-- In April, students at the all-women's Smith College (Northampton, Mass.) voted to replace all of the female pronouns in the student constitution with gender-neutral pronouns. Although males are not admitted to Smith, many students apparently believe that using "she" and "her" is inappropriate for students who were admitted as females but who later identify themselves as "transgendered." According to Dean Maureen Mahoney, a student admitted as a female but who later comes out as a male would still be welcomed at Smith.
-- Dr. Yogendra Shah of Granite City, Ill., was accused by a state regulatory board of performing an abortion on a woman who was not pregnant. In a complaint filed in March and reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in May, a woman said she thought she was pregnant, but wasn't (based on an absence of fetal tissue), and Dr. Shah failed to test for pregnancy before performing the procedure. (A newspaper database search revealed that anti-abortion advocates have been slow to take a position on this story.)
-- Criminals Thinking Small: An alleged February multi-crime spree by Victor M. Cardoze, 23, all started when he prepaid $3 for gas at Joe's Pond Country Store, then pumped $3.50 worth and pointed a gun at the manager before driving off (West Danville, Vt., February). Robert Boyer, 45, was charged with robbery after asking if he could buy lettuce by the leaf rather than the head, being told no, and walking out with lettuce leaves anyway, in front of a police officer (Little Rock, Ark., December). William W. Bresler, Jr., 56, was taken for psychiatric evaluation after he tried to rob a National City Bank of exactly one cent (Westerville, Ohio, March).
-- Giving Up on Their Own Terms: Stephen Ray Carson, 29, in a standoff with police, said he wasn't giving up until he finished the crack cocaine he had just bought with the proceeds of a robbery. (Police got him anyway.) (Panama City, Fla., January) Motorist Christina L. Willis, 36, who was finally caught by police following a 30-minute chase after she hit an officer with her car, still refused to get out until she had finished her beer (Fairfield, Ohio, January). Motorist Troy C. Stephani, 32, trying to elude a police chase so that, he later said, he could finish his crack cocaine, took a wrong turn and accidentally drove into the police station parking lot (Medford, N.Y., April).
(1) (Washington Post, April 11) "Mount Olivet Road NE, 1200 block, March 30. An animal control officer responding to a call about a snake in a bathroom reported that the snake was actually a hair band." (2) (Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian, Jan. 7) "A Vancouver police officer was sent to a home in the 3100 block of S Street ... when a woman called 911 to say a group of 30 cannibals from Yacolt were trying to break into her house. (O)fficers were unable to locate any cannibals." (3) (Grass Valley (Calif.) Union, March 30) "A Dorsey Drive convalescent facility reported that one Alzheimer's patient struck another Alzheimer's patient, but neither of them remembered the incident or wanted medical attention."
-- Some patrons of the Minneapolis Public Library have so freely taken advantage of the lack of restrictions on Internet usage that they have for years been openly viewing pornography, but also subjecting female employees to sexual comments and in some cases have masturbated at the library's computer stations. (These allegations appeared in a March lawsuit by a dozen female library employees, accusing the library of long maintaining a "(sexually) hostile work environment.")
-- Surgeon David C. Arndt, who made News of the Weird last year when he left a patient in the operating room while he ducked out to the bank to cash a check, and who later was arrested for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, filed an application in February to tap into a state legal assistance fund for $15,000 to contest the latter charge, because he said he couldn't afford to pay his lawyer and he didn't want a public defender.
-- Convicted own-home arsonist Merle Crossman, 49, in an Ellsworth, Maine, prison, filed a lawsuit against Middlesex Mutual Insurance Co. demanding payment of $75,000 on the house he burned down, claiming that since he pleaded "no contest," and not "guilty," he is still entitled to insurance payments.
-- In February in Chichester, N.H., Thomas A. Barrett was fined $240 and given a six-month suspended sentence for his no-contest plea to creating a false fire alarm. Barrett told the judge that he was celebrating his 21st birthday at Jillian's Bar & Grill, and as he staggered down a hallway to the men's room, he mistakenly urinated on the floor and pulled the fire alarm, which he thought was a toilet's flushing mechanism.
-- A 35-year-old man was uninjured but his Jaguar mangled after he momentarily lost control at 70 mph on Interstate 15 near Pala, Calif., in January and drove underneath an 18-wheeler, with the car getting stuck under the axle and being dragged for a half-mile before another motorist signaled to the driver of the rig.
-- My Bad: St. Louis, Mo., judge Julian Bush admitted in March that a burglary suspect had been locked up for three months because Bush mistakenly signed a conviction order instead of an order for a hearing. And in February, Pratap Nayak was released from prison by India's High Court, nine years after he had officially been freed; Pratap and his five co-defendants had been found not guilty of assault in 1994, but since the other five were already out by that time for other reasons, court officials had assumed all were out.
In the midst of the national debate over fire codes in the wake of the February Warwick, R.I., nightclub disaster, fire safety consultant Philip R. Sherman told a Providence Journal reporter that toughening the codes was not an automatic cure because the codes will still be ignored due to variations in people's intelligence: "Clearly we have to account for dumb things (when we write the codes). Is wrapping the room in foam plastic the level of dumbness we want to account for? Or will somebody do something (even) dumber?"
Tobacco Kills: A 72-year-old woman accidentally, fatally set herself on fire while filling her cigarette lighter (Somerville, Mass., February). A trucking company was ordered to pay a $2.7 million legal judgment because its only employee smoking area was across a 100-yard, poorly lighted parking lot, where a 55-year-old smoker was accidentally run over returning from a break (Pittsburgh, Pa., February). A 42-year-old man died of head injuries caused when he opened the door of a moving car to spit tobacco juice and fell out (Mineral Wells, W.Va., March).
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was ordered to pay $165,000 and reinstate a former staff member whom it fired in retaliation for her having filed a work-related complaint. And authorities in Jersey City, N.J., declared an emergency upon finding 150 tons of rotting fish, lobster and squid in Max's Natural Foods Warehouse (abandoned, they believe, four months earlier). And Thailand's prisons department announced a contest in which inmates would vie to see which one had the most contagious laugh, and one official said that especially tense inmates would be urged to compete.
Thanks this week to Frank Roach, Michael Snider, Joe Donohue, Alexandra Shazo, Ted Lind, Kathryn Wood, Tom Doheny, Mark Seibel, Tom Preston, Aaron Shafter, Mark Terry, Christine Saum, Jana Hollingsworth, Bob deStafano, Jason Santa, Tom Teegan, William Carter, Andrew Smith, Paul Hirschfield, Thea Pratt, and Sonali Rijhsinghani-Sharma, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)