A Police Officer's Dream Come True

Vincent Morrissey's police brutality lawsuit went to trial in New Haven, Conn., last December, and West Haven police officer Ralph Angelo was on the witness stand, claiming that Morrissey himself had provoked the encounter by swinging at him first. Morrissey's attorney, who was standing near the witness stand and who was skeptical of the testimony, asked Officer Angelo to "demonstrate" just how hard Morrissey had swung at him. Before the lawyer could define "demonstrate," Officer Angelo popped the lawyer on the chin, staggering him and forcing an immediate recess.

In May, India's defense minister George Fernandes ordered three bureaucrats from his finance office to spend a week on the notorious Siachen Glacier in Kashmir, where temperatures are usually way below zero, with wind speeds averaging 60 mph. Reason: The bureaucrats had taken three years to process the paperwork to procure snowmobiles for the glacier, and the minister said the men needed to understand why they should have worked faster.

John Kricfalusi, creator of TV's "The Ren & Stimpy Show," threatened legal action last December against the producers of the Comedy Central show "South Park" for ripping off a cartoon character. According to Kricfalusi, his character Nutty the Friendly Dump, an animated piece of excrement, must have been the basis for "South Park's" Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, a holiday-dressed, singing, dancing piece of excrement.

The Los Angeles Times reported in January on the unusual, sustained success, in turbulent economic times, of the Cat Theater of Moscow, whose 300-seat shows remain sold out weeks in advance. Despite conventional wisdom that cats are untrainable, proprietor Yuri Kuklachev has them climbing poles, walking tightropes, pushing toy trains, leapfrogging over human backs and balancing atop tiny platforms.

In February, authorities had a drug house in the northwest Florida town of Callaway under surveillance, and when four men emerged and drove off in a rental car, deputies decided to stop them and make the arrests. Several squad cars surrounded the rental car, and by the time officers went to open the door, the four men were conveniently covered in white powder. A bag of cocaine they had hidden under the hood had been sliced open by the air-conditioner fan blade.

In February, Cambridge (England) University researcher Fiona Hunter, who studied penguins' mating habits for five years, reported that some females apparently allow male strangers to mate with them in exchange for a few nest-building stones, thus providing what Hunter believes is the first observed animal prostitution. According to Dr. Hunter, all activity was done behind the back of the female's regular mate, and in a few instances, after the sex act, johns gave the females additional stones as sort of a tip.

In June, Rev. Pat Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Fla. (which was sponsoring the local Gay Days festival), that the city was "right in the way of some serious hurricanes," and that "I don't think I'd be waving those (Gay Days logo) flags in God's face if I were you." Two months later, the season's first hurricane to hit land, Bonnie, missed Florida but raked the Carolina coast up through Virginia Beach, Va., the home of the Christian Broadcasting Network (Pat Robertson, proprietor).

In March, a Hamilton, Ontario, hospital settled the $1.7 million lawsuit brought by Lesli Szabo for not making her 1993 childbirth pain-free. Physicians said that painless childbirth cannot be achieved without the anesthesia's endangering the child, but Szabo said she expected to be comfortable enough to be able to read or knit while the child was being delivered.

According to authorities at the Hampton, Va., jail in March, a civilian attendant from the jail's canteen was pushing a cart full of snacks past the locked cell of Anthony Tyrone Darden, 21, when Darden reached through the bars, hit the man on the head with a broom handle, and took two packs of peanut butter crackers. Darden was apprehended.

On the day before Good Friday, reported the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Ernesto A. Moshe Montgomery consecrated the Shrine of the Weeping Shirley MacLaine in a room in his Beta (NOTE: NOT Beth) Israel Temple in Los Angeles. Inspired by an image he said he had while riding in the actress's private jet, Montgomery said a subsequent, large photograph of him with MacLaine was "observed shedding tears," which had inspired prayers and testimony of miraculous healings.

And Hawaii Republican Crystal Young, 57, who beat eight challengers in the primary before losing to U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye in November, explained during the campaign why she has to rely on Social Security disability payments as her primary source of income: She is in too much pain to work because of the electromagnetic needles implanted in her body by, of course, Shirley MacLaine.

In Phoenix in March, a defiant James Joseph Zanzot, 37, was ordered to prison for four years for repeatedly video- and audiotaping women in restrooms. Zanzot called the sentence "unjust," asserting a now-familiar claim that his behavior was only "immoral" and "repulsive," not "illegal." Zanzot pointed out that state law prohibits only intercepting "oral communication" and that he was not interested in the conversation but only in the sound of urination.

