News of the Weird

Wheelchair-confined Richard Paey committed almost exactly the same violations of Florida prescription drug laws that radio personality Rush Limbaugh did, with a different result: Limbaugh's sentence, in May, was addiction treatment, and Paey's, in 2004, was 25 years in prison. Both illegally possessed large quantities of painkillers for personal use, which Paey defiantly argued was (and will be) necessary to relieve nearly constant pain from unsuccessful spinal surgeries after an auto accident, but which Limbaugh admitted was simply the result of addiction. (In fact, if Limbaugh complies with his plea bargain, his conviction will be erased.) Paey's sentence now rests with a state Court of Appeal.

-- (1) China, sensitive about the impression it will make on visitors to the 2008 Olympics, has undertaken a major campaign against open spitting, monitored by volunteer scolders who wear shirts that spell out "mucus" in Chinese and who hand out bags to spit in. (2) India's Rural Development Minister vowed in March that the country will eliminate open defecation by 2012, despite reports of toilet use in some states as low as 15 percent. The government gives homeowners toilet-installation grants.

-- For 30 years now, many residents of Frostburg, Md., have been puzzled, and annoyed, at the three-story-high, 400-foot-long metal- and-concrete frame that Pastor Richard Greene calls his modern Noah's Ark, at which he works off and on, awaiting Judgment Day. According to an April Pittsburgh Post-Gazette dispatch, Greene said the Arc came to him in visions during disturbing dreams in 1976. Some neighbors are patient, but others call the Ark an eyesore that depresses property values and wastes religious charity (since contributions to Greene have totaled $1 million).

-- Ewwwww! (1) Again this year, in April, Jim Werych of the Wednesday Night Classics car club in Brookfield, Wis., ritually dragged his tongue, in a deep lick, across Lisbon Road (with traffic stopped in both directions) to verify, and proclaim, that the streets are free of winter salt and thus safe for the club's delicate classics. (2) A March New York Times dispatch described recent successes in eradicating the grotesque "Nigerian worm," which afflicted 3 million Africans in 1986 but only 12,000 last year. The string-like worm, up to 3 feet in length, produces pools of acid in legs or feet (or eye sockets) and causes excruciating pain until expelled.

-- In April, William Bethel Jr. confessed to police during a traffic stop that the station wagon he was driving was mainly used for transporting corpses for his friend's mortuary service but that he was using it just then to deliver pizzas for Domino's of Feasterville, Pa. (Bethel quickly resigned.)

-- On the day after a federal jury in Virginia sentenced "20th (Sept. 11) hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui to life in prison without possibility of parole, a Florida jury in Orlando gave Carl Moore, 37, exactly the same sentence. The Virginia jury had concluded that Moussaoui could have prevented the deaths of nearly 3,000 people; the Florida jury found that Moore had fondled a 12-year-old girl, briefly, underneath her clothes on an elevator at a resort (his second such conviction).

An Illinois Appellate Court in April upheld a lower court ruling reversing Mongo the steer's disqualification for steroids after he had been chosen junior grand champion at the 2003 Illinois State Fair. Mongo had tested positive for the anti-inflammatory Banamine, for his sore foot, but the court declared the test improperly administered. It was a victory for Mongo's owner, Whitney Gray, but of utterly no benefit to Mongo, who shortly after the fair was slaughtered for steak.

(1) In February, children's book author Frank Feldmann, 35, trespassed to the top of the St. Augustine (Fla.) Lighthouse in the middle of the night, wearing a tiger suit, to decry child pornography on the Internet. However, his point was not immediately understood by police on the ground below because of communication problems posed by his voice-muffling tiger mask. (2) The residents of Steuben County in upstate New York, who attended a community rally in January to protest a planned clean-energy windmill farm, mostly criticized its unsightliness, but one opponent objected because windmill blades make whirring noises that to him resemble sounds of Nazi holocaust torture.

