-- James C. Schaefer recently self-published an autobiography chronicling what he believes was his textbook case of Wisconsinaphobia (heightened anxiety attacks and debilitating back pains at any mention of the state or anything associated with it). After relocating from Milwaukee to California, he has become unnerved by people speaking with Wisconsin's nasal accents, mentions of Wisconsin companies (Harley-Davidson) and Wisconsin-made products, Green Bay Packers' scores, and even public utilities (since he had been a systems analyst for the largest utility in Wisconsin). Schaefer, 64, said he is now "90 percent" cured, after intensive therapy.
-- The attorney general of the Australian state of Victoria told reporters in February that the government would soon propose legislation to abolish the common-law practice of varying the death benefits for widows according to how pretty they are. Technically, the doctrine allows a discount on a widow's compensation if she has strong prospects of remarriage, and judges thus unavoidably take note of her attributes in deciding how much money she needs. (The widow most recently judged a looker lost about US$62,000 until an appeals court intervened.)
Police called on a woman in Kent, Ohio, in February, asking her to make adjustments to a female snowman in her yard whose breasts had been made, according to a complainant, "inappropriate(ly)" large. The woman, Crystal Lynn, at first acceded to the officer's request and draped the snowman in a tablecloth, but after giving more thought about the mentality of a person who would, in the year 2003, call the police about protrusions of ice, she removed the tablecloth, and the officer dropped the matter.
Antoinette M. Hooker, 40, was sentenced to 21 days in jail for, what else, prostitution (Berks County, Pa., February). The assistant pastor of St. Paul's University Catholic Center in Madison, Wis., who was placed on administrative leave in January after being accused of sexual improprieties: Father Bob DeCock. And a 21-year-old motorcyclist received a light sentence for causing a vehicular death because the judge viewed the collision basically as an accident rather than as caused by marijuana, which the man had admitted to using beforehand; the prosecutor, Ms. Mary Jane Kanabis, was disappointed at the sentence (Greenwich, Conn., December).
-- In February, in her last meeting as mayor of South Gate, Calif. (a Los Angeles suburb), after being overwhelmingly ousted in a special election by voters certain that she and some colleagues were corrupt, Ms. Xochilt Ruvalcaba, 30, sucker-punched nemesis Councilman Henry Gonzalez (age 67, who walks with a cane) in the face. The assault took place in front of 200 catcalling anti-Ruvalcaba voters, some video-recording the meeting. And three days before that, on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco, Mayor Willie Brown angrily confronted his nemesis, Aaron Peskin of the city's Board of Supervisors, thrusting his face within centimeters of Peskin's while screaming vulgarities (which were described in a San Francisco Chronicle story as "mother" and "s").
-- The Tacoma News Tribune reported in January that Washington state's halfway house for former sex offenders who are kept on for treatment after their prison terms expire is costing taypayers about $340,000 per "patient" per year (vs. about $25,000 per year to house a prison inmate). So fearful is the state that the three men now housed there will harm the 11 schoolchildren in a nearby elementary school that it has assigned three counselors, a director and a state trooper to watch the men around the clock. Gov. Gary Locke has targeted the program for a cutback, but legislators resist because of their fear of the three men.
-- Officials at Nevada's Yucca Mountain repository for high-level nuclear waste are struggling with a Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirement that the site post signs warning intruders of its dangers, lasting as far into the future as the year 12,000 A.D., even though no one knows whether any language now spoken on Earth will be spoken then. (The oldest known writing, Sanskrit, is about 7,000 years old.) Among the suggestions (according to a February Wall Street Journal report): drawings of someone vomiting while drilling at the site; and simply making Yucca Mountain also a global feces dump, to discourage trespassers.
-- A February report by Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation concluded that Enron Corp.'s tax-avoidance schemes in the 1990s (including 692 partnerships in the Cayman Islands) were, according to a New York Times reporter, "financial maneuvers so complex that the Internal Revenue Service has been unable to understand them." Even so, the IRS staff consistently failed to challenge Enron's maneuvers, passively accepting sophisticated opinion letters from Enron's law firms approving the arrangements (letters purchased by Enron at a typical price of $1 million each).
British boatman Andrew Halsey, 45, set off from Peru last Nov. 28 with 260 days' food, intending to row solo across the Pacific Ocean to Australia (about 8,000 miles). According to a BBC progress report on Feb. 8, after 72 days of fighting winds and currents and rowing probably 2,300 miles out, back and in circles, he was still 8,000 miles away. (A March 7 update in a British weekly reported that he had closed to within 7,600 miles of Melbourne.)
Gary Lee McMurray, 30, was arrested in February for grand larceny in Jonesville, Tenn. Police said McMurray telephoned Debra Letourneau of Long Hollow while she was at the home of another man, told her he had her upper plate of false teeth, and told her that if she did not pay him a ransom (amount not reported), he would stomp on them.
Ms. Selimy Mensah, 39, was hospitalized in Leonia, N.J., in February with second- and third-degree burns. According to police, Mensah started a fire in her second-floor apartment when she, for some reason, tried to open a canister of spray paint with an electric can opener.
Last year, after a KORB personality in the Davenport, Iowa, radio market offered listeners $30,000 a year for up to five years to tattoo "93 Rock" (the station's ID) on their forehead, Richard Goddard Jr. took him up on it, and Goddard's grumbling about the station's subsequent, alleged reneging on the deal got wide newspaper coverage. In January 2003, according to police, John and Mary Rushman of Colona, Ill. (with whom Goddard had been temporarily staying), were charged with beating Goddard in the face with a ball peen hammer because he was severely getting on their nerves with all of his complaints and suicide threats.
South Dakota Highway Patrolmen made a guns-drawn stop of a motorist in February, as suspicious because he was driving his van on Interstate 90 while wearing a gas mask (but he said he was just making a restaurant delivery of food that had an unpleasant smell). And Mikhail Kalashnikov, 83, inventor of terrorists' favorite assault rifle, expressed remorse for his invention recently, said he wanted to rehabilitate his name, and signed on with a German company to manufacture Kalashnikov umbrellas. And North Korea's Kim Jong Il turned 61 in February, which was an opportunity for countrymen to give Christmas-type presents to their kids, for Kim to celebrate by turning on the electricity at government farms for a whole 24 hours straight, and for the official news agency to remind people of Kim's accomplishments, including 11 holes-in-one in his first-ever round of golf.
Also, in the Last Month ...
A 48-year-old man was one of the big losers in the U.S. Supreme Court's recent approval of three-strikes laws and now faces life in prison for an office break-in; his previous convictions (many, many more than the required two) were for robbing women at gunpoint of the panties they were wearing (Orange County, Calif.). China's Yunnan province rolled out a fleet of 18 "mobile execution vehicles" to travel the countryside so that capital punishment (lethal drugs) could be imposed immediately upon a guilty verdict. And a 54-year-old German artist is set to open a "brothel" in which owners (for about US$30) could bring their dogs to have sex with each other in private rooms (Berlin).
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)