A police report in the Martinez (Calif.) Record on April 9 described a one-car accident in town. According to police, a man was playing "What's That Color?" with his young son while driving and held his breath to make his face red. However, he held his breath too long and passed out, and the car ran off the road. Neither he nor his son required medical attention.

Ronnie Darnell Bell, 30, was arrested in Dallas in February and charged with attempting to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. (In the movie "Die Hard With a Vengeance," knocking off the New York FRB required a small army of men and truckloads of weapons.) According to police, Bell was initially confused because there are no tellers, so he handed a security guard his note, reading: "This is a bank robbery of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, of Dallas, Texas, give me all the money. Thank you, Ronnie Darnell Bell." The guard pushed a silent alarm while an oblivious Bell chatted amiably, revealing to the guard that only minutes earlier he had tried to rob a nearby Postal Service facility but that "they threw me out."

Cafe Ke'ilu ("Cafe Make Believe") opened in a trendy section of Tel Aviv in April, with tables, chairs, plates, silverware, menus and servers, but no food or drink. Explained manager Nir Caspi (who calls the experience "conceptual dining"), people come to be seen and to meet people but not for the actual food. The menu, designed by top-rated chef (and owner) Phillipe Kaufman, lets diners order some of the world's most exquisite dishes (eel mousse, salad of pomegranates, if in season), "served" on elegant (but empty) platters.

The Department of Energy announced in May, after reviewing project records from the 1950s, that some inspectors at a uranium processing plant near Cincinnati used the somewhat-unscientific method of measuring the substance's metallic strength by sprinkling some on their tongues to see if tasted right. The inspectors feared that if they did not submit high-enough-grade samples, the government would regard their uranium as useless and shut down the plant.

Rev. John Wayne "Punkin" Brown Jr., 34, died on Oct. 3 of a rattlesnake bite while ministering at the Rock House Holiness Church in northeast Alabama near Scottsboro. In a landmark book on snake-handling preachers in the South ("Salvation on Sand Mountain" by Dennis Covington), Brown was called the "mad monk," the one most "mired in the ... blood lust of the patriarchs." His wife, Melinda, had met the same fate three years earlier at a church in Middlesboro, Ky., and relatives are divided whether to permit the Browns' three children to carry on the legacy.

In April, the Los Angeles City Council agreed to pay $9 million to five surviving victims of a drunk driver whose car wandered across a center line and hit the van in which they were riding, unbuckled. A court in 1997 had awarded the victims $29 million and said the city had to pay 57 percent of that because the yellow line in the center of the road was too dim.

In March, San Francisco sculptor Joe Mangrum, sitting on $1,480 worth of outstanding parking tickets accumulated by his 1986 Mazda, persuaded the city Art Commission (which was not aware of the tickets) to let him disassemble the car into a pile in the middle of Justin Herman Plaza and call the sculpture "Transmission 98," for which he collected a $2,000 artist's fee from the city.

In July, a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., rejected a prosecutor's request to stop Latin Kings gang leader Antonio Fernandez from selling Amway products. Fernandez, out on bail on drug charges, is restricted to his home, and the prosecutor believes a sales route would allow him to conduct Latin Kings business. On the other hand, Fernandez's lawyer said the Amway business was an encouraging sign and might lead other gang members into Tupperware or Mary Kay.

In August, Ukrainian Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko began a crackdown on tax delinquents to collect the $3.5 billion the government is owed. The centerpiece of the campaign is to call the top 1,500 tax scofflaws, mostly business executives, to a military base near Kiev, to live for an undetermined time in tents, to listen to lectures on civil defense preparedness for natural disasters, until apparently out of sheer boredom they decide to pay up.

In August, Deborah Gaines, 31, filed a lawsuit against the Brookline, Mass., abortion clinic shot up by John Salvi in 1994, asking it to pay the cost of raising her kid, now age 3. She was queuing up for an abortion that day when Salvi started firing and said she was so traumatized that she could not bring herself to go to another clinic, and eight months later, little Vivian was born. Gaines said she loves her daughter but that her daughter shouldn't be here.

When authorities raided a cockfighting operation near Gadsden, Ala., in July, they found not only a restaurant and 250-seat theater for patrons, but two air-conditioned trailers in which the roosters hung out before their matches, one of which featured piped-in country music.

