Eugene "Butch" Flenough, Jr., was arrested in Austin, Texas for robbery of
a pizza restaurant after employees identified him.  To hide his face during
the robbery, Flenough wore a motorcycle helmet, which had "Butch" and
"Eugene Flenough, Jr." written on it.

Stan Fox, who finished last in the 1990 Indianapolis 500 after traveling
only ten laps before a gear box problem forced him out of the race, 
nonetheless earned $108,000.

When the Army tested a new air defense gun called the Sergeant York, 
which was designed to home in on the whirling blades of helicopters 
and propeller-driven aircraft, it ignored the chopper targets.  
Instead, the weapon demolished a ventilating fan on a nearby latrine.

In Oslo, Norway, Jermund Skogstad, fifty, was moving into his new apartment
when he took a break to get something to eat.  He went to a nearby cafe but
forgot to take his wallet, which contained his new address.  He was unable to
find his way home.  "This is embarrassing," he told a newspaper a month
later, hoping word of his plight would reach his new landlady, whom he had
paid a month's rent in advance.

Scientists at the University of California - Irvine believe they have
disproved the theory that limbless animals use less energy than do 
legged animals.  Biologist Bruce Jayne and crew monitored the movements
of snakes slithering on treadmills while wearing tiny oxygen masks.

The New York State Lottery had to suspend play on the number 3569 before
noon on December 27, 1989, because it had been played by too many people.
Thiswas the number of the license plate (VR3569) on the truck New York
Yankees manager Billy Martin was killed in days earlier.

The government of China executed twelve male and six female factory
managers by firing squad at a refrigerator plant just outside Beijing in 
1989 because the poor quality of their products constituted "unpardonable
crimes against the people of China."  Customers had complained for years
about having to wait for refrigerators that were usually unusable when
delivered.

Happy Perhelion!  At 3:00 pm today (January 3rd). the Earth is at its
closest approach to the Sun for the entire orbit.  One week from today,
the 10th, is the date of perigee for the Moon.

In Duluth Minnesota, carpenter Lanace Grangruth accidentally shot a nail an 
inch and a half into his head from his nail gun, tacking his cap to his head.
Said Grangruth, "I didn't actually feel it go in.  I tried to take my had off,
and it wouldn't come off."  The nail penetrataed relatively harmlessly at a
crevasse between the two lobes.

Darrel Brown, 53, was convicted of defrauding the Veterans Administration of
more than $700,000 by feigning paralysis for more than twenty years.  He had
been faithfully reporting to VA facilities during that time in a wheelchair
after having bound his arms and legs tightly for days before visits so they
would temporarily atrophy.

Shirley Koota, 62, of Miami, accompanied her husband Bert, 65, to a pistol 
range to learn how to use ther new .22 automatic.  During the lesson, she
squeezed off a round, and the hot cartridge, ejected by the pistol, flew
down the front of her dress.  It startled her so badly that she whirled
around and shot Bert in the leg.

Derrick Johnson, 28, who allegedly stole food over a period of three
months from a Kansas City gas station cooler while yelling "Catch me
if you think you can," was shot and killed by a station clerk.

Two men, aged 16 and 18, after an attempted burglary in Larkspur, CA, in
1989, scaled a chain-link fense outside town to evade police who were
following them, only to discover later that the fence was the outer 
perimiter of San Quentin Prison, where guards soon arrested them.

Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, says he experienced a vision
in which a UFO took him from a Mexico mountaintop to a "mother wheel" where
the voice of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the religious sect, told him to tell
the world that then-President Ronald Reagan was planning a war.  Farrakhan
said that the later air attack on Libya was partly foiled by the Mother Wheel.
"The Wheel was, in fact, present and interfered with the highly sensitive
electronic equipment of the aircraft carrier, forcint it to return to Florida
for repairs."
 
1990 New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Pierre Rinfret had some
difficulty establishing voter name recognition.  A New York Times informal
survey of voters identified Pierre Rinfret as an artist, a perfume, a drug
dealer, a movie star, a fashion designer, a chef, the French ambassador to
the United States, and a goalie for the New York Rangers.
 
Chef Albert Grabham of the New House Hotel in Wales hid the restaurant's
New Year's Eve earnings in the oven.  He failed to remember that when he 
lit the same oven to prepare New Year's Day lunch.

A transient unable to leave a tip for a waitress at a Salt Lake City
restaurant told her, "I'm going to go rob a bank and I'll be right back."
Police arrested him after he walked out of the First Interstate Bank with
$1200 and walked back across the street to leave a $2 tip.

Eighteen-year-old Ronald Kramer of East Wenatchee, Washington, was arrested
along with three friends after they got drunk, dug up a body in a cemetary,
and took it to the home of a friend in the middle of the night as a joke.
The body was at least seventy years old.

Two inmates at the Logan County, Utah, jail were charged with various crimes
in 1990 after having made their third foray of the evening from the jail
(this time to set a fire in the sheriff's evidence room).  They first escaped
through a crawl hole to get beer from the wife of one of the three, then 
returned to jail.  A few minutes later, they left to steal weapons and get
more beer, then returned.  After their third adventure, an officer noticed
empty beer cans outside the office door.

Missouri liquor officials cited Mike Tomlin, owner of Whispers nightclub
in Columbia, for sending letters to University of Missouri fraternities
advertising his club as the place to find "drunk, horny women."

A study of ovine sexuality by University of California at Davis graduate
student Anne Perkins noted the difficulty of determining if lesbianism exists
among sheep "because if you are a female sheep, what you do to solicit sex
is stand still.  Maybe there is a female sheep out there really wanting
another female, but there's just no way for us to know it."

A New Jersey appeals court refused to block a lawsuit filed by Vincent
Vecere against Trump Castle Hotel and Casion for negligence.  Vecere said
the hotel was responsible when he swung his hand back (while shaking dice)
and hit a post on the craps table.

New Jersey state police say that a man may have been hit by as many as 
twenty-one cars on the Garden State Parkway on the night of September 24,
1990.  A man who pulled off the road to help "continually heard thumps that
he believed to be the body being hit again and again," said police.

According to a 1989 interview, the villagers of Turalei, Sudan, have no idea
of just how successful former villager (and now professional basketball
player) Manute Bol has become.  "If Manute is still alive, tell him his wife
has married another man and most of his cattle were stolen..."  said his
uncle.  "If he has no cows, and he wants to marry an American wife, we can
get the cows together for him," said the deputy chief of the village.  "Just
let us know how many cows the woman's family demands."

David Ashley, charged with raising poultry without a permit, appeared in
court in Seneca Falls, New York, with a rooster tucked under his arm.
When the village justice Gordon Tetor ordered the bird removed, Ashley
told the judge that the bird was his attorney, explaining "it was the 
only counsel I could afford."
 
Portsmouth, Rhode Island, police charged Gregory Rosa, 25, with a string of
vending machine robberies after he inexplicably fled from police when they
spotted him loitering around a vending machine.  Police were pretty sure 
they had their man when Rosa later tried to post bail using $400 in coins.

Retired Brig Genl Alfredo Lim, Director of the National Bureau of Investi-
gation, was assigned by Pres. Corazon Aquino to investigate charges of
fixing the Philippines state lottery's Sept 1, 1990 drawing.  At the Sept.
16 drawing, which was specially televised in hopes of restoring public
confidence in the game, Lim stepped forward with the winning ticket to 
collect the $200,000 top prize.

The New England Journal of Medicine warned that communion wafers often used
in Catholic and Anglican services might be hazardous.  The report noted
that the wafers are made from wheat flour containing gluten and other
substances that can prompt an attack of a digestive disorder that prevents
the absorption of nutrients and causes a variety of symptoms.

Deacons of the Greek Orthodox Church in Athens demanded a 15 percent pay
raise in 1985 to compensate them for having to inhale incense smoke
during services.  They complained it was as bad as cigarette smoke.

Floyd Ullie, Seventy-two, king of the fourth Irregular Prune Parade in
El Monte, California, failed to appear at the event after he became ill
from eating too many prunes.

Adelheid Streidel, 42, said she stabbed German political figure Oskar 
Lafontaine to get the press to report that "there are people factories 
and underground operating theaters in Europe where people from the 
population are remolded physically and mentally.  This takes place with 
the approval of politicians."

Arthur Valdez was found guilty of attempted escape from California's
Vacaville prison despite his claims that he was only following 
instructions from "Domies from the planet Corpus" and had actually
"left his body" at the time.

David Lusco, 42, was ordered to jail after his arrest for kidnapping near
Moscow, Idaho.  Allegedly, he had imprisoned his wife in their pickup truck,
forced her to join him in disrobing, and driven off on a reckless rampage.
When she escaped and donned a passerby's coat, he chased her while wearing
only a hat.

Father Eladio Blanco, 49, refused to accompany a funeral procession from
his church in Pexieros-Os, Spain, to a cemetery, saying "She (the deceased)
has no right to a proper burial because she almost never came to Mass."
When the crowd of three hundred mourners insisted, Blanco drew a pistol and
fired four shots, wounding one mourner.

Thirteen minutes after being pronounced dead, George Barr, 82, started
breathing again.  He was released from a Ridgewood, New Jersey, hospital
several weeks later and intended to continue working on a series of
science books for children.

Taiwan's justice ministry proposed that condemned prisoners who agreed to
donate organs after death be spared the traditional execution (being placed
face down in a sandpit and shot through the heart).  Instead, they could 
elect to be executed by a bullet in the head.

Ben Masel's campaign posters for the Illinois Republican gubernatorial
nomination featured Masel nude with the slogan "Nothing to Hide."

Brian Peterson, thirty-five, of New Britain, Connecticut, died after a 
woman sat on his lap while he was seated on top of a glass table.  The 
glass cracked, with one piece nearly severing one of his arms.

Darius McCollum, twenty-five, of Queens, admitted stealing thirteen buses
from Transit Authority depots in one year.  Described by New York police
as a "bus buff," McCollum was wearing an actual bus driver's uniform
when he was caught.

Late in July of 1989 a kitten with eight legs and two tails was born in the
village of Machala in Ecuador.  Rejected by its mother, it died within
hours.  The devout Catholic population there saw it as a bad sign.  "We are
nearing the end of the world because people are so decadent," said one.

When Jimmie Pettit entered Miami's Channel 4 studios claiming that he had a
bomb, the building was evacuated.  On further inquiry it was understood that
Pettid claimed that the CIA had surgically implanted a bomb in his brain 25 
years before, and he was asking for help.  He later said that the bomb had
moved to his rectum.

