementary school art teacher in Boca Raton was suspended for 4 weeks for her poor judgment in telling 2nd-graders about the World Trade Center attack on the day after; she had graphically explained the airline hijackers’ knife scenario and allowed student drawings of the planes smashing buildings, with bricks falling on people’s heads. [Miami Herald, 9-21-01] McDonald’s sweepstakes winner ($50G/yr for 20 yrs) Patrick Collier was arrested in Daytona Beach for roughing up his fiancee during an argument over how to spend the money. [Orlando Sentinel, 9-19-01] [The Link is to the first story.]
Story Link
Below the Fold for Friday (September 21, 2001)
Police in Hawthorne, Calif., arrested Hugo Rojas, the head of the city’s Youth Commission, who allegedly paid some of his kids to steal campaign signs of his opponent in the upcoming School Board election; last yr, Rojas was picked up on suspicion of impersonating a cop at a strip joint in West Hollywood. [Daily Breeze (Torrance, Calif.), 9-18-01]
Dorothy Marie Livingston, 24, was arrested and charged in Newport, Pa., with depositing a piece of U.S. currency with the face value of $1M (er, no such thing) and then withdrawing some money against it; it was not reported whether the clueless First National Bank of Newport teller was disciplined. [Harrisburg Patriot-News, 9-19-01] [The Link below is to this story.]
Thailand Sen. Wallop Tangkananurak told reporters with great alarm that videogame-playing boys age 14-16 were out of control, as evidenced by the trendy new practice of offering up, as stakes in winning the games, sexual turns with each other’s girlfriends. [Straits Times (Singapore)-The Nation (Bangkok), 9-19-01]
Story Link
Editor's Notes (Friday, September 20, 2001)
* This site has been very hard to reach for 2 days now, owing to a server hardware problem and then, on top of that, the NIMDA virus, which generates hundreds of thousands of useless messages, tying sites up. (Speaking of that, my total is now about 17,500 useless messages that have come into my compuserve.com e-mail account, generated from the SirCam worm virus.) I, of course, have not been able to upload content for 2 days, either. Hello. Is anyone out there?
Ontario Candidate in Big-Time Trouble over "True" Travelog
A candidate in the local elections today, the Liberal Party’s Bob Hunter, wrote a book 13 yrs ago of his around-the-world excursion that included group sex with underage Thai girls. The book cover described the stories as “all true,” but Hunter says now, Oh, that underage-girl part was just a fantasy to make a satirical point about the “collapse of eastern culture and the decadence of western culture.” Stay tuned. [National Post, 9-18-01]
Story Link
Another Man Who Just Can't Give It Up
Terry Bennett was scheduled for trial in Edwardsville, Ill., on Monday for home-repair fraud (“deceptive practices”) but called to say that he couldn’t make it because he was too busy helping out at the World Trade Center rescue site. Problems: (1) Caller-ID fixed Bennett’s call as local (oh, but the call was forwarded by his wife, despite the fact that the court employee heard , “Terry! Telephone!”); (2) Bennett first said he flew to NY (but all planes were grounded); (3) Then he said he rode in a van with some local people he didn’t know (and whose names don’t compute in local phone books); (4) No background noise was heard from the rescue site (because all the workers were asleep, resting); (5) He didn’t know where he was or where he was working (except that it was “down off the main drag”); (6) Bennett was sighted at home during the time (except that the man ID’d as Bennett said he was really Bennett’s cousin). [Belleville News-Democrat, 9-18-01] [The N-D has a really mickey-mouse website; thus, no Link]
King of Swaziland Decrees Teen Girls to Wear Tassels for ID
King Mswati III, faced with climbing AIDS numbers, ordered all teenage girls to lay off sex for 5 yrs and to wear green and yellow tassels to make it easier for men to toe the line with them (under threat of a fine, for man and woman both, of either 1 cow or either $150 or $250, depending on which version of the BBC story is accurate). Married teens may be exempt, but they have to wear red and black tassels. [BBC News, 9-18-01]
Story Link
Selections from Ground Zero in New York City
Mobster Carmine Agnello has offered New York City the use of his heavy-duty car shredder to help clear away the metal debris at Ground Zero. [Ed.: Seriously.] [Chicago Tribune-Newsday, 9-19-01]
Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, 73, got in trouble over the weekend in Hamburg, Germany, making a point about traditional artistic impotence, calling the World Trade Center bombing “the greatest work of art ever”: “that characters can bring about in one act [the kind of emotion that] we in music cannot dream of.” [Agence-France Presse, 9-18-01]
Police in Hamilton, N.J., concluded, after an investigation, that two guys who were collecting fireworks that eventually blew up their car did not (despite lengthy rap sheets, including bias crimes) intend to use it to retaliate for the World Trade Center attack; rather, they were just your normal, run-of-the-mill idiots who were smoking around fireworks. [Trenton Times, 9-19-01]
Editor's Notes #1 (Thursday, September 20, 2001)
* This entire website was inoperative for most of the day (U.S. time) yesterday so the stories posted today include the ones I would have put up yesterday.
* Yr Ed received this message from an editor at Wireless Flash, whom I have occasionally dissed:
“Hey! This excerpt from your website is wrong: [News of the Weird (founded 1988) is the longest-running, most widely-read bizarre-but-all-true news feature in the United States--indeed, the gold standard of weird-news reporting.] Wireless Flash News Service (previously Copley News Service) has been around since 1980 and is used by 800 media outlets reaching a combined audience of 70 million. Also, WF generates its own news--the reporters don't glom six-month-old stories from other sources. To make my point, I've enclosed two recent issues and an FAQ. If you guys are the gold standard, why are Newsweek, Jay Leno, ABC News, Fox News Channel, David Letterman, NY Daily News, New York Post and Salon subscribing to Wireless Flash as a news source? I don't really expect you to respond but I think your web statement is woefully inaccurate. However, you never did claim to be a journalist. Regards, David Moye, Senior Associate Editor,
Wireless Flash News Inc.” [See following item for response (because this web page cannot accommodate long, continuous items).]
