News of the Weird

-- In recent months, two different Hindu cults in India have begun to embrace ancient sacrifice rituals, one using horses and the other using the "Nara bali" practice of human sacrifice. In the village of Juna Padia, Assam, 150 priests participate in ceremonies to slaughter 10 horses and collect their deified blood for, they say, peace and prosperity. And in the state of Orissa, because of a paucity of human volunteers to sacrifice, the Kamakhya Temple cult uses human-size effigies made of flour, which its leaders insist are just as powerful in impressing divine forces.

-- South Korea's baby-boomer parents in increasing numbers recently are sending their preschool youngsters for outpatient mouth surgery to snip the tissue under the tongue because they believe more tongue freedom will permit the children to pronounce the difficult "l" and "r" sounds that have long stigmatized many Asians when speaking English. "Learning English is almost the national religion" in South Korea, according to one educator quoted in a March Los Angeles Times report, but many authorities in South Korea say Asians' pronunciation trouble is purely cultural and that only a very few people are born with tight-enough tongues to be helped by these "frenectomies."

IRS admitted to a Washington Post reporter in April that it had paid out $30 million in fraudulent refunds in the last two years to black taxpayers claiming (at about $40,000 each) the nonexistent slavery reparations credit (and 12 of those were IRS employees). (However, IRS did catch $2.4 billion of slavery claims before refunds went out.) And the agency filed formal charges against at least two accountants who have been advising clients to use "Section 861" of the tax code to claim (preposterously, according to every court that has heard the claim) that income tax only applies to Americans who work for foreign companies. (That scam reached prominence in March when the agency revealed that actor Wesley Snipes had asked IRS to refund the $7.3 million he paid in 1997 taxes, citing Section 861.)

-- Spanish inventor Andres Diaz made the first U.S. sale of his $20,000, side-loading, automatic cat-washing machine late last year to a Miami company, PetClean USA. The three-cycle, 37-nozzle machine processes the cat in 30 minutes, and Diaz swears the cat doesn't mind it. (And in March, Antrim, Northern Ireland, inventor Trevor Graham was awarded about $8,500 from the Winston Churchill Foundation to study mobile dog-washing equipment in the U.S.)

-- Other Recent Inventions: Vladimir Markov's "anti-rape" jeans, with a locked, coded steel top button designed to discourage attackers who haven't time to figure out how to open it (Croatia). And college-student inventors' pulsating vest composed of eight cellular phones' vibrating units sewn in to touch acupuncture-friendly parts of the abdomen (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore).

-- New Management Incentive Structures: Tyson Foods' CEO John Tyson was awarded a $2.1 million bonus for last year despite a dismal economic performance and a federal indictment for smuggling in illegal aliens to work at 15 plants in nine states; headquarters officials said the alien problem must have been 15 individual managers out of control. And federal government bonuses to its managers increased by 25 percent for the last fiscal year to an average of $11,000, despite, to put it gently, widely varied agency performances in meeting goals.

-- "Quorn," an edible, nutritious fungus that its manufacturer says looks and tastes "like chicken," made its U.S. debut in January from the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical house AstraZeneca. Quorn (also known as mycoprotein) is sold as chickenlike nuggets or in lasagna or as a ground beef-like substance and is high in protein and fiber and low in calories. Said a sports nutritionist quoted by the Associated Press: "I think it's got a lot of potential. We just have to make sure 'fungus' is not going to appear on the label."

-- A Manitoba, Canada, farmer filed a lawsuit in January against four doctors and the Brandon Regional Health Authority after he contracted the flesh-eating-bacteria disease while undergoing colon surgery. The man had to have his buttocks amputated.