A group of boys played a game of soccer on a South Bronx streed with a human
head wrapped in rags before the father of one of the boys realized what their
"ball" really was.  They had found it in a box of trash.  Police found
dismembered arems and legs nearby, but no torso.

Julia Schumansky, 64, of Hartsville, Tennesee, underwent surgery for a tumor
in her left buttock.  Instead of a tumor, doctors found a 4-inch pork chop
bone, which they estimated had been there between 5 and 10 years.  describing
herself as "overweight," she speculates she must have unknowingly sat on the
bone, and that the skin grew around it.
 
Dr. Janis Ashley told a Sedalia, Missouri, newspaper in 1989 that she would
shortly have a sex-change operation so that she could find a wife and raise
a family.  She had been a woman for eleven years, following her first sex
change.
 
A man in his twenties from Tasmania jumped into the ape enclosure at the
Melbourne Zoo screaming "I've come to kill a gorilla!"  He then kicked
and punched a 220-pound primate before zoo officials locked him in a cage.

New York City police arrested three men in the shooting death of a cocaine
dealer, including Domingo Osario, twenty-two, whom they accused of driving
the getaway car.  Mr. Osariao has no arms.

Washington State Senator Jim West proposed in 1989 to make it illegal for 
couples under eighteen to engage in "heavy petting," but the bill was
killed in committee the next year.

To settle a lawsuit involving a man who died in a construction accident in
Houston, his relatives agreed to forgo thier claim of $50,000 from one of 
the defendents, Derr Construction Company, if Derr's lawyer would allow each
of them to punch him in the face.

A guest at a party in Kincaid, West Virginia, was trying to explode a
blasting cap, hooked to a battery, in an aquarium.  When it wouldn't go off,
another guest, Jerry Stromyer, 24, said he would demonstrate how to do it.
He put the blasting cap in his mouth and bit down, blowing out all his teeth
and extensively injuring his tounge and lips.

A fist-fight broke out when sixty traditionalist Roman Catholics tried to
take over the main altar at Saint Maclou Cathedral near Paris so that they
could celebrate the mass in Latin.  The brawl lasted over an hour until a 
priest agreed to move to a side chapel for his Latin service.
 
Bill R. Clark, sixty-one, of Jonesboro, Arkansas, was issued a patent for
his invention that embosses numbers on the heels of socks to help identify
them when they come out of the dryer, saving the owner the time needed to 
match them up.

Marc Adams, a senior fine arts student at San Jose State University, was
detained by police for indecent exposure after donning a homemade clear
vinyl suit and mask over his nude body and lying down on a table in front
of the university's fine art building.  Adams entitled his work Kinetic
Composition on a Cube.

Police in Kassel, West Germany, checking a car abandoned after an accident,
found its windshield washer bottle full of schnapps and a tube leading to
the dashboard.  When police tracked down the driver, he admitted that he had
been taking swigs of the liquor from the tube before the crash.

After having been struck by a hit-and-run driver along I-5 near San Diego, 
Juan Francisco Camacho spent four days on the median strip signaling for help 
as a half-million cars passed him.  During the next few days, Camacho, in 
great pain and often delirious, sat up and even managed to stand in full 
view of people at nearby businesses.

During his trial for the attempted assination of Pope John Paul II, Mehmet
Ali Agca claimed that he was Christ, and warned that "in this generation,
the days are counted," and said that his attack on the Pope was linked to
the third "Fatima Secret," which he demanded be revealed.

A woman in India agreed to grant her husband a divorce in order to marry
another woman on condition that he first submit to a public beating
administered by her.  He agreed and the court allowed it.

William Curry, 30, of Boston, died of a heart attack two weeks after winning
$3.6 million in the Massachusetts Megabucks Lottery.  "It was the stress of
it that killed him," said a relative.  Curry was reportedly hounded by 
accountants, financial advisors, and requests for cash in the days after his
win.

A group of Baltimore teenagers held a contest during the annual March of
Dimes walkathon in which the one who landed the best punch on one of the
charity walkers would receive a cardboard replica of a prizefighter's
championship belt.  The group was linked to eleven attacks on walkers.

After Phoebe Schneider of Carteret, New Jersey, sued her husband Eugene
for divorce in 1976, she filed a second suit charging that he went too
far in dividing their property equally.  She alleged that he used a 
chain saw to cut their home in half, rendering it uninhabitable.

Alcide Chaisson, 69, was arrested after allegedly standing near the
Crystalaire Airport northeast of Los Angeles and using a four-foot square
mirror to attempt to reflect the sun into the eyes of pilots landing planes
there.  Chaisson claims that the planes drown out the radio in his trailer
nearby.

Two women giving birth in the Philippine village of Lutayan during a
firefight between government troops and Muslim rebels named their
baby boys Bazooka and Armalite.

Police in Granada Hills CA arrested five Los Angeles housewives, members of
a bowling league, who were betting a couple of dollars a week in their
matches.  Police learned of the bets through a tip from a disgruntled 
former league member, and two vice squad officers staked out the bowling
alley for two hours, watching $8 change hands.

Michael Lane, 28, of Providence RI was arrested for driving his car
through the front doors of St. Joseph Hospital and plowing into the
information desk in the lobby, apparently to get immediate attention
for two passengers who had been stabbed.

District Judge Brigita Volopichova, 27, of Pizen, Czechoslovakia, was
disciplined by legal authorities for bringing "disgrace" to judges by
entering a televised "Miss Topless" event.  She came in second.

When actor Corey Feldman was asked for an explanation after being 
arrested for cocaine possession, he said he had to take it in order
to get over the news that his girlfriend was dating actors Charlie
Sheen and Corey Haim.

Charles W. Doak, owner of the Wilson Candy Company in Rocky Mount,
North Carolina, was killed during a robbery after being hit on the
head several times by a nine-pound, two-and-a-half-foot candy cane.
 
Jerry Lee Dunbar pled guilty to the strangling of a woman in an Alexandria,
Virginia motel.  He hid her body under the floor of the motel room.  In a
pretrial conversation with a psychiatrist, Dunbar said that he is often
surrounded by little people who glow in the dark and that he hears voices
which give him violent instructions.

After adding another "z" to his name, Zeke Zzzyzus (formerly Zzyzus)
retained his place as the last name in the Montreal telephone
directory.  Zzzyzus beat Zzyzyx, Pol Zzyzzo, and Zzzap Distribution
for last place.

The largest living species of kangaroo has a head the size of a sheep's and
may stand 7 feet tall.  An extinct species reached a height of more than 10
feet.  There are miniature kangaroos, such as the musk knagaroo, that are
no bigger than a jackrabbit.

Police in Washington state labeled Christian Agar's death "suspicious"
when the 25-year-old Seattle man's body was found completely wrapped in
duct tape near U. S. Highway 101.  His body was detected after the 
"mummy shaped object" was x-rayed.

After being arrested for shoplifting at least once a month from May 1979
through May 1983, and having been convicted 37 times, LePonds Shaffer,
thirty, told a Chicago courtroom that doctors had implanted a radio
transmitter in his neck by which they distorted his ability to
distinguish right from wrong.

China gave commemorative gold watches to the soldiers who participated in
crushing the 1989 democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.  The watch face
features a soldier on sentry duty, while an inscription says "Commemoration
of the June 1989 Crackdown."

In Massachusetts, the Pittsfield School Committee announced that studends
could fulfill their physical education requirement by reading pamphlets
about exercise.

In Seattle, George Furedi, thirty-seven, was charged with driving his car
up the steps of a Mormon church and through the door.  He explained that
the church's public address system kept him awake at night.

The Los Angeles city attorney accused Daniel Ramos, eighteen, of painting
the word "Chaka" on ten thousand sites in Southern California, from 
utility poles to buildings, walls, and traffic signs, causing an
estimated $500,000 in damages.

Adolph Daxboeck, twenty-three, was taking part in a contest in Burnaby,
British Columbia, to see how far a Ping-Pong ball could be blown.  He
inhaled by mistake, and the ball lodged in his throat, choking him to death.

Mafia gangsters suffer worse stress than top business executives, according
to Dr. Granesco Aragora.  The Sicilian pathologist, who spent more than 40
years studying Mafiosi remains, conlcuded that gangsters tend to have 
"thickened arteries, kidney failure, stomach ulcers," and livers that are
"yellowish, fatty, and chronically short of glucose."

Amazonino Mendes, governor of Brazil's Amazonas State, announced that he
was fulfilling a campaign promise when he offered to distribute free
power saws to settlers in the Amazon rain forest region.  The saws cut
down trees ten times faster than axes.

Rather than make any statements, Hakic Ceku appeared in a Spanish court
room with his lips sewn shut.  The man, accused of firearms violations
and being part of an armed gang, then attacked his lawer with a glass
ashtray.

A man tried to stick up a cafe in Montpelier, France, with a candy
revolver, but the owner saw it was a fake and called the police.
by the time they arrived, the man had eaten the weapon.

Convicted murderer Thomes Marston argued in his appeal that conflicts of
interest were responsible for his 1985 conviction in Mendocino county, CA.
First, he submitted evidence that his attorney had fathered the child of the
then-district attorney, who was allegedly hassling the father for support
at the time of the trial.  Then a witness informed the appeals court that
the mother had told her that the real father was not the lawyer, but the 
judge in the case.
 
The Nazi Bar in Bankok, Thiland, adorned with photos of Nazi storm troopers
and caricatures of Hitler, changed it's name in 1988 after complaints by
foreigners.  "We don't want to offend even a few people, so we're
experimenting with a new, neutral name and decor," said manager Aor
Sarayuk of the renamend "No Name" bar.

In Chippewa Falls, WI, Thomas L. Weber announced that financial problems had
forced him to close the office that was the center for a project to raise
$25 million to build a reception station for visitors from outer space.  His
plan called for the station to provide a safe landing area for aliens.  Weber
had counted on a groundswell of financial support and said he did get "tens
of thousands of letters."  Most of the letters contained no money, however,
just requests for more information, for which Weber couldn't afford the 
postage to answer.

Harold Womack's Porsche got stuck in a cinder pit at the Sunset Crater
National Monument, and the Phoenix area man thought he could get out by
using a steamroller he spotted nearby.  Womack drove the steamroller over
to his car and hopped off to attach a chain, but the machine kept rolling
and flattened Womack's car.

Suspending Kenneth Worles's driver's license after his sixth arrest for
driving under the influence didn't keep the Naples, Florida, man off the
road.  Police arrested him again for drunken driving when he ran a red
light at a busy intersection while riding his 10-HP lawn mower.