New York City raw-food restaurateur Dan Hoyt, 43, was sentenced to two years' probation in April for a highly publicized 2005 incident in which he indecently exposed himself on a subway train in front of a 22-year-old woman, who reacted by photographing him with her cell phone and displaying the shot on the Internet. In an April interview with New York magazine, Hoyt shrugged off the incident, calling his habit just another facet of a "pretty cool," thrill-seeking person. "I've met women who enjoy (being flashed)." Except for the subway incident, even his victim would "probably want to go out with me."

-- Short Attention Spans: Brian M. Williams, 21, was arrested for allegedly robbing Houchens Market in Glasgow, Ky., in April; police had found him minutes afterward across the street filling his gas tank. And Nathan Myles, 25, was sentenced in March to three years in prison for a lengthy, destructive police chase in Thunder Bay, Ontario; it ended when Myles stopped for a haircut. And Mario Caracoza, 26, was arrested for allegedly robbing a Bank of America in Bristol Township, Pa., in May; police had found him minutes afterward eating breakfast at the Sunrise Diner next door.

-- Wrong Place, Wrong Time: (1) Konoshin Kawabata, 48, was arrested in Osaka, Japan, in March for burglarizing a temple; he wandered through an unmarked door and was surprised by 20 sumo wrestlers, who were staying at the temple and who easily detained him. (2) Police in Melbourne, Australia, arrested a 34-year-old man for robbery in January after the victim (renowned illustrator Bill "Weg" Green) provided police with an unusually helpful drawing of the perp's face.

(1) People hit by "flying" cows (that fall out of livestock trailers on highways and overpasses), with the latest occurring near Seguin, Texas, in March, when a cow flew out onto Interstate 10, causing collisions of two police cars that soon caught on fire. (2) Patient, by-the-book, but useless police standoffs (in which cops implore residents for hours to surrender, eventually to learn that no one is home), with the latest being a suspected drug house futilely surrounded for seven hours by SWAT officers in Oklahoma City in April.

People who accidentally shot themselves recently: Clayton Teman, 23, Springfield, Ore., January (badly misfired while being chased by police). A 25-year-old man, Wichita, Kan., February (driving with loaded gun between his legs). Sheriff's deputy Jeff Hamric, Parkersburg, W.Va., March (during firearms practice at a gun range). An undercover Lauderhill, Fla., police officer, January (when a car bumped him on the street). A 15-year-old boy, North Brunswick, N.J., March (another "waistband as holster" accident). William Tyree, 33, Dacula, Ga., April (badly misfired while being chased by police). An unidentified man, Nacogdoches, Texas, February (shooting at an opossum). And in April, two men, a 23-year-old in Hopkinton, N.J., and an unidentified man in Grass Valley, Calif., fatally shot themselves while playing alcohol-induced games with their guns in front of friends.

CORRECTION: In last week's News of the Weird, I misstated that a young girl's defective heart was removed, in favor of an artificial one, and then re-started recently, after 10 years. Actually, the heart had remained inside her all along, but dormant.

The National Health Service office in Dundee, Scotland, has recommended toilet techniques for the estimated one-third of the population that suffers from bowel and bladder dysfunction, according to an April report in The Times of London. The pamphlet, "Good Defecation Dynamics," lists preferred breathing habits and describes the proper, upright, seated posture for effective elimination ("Keep your mouth open as you bulge and widen"), and encourages support for the feet, perhaps "a small footstool."

-- Earlier this year in separate incidents, two physical education teachers at Ernest Ward Middle School in Pensacola, Fla., were arrested and charged with bribery for allowing students to avoid gym classes by paying the teachers money. Tamara B. Tootle, 39, charged in April, allegedly gave students credits at $1 per student per class, and Terence Braxton, 28, arrested in February, pleaded guilty in May to a similar scheme, admitting to making at least $230.