At press time, the Pennsylvania Judicial Conduct Board was still considering what to do about Pittsburgh Common Pleas judge H. Patrick McFalls Jr., based on recent alleged incidents: creating a disturbance at an airport ticket counter (while visiting Charlotte, N.C., late December); "giving" his $60,000 car to a young man and not remembering it so that he later called in a stolen car report (Feb. 5); being arrested for creating a disturbance with a cab driver about the fare (while visiting Miami Beach, Feb. 11); removing his pants at a restaurant (Feb. 14); being arrested at a theater for becoming boisterous during a movie (March 30); allowing his pants to fall down several times while having an animated conversation on the street (March 30).

Recent Reasons Given: victim (his own mother) wouldn't pay the $1,850 fee he promised his date from an escort service (Dean Glick, 41, convicted in Scottsdale, Ariz., March); victim fought him over a can of Natural Light beer (Armando Galvez, 36, arrested in Fort Myers, Fla., March); schoolteacher-victim called him a "queer" (Ronnie Worley, 22, convicted in rural Winfield, W.Va., in March); roommate-victim disagreed with him over whether to turn the lights off (Joseph Rich, 56, arrested in Broward County, Fla., January); victims (his own wife and son) had to be killed in order to keep them from learning he was about to be arrested for rape (Kenneth Hairston, 50, arrested in Pittsburgh, December).

"For almost 20 years," wrote a Boston Globe reporter in March, "convicted rapist Benjamin LaGuer (imprisoned at the MCI-Norfolk facility in Massachusetts) has waged a public campaign maintaining his innocence," most recently demanding DNA tests that would clear him of a brutal attack on an elderly woman. LaGuer's supporters raised $30,000 for the test, and on March 22, the results came back: The sperm was LaGuer's. (But even worse off was rape suspect Marshall Thomas, 44, who early this year finally received his long-begged-for DNA test that he was sure would free him from a 1999 rape charge. That case is still pending, in Belleville, Ill., but Thomas's DNA was matched to an earlier, unsolved rape, and prosecutors said they planned to file additional charges.)

The Girl Scouts recently began offering merit badges in stress-reduction to scouts aged 8 to 11, but the girls, of course, had to complete a schedule of activities to earn one. And a Colorado artist created a line of hand-painted figurines in the images of serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Ed Gein (March). And Britain's Medical Research Council reported that British men's sperm counts continued to drop, probably because of exposure to industrial pollutants, and are now proportionately about one-third the level of hamsters' sperm counts (March).

The premiere of Thailand's version of "The Weakest Link" TV show was deeply controversial because the show's trademark brutality and selfishness so much contravened the country's alleged sensitivity and generosity (Bangkok). A 32-year-old man, fleeing into the woods on foot after a police traffic stop, was quickly captured after being incapacitated by a skunk's spray (Lewiston, Maine). Police shut down what an officer called a "full-service (drive-through) drug window" at an apartment house (Syracuse, N.Y.). The Sioux City, Iowa, city council made yet another official request to the Federal Aviation Administration to change its airport designation, which is SUX.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- University of Connecticut physics professor Ronald Mallett, 57, said in April that after years of study, he hopes to begin experiments this year leading to genuine time travel, involving probably no more than a neutron or two at first but laying the groundwork for transporting larger objects. Mallett believes his theory is solid (straight from Einstein's Theory of Relativity), but that amassing the amount of energy necessary even to move small objects may be impossible with current knowledge. Mallett said he's been thinking about time travel since age 10, when his father died, because he wanted to go back in time to warn his dad of the dangers of smoking.

-- According to a March Washington Post Magazine feature, a deaf Bethesda, Md., female couple recently gave birth to a child whom they had conceived by artificial insemination and specially designed to be born deaf. (They had used sperm from a man with a long family history of deafness.) The couple said they merely want their son to be like the rest of the family, including their older daughter. The boy is deaf in one ear, but the other ear may still develop hearing.