When a communist party paper in China hailed Wang Zaoming in 1985 for
successfully breeding a new flower, people either wrote her asking for
seeds, saplings, or outright cash, or else they dropped by her home in
person.  She finally collapsed from the strain of cooking an average of
seven dinners daily for visitors, who also walked off with six hundred
pots of flowers.

Anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution were able to reconstruct
the face of a male skeleton found wearing a woman's dress and stuffed
into the chimney of the Good 'N Loud Music store in Madison, Wisconsin,
in l989.  Police believe the man was killed elsewhere and hidden in
the chimney.

Officials at the Hall Prison outside Stockholm reported the escape
of a skinny inmate who saved all the margarine from his meals until
he had enough to cover himself and squeeze through the bars.

Stanford University researchers ended a longstanding debate among owl
specialists as to which sense owls rely on most to detect food at night.
In a journal article, they concluded "sight" to be most important
after conducting an experiment in which owls were fitted with eyeglasses.

Diane Montiero, a Greyhound bus passenger, took over the wheel for a trip
from Delaware to New York after the replacement driver admitted that he
didn't know how to drive a manual transmission.

Former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu once responded to critical
anonymous letters written by Romanians to Radio Free Europe by ordering
that handwriting samples be taken from the entire population of more
than 20 million.

In 1984, Walter DeBow won a judgment for $3.4 million in damages against the
city of East Saint Louis, Illinois, for a wrongful beating he suffered while
in city jail, but he was unable to collect, as the city had been bankrupt.
In 1990, as compensation, DeBow was given title to the city's main municipal
building and its 220-acre industrial park.

In a price war on bananas between Twin Valu and Food 4 Less in Cuyahoga
Falls, Ohio, which started at 50 cents per pound, the competitors
repeatedly lowered the prices until Twin Valu began giving bananas
away for free.  Food 4 Less then matched that price but began taping
pennies to each bunch.

The Philippine Broadcasters' Association fined station ABS-CBN $11,600
for a l988 incident in which it sandwiched the 91-second-long
Mike Tyson-Michael Spinks boxing match with one hour of commercials.

A group of five boys in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida, spent four days
rescuing a kitten from a drainage pipe, finally capturing it by
lowering fish tied onto a badminton net.  The boys named the kitten
Baby Jessica Too.

Firefighters in San Jose, California, had to chisel three-year-old
Jennifer Camilleri's foot free from the toilet.  Jennifer had been
standing on the toilet to wash a toy pony in the sink when she slipped
and got stuck.  Two years earlier Jennifer was almost strangled when her
sweater caught on a fence after she climbed a wood pile to reach over
a fence and pet a neighbor's dog.

The wife of Brunswick, Georgia, handyman-inventor Teddie Eli Smith, involved
in a custody dispute with him over their four-year-old daughter, said that
the child was conceived with a homemade artificial inseminator Smith rigged
up with a bulb syringe and hair spray container.  She further said that the
device had been stocked with the sperm of Smith's seventeen-year-old son by
a previous marriage.  Smith's daughter would thus be his granddaughter,
and his current wife could be called his first wife's daughter-in-law.

St. Paul, MN, bank president Michael Brennan filed a $50,000 lawsuit
against the city and a construction company for a mishap in his bank's
restroom.  The construction company had shut off a sewer line without
notifying the bank, and when Brennan flushed, he was suddenly washed
out with "200 to 300 gallons" of raw sewage.  The company offered
only to buy him a new suit.

The Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Massachusetts was shut down for five
days during 1986 at a cost of $250,000 because of workers' horseplay.
Workers had rolled up a pair of gloves and taped them tightly to simulate
a ball, which had been lost during a game because of an overthrow into a
backup safety tank.

Hijackings and crashes aren't the biggest risks airline passengers face,
according to a 1989 British study.  Food poisoning is.  Nearly 25 percent
of all airline meals inspected contained ten times permitted bacteria
levels.  The study acknowledged that, although food poisoning already
is the top cause of pilot illness, fewer than thirty outbreaks of
airline food poisoning have been reported in the past 25 years, but
insisted that such incidents are grossly underreported.

Grant Oliver, 25, was arrested in Torquay, England, in 1989 when police
spotted him punching and yelling at someone on the street.  On closer
inspection, police discovered the victim was a blow-up doll but jailed
Oliver anyway for disturbing the peace.

A Dallas couple, Charlie and Sharon Reed, were happy enough when the police
called to say their stolen car had been found.  After they saw it, they
were even happier.  When it had been stolen 3 months earlier, the banana-
yellow 1976 Volkswagen convertible had a cracked windshield and a smashed
rear end.  When the Reeds picked up the car, it had new bumpers, new
fenders, a new paint job, and a new windshield. It even had a full tank
of gas.  "I think the thieves aligned the front end, too," Charlie Reed said.

A feature of a 1985 soviet trade show was an "exhibition of shame and
disgrace," designed to embarrass producers of defective merchandise.
A prime example was a large shipment of women's boots with high heels
--attached to the toe.

In Renton, Washington, Tanna Barney, 24, concerned that her husband Marc
was overdue on a long motorcycle trip, went looking for him in the family
car.  According to state police, as she rounded a curve she hit him head-on
and killed him.

Jeffrey Allen Hayes, 32, pleaded guilty to strangling Shannon Fay Stevens
in West Seattle, Washington, explaining he mistook her for his ex-girlfriend,
Barbara Dodge.

Seven-year-old Jason Riche drove himself to school in a 1980 Buick
belonging to his mother's boyfriend after complaining that it was
raining outside.  Minutes after telling him to go back outside and
wait for the bus, Jason's mother saw him driving away.  Jason drove
the five-kilometer distance to his Ontario school without incident.

A San Francisco woman was awarded $350,000 by a jury against the city for
injuries sustained when she fell in a public park.  She had been drinking,
took a taxi home, and got the driver to stop en route so she could answer
a call of nature in a clump of bushes at the edge of the park.  She lost
her balance, tumbled down a hill that was obscured by bushes, and
suffered major injuries.

Jennifer Connor, 18, a New York woman with a high hairdo, was diagnosed in
1989 with hearing loss and a "serious" ear infection.  Her physician said
her ears were clogged with hair spray.

A Cairo newspaper reported that Mohammed El Mahdi Essa, 38, was arrested
in a sting operation for selling his son, 3, to raise $700 to buy a
videocassette recorder.  Essa told police he was forced to do it because
of his honesty.  Said he, "I have never stolen in my life."

Canadian tourists Eric Plourde, 19, and Patrick Chartrand, 20, who had
driven from California to New York, stopped their car in the Bensonhurst
section of Brooklyn when they saw a woman in her mid-eighties sprawled
on the sidewalk, calling for help.  After they got out to assist her,
they were attacked by a group of ten to twelve teenagers wielding bats
and pipes who police said apparently thought the Canadians wer mugging
the woman.

An Alaskan Airlines Boeing 737 was struck by a fish on takeoff from the
Juneau, Alaska, airport in March 1987, causing a delay during which the
plane was inspected for damage.  The fish had been dropped by a bald
eagle.

A 17 year old pine tree in the Chinese village of Xinfu, which attracted
forty thousand people with stories of the miraculous healing power of
the water raining down from its leaves, was found actually to be dripping
with the urine of millions of insects.

Postal carrier John Cade was placed on five years' probation for having
hoarded three tons of undelivered mail in his home, much of it buried
in the backyard, for three years.  Cade said he started hiding leftover
mail at home so his superiors wouldn't think he was inadequate at the
job, then saw things start to get out of hand.

Kathy Oliver, Director of a Portland, Oregon, drug treatment program,
commenting on the success of giving free, clean needles to intravenous
drug users:  "It proves that IV drug users are...willing to go out of
their way to protect their health."

The Illinois Department of Conservation created a program, with $180,000
from the legislature, to study the contents of owl vomit to determine
what owls eat during different seasons.

Kevin L. Jones, 20, was arrested in Richmond, Virginia, after walking
into a police station to post bail for a friend.  He and his girlfriend
stared a little too long at the wanted poster featuring his name
and photograph, drawing the attention of officers.

The state of California took four years, 25 drafts, and $600,000, but
finally produced its "Wellness Guide" giving advice on proper living
habits.  Among the guidelines for parents:  "Don't beat, starve, or
lock up your kids."  Among the other advice:  "Don't buy something
you can't afford."  And:  "If you are sexually active and don't want
to make a baby, you may want to use birth control."

Police arrested Emmet Wheat, 47, in the San Francisco suburb of Hayward, CA,
for hitting 18 vehicles with his flatbed truck, injuring 12 people.  His
wife, Karen, said she spoke to him over the truck's two-way radio just
before he crashed into the highway center divider after littering three
miles of the Nimitz Freeway with dented vehicles.  "He said the Lord had
spoken to him," Karen recounted, "and that the Lord told him he could drive
through cars."

As part of the condition of probation for Ronald P. Edwards, who pleaded
guilty to battery in Pineville, Lousiana, Judge Joel Chaisson ordered
Edwards to remove the curse Edwards had placed on him at the time of his
arrest.

Winners of a lottery in the Ukrainian city of Stakhanov often walk away
with rolls of toilet paper, towels, pigs, hens, goats, detergent, and
bath soap as their prizes.  "But don't forget that there are great
shortages," said the newspaper _Literary Gazette_.  "In the city of
Stakhanov, except for the lottery, one cannot get these goods."  Tickets
cost 50 kopeks (about 81 cents), which is more than the cost of many
prizes.

Thomas Lee Jones, 24, was arrested for robbing a Santa Barbara, CA,
restaurant with a note threatening "to shot" ????? employees.  Police
set up a roadblock asking people who fit Jones's description to spell
"shoot" and soon apprehended Jones.

When patrolman Philip Human spotted three children riding in the open
truck of a sedan in Nyack, NY, he stopped the car and found eight more
people were riding in the front seat--five over the legal limit--and
fourteen in the back seat.  He ticketed the driver, Salvador Caban, 47,
who had only one arm.

After a sex change operation in May 1982, Christine Lynne Oliver of
Minneapolis began having second thoughts.  "I started getting feelings
that my old male identity was returning," she said after reverting to
wearing short hair and pants.  "It's like waking up from a bad dream
or something."  That November, she filed a $50,000 suit against four
doctors and the hospital, claiming they never should have allowed the
operation in the first place.  She said they failed to conduct a thorough
enough psychological exam, which would have shown she wasn't really a
woman trapped in a man's body, just a guy having problems getting over
the death of his wife.