Editor's Notes #2 (Thursday, September 20, 2001)
* For the record, Yr Ed repeats: Wireless Flash writes light fluff that occasionally borders onto what Yr Ed would call weird news, but it has a remarkably lame record at having major media outlets run its stories as news, and when I tried to go behind a few WF stories, I found them, if verifiable at all, verifiable essentially by just one person, who may or may not have existed or even been traceable. If I were Leno, Letterman, etc., or AM radio morning shows, I would probably pay to get WF “stories” (for that matter, probably also Weekly World News stories) as ideas, especially for gossip features. News of the Weird always has used, always will use, only news stories (not tidbits from feature columns) that have appeared in mainstream daily newspapers, and all sources are on record and available for public inspection.
On the other hand: Why am I having this discussion? A pissing match with Wireless Flash? How low will I stoop? Anybody out there want to argue that Pauly Shore is a great comedian?
Japanese Woman Violates Waste Disposal Act by, Er, Ewwwww, Gross!
A 25-yr-old bulimic woman from Toyoda, Japan (near Nagoya), was arrested Friday for massive violations of the Waste Disposal Act after being identified as the person who has, for over a year, been dumping about 60 lbs. of vomit a week, collected in plastic bags. She was quoted as saying, “I didn’t want to throw away the vomit near my home, so I took it to faraway places.” (Tame by comparison was the arrest yesterday of Tokyo high school teacher Suburu Kimura, 41, for his latest idiosyncratic attack on a woman in a commuter train; in several alleged episodes, he spits gobs of hock into his hand and then flicks it at her.) [Mainichi Daily News, 9-15-01] [Mainichi Daily News, 9-17-01] [Link is to the first story] LINK
Story Link
Judgment-Challenged Company, Preacher Apologize
The firm NCCI Holdings (Boca Raton, Fla.; compiles worker compensation insurance data) apologized yesterday for its controversy-neutering decision on Friday telling employees that patriotism had no place in the workplace and that any sympathetic American Flags in offices had to come down. Also apologizing yesterday (apparently a deep apology, as opposed to, you know, a Washington-type apology) was Rev. Jerry Falwell, who said he was wrong to partly blame gays, feminists, the ACLU, and abortionists for the terrorist attacks; he said his lifelong belief has been that it is not possible for mortals to know God’s motivations. (On the other hand, Pat Robertson, who was sitting right beside him when Falwell made his original charges, and who nodded his head and um-hmmm’d his agreement the whole time, had a statement issued by his people that he really didn’t understand what Falwell was saying.) [Tampa Tribune-AP, 9-18-01] [New York Times, 9-18-01]
Below the Fold for Tuesday (September 18, 2001)
Sentenced to life in prison for murder: Michael Wayne Henry, 25 (Dallas). [Dallas Morning News, 9-17-01]
Hospitalized with 1st and 2nd degree burns on the face, incurred while celebrating her son’s homecoming from college, by igniting a shot glass of 151-proof rum and trying to swallow it: Karyn Aikin, Newfane, N.Y. [Buffalo News, 9-17-01]
Thomas Gerard Marron, 48, was judicially banned from attending soccer games in the UK for 4 yrs after going up to a referee (who is well-known among fans to have a day job as a farmer) at halftime and nailing him with the quaint verbal raspberry “I hope your farm gets foot-and-mouth.” [The Guardian, 9-18-01]
They Still Do It
You’d think after all these years of warnings in News of the Weird that bank robbers would learn to perform a little housekeeping at the crime scene, but, well, not George Carter, 45, who was arrested Friday and charged with robbing a First Merit Bank branch in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. According to a teller, Carter (apparently very nervous) handed over, along with the stickup note, one of his name-imprinted deposit slips. Speculation: He had intended to fill out a deposit slip as a cover in case he got cold feet, and when he decided to go ahead with the robbery, didn’t notice that he still had the deposit slip in his hand. [Cleveland Plain Dealer, 9-16-01]
Below the Fold for Monday (September 17, 2001)
The Orange County (Orlando, Fla.) sheriff’s office apologized last week to Adelberto Ruiz Hasselmyer for mistakenly arresting him; he’s 5-8, 360 lbs., black, but the man on the Wanted poster, Jorge Adaberto Ruiz, is 5-4, 150, white (not to mention having a different name). [St. Petersburg Times-Orlando Sentinel, 9-13-01]
Editor's Notes (Monday, September 17, 2001)
* “Luckily,” said Weird Newsranger Mark Schiefelbein, “no matter how trying the times [last week], at least one can always count on a local TV station accidentally airing a porn clip,” as KMIZ-TV in Columbia, Mo., did on the 10 o’clock news Wednesday night. [Columbia Tribune, 9-13-01] [The Link below is to this story.]
* It’s Tough to Be God These Days: Mohamed Atta said God forced him to kill; President Bush said God will punish Atta for killing. Ariel Sharon said God’s on Israel’s side; Yasir Arafat said God didn’t force Atta to kill but nevertheless is on Palestinians’ side. Jerry Falwell said God’s on America’s side and allowed Atta to kill only because of our gays and feminists.
Story Link
Cumulative Thank-Yous for the Week
Jeanette Morrison, Leslie Goodman-Malamuth, John McArthur, Ted Hering, Jonathan Eisenberg, Judith Matray-Devoti, Steve Steinberg, Michael Cumella, Roger Strong, Mike Bethany, Lynn Staab, and the News of the Weird Senior Advisors and Chief Correspondents.
©
2001, Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