To "create a condition of silent introspection" during probation, a federal judge sentenced recidivist petty criminal Edward Bello, 60, in December to refrain from watching television for 10 months (New York City). And after pleading guilty in February to stabbing a man, Leah Marie Fairbanks, 25, was sentenced to 14 months' probation, during which she was to read the Declaration of Independence and seven classic novels and to write reports on each; her co-defendant, sentenced by another judge, got eight years in prison (Duluth, Minn.). And Luther Crawford, 50, who has 12 kids by 11 different women, avoided prison in March (he was $33,000 behind in child payments) by agreeing to a judge's offer to refrain from all sexual intercourse until he is paid up (although he said a week later that he thought the agreement had been a joke) (Louisville, Ky.).

-- Ian Cheeseman, 34, who pleaded guilty in October to multiple counts of sexual assault against girls in several Canadian cities, took the stand in February in Ottawa at his sentencing hearing and vehemently denied that he had gone so far as to actually rape any of his victims. "That's not my thing," he said, referring to intercourse. "Urophilia (drinking the urine of young girls) is my thing."

-- Marvin Martin II was convicted in February in Ottawa, Ohio, of shooting a 15-year-old boy to death following an incident with the boy's mother, despite Martin's insistence that the perp was not he but his clone (he says he was cloned three times while in the Army). And Edward Lawrence Frostbutter, 17, was arrested in January and charged with raping a classmate in a restroom stall at Calvert High School (Calvert County, Md.), despite his insistence that it was his alter ego "Sam" who had committed the crime; the victim was a friend of the accused, thus "knew" "Sam," and went into the stall voluntarily with Edward but said she was surprised when "Sam" showed up instead.

-- Jerome Heckenkamp, indicted for illegally hacking into computers at eBay, Lycos and other companies, challenged the charges at a court appearance in San Jose, Calif., in March by denying that he is the person named in the indictment, in that the document refers to a "HECKENKAMP" in all capital letters, whereas he capitalizes only the H. And two months earlier, Frederick R. James, 41, facing drug charges in East St. Louis, Ill., told the judge at a hearing that he owns a copyright on his name and that if the judge wants to utter it, he'll have to pay a royalty of $500,000 each time.

-- Auckland, New Zealand, police sergeant William Paul McKenzie told a judge in January that it was not his fault that he drove into a 43-year-old blind therapist in a crosswalk last year, knocking her down and breaking her leg. The victim was accompanied, as usual, by her guide dog, trained never to step into moving traffic, but according to the defense lawyer, since McKenzie looked both ways before accelerating, the problem must have been dog negligence.

-- Nice Tries: Michael William Rahmer, 26, arrested for purse-snatching in Reno, Nev., in January, told the police he was only trying to test police response time to a crime report (and that he was indeed impressed with how fast they caught him). And female leaders of Britain's large Unison trade union proposed in January that the organization join the cannabis-legalization movement, calling it a "women's issue," on the ground that smoking pot is a no-calorie way to lose weight.

In February, public school employee Maggie Wallace, 45, was sentenced to a year in jail; last Sept. 12, she had thought the kids needed a breather from the events the day before and so called in a bomb threat so the school would close (Johnstown, N.Y.). And Jose Portillo, 27, was charged in February with having sex with an underage girl, who was 12 at the time and then became pregnant; Portillo told police he thought she was 13 (Albuquerque).

In February, prosecutors in Orleans County, Vt., finally got around to filing a murder charge against Jamie Ovitt for killing his ex-stepfather Duane Perry in April 2000. Allegedly, Ovitt shot Perry because he was mad that Perry was spreading the word around town (truthfully) that Jamie and his mother were fathered by the same man (a fellow named "Hebe" Ovitt). According to the prosecutor, the murder was not smooth: Ovitt's fatal bullet went right through Duane Perry and hit the ex-Mrs. Perry (who was helping Jamie), bloodying her knee, and after they buried Duane in a deep grave, they jumped into Duane's truck to get away, only to realize that the keys were still in Duane's pocket.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (51) The careless burglar who makes his getaway on foot, oblivious to the footprints he's leaving in the snow or mud, usually leading to his own nearby home or car, as was the case for two men who stole a boy's tooth-fairy money in March from a home in Portage, Ind. (52) And the playing of dreadfully unpopular music on loudspeakers as a way of dispersing unruly young people from public places, as the city of Santa Cruz, Calif., did to clear loiterers on Pacific Avenue in January.