In Bossier City, LA, Terry Polk, 26, got into a dispute at a party.  He
challenged his adversary to settle matters with a head-butting duel,
and the two banged each other several times.  Polk died shortly afterward
from a cerebral hemorrhage.

India's _Chandiagarh Tribune_ reported that an unidentified farmer whose
buffalo had eaten $2,000 worth of his wife's gold jewelry twelve years
earlier had just recovered the cache from its belly after waiting
patiently for the buffalo to die.

A judge in Litchfield, Connecticut, ruled that Arthur J. Werley would
be tried for the beating death of Kimberley Labrecque.  According to
court documents, Labrecque was beaten after she spurned Werley's sexual
advances and told him that he looked like Howdy Doody.

From the _Wichita Eagle_ crime column, April 11, 1990:  A man walked into
a gas station, laid $2 on the counter for cigarettes, and while the
attendant turned to get the cigarettes, the man reached into the cash
register, took the entire paper contents, and fled.  The attendant told
police there was a $1 bill on top of the paper compartment, and only
several scraps of paper underneath.  Meanwhile, the man left the $2 on
the counter.

To demonstrate a new insect repellent at a restaurant in London, Diana
Moran, a star of a British television fitness show, climbed into a
glass cage with more than 3000 starved mosquitoes.  The mosquitoes
escaped, however, and attacked the audience of businessmen and journalists,
leaving them bitten, swollen, and itching.  Moran, the only person
protected by the new repellent, wasn't bitten.

Maryland State Police were on the lookout for a man wearing a disposable
diaper and a T-shirt and reportedly driving a sports car with a backseat
filled with cans of whipped cream after reports that he had been seen
crossing over the state line from Pennsylvania.  It was his third reported
excursion into Maryland that year.

The California Supreme Court ruled that cancer patient John Moore was
entitled to profit from the enlarged, cancerous spleen that was removed
by operation in 1976.  After the operation, doctors used the spleen to
develop anticancer drugs and Moore figured the potential profit from
those drugs was more than $3 billion.

When customers complained that a slot machine at a laundromat in
Anchorage, Alaska, was a fraud because it was fixed not to pay off,
the authorities disagreed.  They said the no-payoff feature was what
made the machine legal.  If the customers could have won, the machine
would have been a gambling device, which is illegal in Alaska.

In Deerfield, Florida, Broward County Circuit Judge Lawrence Korda
sentenced Philip Tiger, 77, who was convicted of manslaughter for stabbing
his wife to death and who tried to take his own life, to watch the
movie _It's a Wonderful Life_.

The Tuscola High School marching band in Waynesville, North Carolina,
practicing in the school's parking lot, froze in their steps as an
Oldsmobile Cierra driven by 17-year-old classmate Sean Sojack drove
through their formation.  Sojack's father said that his son, new to
driving to school, simply saw an opening in the ranks and went for it.

Nineteen people ice-fishing on Lake Mille Lacs had to be rescued from a
large ice floe after the ice broke free and carried them more than a
half a mile out into the lake.  The ice-fishers, rescued by boat, left
behind ten ice-houses and three all-terrain vehicles on the floe.

Uganda was rife with coup rumors after a newsman on the state-run radio
was heard to say, "Oh my God!" over the air, followed shortly by "Good
night" and the station going off the air.  He was actually reacting to
the sight of a poisonous snake slithering into the radio studio.

In the Los Angeles suburb of Canoga Park, John A. Anderson, 72, was picking
up an examiner to take his driving test when the car lurched forward.  It
crashed through the wall of the Department of Motor Vehicles building,
careened through the counter area, and came to rest 30 feet inside the
building, but not before sending some 60 people scrambling, injuring six
office workers, and causing $40,000 worth of damage.

After being plagued by dreams that her mother, who had been listed by police
as a missing person for 3-1/2 years, was "in a place where she couldn't
move, either tied up or locked up," Kelly Tyburski, 20, broke into a
locked freezer in the basement of her family's home and found her mother's
body.  A Detroit medical examiner said that she may have been alive when
placed there.  Tyburski's father was charged with the murder.

After the group Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System claimed
responsibility for bombings that killed a federal judge and a lawyer,
Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Thom Robb accused the group of trying to give
the KKK and other racist organizations a bad name.
   Following the 1977 showing of the television special _Roots_, the KKK
requested equal time to present a rebuttal.  "Roots was a biased historical
presentation from a black militant point of view," said the Klan's national
grand dragon, David Duke.  ABC-TV denied the request.

An error by an Arizona court resulted in Bonita Lynch becoming one-fourth
owner of her ex-husband's $2.2 million lottery jackpot.  A paperwork
error delayed their official divorce date for 11 days, and it was during
that time that Mr. Lynch won the lottery.

Francisco Marino, a Mexican citizen who had been in the United States for
six months working as a dishwsher, was hit by a New York City subway train
and lost an arm when he fell drunk onto the tracks.  He sued the Transit
Authority, arguing he wouldn't have fallen on the track if transit officials
had removed him from the platform after observing that he was intoxicated.
After a jury awarded him $9.3 million, Marino exlaimed, "God bless
America."

Night after night for several months, a San Antonio, Texas, homeowner told
a court, a group of men drove up to his house to throw used tires into
his yard until there were about ten thousand of them stacked eight feet
high.  Johnny Crawford, 57, testified that whenever he tried to stop the
men, they beat him up.

After suffering a stroke, a 32 year old Baltimore man suddenly began speaking
with a Scandinavian accent, according to neurophysiologist Dr. Dean
Tippett of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  Tippett said the
man had no experience with foreign languages and seemed to enjoy his new
accent, saying he hoped it would help attract women.  It faded six weeks
after the stroke.

David Posman, 33, was arrested in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island, after
allegedly knocking out an armored-car driver and stealing the closest
four bags of money.  The closest four bags were coins--each containing
only pennies and weighing thirty pounds each, slowing him to a stagger
during his getaway so that police officers easily jumped him from behind.

Police in Plattsburgh, NY, were baffled by a number of cases in which a
man pretending to be a doctor telephoned children and tried to persuade
them to strangle their siblings.  He told one 11-year-old, "If you don't
want your little brother to die, you must strangle him immediately."

Residents of a mobile home park near Brandon, Florida, were pinned down
for nearly two hours by gunfire.  Police who investigated also had to
dodge bullets before discovering the shots were coming from two
out-of-town businessmen making a law-enforcement training video at a
private firing range 1-1/2 miles away.  They were testing an M-16 rifle,
a 9mm Heckler, and a Koch MP5 assault weapon.

The University of Tokyo's medical department has collected at least 120
brains of prime ministers, novelists, artists, and scholars since 1913
to determine what makes the brains of famous people special.  "We'd like
to get many more," said Yutaka Yoshida, the collection's curator.  "I'd
especially like to get brains from mathematicians, musicians, and singers."
About the only thing scientists have been able to conclude from the
collection is that the brains of some famous people were heavier than
those of less distinguished thinkers.  Detailed examinations of the brains
have been limited because of the deep-rooted Japanese reluctance to tamper
with the dead.  "We try, as far as possible, not to cut them," Yoshida said.
"We want to keep them in their original shape."  He admitted, however, "You
can't do much research, just looking at the outside of the brains."

Art collector Ethel Scull, 67, was fined $1000 after pleading guilty to
making 1,208 telephone calls in one week in January 1988 to her financial
adviser, Charles Lewis.  She made the calls -- 485 in one day -- to
complain that she lost money in the October 19, 1987, stock market crash
as a result of his bad advice.  In reality, she had made $300,000.

Ricardo Sanchez, the Mayor of Maicolpue, Chile, was making a speech when
hecklers began shouting antigovernment slogans at him, whereupon he
collapsed and died of a heart attack.

Eight inmates broke out of their cells at the Nashville, Tennessee, city jail.
While trying to escape, they found themselves in the woman's cellblock.
Distracted, they forgot about escaping and engaged in sex with female inmates
until guards tracked them down and apprehended them.

A 1985 bill that proposed legalizing prostitution in Washington state
provided that licenses be issued "only upon satisfactory proof that the
applicant is of good character."

The Air Force announced it was funding a $100,000 project at the University
of Florida to blast simulated jet engines through barns to see how the
noise affects pregnant horses.

Citing the example of Leonardo da Vinci, sleep expert Claudio Stampi of the
Institute of Circadian Physiology in Boston announced that people can get by
on only ninety minutes of sleep a day if they limit themselves to 15-minute
naps every four hours.  He did note that one Italian actor who emulated
the Renaissance artist's sleep schedule had to quit after six months because
he had too much spare time.  "He didn't know what to do with it," Stampi
said, "since he wasn't another Leonardo."

Texas A & M Chemistry Professor Don Sawyer announced he had developed a
commercial process to turn toxic waste into salt.

New York State Trooper Joseph Cyran, bicycling from Los Angeles to Atlantic
City to raise money for drunk-driving victims, was 40 miles short of his
goal when he was struck and critically injured by a drunk driver.

In El Paso, Texas, Drug Enforcement Administration agent David M. Petz was
making a last-minute check of the home he was selling when he found some
boxes the buyer had stashed in a closet.  They contained 415 pounds of
cocaine.  DEA agents arrested the new owner and four other men, who were
part of a drug ring the DEA had been trying to nab for a while.

Bob Engel, a National League umpire, was charged with stealing 4,180 baseball
cards from a store in Bakersfield, California.  Asked by police why he took
the cards, Engel reportedly said, "To collect and trade."

Health services legislation in the Florida House of Representatives was
voted down in 1990, with the deciding vote cast by Representative Mike
Langston's son, 12, who was fooling around with the electronic vote
machine on his father's desk on the floor of the House.  Representative
Langston said he personally would have voted yes but had stepped away to
make a phone call when the vote came up, leaving his son alone.

Soviet psychic E. Frenkel failed in his attempt to stop an oncoming freight
train through the use of his psychic powers.  The train engineer said that
Frenkel jumped onto the tracks in front of the train with his arms raised
and his head lowered.  Investigators found Frenkel's notes, which read,
"First I stopped a bicycle, cars, and a streetcar.  Now I'm going to stop
a train."

Attorneys for accused bigamist Air Force Captain Neil Clark explained their
client agreed to marry the second woman in order to sleep with her because
his overwhelming sexual desire diminished his mental capacity.

Despite the lack of scientific proof that the Loch Ness monster exists,
it generates $42 million a year in revenue from tourists who visit the
Scottich lake each year hoping to see the legendary creature.