-- More Side Businesses: (1) A highly publicized attraction of the Isdaan restaurant in Gerona, Philippines (according to a March Reuters dispatch) is its "wall of fury," against which diners can vent frustrations by smashing things (with fees ranging from the equivalent of 30 U.S. cents for a plate up to $25 for an old TV set). (2) In July, according to BBC News, British farmer David Lucas will be forced by European Commission rules to give up his lucrative sideline of building gallows for Zimbabwe and other governments that still employ hangings. Lucas' single gallows sells for the equivalent of $22,000, and the Multi-Hanging Execution System, mounted on a trailer, goes for about $185,000.

In April, noted surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub and a team at Ormond Hospital in London re-started and re-inserted the original heart of a 12-year-old girl after it had been in storage for 10 years while she lived with a donated heart. Because the donated heart was finally showing signs of rejection, Dr. Yacoub decided that the original, which was removed because of acute inflammation, might have repaired itself enough to work again.

(1) In Miami, actress-dancer Alice Alyce, 29, sued the owners and managers of the musical "Movin' Out" for $100 million in March after they fired her, allegedly because they believed her breasts are too large for her role. (2) Schoolteacher Sue Storer, 48, filed a lawsuit against the government in Bristol, England, in March, asking the equivalent of $1.9 million for having fired her when she complained of, among other things, never getting a replacement for her classroom chair, which she said emitted a "farting" noise every time she sat down.

-- Unclear on the Concept: (1) Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate (and football hall-of-famer) Lynn Swann, who says state taxes are too high, was revealed by the Allentown Morning Call in March to have been neglecting to collect legally required state sales tax from the Pennsylvania customers of his football memorabilia Web site. (2) Arizona gubernatorial candidate Mike Harris donated $100,000 of his own money to his campaign in April, six months after successfully begging a judge to cut his $2,000-per-month child-support payments in half (and conceding that he had not disclosed that he owed his ex-wife $44,000 more from a property sale). Harris said even paying $1,000 a month was "pretty darn generous" of him.

-- (1) Pasco County, Fla., candidate John Ubele, 28, a proud member of the white separatist National Alliance, said he's more concerned with runaway government expenses than with race as he campaigns for a seat on the county's Mosquito Control Board. (2) New York state Sen. David Paterson, running for lieutenant governor, said in March that he now regrets introducing unsuccessful legislation for 14 straight years (until 2001) to make it legal for suspects to physically resist police.

Women's handbag designers, uncertain about the effect of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana's alligator habitats, spent the winter searching for new supplies of hides, according to a March Wall Street Journal report. The fall gator harvest saw prices rise 50 percent from two years earlier, forcing Ralph Lauren, for example, to raise the price of its most prestigious alligator purse to $14,000, and hide prices were expected to rise another 50 percent this summer. (Alligator shoes, shirts and coats have also soared in price, and the alligator-paneled piano sold by Giorgio's of Palm Beach now costs $950,000.)

In April, Michael Theleman, 45, finding true love hard to come by in the isolated town of Bray, Okla. (pop. 1,035), posted a yard sign offering to pay $1,000 for help in finding a "virgin" bride between the ages of 12 and 24. Offended neighbors convinced him to take it down, but he replaced it with another, stating that his future wife must not be "pig-worshipping, heathen (or) white supremacist." Theleman said he couldn't understand the neighbors' furor, recalling that his grandmother was married at 14 to "a much older man."

(1) Salt Lake City high school student Travis Williams was bitten by a baby rattlesnake in May, even though a companion had warned him to avoid it. Said Williams, "(E)ven though she told me not to ... I picked it up anyway. I'm not too bright that way." (2) Chesterton, Ind., high school student Michael Morris was hospitalized in May with a broken leg and broken arm after being run into by a friend driving an Acura at about 25 mph, but it was consensual. The friend described Morris as an adrenaline junkie who had had the friend run over him before, but Morris told the Times of Northwest Indiana, "I won't do this no more."

