-- His Own "Head Start" Program: A 7-year-old Minneapolis boy stole an SUV on Dec. 6 and crashed into several things, and then, after attempts by the police and his guardian to explain to him why stealing cars was wrong, he stole another one on Dec. 17 and hit another vehicle, injuring a boy riding with his mother. His two reported explanations were, respectively: "I want to be a good driver when I grow up," and "I just had to get to school and I don't know where it is." (According to a hopeful Minneapolis Star Tribune report, experts believe that kids that young who commit crimes are no more than two to three times more likely to turn into violent criminals.)
-- In a December New York Times dispatch from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, concerning the heavily religious-law-regulated Perdu lingerie shop, its female marketing director said that about 85 percent of Saudi women wear ill-fitting bras, perhaps because the law requires that sales clerks in public stores be men. According to the Times, "(W)hile women may be berated for showing a ... leg or an arm (in public), they must ask strange men for help in assessing their bra size."
In December, police in Urbana, Ohio, said they would soon file fraud charges against Teresa Milbrandt, 35, for tricking local people and businesses into giving her more than $10,000 on behalf of her 7-year-old daughter, who she falsely said had leukemia. Milbrandt apparently never even told her daughter why she had to have her head shaved (to simulate the effects of chemotherapy), but that touch of realism ultimately caused the scheme to collapse when someone noticed the hair had been cut and was not falling out.
-- Two men who have sat on juries in notoriously litigation-friendly Jefferson County, Miss., filed a lawsuit against the TV program "60 Minutes" in December, claiming that they were defamed in a segment about Mississippi juries' generosity. Anthony Berry was on a jury that gave out $150 million in an asbestos case, and Johnny Anderson was on one that awarded $150 million in a diet drug case, and both say the "60 Minutes" segment made the juries seem so extravagant that they must be getting kickbacks. The two men's lawsuit (filed in Jefferson County, of course) asks for more than $6 billion.
-- The president of Baptist-affiliated Gardner-Webb University (Boiling Springs, N.C.) admitted in September that he raised a star basketball player's grade-point average so that he would be eligible to play in the 2000-2001 season, during which Gardner-Webb won the National Christian College Athletic Association championship. (The president, Christopher White, resigned in October; the class that the player failed, for cheating, but which was not counted on his GPA, was in religion.)
-- Following a Detroit Free Press interview in November with bulk e-mailer Alan Ralsky (who gloated that his success at sending "spam" advertising had paid for his $740,000 home), Internet spam-haters tracked down Ralsky's West Bloomfield, Mich., address and inundated him with thousands of unsolicited hardcopy catalogs and mailings. In another case, following news that the Pentagon had hired former Reagan administration official John Poindexter to oversee the creation of software that could track nearly all consumer transactions in the country, an SF Weekly (San Francisco) columnist released Poindexter's home phone number, and Internet activists set up a Web site for tracking all of Poindexter's personal transactions.
-- Jay Glaspey, 37, was hospitalized in Des Moines, Iowa, in September after accidentally setting himself on fire while trying to burn his girlfriend's bed after a fight. And Cordell T. Holland, 24, was hospitalized in Prince George's County, Md., in July after accidentally setting himself on fire while trying to burn up his car for the insurance. And Timothy Grubb, 46, was hospitalized in Cleveland in October after accidentally setting himself on fire while trying to burn down his ex-girlfriend's house.
-- In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in October, David Voth, author of a best seller on how to keep from paying income tax in Canada, was fined for his failure to file income tax returns since 1995. And Robert H. Morrison, author of "Divorce Dirty Tricks" (on how to avoid child-support payments), pleaded guilty in Phoenix in December to avoiding support payments on his 12-year-old son.
In November, Jason Morris, 30, was acquitted by a jury in Greater Manchester, England, of the charge that, using ordinary pliers, he pulled out 18 of his girlfriend's teeth, leaving her covered head to toe in blood. The case turned when the girlfriend, Samantha Court, 25, took the witness stand and admitted that she pulled the teeth out herself, during an April drug binge during which she tried to get rid of a green and pink fly that had darted down her throat. Court said the couple has decided to stop doing drugs.
In 2001, a woman filed a federal lawsuit in Minnesota (Engleson vs. Little Falls Area Chamber of Commerce), seeking to recover for injuries she suffered when she tripped over an orange traffic cone. The lawsuit was dismissed in November 2002 by Judge Donovan Frank, who said the law does not expect anyone to warn people that there's a warning cone up ahead.
In November 2001, News of the Weird reported on a language its practitioners called The Truth (but which is basically indistinguishable from gibberish), which at that time a few Canadian defendants were using in tax-evasion trials (with a huge lack of success). In December 2002, Janet Kay Logan, 46, and Jason Zellmer, 22, were convicted in Madison, Wis., of creating phony lawsuit documents, despite their using The Truth in their trial and attempting to call as a witness the language's creator, David Wynn Miller, also known as the "king of Hawaii," who informed the judge that the genesis of The Truth was when Miller "turned Hawaii into a verb" and showed "how a preposition is needed to certify a noun." Logan insisted until the very end that the lawsuits were legitimate because she is a judge in the "DI-STRICT court of the Unity State of the World."
A carjacker made off with a Honda Civic following a struggle, but he did leave behind his colostomy bag, which fell off in the fight (St. Albert, Alberta). Two hours after a TV news crew visited a candle shop to interview the owner about holiday fire safety, a faulty candle in the shop started a blaze that gutted four businesses (Colorado Springs, Colo.). The University of Magdeburg yielded to longtime demands of the daughters of the late 1970s Red Army terrorist Ulrike Meinhof and gave back Meinhof's brain, which it had commandeered after her 1976 suicide (Koln, Germany).
London's Daily Telegraph reported in December on a recent Peruvian military video that showed a dog being massacred and its innards eaten by troops training to become ruthless killers; a Peruvian official admitted that live dogs had been used in the past, but not since August 2002. Also, according to a December Reuters report, a surreptitious videotape surfaced of a ritual of elephant domestication in Thailand, in which a young elephant is forced from his mother and beaten for hours, to make him suitable for tourist attractions. (Thai officials defend their domestication program because the country has far more elephants than habitat necessary for them to survive in the wild.)
Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (59) The elderly motorist who takes one wrong turn and then seems powerless to correct the mistake for hours or even days, such as the McLean, Va., woman (age 80) whose planned 10-mile shopping trip in November left her north of Pittsburgh, 250 miles away, 48 hours later. (60) And the packs of young men on minor-crime sprees who proudly videotape themselves during the acts, thus making prosecutors' jobs so much easier when the tapes are recovered, as with four men on a vandalism and shoplifting spree in the St. Louis area in November.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)