_Fortune_ reported in 1988 that some employees of Merrill Lynch's New York
office were so incensed at its poor mailroom service a few years ago that
they sent interoffice mail via Federal Express.  Wrote _Fortune_, "Memos
were whisked from floor to floor via Memphis."

In India, Moloy Kundu, 32, and his wife, Tapati, 27, reported that each had
sold a kidney to enable them to purchase a desktop publishing machine so
they could resume issuing the weekly newspaper _Bela_, for which no other
financing could be found.

Drug-possession defendant Christopher Plovie, on trial in 1990 in Pontiac,
Michigan, claimed that he had been searched without a warrant.  The prosecutor
said the officer didn't need a warrant because a "bulge" in Plovie's jacket
could have been a gun.  Nonsense, said Plovie, who happened to be wearing
the same jacket that day.  He handed it over so the judge could see that its
material did not make bulges.  The judge discovered a packet of cocaine in
the pocket.

Kouroch Bakhtiari, 27, was arrested for masterminding a three-man escape from
a New York City correctional center, in which he meticulously braided over 15
rolls of unwaxed dental floss to make a rope strong enough to support a 190
pound man.  However, he had neglected to plan for gloves; the floss so abraded
his hands he had to be hospitalized with severed tendons and ligaments.

Czechoslavakia's new government scheduled a striptease dance show for foreign
visitors in Prague in 1989 but then discovered the previous government had
authorized only two women in the entire country to be stripteasers.  One was
located, but she was out of practice and tired after only a few minutes.

Joseph C. Clemons, 26, housed in a courthouse cell in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
pending a court appearance for breaking into a motel, pried open the cell
door, walked down a hallway and past guards at the front door, and escaped,
all while wearing leg irons.  (He was not discovered missing until a local
citizen called police to report a man walking down the street wearing
shackles.)

When the only law enforcement officer in Arcade, Georgia, Sid Glenn, was
arrested for attempted burglary, in 1989, an _Atlanta Journal_ reporter
called the Arcade police department to find out who had arrested Glenn.
No one answered.

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services began in 1990 to publish a monthly
list of the worst excuses received for nonpayment of child support.  Among
the first winners:  "I can't afford to pay child support (because) I've got
to pay my cable TV bill"; "We only had sex one time (therefore) I couldn't
be the father"; and "I will not allow my ex-wife to get rich on my money
($25 a week)."

Louisianna State Representative Carl Gunter, opposing an exception to an
anti-abortion bill for victims of incest:  "Inbreeding is how we get
championship horses."

A Seattle police officer said a 68-year-old woman arrested for shoplifting
four packs of cigarettes blamed the episode on Judge Wapner of _The People's
Court_.  She said she was driven to experiment after hearing the judge tell
talk-show host Pat Sajak that "everybody steals, at least once in their
life."

A man using an outhouse near Lawrence, Kansas, said he lost his footing while
trying to retrieve his wallet, which had fallen through the floorboards.  He
fell in and had to spend seven hours in three feet of muck before being
rescued.  Douglas County Sheriff Loren Anderson described the man as unhurt
"but in a pretty ugly mood."

Gregory Fensom, 32, was fired by the RE/MAX real estate office in Independence,
Missouri, after he led five people to a sale house listed with his office and
staged a 3 a.m. party with drinking and loud TV.  Fensom did not know that the
owner had not yet vacated the house, and when she appeared from her bedroom,
Fensom said, "I'm the realtor, and I'm showing the house."

Denise and Jeffrey Lagrimas, who were hosting a neighborhood-watch meeting in
their Oroville, California, home, were arrested during the meeting after a
neighbor spotted her stolen TV set in the Lagrimas home and then realized
that Denise was wearing her stolen dress.  Police officers giving a
presentation at the meeting obtained a search warrant and found $9,000 worth
of stolen goods.

Orange County, California, Superior Court clerks discovered in 1989 that they
had failed to complete the paperwork to make nearly 500 pre-1985 divorce
judgments final, thus leaving the parties still legally married.

A 9th-grade boy was sent into intensive care in Wauwatosa, WI, after a track
meet.  He had just cleared the bar while pole-vaulting when a gust of wind
blew him past the landing pit onto the concrete.

Margaret Weldon, 74 and legally blind, scored a hole-in-one on the seventh
hole at Amelia Island (Florida) Plantation's Long Point course in 1990.
(Her husband coaches her shots.)  The next day, she did it again.

Police arrested jockey Sylvester Carmouche, 28, for fraud after he "won" a
1990 race at Delta Downs in Vinton, Louisiana.  He apparently had taken
advantage of the dense fog that night by laying back at the starting gate
while the other horses circled the track, then joining them for the stretch
run, which his fresh horse won by 20 lengths (in a time 32 lengths better
than her last performance).

In Fort Lauderdale, FL, plastic surgeon Dr Frank Lomagistro saved the fingers
of a woman who had them almost severed when her boyfriend accidentally
slammed the door on them.  Lomagistro attached 35 fat, black leeches to her
fingertips so they could draw blood strongly enough from her hand down to
the fingers that the blood would return to the hand in normal circulatory
motion.  The operation was pronounced a success.

According to an article in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_,
doctors who had advised surgery on a 43-year-old woman to adjust a dislocated
electrode in her heart pacemaker reported that the problem had been resolved
without surgery.  The patient's husband had held the woman upside down with
her head touching the floor and had shaken her up and down violently for five
minutes.  X-rays revealed that the electrode was back in place.

A 1989 United Nations study disclosed that more than six hundred tons of
bodily waste (from six million people and two million dogs) are released
onto the ground and into the air every day around Mexico City and that
deforestation has eliminated much of the foliage that previously prevented
the fecal dust from contaminating the city.  The colonies of microorganisms
are so numerous that scientsts' equipment lacks the precision necessary to
count them.

Jerry Hodge, Vice Chairman of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, shed much
light on the practice of using prison inmates to train bloodhounds when he
invted friends along on the exercises and had jackets made up with "The
Ultimate Hunt" embroidered on them.  In the training, inmates, called "dog
boys," are released on the prison grounds with a one-hour head start before
the hounds are set on their trail.  As many as ten dogs track one man.  Several
of the inmates, lacking protctive clothing, have been bitten.

Government investigators examined reports that Captain Cesar Garcez, 32, flew
his Boeing 737 off course for three hours before crash landing in the
Brazilian jungle because he was listening to a football match on the radio.

Kevin Ford and Donald McNair were charged with various driving-related offenses
in Buffalo, NY, after Ford's Brother, Montgomery, drove Kevin's car up a
telephone pole guide wire, causing the car to flip over.  Kevin explained that
he had been drinking and turned the keys over to Montgomery, who is blind, but
who "always wanted to drive."

Pamela Jones of Lexington, Kentucky, thought she was marrying San Fransicso
49ers quarterback Joe Montana in a 1986 ceremony, but a suspicious minister
determined that the groom was an imposter.  "But he told me he was Joe, and
had the NFL jacket," Jones reportedly told the minister.  John Ford, 39, was
in fact already married to another woman who believed him to be Hank Williams,
Jr., and he was charged with swindling $10,000 from a third fiancee.

An eighth-grade Phoenix girl held her English class hostage for an hour with
a .357 Magnum because she was upset that her girlfriends wouldn't talk to
her.

James A. Vandermeer, 25, was charged with driving while intoxicated after
Rochester police found the body of Gilbert T. Nettles Jr., 26, caught in
the windshield of Vandermeer's car.  Police estimate that Nettles was carried
nine miles on the hood from the site where he was struck.

In a similar accident in Lantana, FL, one year earlier, 74-year-old Stanley
Dobek allegedly drove for four miles with the body of bicyclist John Davis,
42, sticking through his windshield and into the passenger seat of his car.

Californian Enrique Silberg changed his name in 1985 to Ubiquitous Perpetuity
God after a judge refused to allow him to change it to simply "God."

During his campaign for circuit court judge in Sioux Falls, SD, Richard
Hopewell, 53, admitted to a 1978 incident in which he appeared nude in a
local drug store but claimed that he was under the influence of PCP at the
time, administered by a "secret agent of a political adversary."

In 1987, the Atlanta home of William (79) and Minnie (77) Winston began to
bleed.  Police called to investigate blood splashing "like a sprinkler" from
the Winston's bathroom floor could find no explanation.  Steve Cartwright, an
Atlanta homicide detective, said that no bodies were discovered, only
"copious amounts of blood" splattered on walls and floors in at least five
rooms.  A police analysis confirmed that the substance was indeed human blood.

An Arkansas squirrel hunter waited a day to report finding a dead body in the
woods because he thought any investigation would spoil his plans for hunting
the next morning.

When a San Mateo County, California, sheriff's deputy approached Barry
Buchstaber, who was standing beside a car with two broken windows, and
asked for identification, Buchstaber handed the deputy the only official
document he had--a copy of a current arrest warrant against him for
driving with a suspended license.

Two weeks after Kentucky businessman Charles Hayes paid $45 to buy a used
computer system from the U.S. attorney's office in Lexington, the office
informed him that the system's memory might not have been erased and could
contain sealed grand jury indictments, information about federally protected
witnessess and FBI informants, and data about employees in U.S. Attorney
Louis DeFalaise's office.

Joan Raeburn, 26, of West Harrison, Indiana, was traveling by car on a rural
road near the Ohio state line in 1987 when she was the victim of a hit-and-run
pilot, who grazed the roof of her car with his single-engine airplane and flew
off into the night.

Fisherman Josaia Tusoba, 31, was severely wounded in his boat 60 miles from
Suva, Fiji, when a 3-foot-long swordfish, apparently attracted by the sun
reflecting on the boat, leapt from the ocean and speared him in the chest.

Baigio di Crescenzo, 23, smashed his car into a tree near Rome and was badly
injured.  After a motorist took him to a hospital, he was sent in an ambulance
toward another hopsital for further treatment, but the ambulance smashed into
an oncoming car.  A motorist took him to another hospital, where he was again
dispatched in an ambulance for further treatment.  That ambulance smashed into
another car in a suburb of Rome, killing di Crescenzo.

Don Oestreich and Bernice Johnson, distracted by the colors of the fall
foliage while boating on the Mississippi River in Minnesota, shot over a
40-foot dam and into the rushing overflow below, but were rescued by two
fisherman.

A Trenton woman coming out of a New Jersey National Bank branch was robbed
of $91 in food stamps by a tall man wearing a black rubber suit and flippers
who threatened to shoot her.  The woman said she believed the threat because
the man was carrying a long case that could have contained a speargun.