News of the Weird reported in 2001 that a bulimic woman in Toyoda, Japan, had been caught illegally dumping about 60 pounds a week of her own vomit in remote locations and, in 2003, that another bulimic woman had been caught discarding similar quantities near Madison, Wis. (perhaps, say health professionals, to assist their denial process by keeping their own homes untainted). In April 2006, sheriff's deputies reported a similar spree, ironically near an Iowa town called Mount Pleasant, that has now totaled about 50 bags' worth over a three-year period, but at press time, the vomiter was still at large.

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Bruce Wayne Potts, 34 (DeSoto, Texas, February); Oral Wayne Nobles, 71 (arrested in Kingman, Ariz., on a Massachusetts warrant, April); Ronald Wayne Spencer Jr., 19 (Richardson, Texas, April). Arrested and suspected of murder: Darrell Wayne Lewis, 32 (Tempe, Ariz., March). Sentenced for murder: David Wayne Hickman (Dallas, May); Anthony Wayne Welch, 27 (Viera, Fla., March). Committed suicide while serving life in prison for murder: John Wayne Glover, 72 (Sydney, Australia, September 2005).

More than 90 people were killed while observing their religion in three incidents in April. A stampede by thousands of women at a religious gathering in downtown Karachi, Pakistan, resulted in 29 deaths; a packed bus speeding home from a religious festival went out of control and plunged into a ravine near Orizaba, Mexico, killing 57; and a few days later in Santa Maria del Rio, Mexico, five were killed by lightning, which struck the large metal cross before which they were praying.

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)

Just after classes let out at Callaway High School in Jackson, Miss., on April 28, Mayor Frank Melton, riding down Interstate 220 with his police escort, motioned to the drivers of four school buses to pull off the road so that Melton could board the buses and shake hands with and hug the students, apparently just because, as he later told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, recent weeks had been "stressful." Melton told the newspaper that he's just "passionate" about kids and education. "I didn't do anything stupid or illegal," he said, but a state education official said that it was improper to interfere with the operation of a school bus except in an emergency.

-- Stacy Steel, 38, the former executive director of the Humane Society in Oceanside, Calif., was arrested in April and charged with fraud for using the organization's authority to buy 3,600 Vicodin tablets (a prescription pain-reliever), which she said were for her dog.

-- Not My Fault: (1) Ms. Tyler Bauer, 18, sued TGI Friday's in Frederick, Md., in March, asking $200,000 for serious facial injuries from falling out of a moving pickup truck. Bauer, who registered a .238 blood-alcohol reading, was given beer and liquor by an adult patron of TGI Friday's and claims the restaurant should have found out and stopped him. (2) In March, a jury in St. Louis awarded Gretchen Porro $100,000 for the loss of two fingers at the City Museum's Puking Pig attraction. Although the exhibit was closed, Porro nonetheless crossed a railing and stuck her hand inside the machinery to get it to release a vat full of water. (The jury valued the injury at $500,000 but said Porro was 80 percent at fault.)

-- Yes, My Fault: Michelle Srun, 34, testifying for leniency for her accused-rapist husband in a Montgomery County, Md., court in March, said she must be partly responsible for his attacks on several underage girls, in that she belittled and abused him for years with her overbearing personality and had multiple affairs during their marriage (six simultaneously during one stretch). (Unimpressed, the judge gave Mr. Pov Srun 27 years.)

-- Simon Hamilton, 35, admitted in Canterbury (England) Crown Court in April that he took furtive "upskirt" photos of women standing in public places and even acknowledged having an extensive collection, but he denied that the pictures gave him sexual gratification. Rather, he said, he was merely a habitual collector of things and spent his time cataloguing the photos rather than looking at them. "It was the sort of gratification of a job well done," he explained, telling the judge that he came from a long family line of collectors. (Besides, Hamilton said, his upskirt days ended around 2001, when he decided to re-enter the practice of law and realized that upskirt photography was "no longer ... appropriate." (At press time, no verdict had been reported.)