In February, the kinder, gentler Hawaii House Agriculture committee approved a bill to legalize cockfighting, provided the roosters wear tiny padded gloves on their feet instead of the traditional metal leg spurs.

And cockfighting was banned by referendum in Arizona in November but not without a battle led by actor Wilford Brimley, who said he used to drive regularly across the border from his Utah home to watch matches. Said Brimley, of the roosters, "They're magnificent." "It's always thrilling to watch."

In August, lobbyists in Bonn, Germany, called the Working Group for the Unemployed, held a series of rallies to demand six weeks' annual paid vacation for people out of work, pointing out that those looking for work often are under greater stress than those with jobs and thus need a longer holiday.

In August, residents of a West Hartford, Conn., neighborhood handed the renowned Johnnie Cochran a stunning defeat. Cochran, defending two Rottweilers accused of barking too much, failed to persuade a judge to lift a 9 p.m. outdoor curfew on the dogs, which belong to his friend Flora Allen (mother of basketball player and actor Ray Allen).

According to a Times of London report in October, 45 people (celebrities and prominent executives) have had low-power microchips surgically implanted in their bodies in order to make it easier for police to track them by global satellite in the event they are kidnapped. The Sky-Eye chip, made by the Gen-Etics company, consists of organic and synthetic fibers that are powered by the body's own neurophysiological energy.

Executed for murder in 1998: Dennis Wayne Eaton (Virginia). Found guilty of murder: Bobby Wayne Woods (Texas), Coy Wayne Wesbrook (Texas). Charged with murder: Monty Wayne Lamb (Texas), Morris Wayne Givens (Alabama), Michael Wayne Hall (Texas), Michael Wayne Gallatin (Washington), John Wayne Stockdall (Missouri). Accused of murder and still on the lam: Jason Wayne McVean (Colorado). Died while under suspicion for murder: Donald Wayne Martin (Texas), Robert Wayne Shelton (Missouri).

Distrust of modern medicine has led to the increasing popularity of therapeutic self-trepanation (drilling a hole in the head to "unseal" the skull), according to a June Chicago Tribune story. Trepanation activist Peter Halvorson recalled that drilling into his own skull 25 years ago ("Smoke was coming out of the hole," he said) brought him "a heightened, childlike sense of awareness" and a permanent state of higher consciousness. Neurosurgeons contacted by the Tribune used words like "amazed" and "stunned" at the craze, but according to the report, trepanists are so confident about what they do that criticism just doesn't sink in.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- The owners of Karma Farms in Marshall, Texas, came under severe criticism in November for having purposely bred a litter of deformed cats with short, slinky front legs (because part of a vital bone is missing) and six-toed back legs that allow the cat to stand up like a kangaroo. The first "Twisty Kat," said owner Vickie Ives Spier, which was bred by accident, was "so admired" that she decided to breed more but denied that she intended to raise the Kats for sale. Several animal rights groups howled, and Spier said she has received death threats.

-- According to an October Houston Chronicle report, free-lance advisers Roderick MacElwain, 47, and Neal Caldwell, 47, have set up a canopy in a park along the shore of White Rock Lake in downtown Dallas, nearly every Sunday for the past three years to offer passersby (according to their homemade sign) "Free Advice." They had 15 callers that first day and have progressed now to a point in which people queue up under a nearby tree for the opportunity to hear what they ought to be doing about relationships, neighbors, bosses, finances, home repair or nearly any other subject.

In September, Don and Penny Karch set up a display of 28 toilets in their back yard in Pittsfield, Mass., to complain about an adjacent, restroomless convenience store, whose patrons in need occasionally relieve themselves behind the store, in full view of the Karches' kitchen window. And Edward Aragi dragged a dead deer into a People's Bank branch in Stamford, Conn., in November to get employees' attention about an alleged clerical error on a bounced check. And Levent Kirca, who is Turkey's Jay Leno, went on a hunger strike in November after the government sacked his TV show because he had made fun of an official who proudly proclaimed her virginity.

These days, when a man in the news reveals for the first time that he is a transvestite, it seems not so much to shock as to provide newspapers with a chance to weave a fashion report into the story. In London in November, former financial fund manager Peter Young arrived in court after being indicted on massive fraud counts, which were not discussed by the press as much as his outfit was ("light brown jumper with a pattern of violet and blue pansies over a flowing white dress with red and orange floral prints," wrote the Daily Telegraph). And also in London, Falklands War hero Brian "Lynda" Waling's march in the Remembrance Day parade in November was duly noted (blue skirt, white handbag, floppy hat, all smartly set off by his military medals).