In a 1981 incident, as gunfire rang out in a Las Vegas casino when police
scurried to catch some troublemakers, dozens of officers had to climb over
casino customers, who had dropped to their knees but continued to feed the
slot machines.

Police in Lewisburg, Tennessee, spotted a ten-gallon tub of marijuana plants
but couldn't spare any officers to watch for the owner.  They confiscated
the plants and printed a picture of them in the Lewisburg _Tribune_ with
the caption:  "Have you lost a tub of marijuana?  If you have, you may claim
it at the Lewisburg Police Department."  Police arrested Leroy Chilton, 26,
when he appeared and said the plants were his.

Thomas L. Martin, 22, manager of a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant in Oroville,
California, reported that he was robbed of $307 after work.  He provided
police sketch artist Sergeant Jack Lee with a detailed description of the
subject.  After Lee finished the drawing, he observed "it looked just like
Martin."  Police arrested Martin, who confessed to taking the money himself.

As was its custom, Lakeland, Florida, rewarded city employee James Moran for
his twenty years of service with a pin and a certificate for a free dinner
for two.  Other workers had spent $34-60, but Moran and his fiancee ran up a
$511 tab.  His angry superiors suspended him for two weeks and demoted him to
a position that paid $11,000 a year less.  Moran eventually paid the bill, but
an appeal board upheld the demotion.

In Draperstown, Northern Ireland, Charles Rogers, 67, was watching a grave
being dug for his dead brother when the sides started to cave in.  He reached
down to help a gravedigger and fell himself.  When he hit the bottom, the
headstone fell on top of him, crushing him.

Albert Mangino of New Castle, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 32 days behind
bars for drunken driving in 1987, but because he claimed he gambled on
horses for a living, Common Please Judge Ralph Pratt granted him work release
status so he could leave jail each day to go to a West Virginia racetrack.

At a maximum-security state prison in Shirley, Massachusetts, Gordon
Benjamin III was granted parole but decided to remain behind bars for
another two months to appear as Sir Lancelot in an inmate production of
Camelot.  The cast had already lost four King Arthurs, two Merlins, and
one Squire Dap before opening night because prisoners playing these roles
were transferred.

Donato Causarano, 53, a court clerk in San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy, was
working alone late at night when he reached for some documents and a stack
of files fell on him, trapping him for five hours.

West Delaware High School in Manchester, Iowa, acted to curb students'
rest-room breaks by requiring students on their way to the bathroom to
wear toilet seats around their necks.

A government paymaster showed up at the camp of a band of Cambodian soldiers
who had been stranded in a one-year battle and who had gone four months
without being paid.  But when it was revealed to the soldiers that the
paymaster had brought no money, they killed him and then ate his body.

In India, Zahid Hussein, 23, opened a rent-a-mob service in 1984 charging
$20 per day to supply a large number of mostly unemployed people who will
chant slogans, wave placards, and boo or cheer on cue.  They earn around
5 cents a day each.  If orders call for them to break the law, they get
around 15 cents a day.

Gordon and Jasmine Gelsbrecht opened a restaurant in a suburb of Winnipeg,
Manitoba, called "The Outhouse," built on the theme of toilets.  Toilet
bowls were placed among the tables, and a toilet seat logo appeared on the
menus.  Health inspectors then forced the restaurant to suspend operation
because it lacked adequate rest rooms.

Mackie International withdrew its Chilly Bang! Bang! Juice snack package from
the market after complaints from at least two state agencies.  The Sante Fe
Springs, California, company had developed a pistol-shaped package that allowed
children to drink the juice by holding the barrel in their mouths and squeezing
the trigger.

Annette Montoya, 11, of Belen, New Mexico, and her parents were arrested for
forgery after Annette, in the company of her father, attempted to open a bank
account with a $900,000 check.  The girl told sheriff's deputies that she
earned the money doing "some yard work."  During her interrogation, she crossed
her heart and said, "Hope to die if I'm lying."

Stopped by Massachusetts State Police for driving his car at 120 mph, John
Rosano II, 23, explained that he had just purchased a roast beef sandwich
and he had to get home to eat it before it got cold.

A judge in Louisville decided a jury went "a little bit far" in recommending
a sentence of 5,005 years for a man it convicted of five robberies and
kidnapping.  Judge Edmon Karem reduced the sentence to 1,001 years.

A jury in Nassau County, NY, awarded $425,000 to a 24-year-old bookkeeper who
claimed she lost her hair from the shock of biting into a squirming beetle in
her yogurt.  The woman was watching television and eating raspberry yogurt
when according to her attorney, Abraham Fuchsberg, "she felt a piece of foreign
matter in her mouth.  She knew it was too hard to be a raspberry, and besides
it was moving."

Doctors at Indiana University discovered a patient's anemia was caused by the
man's having swallowed $21.32 in coins, including 80 quarters.  The zinc in
the quarters caused a copper deficiency that led to the anemia, which went
away when the coins were removed.  The patient said he had swallowed the coins
to prevent a gun in his stomach from firing.  The doctors found no gun.

A 26-year-old man was charged with robbing a tavern in New Athens, Illinois,
at gunpoint.  According to sheriff's lieutenant Otto Jakob, after the robbery
the man apparently lost his car keys, so he stripped to his underwear and
went back inside to say he, too, had been robbed.  He was nabbed because he
couldn't disguise his voice enough to fool the people he had just held up.

Four members of a Buffalo, New York, junior firefighters' club admitted to
setting twelve fires and reporting thousands of false alarms over a three-
year period because they wanted to aid firefighters who complained of
boredom.

After a dorm-room inspection by an environmental health hygiene officer, four
University of MN football players were evicted.  In the room of freshman
flanker Pat Tingelhoff and junior defensive tackle Mike Pihlstrom, the officer
found dried blood, animal entrails, an empty beer case filled with maggots,
and body parts from a beaver, squirrels, and other animals, along with ground
glass, at places an inch deep, ripped mattresses, and smashed furniture.  An
unnamed source told the student newspaper that a deer's head filled with
maggots had been taken from beneath a bed just prior to the inspection.
Tingelhoff, a wildlife management major, denied there was a deer head or
entrails in his room but disclosed that he had removed the fat from a beaver
skin there.

Shortly after Frederick Warren argued with the driver of a tractor-trailer at
a Marylad truck stop, he ran after the driver's slow-moving truck as it was
leaving the stop and stabbed the left rear tire with a hunting knife.  When
the knife punctured the tire, the blade was blown directly back at Warren,
stabbing him in the throat.  He staggered for about 100 feet and died.  The
driver, apparently oblivious to what had happened, drove away.

The Michigan Board of Medicine gave a two-week suspension to Dr. Leonard Wolin
after he allowed his 14-year-old son to assist him with a bladder operation on
a 50-year-old woman.  Wolin let his son feel a catheter balloon in the woman's
bladder and had him put in two stitches when he was sewing a layer of tissue.

Murder suspect Dennis J. Hannuksela, 29, escaped from police custody in
Duluth, MN, when, being taken for a hopsital visit, he dropped his crutches
and took off "like a jack rabbit."  Said Sgt. Tom Person, the county jail
supervisor, "The deputy didn't have him in handcuffs because you don't
handcuff a man on crutches."

A 17-year-old Memphis woman was married for four months before discovering
that her husband was a 19-year-old woman.  According to a clergyman involved
in the case, the woman said that her husband never let her see "him" naked
because he was supposedly deformed by a football injury.  The bride reportedly
became suspicious when some of her husband's friends referred to him as
"Harriet."

Pro golfer Homero Blancas once hit a ball out of the rough in a tournament and
saw hit a palm tree and then lodge in the brassiere of a female spectator.
Blancas asked fellow golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez what he should do, whereupon
Rodriguez reportedly replied, "I think you should play it."

Eight years after being convicted of arson, 31-year-old David Dilorio was
appointed to the North Providence, Rhode Island, fire department.  A police
check had failed to turn up any criminal record because Dilorio's name was
misspelled.

Commenting on the scene of a truck accident in which 44,000 pounds of pig
carcasses were dumped over the highway near San Bernardino, California
Highway Patrol officer John Savage said, "These little piggies didn't make
it to market."

Ohio veterinarian Marshal Pettibone, who uses a freeze-drying machine to
preserve dead pets, said, "There's no sense in getting a new cat every ten
years or so when you can have the same one for 50 or 60 years!"  Said Oramae
Lewis, who had her cat Felix freeze-dried after he was run over by an 18-wheel
tractor-trailer, "He's just like he was in real life except he's a little
flatter in the middle."

In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Sandra Kaushas stabbed her husband Edward five
times after he refused to go out for pizza during the first half of a 1985
Miami-New England football playoff game.  He told police he had offered to
get chicken at halftime, but that didn't satisfy her.

Jurgen Hergert, 44, known as the "King of Snakes," broke his old record when
he sat in a glass cage of snakes for 100 days.  Inside the cage were 24 rattle-
snakes, vipers, puff adders, and cobras.  During his stay, one Indian cobra
killed three other snakes.  While in the cage, he lost nine pounds and
averaged only two or three hours of sleep per night, and his girlfriend
called off their engagement.

A Lewistown, Pennsylvania, woman who weighed nearly 600 pounds and who had to
be taken to the hospital by fire and rescue workers had a 280-pound cyst
removed.  When called to the home, one rescue worker thought "there were two
people lying in bed."  Workers had to knock down a wall to extricate her from
the house.

Doctors worked more than seven hours to close farmworker Chris Haines's
mouth in Little Thurlow, England, after he had yawned too widely and couldn't
get it closed.  Haines could only make gurgling noises during the procedure
and thus could not communicate with doctors.

Lynn Ray Collins, mute for 17 years after being hit by a car, regained his
speech after falling against a glass door in Albertsville, Alabama.  He was
moved to speak to paramedics as he watched three pints of blood gushing from
his head wound.

In l981, the image of Christ being crucified attracted crowds to Santa Fe
Springs, California.  It was eventually determined that the image was caused
by two streetlights shining on a bush and a real estate sign.

Officials in Jacksonville hired twenty-three people to work the weekend before
Christmas 1989, doing nothing but flushing the 503 toilets at the Gator Bowl
to prevent the stadium's water pipes from freezing.

In Dallas, a 25-year-old police officer posing as a high school student as
part of an undercover drug operaton was nabbed for being tardy and sent to the
principal's office.  Told he could choose between a paddling and detention,
the officer was forced to take the spanking because detention would have
interfered with a scheduled drug buy.