In April, the University of Minnesota Press published a treatise, "Harmful to Minors," whose thesis is that society should relax the restrictions on child-adult sex. Scotland introduced a systemwide experimental program in prisons giving methadone to inmates about to be released, to allow them to build up a tolerance so as not to overdose on heroin immediately upon hitting the street. In a divorce case set for court in June, the ex-wife of former Zambian president Frederick Chiluba is asking for more than $2.5 billion, equivalent to about three-fourths of the country's gross domestic product.

The government of driver-lax Iran reported that on one day in late March, 122 people died and 2,000 were injured in more than 900 different traffic accidents. Britain's Susie Stephens, 36, a world authority on pedestrian safety, who was speaking at a biking/walking conference, was accidentally run over by a tour bus and killed as she crossed the street near her hotel (St. Louis). A 12-year-old girl bloodied the male flasher who confronted her in a hotel elevator, by grabbing his zipper and yanking it up quickly (Virginia Beach, Va.). A Univest bank accepted for deposit two $100 bills chewed up and swallowed by the depositor's dog and recovered only when the dog answered nature's call (Hatfield, Pa.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)

-- University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, 39, has for 20 years worn computer components on his body for ongoing research and even calls himself a cyborg, and carries enough documentation that he had never (even after Sept. 11) caused problems with airport security. (He wears computerized glasses and headgear and an electronic body suit; is constantly connected to the Internet; can see behind him; and can "feel" items across a room.) However, on Feb. 18, officials at St. John's, Newfoundland, airport would not let him board for two days while searching and testing him and making background checks. When they OK'd him on Feb. 20, about $50,000 worth of his equipment had been broken, and he was bleeding from having his chest electrodes removed. Two weeks later, Mann filed a lawsuit against Air Canada and Canada's transportation authority.

-- As a longstanding part of his lecture on "assault and battery," University of Virginia torts professor Kenneth Abraham said he gently taps the shoulder of a student at random in his class to illustrate the principle that even negligible unwanted contact can be costly if the victim is uniquely vulnerable in ways that no one could have expected. Indeed, Abraham did not know that a student he tapped recently, Marta Sanchez, had been raped a while back and that the tap apparently triggered fear and stress. In March, Sanchez filed a $35,000 lawsuit against Abraham, claiming that the tap constituted assault and battery.

The Swiss Re reinsurance company told financial analysts in February that it would likely post its first yearly loss since 1866 unless a court agrees with it that the two Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center (18 minutes apart) were just one big event, thus saving it at least $3.5 billion. And the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in March that two widows can collect on their husbands' life insurance policies even though the men died while committing crimes (one while attempting murder; the other when cocaine-filled balloons burst in his stomach).

-- In March, Jefferson County, Colo., sheriff John Stone informed the Denver Rocky Mountain News (with which he has been feuding over allegedly covered-up evidence regarding the mass shootings at Columbine High School) that his e-mails and letters about the case might be released under the state's public-records law, but that he could not be sure unless the newspaper first paid the cost for gathering up his correspondence files so that his lawyers could inspect them. The sheriff's office calculated that the retrieval cost would be, at a minimum, $1,072,200.

-- Latest Unintended Consequences: A 2002 Oregon law makes owners of partly electric cars pay $15 more to register them than owners of gas-guzzlers pay to register theirs, in order to replace the gasoline taxes the environment-conscious motorists are saving by driving fuel-efficient cars. And Arizona state Rep. Linda Binder's proposed law would prohibit allowing unrestrained dogs to ride in the back of pickup trucks, although for the past 18 years, Arizona legislators have tried but failed to enact a similar provision for kids in the back of pickups.