Christine Bergmann, Minister of Women in the new Schroeder administration in Germany, said in November that she would soon submit a bill calling for health, retirement and unemployment benefits for prostitutes, as well as providing a legal right to sue johns who don't pay up. Also, she said, prostitutes should be able to retire, with full benefits, by age 60. And in a stark contrast to the strict no-prostitution policy in the Mao Tse-tung era, the city of Shenyang, China, recently began acknowledging its estimated 100,000 prostitutes, by taxing them.

In November, Roland Dougoud, age 105, received a letter from the local government in Echallens, Switzerland, demanding that he register for school, along with 65 kids whose birth year also is "93." And Rev. Jerry Falwell said in November that he welcomes the problems and shutdowns that might be caused by computers misprocessing the year 2000 because that "may be God's instrument to shake this nation" into a religious revival.

Columbia, Tenn., police filed drug and evidence-tampering charges against Ginger Janet Osborne in November. She was spotted by police acting suspicious in her car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. When ordered out of the car, Osborne allegedly dropped soggy pieces of seven $100 bills on which she had been chewing.

-- Three days after the November election, someone called in a bomb threat to the Minnesota capital during Gov.-elect Jesse Ventura's visit, and police found a suspicious object taped to a tree on the grounds. The package was given full, serious bomb-squad treatment and very carefully driven to a disposal facility. Despite all the precautions, however, a wind gust blew the package out of the bomb-squad truck and onto the street, where it was run over by several cars.

-- Jarold Sanchez, 23, shot himself in the face in November in Craig, Colo., after spotting an elk near a railroad track on a hunting trip. Sanchez had lain down, resting the barrel of his rifle on the near track, pointed at the elk and squeezed the trigger, but managed only to hit the other track two feet away, causing the bullet to bounce back and graze his cheek. Sanchez said he knows now that the barrel is lower than the sight.

-- In November, in the final moments of West Virginia's 35-28 football win at home over Syracuse, state troopers attempted to protect the WVU marching band from fans who were celebrating so boisterously that they posed physical threats to the band members and their musical instruments. Troopers fired mace to disperse the unruly fans, but a gust of wind blew the mace directly onto the marching band, causing widespread vomiting and sending six members to the hospital.

-- In November, employee John Boernier-Mercier, 45, who was tending to his own business sitting in the men's room at Budney Overhaul and Repair in Berlin, N.H., was grazed on the hand and knee by a bullet fired by his boss, Kevin M. Budney, 31, who was across the hall and had accidentally squeezed the trigger while looking for its serial number.

A man robbed an adult video store in Edmonton, Alberta, in December, and at press time was still at large. However, the clerk got a good look at him because he was carrying a gorilla mask with him, and only after he had picked up the money and cut the telephone line did he put the mask on and walk out.

Shawn Padden, 24, was convicted of manslaughter in November because of his role in the death of an 18-year-old friend. Acquaintances of the men said that Padden's and his friend's hobby was "hanging" (as in, by the neck) and that the two practiced their techniques frequently until Jan. 5, 1998, when Padden accidentally pulled a chair away before his friend, who had his hands tied behind him, was ready.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)

-- A November Associated Press dispatch described the work of commercial leech and maggot suppliers who sell to hospitals for medical treatments. A Welsh firm, Biopharm Ltd., moves about 20,000 3-inch-long leeches a year at $17 each to suck blood through delicate, clogged veins to restore circulation, and a unit of the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend, Wales, produces sterilized maggots to eat decayed skin on a wound to speed the healing process (price: $90 per 100 maggots). Boasts Dr. Stephen Thomas, who guards his secret technique for sterilizing fly eggs, "Our maggots are cleaner than the patient."

-- Los Angeles surgeon Brigitte Boisselier announced in November that her company, Clonaid, might soon accept clients, at $200,000 each, to make genetic twins of themselves. She plans to use the technique that produced the sheep Dolly, which she hopes will be refined for humans by the year 2000. In her spare time, Dr. Boisselier is a bishop in the Raelian religion, founded in 1970 by a French former sports reporter, which believes that Earth was created 25,000 years ago by alien DNA. Said Dr. Boisselier, "I'm a scientist and very pragmatic even if I do believe in little green men."

The developers of the Providence (R.I.) Place shopping mall now under construction announced in November that they had reached agreement to house a private high school of about 100 students with classrooms inside the mall.