Two men had little trouble robbing an armored van in Livornia, Michigan.  They
simply pulled open the van's back doors, which were unlocked and held shut by
rubber bands, which police said the van's security guard used to avoid going
to all the trouble of unlocking and locking the doors at each stop.

In 1989, a woman eating a tunafish sandwich in her 31st floor apartment in
Philedelphia was hit in the arm by a bullet.  Police determined that the
bullet entered the apartment window on an even trajectory but there are no
neighboring buildings at the same height.  "We have no idea where this bullet
came from," said Capt. Richard Kirchner.  "If you look out, the only thing in
that area that's really tall in the Arco burn-off tower," which is two miles
away.

After the New Jersey Department of Transportation began construction on a 7.2
mile stretch of Route 55, the following things occurred:  One construction
worker was run over by an asphalt roller truck; another was blown off a bridge
overpass; one inspector died on the job of a brain aneurysm; one worker's feet
mysteriously blackened; one worker's wife miscarried; a van carrying five
workers burned and exploded; one worker's parents were killed in an auto
accident the night after the project began; the brother and father of one
worker died on the same weekend.  Carl Pierce, chief of the Delaware Indians,
said that the construction desecrated an ancient buriel ground.

A 1986 report by a U.S. Department of Education panel on a history curriculum
designed for students to react to the genocide of Jews during World War II
criticized the content of the curriculum as "unfair" to Nazis and the Ku Klux
Klan.  The report stated, "The program gives no evidence of balance or
objectivity."

Donald J. Talmont, 20, was charged with criminal damage to property after he
rammed his car into ten trees and three street signs in Milwaukee on the
night of a lunar eclipse in 1989.  Police quoted him as saying that he only
gets that way when there is a lunar eclipse.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, 90% of the data transmitted from
U.S. space missions (enough tapes to fill the floor space of 50 football
fields) has never been analyzed and cannot be because the data can only be
read by computers that are now obsolete.

The Smith and Wesson Company opened a golf driving range for its employees
in Springfield, Massachusettes, on October 18, 1984, but was forced to close
it a week later after flocks of sea gulls began bombarding company executives,
motorists, and neighbors with hundreds of golf balls they would pick up, fly
up into the air with, and drop.

Two men stole $25 from a Cincinnati restaurant armed with a cicada.  They
thrust the bug at the cashier, 22-year-old Marquisa Kellogg, who then fled,
leaving the cash register unattended.

Authorities in Wisconsin Rapids, WI, investigating the death of 30-year-old
Mary Herman, said the woman was killed by a "crushing type injury" that looked
like a car ran over her but left no tire marks.  They concluded that an
elephant was the fatal weapon and charged two animal trainers from a circus
that had passed through town when the woman was killed.

When the late Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was jailed in Charlotte, North Carolina,
on charges of immigration fraud, he immediately requested special food and a
throne for his jail cell.

In 1987 California Highway Patrol officer Dave Guild stopped a car traveling
50 mph on the San Diego Freeway because its hood was open and a man was under
it working on the engine.  The men said that they had been having trouble with
the gas pedal and that the man under the hood was keeping the engine running
by working the carburetor control.  Neither could understand why they were
being ticketed.

The U.S. Department of Energy spent $1.4 million sending the entire 25-pound
8,800-page environmental impact statement on the superconducting supercollider
to 16,000 citizens who had expressed interest in the project in 1988, when
only the mailing of a summary of the statement was required by law.

Researchers at Georgia Tech paid volunteers $15 to tumble down a flight of
stairs as part of a project to find out how a body falls.

A 30-year-old California man committed suicide in 1980 with an overdose of
drugs because, according to a suicide note, "I just can't live another four
years with Reagan."

Students in Stuttgart, West Germany, resorted to deliberately infesting
themselves with head lice to get themselves barred from school.  The German
Education Ministry reported the students were paying the equivalent of $2.60
for the parasite.

In China, two brothers with a gambling addiction sold their mother to a
peasant in Kwangsi province after tricking her into affixing her thumbprint
to a bill of sale.

A man was arrested and accused of a wave of hair-snipping crimes in South
Dakota, Wyoming, and New Jersey.  He allegedly would sit behind women in
movie theaters, snip a braid of hair, and then dash off.  Police found four
shoeboxes full of snipped hair in a search of his house.

Postal carrier John Douglas Hansford pleaded guilty to robbery in a London
suburb for snatching glasses off the faces of 38 young women in a spree
several years ago.  "I don't know why I did it," he said.  "I just fancy
girls who wear glasses."  A court psychiatrist said Hansford had at least
five years of counseling ahead of him.

Preston Womack of Mableton, Georgie, was arrested by Cobb County police after
he sat in a restaurant wearing a pair of jockey shorts on his head and would
not leave when asked.  Police Sgt. M. Toler said later that "other than
wearing jockey shorts on his head and socks on his hands, he was well behaved."

A 1982 United Nations report warned that sex education lessons were failing
in certain remote Asian villages.  Observers found that men were swallowing
birth control pills and, to mimic the health educators' demonstrations, had
placed condoms on their fingers and on bamboo poles.

Thirty minutes after Thomas James Rosney was released from jail in Boulder,
he was arrested in the jail's parking lot for attempting to break into a car.
In Seattle, police charged an 18-year-old man, who has just been released in
court by Judge Philip Killien, with stealing Killien's car from the courthouse
parking lot on the way home.

John Wayne Gacy, 45, on death row in Illinois and suspected of killing 33
young men and boys, announced his engagement in 1988 to Sue Terry, 43, of
Centralia, Illinois.  Said Terry, who is the mother of eight children, of
the charges against Gacy, "I don't believe hardly any of it."

In Lusk, Wyoming, a 76-year-old woman whose license expired in December 1982
was arrested five times in the following five months for driving without a
license.  She had failed the eye exam required for renewal, which officials
said she could have passed by wearing corrective lenses.  She refused,
insisting that eyeglasses were "a communist plot.  Commies will land here
someday and control everybody by taking away our glasses."

In l980 Harry Zain, a fundamentalist Christian and sometime political candidate
in W. Virginia, undertook an intensive lobbying campaign for a federal law to
lower the marriage age for girls from 16 to 12.  He wanted to wed his dream
girl, whom he had met four years earlier in Charleston when she was 9, and in
support of his proposal, visited at least 60 members of Congress at their
homes in the Washington area before the FBI began encouraging him to stop.

The barbaric tradition of the annual Gotmaar Festival continues in Pandhuma,
India, despite the village's increasing modernization (10,000 TV sets among
its 45,000 population).  After a full moon in early September, all village
activity stops and males divide into two groups to gather rocks and then spend
the rest of the day throwing them at one another, attempting to kill or injure
as many as they can.  At sunset, they stop, nurse the wounded, and return to
normal life.  In l989, 4 were killed and 612 wounded.

Chinese soldiers burned 20 tons of used clothing donated from abroad on
November 12, 1985, kicking off two weeks of officially sponsored burnings
of donated foreign clothing.

The town of Grantham, New Hampshire, which had two streets named Stoney Brook,
changed Stoney Brook Drive to Old Springs Drive and Stoney Brook Lane to Old
Springs Lane.

Randy Myer, city public information director of Lexington, Kentucky, paid
$400 for a set of steel-belted tires designed to be bulletproof, bombproof,
and spikeproof, then he had a flat after running over a ballpoint pen.
"It still wrote," Myer said.

A 22-year-old female cab driver in San Francisco who was raped at gunpoint in
her cab was fired for not screening her customers carefuly enough.  "I can't
afford to take any chances," her boss, Guey Wong, told her in front of a
reporter.  "I'm lucky the cab wasn't hurt.  You might endanger my insurance,
you might increase my rates."

In Laurel Park, North Carolina, a 25-year-old man was charged with the ax
murder of his mother a month after she posted $10,000 to bail him out of
jail on a charge of killing his stepfather.

Professional psychic Judith Richardson Haimes won more than $1 million from a
Philadelphia jury because, she said, a faulty CAT scan at Temple University
Hospital robbed her of her ability to see the future.  When a Temple lawyer
announced after the trial that Temple would appeal, Haimes incorrectly
predicted that Temple would lose that appeal.

Terry and Deborah Shook sued the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for $115,000
because their son's second-grade teacher forced him to lick saliva off the
playground during recess as punishment.

In a 1988 ABC-TV poll of 17-year-olds, one girl answered that the Holocaust was
"that Jewish holiday last week, right?"  Another thought the Ayatollah was a
Soviet gymnast, and yet another thought Chernobyl was Cher's full name.

Forewarning of a decline in morality, civic leaders and parents in Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia, had to quell a fad in 1986 in which children banded together dressed
as Michael Jackson, mimicked his movements, and marauded through the city and
suburbs causing disturbances.  Boys were wearing rouge and lipstick.

One group that responded to an appeal to donate clothing to survivors of the
December 1988 earthquake in Armenia was the Potomac Rambling Bares, a
Washington, D.C., area nudists' club.

A student in an anatomy class at the University of Alabama School of Medicine
in Birmingham informed the school's director that one of the cadavers being
dissected in the class was her great aunt.

Dallas city councilor Roland Tucker, known as a crusader for crime prevention,
had his parked car stolen after leaving the keys in the ignition.  The car
contained Tucker's research material on crime prevention, including information
pertaining to a proposed ordinance making it illegal to leave the keys in the
ignition of an unattended car.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Baptist minister Dwight Rymer used electric shocks to
help him teach the Bible to chilren.  He asked for young volunteers to sit on
a stool wired to a 6-volt lantern battery in order to demonstrate that
sometimes God "can shock you into hearing His word."

London police investigating the death of 56-year-old Leslie Merry, who was
fatally injured by a turnip thrown from a passing car, said the attack
apparently was carried out by a gang whose members toss vegetables at random
at passersby.  Investigators noted that three months before Merry's death,
another man suffered stomach injuries when he was hit by a cabbage.

A 30-year-old woman was accused by Oakland police of shooting her husband in
1989, after tailing him on a freeway and pulling alongside his car.  Police
say that the incident started earlier in the evening when the husband rolled
a gutter ball while bowling, causing them to lose by six pins to another
couple.

A 13-year-old boy pulled a loaded .357 Magnum on his teacher because the
teacher refused to publish a photograph in the La Crescente, CA, junior high
yearbook of the boy wearing his "Anarchy Now" T-shirt.