Outsized Payoffs: (1) The family of an 8-year-old boy in Espanola, N.M., won an award of $221,000 in April, payment for a bad half-hour experience for the boy when he was improperly booked, outfitted in an orange jumpsuit, and jailed after throwing a tantrum in his principal's office. (2) In March, a 10-year-old boy in Torquay, England, was awarded the equivalent of almost $2,800 following his expulsion from school for selling marijuana. The local government agreed that his school had acted too slowly in fulfilling its duty to find the expelled boy alternate schooling.

-- In April, Rudy Rios, the junior varsity baseball coach at Chavez High School in Houston, was fired from that job after the principal learned that he encouraged students to skip school to attend protests over U.S. immigration policy. Reportedly, Rios was not fired, however, from his other Chavez High job, which is as teacher of English as a foreign language, even though Rios wrote, on an immigration-protest flier: "We gots 2 stay together and protest against the new law that wants 2 be passed against all immigrants. We gots 2 show the U.S. that they aint (expletive deleted by the Houston Chronicle) with out (sic) us."

-- Instructions from Britain's Home Office to local police departments in April introduced a "Gravity Factor Matrix" to prescribe significantly lesser punishments for a wide range of crimes, including such serious ones as attempted murder, arson and sex with underage girls. According to the matrix, suspects who confess and who have no prior offenses may, at police discretion, have the crime registered on their record but receive only a "caution" that does not require a court appearance or further punishment. Only the most heinous crimes require detention in all cases. The Labour government's political opponents were livid, accusing the government of taking its "anti-prison bias" too far.

Adventures With Cash Registers: (1) The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, reporting in March on recidivist-robber Eugene Rutledge, 21, found that employees at one Taco Bell were so accustomed to Rutledge's robbing them that as soon as he appeared at the door, they would ritually open the cash register for him. (2) In Denver in April, a man tried to rob a Walgreen's drugstore, but a clerk resisted and, during a scuffle, grabbed the first thing at his disposal to throw at the man, and it happened to be the store's cash drawer. The robber eagerly gathered up the loose money, fled, and according to police is still at large.

Police in the Ibaraki prefecture north of Tokyo arrested a 70-year-old man in April after the manager of a 7-Eleven reported that the man had menaced him with a chainsaw. The would-be customer apparently came to the store every day only to read from various magazines for sale, and after several hours, the manager finally ordered him to leave. The man returned a short time later with the chainsaw, cranked it up, and shouted, "I'll cut you to pieces." He then laid it down and resumed reading and was still reading when police arrived.

At least one judge in recent years accepted the defense of mistaken sexual intercourse when a man enters a dark bedroom and initiates sex with a woman he believes is his sexual partner, only to discover that it is another resident of the home. In a recent case, Paul Chappell, 31, raised the defense at his trial in Sydney, Australia, claiming that he (reportedly intoxicated) erroneously stumbled into bed with his new girlfriend's female housemate. Since the housemate's boyfriend was elsewhere in the house, she assumed that the boyfriend had decided to come to bed and that it was he having sex with her. At press time, the trial had not concluded.

A female guard at a New York state juvenile detention center was raped, beaten and kidnapped at knifepoint in 2004 by one of the inmates, who escaped with the guard in a car and remained at large until he was recaptured six hours later, but when the guard applied for union insurance payments, she was informed that the contract paid kidnapping benefits only for incidents of at least eight hours' duration. According to a March Albany Times Union story, she received worker compensation and about $10,000 in other benefits, but if she had remained captive for two more hours, she would have received between $40,000 and $100,000 more.

(1) A three-year study at the PET Center at Arhus Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, reported in March, affirmed that the designer drug Ecstasy can cause depression in pigs. (2) Drawing heavy fire from critics in March was a Cdn$150,000 (US$135,000) grant from the Ontario government to researchers at Laurentian University, for the purpose of studying the sex drives of squirrels (to assess how wildlife adapt to the environment).

(Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at http://NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, FL 33679.)