Window washer Kerry Burton, 27, was only slightly injured in November after falling five stories from a building in Calgary, Alberta. Burton landed butt-first in the basin of water that was tethered to his body and bounced two feet in the air after the bucket hit the pavement. And in November, Jo'Tan Cooper, 18, escaped from the Natick, Mass., police station lockup by sliding his 5-foot-6, 130-pound body through the 9-by-17-inch food-tray slot. (He was recaptured before he made it out of the station.)

In November, the state of Punjab, India, announced that its 18-month search for its most honest government officer (which carried an award of more than $2,000) was over, because they couldn't find anyone worthy. However, as part of the same program, the government revealed that it had found 300 corrupt officers worthy of prosecution. (India was recently named as the world's eighth most corrupt country by an international watchdog organization.)

The latest episode of inmates acting as winemakers was disclosed by the Chattanooga Times in October, reporting on missing sugar from the pantry of the Franklin County Jail in Winchester, Tenn. Authorities traced the sugar to two dozen inmates concocting a fruit-based wine in, as usual, a jail cell toilet.

In the course of offering support for Scottish independence from Great Britain, Mohamed al-Fayed (father of the late Dodi al-Fayed) told a Glasgow Herald reporter in October that Scots are sexually superior to Brits, in part because of the kilt (which al-Fayed says they stole from his own ancestors, the Egyptians). "The Egyptians wore nothing underneath. That is why they were great (copulators). (W)hen you leave your organs free and ventilated with air, they are always fertile."

In November, Ms. Ma Yulan, 41, owner of a restaurant and bathhouse in Beijing, was convicted of allowing her hostesses to engage in sex for hire and was sentenced to death.

The Hotel de Sal Playa (altitude, 12,500 feet and recently renamed the UT Salt Palace and Spa) in the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia is a 12-room setup in which the walls, beds, tables and chairs are made entirely of blocks of salt. According to an August Associated Press travel story, the rooms go for $50 a night and have no salty smell (although during the rainy season, the walls are covered with brine).

In May, after another guest at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria hotel disturbed her sleep for two hours and eventually urinated outside her door, Elizabeth Jaffe received a complimentary bottle of wine and a fruit and cheese basket from the management to make amends for her horrible night. According to Jaffe's $6.5 million lawsuit against the hotel filed in August, the fruit and cheese caused severe vomiting, requiring her to be hospitalized with intestinal bleeding and dehydration. "Obviously," said Jaffe's lawyer, "it was the fruit."

On Nov. 9, according to police in Creedmoor, N.C., Leroy Howard, 30, took a space heater from the back of one truck, placed it into the truck he was driving, and fled, just as the police chief, who happened to be driving by, asked him what he was doing. Chief Ted Pollard chased Howard, who abandoned the truck (which had been stolen in nearby Oxford, N.C.) and fled on foot. Oxford police joined in the chase. Two state wildlife officers were in the area and also joined. Two vans carrying a SWAT team happened to be passing by, headed for training, and joined in, and then called their 60 colleagues at the training site to come on over. A Highway Patrol helicopter was nearby, also, and joined the chase. Four hours after the theft, Howard was in custody.

Several times, News of the Weird has mentioned natural-cause deaths that had gone unreported for months and even years. In November 1998, a landlord entered the Bonn, Germany, apartment of Wolfgang Dircks when rent invoices to Dircks' bank stopped being paid. The landlord found a skeleton in a chair in front of a television set (in the "on" position but now out of order) and beside still-twinkling Christmas lights and a TV program guide of Dec. 5, 1993. Since no one had seen Dircks in years, authorities declared that to be his date of death.

A 29-year-old man was accidentally run over in September by a tractor-trailer on the traffic-jammed Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago after he had gotten out of his car to gather debris to throw at the truck's driver for some alleged highway discourtesy. Apparently, he slipped on spilled oil and fell under the wheels. And a 33-year-old man died in a workplace explosion in Ascutney, Vt., in November when he cut into a 55-gallon drum with a blowtorch in order to make scrap metal and was perhaps surprised that the drum contained propane. According to fellow workers, the man had done the very same thing the week before, but that explosion had merely blown his gas mask off.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33738, or Weird@compuserve.com. Chuck Shepherd's latest paperback, "The Concrete Enema and Other News of the Weird Classics," is now available at bookstores everywhere. To order it direct, call 1-800-642-6480 and mention this newspaper. The price is $6.95 plus $2 shipping.)