-- Last Christmas season, to demonstrate "fertilization" of the earth, the Copia art emporium in Napa, Calif., exhibited 35 squatting, butt-baring figurines by Spanish artist Antoni Miralda (including nuns, angels, Santa Claus and the pope). A Copia spokesperson said placing such defecating statuettes in Nativity scenes is a traditional activity in the Catalonia region of Spain.

-- In March, the cat belonging to avant-garde British artist Tracey Emin ran away, prompting Emin to create fliers to nail up around the neighborhood asking for help finding it. When neighbors realized that the missing cat was Emin's, her posters began disappearing and were being offered on the street for as much as about $800. A spokesperson for East London's White Cube gallery, who is sometimes in the position of defending Emin from critics who deny that her work qualifies as "art" (Emin's most famous piece was a messy bed), told reporters that the poster was not art, even though the public might regard it as art.

-- New York artist Chrissy Conant, 39, will display 13 of her reproductive eggs, floating in silicone, at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Conn., in May, in an exhibit addressing the pressures that women feel when their biological clocks are ticking down. Conant said in an interview that, in fact, she was actively seeking a man: "Consider me for consumption and consider my eggs, because I think they're pretty good."

The U.S. Postal Service revealed in March that 10 men had already been convicted as part of an Internet group that exchanged videos of themselves administering beatings to children (often their own). One man wanted to join the club but lacked an authentic video to contribute and so made one of himself administering corporal punishment to a small mannequin. Among the group: a middle school teacher, a nurse, a former Boy Scout leader, and a former Sunday school teacher.

Carol Urness, recently retired University of Minnesota librarian, opened a used-book store in February in St. Anthony, Minn., consisting of about 1,000 books from her own collection, but told a Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter that often she refuses to sell a book on the shelf because she can't stand to part with it. "The first day, a woman walked in and bought three books," she said, "and I about had a stroke." "This bookstore is hard to find," she added, "and once you get here, it's almost impossible to buy anything."

Just a few weeks ago, News of the Weird reported on electricity salesman Dennis Lee, who is under order from attorneys general in seven states, but a more recent report by Las Vegas Weekly shed even more light on the scams, which have so far hooked more than 2,000 people. One of Lee's dealers, Conrad Sorensen of Henderson, Nev., told the newspaper that he purchased (for $20,000 in 1999) the right to sell Lee's free-energy inventions (e.g., silent jackhammers, oil-eating balls, cars that run on water) and to recruit fee-paying "witnesses," who would buy Lee's generators, get free electricity for life, and sell their excess wattage to nonwitnesses. Sorensen, who believes Lee's work is a sign from God, said confidently that the magic generators will finally be unveiled on July 4, 2002, but a Lee critic in Pennsylvania said Lee's people have been assigning, and missing, such deadlines for 15 years.

The letter in which Texas gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez thanked the Texas State Teachers Association for its endorsement contained run-on sentences, a dangling modifier, a subject-verb disagreement, and the word "gonernor." The Rhino Management Group in Africa criticized "green hunting" (hunting with tranquilizer guns) because of evidence that animals hit more than once are permanently damaged. A 27-year-old woman told reporters in January that when she called Camarillo, Calif., police on Saturday, Dec. 22, to report a sexual assault, she was told that the staff is limited on weekends and that she should call back Monday morning (and when she did that, detectives counseled her to report for a medical exam).

Thierry Meyssan's book "The Frightening Fraud" became a best seller in France with its thesis that the U.S. government staged the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Two people commandeered a Krispy Kreme truck with its back door open and led police on a chase that created a 15-mile-long trail of scattered doughnuts (Slidell, La.). A nursing home complained that the unionizing vote by its workers should be overturned since someone put a series of voodoo signs around the workplace, thus frightening the home's large Haitian-American work force (Miami). The annual April Fool's ice cream flavor this year at the Wahlburger restaurant was vanilla diced with hamburger sandwiches (bun, lettuce, meat); last year, french fries were used (Avon, N.Y.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.)