Pittsburgh councilman William R. Robinson proposed a leash law for cats,
calling felines vicious animals known to "suck the breath out of a child"
when they smell milk on the child's lips.  Local veterinarians disputed the
basis for the statement, despite Robinson's insistence that critics "look at
all the incidents" in which a cat has sucked the breath out of a child.

The three children of Marion, NC, street preacher David Strode were suspended
from school repeatedly during fall 1988 for preaching hellfire and damnation,
disrupting their classes in school.  Especially galling to school officials
was their use of words like "adulterer" and "fornicator."  The father said the
family does not attend church because traditional ministers are "compromising
cowards."  "Besides," he said, "no church will have us."

R. Leonard Vance, director of health standards for the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, told a committee of Congress in 1986 that he could not
turn over logbooks involving allegedly improper meetings he might have had with
industry representatives because his dog had thrown up all over them.

In Pennsylvania in 1988, Kelly Kyle, 17, was at home alone in the living room
when she noticed deer in the yard.  One suddenly crashed through the living
room window and was followed by four others, after which all five proceeded to
trash the house.  At the time, Kelly's father was out deer hunting.

Bob Holt, 20, hired to dress up as a duck to advertise a Seattle radio station,
was attacked on a downtown street by a man who spun him around by one wing,
pulled off his duck bill and beat him over the head with it, then ran off.  "I
didn't speak to him," Holt said.  "I didn't flap my wings, I didn't do
anything like that."

Loren Tobia, news director for WSAZ-TV in Charleston, was covering a news
conference by H. John Rogers, a candidate for the U.S. Senate who had just been
detained four days at a Wheeling mental health center for spitting in the face
of a police chief.  Following his speech, which he interrupted to berate
another TV reporter for not paying attention, Rogers asked if there were any
serious questions.  Tobia asked the first one:  "Do you think your recent stay
in a mental institution will hurt your candidacy?" Rogers strode over to Tobia.
"Was that a serious question?" he asked, then punched Tobia in the face.

In Atlanta, a daring thief stole $8,900 worth of cameras and accessories from
an exhibit booth at a convention for crime-detection experts.  His getaway was
delayed by having to pretend to be a salesman and give a 45-minute sales pitch
to a security guard who had seen him walking off with the goods.

Police in Tulsa, responding to an emergency call that a man was holding a woman
at knifepoint, surrounded the wrong house.  The man was in the house next door.
He tried several times to surrender, but the police, thinking he was just a
nosy neighbor, kept ordering him back inside.  After about an hour, a newspaper
photographer who lived nearby alerted police to their mistake.

Undercover police in Pompano Beach, Florida, arranged to sell two pounds of
cocaine.  The buyers turned out to be undercover officers from the Fort
Lauderdale police.

In Florida, Dade County and Jacksonville officials discovered that their new
$34 million jail was being built with 195 cells -- but no cell doors.  Michael
Berg, city-county director of jails and prisons, said he wasn't sure how the
oversight occurred.  And at the Ontario County Jail in Canandalgua, NY,
installation of new cell doors was halted when officials discovered the bars
were too far apart and prisoners could slip through them.

In Baton Rouge, a man was sentenced to five years' probation for trying to pass
a counterfeit $20 bill that he had made by cutting the corners off a real $20
and pasting them on a $1 bill.  Federal Judge John Parker called him "the most
inept counterfeiter I ever heard of."

A New York City woman paid two men $20,000 to beat her husband to death with a
baseball bat.  He survived.  She paid the men $150,000 to shoot him.  He took
six bullets but survived.  Then the hit men charged her $300,000 for another
try, promising this time to get it right.  The police arrested all three.

The resident safety expert for the Kansas Fish and Game Commission, who was
wearing an orange cape with "Kansas Safe Hunter" printed on the front and
fluorescent orange clothing, was shot accidentally in the arm and shoulder
while bird hunting--by a co-worker.

In Laguna Hills, California, Brinks guard Hrand Arakilian, 34, was crushed to
death while riding in the back of an armored car when $13,000 in quarters,
weighing 832 pounds, fell on him.

Cellist Augustinas Vassiliauskas of the Soviet Vilnius string quartet was
climbing the podium at the 1980 Kuhmo Music Festival for a third round of
applause when he tripped and fell on his prized Ruggieri cello, breaking the
300-year-old instrument beyond repair.

In Toronto, Franco Brun choked to death on a pocket Bible.  The medical
examiner speculated that the 22-year-old man had tried to swallow the 874-page
Bible to purge himself of the Devil.

An 81-year-old woman in Arkwright, South Carolina, died of smoke inhalation
after apparently mistaking an end table in her mobile home for a fireplace
and setting a fire under it.

A Minnesota Supreme Court justice was charged with cheating on a 1983 multi-
state bar exam that he took while trying to qualify to practice law in other
states.  He was given special permission to take the exam in his office but
then admitted to peeking in a book to help him answer a question.  He later
explained that he thought it was okay to peek during the bar exam.

In Palermo, Italy, the funeral of Antonio Percelli was halted when Percelli,
mistakenly declared dead, climbed out of the casket.  Percelli's move so
startled his mother that she died on the spot of a heart attack, and was
buried later at the gravesite that had been ordered for Percelli.

Walter Davis, 75, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1986 in the
murder of his wife.  According to testimony, she had harangued him for five
hours one day about a conversation he had had, in her presence, with a woman
in a grocery store on how to preserve unused portions of a loaf of bread.

Rev. Jim Brown of Ironton, Ohio, told the First Church of Nazarene congregation
in 1986 that the theme song to the old TV show, "Mr. Ed," played in reverse,
contains satanic messages.  According to Brown, "A horse is a horse, of course,
of course," backwards, is "the source is satan."

In 1978, a Paris grocer stabbed his wife to death with a wedge of Permesan
cheese.

In Birmingham, Alabama, a man was convicted of assault and battery after
hitting his wife over the head repeatedly with their 1-1/2 pound chihauhau
during a domestic dispute.

Kerry Shea, 14, "just lost control" of her toothbrush and swallowed it, but it
was retrieved shortly afterward by a DePere, WI, doctor.  Shea offered only
that she was "brushing the back of my tongue because I saw on TV that it helps
to get a lot of sugar that way" when "it just slipped and I swallowed it."

In Houston in 1987, a 10-year-old boy shot and killed his father, Edward Simon,
45, and wounded his mother, Mary Simon, 47, with a .38-calibre revolver when
they refused to let him go outside and play.

In a 1987 poll asking South Korean children to name their favorite things, the
children ranked their mothers first but put their fathers third--behind a
serving of beef.

In 1987 Rep. Will Green Poindexter introduced a bill in the Mississippi
legislature to permit dwarfs to hunt deer with crossbows during archery season.

Alaska State Senator Bob Ziegler introduced a bill to make it illegal for a dog
to impersonate a police dog.  No dog other than a police dog could use police-
dog facilities, eat police-dog food, bite criminals, or loiter in the vicinity
of a fire hydrant.

A California firm markets solar-powered tombstones that talk back to graveside
visitors with recorded messages that play perpetually.

Willie Homes of Hillsborough, CA, developed a snorkel and tube for guests in
high rise buildings in which fires break out.  Using the snorkel, guests could
reach down through the toilet trap to the water line in the tank to use the
oxygen in the air vent that runs to the roof until they could be rescued.

A London bill-collection agency, Smelly Tramps, Ltd., duns deadbeats by sending
foul-smelling vagabonds to sit in the debtor's office until he agrees to pay
up.  The firm, which uses a special "stomach-churning" chemical that makes the
office virtually uninhabitable within 10 minutes, claims a 90% success rate.

Among the items at a 1987 Japanese inventors' fair was "six-day underwear" --
a garment with three leg holes and instructions for the user to rotate it 120
degrees each day for three days and then turn it inside out for another three
days.

Nino Placenza, 75, tried to kill himself in Bradenton, Florida, by drilling a
hole in his head with a power drill, but only wound up in intensive care.

A 38-year-old Orland Park, Illinois, man, distraught over an argument with his
girlfriend about buying drapes, killed himself by cutting a hole in his
waterbed, sticking his head through it and drowning himself.

Patrolman Robert D'Ascanio of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, apprehended a purse-
snatcher he was about to lose one night by barking like a dog and then shouting
"Okay, let the dog loose!"  That caused the suspect to stop in his tracks.
The Pittsfield police department had eliminated its K-9 unit (consisting of
one dog) three years before.

A 350-lb. man attempted to rob a Long Island jeweler with a gun, but before
the loot was handed to him, he tripped and fell and was unable to get back to
his feet before the police arrived.

Two men with guns fired a total of twelve shots at each other at point-blank
range in a Cleveland apartment, but no one was injured.  Police speculated that
the men, aged 76 and 77, missed because one had glaucoma and the other had to
prop himself up with a cane each time before firing.

In Hudiksvall, Sweden, police arrested a 31-year-old father, charging him with
stealing $6 from his 3-year-old son's piggy bank.

Fire crews responding to a call in Smethwick, England, found George Thurlow
standing at a door waving furiously.  He directed firefighters upstairs to the
back bedroom, where they found, in thick smoke, Thurlow's wife and two elderly
daughters sitting calmly in the burning room, watching the American TV show
_St Elsewhere_.  One daughter was smoking a cigarette.

A 47-year-old woman, described as "large," was convicted of shoplifting items,
including a $695 color TV set and fur coats, that she concealed between her
legs as she walked from stores.  According to court testimony, the TV set was
balanced between her knees, and when she bent over to pick something up, a
store employee saw the outline of the TV set under her dress.

A Parisian nightwatchman killed his second wife because, police theorized, she
overcooked a roast.  Seventeen years earlier he killed his first wife because
she had undercooked a meal.

Two California women, Judy Schwartz and Rickey Berkowitz, were shipwrecked in
the Java Sea in 1985.  For three weeks, they lived on nothing but toothpaste.
After their rescue, Colgate-Palmolive gave them 400 tubes of its toothpaste.

A Washington, D.C., man was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of
committing five bank robberies.  A common link in three of the robberies was
his poor spelling in a note which he handed to the tellers, telling them to
put the money in the bag and that he meant "no bullshirt."

A would-be robber tried to stick up an Oakland bank.  The teller gave him a
dummy bag with marked bills and an explosive set to detonate at the bank's
door.  He stuffed the bag down the front of his trousers, and the device
worked.

A 32-year-old suspect wanted by the FBI on charges of murder and assault and
for questioning in more than a dozen murders and 50 beatings, was arrested by
FBI agents as he jay-walked in front of their car in Oakland, CA.  The agents
had his picture on the front seat of their car when he walked past and they
recognized him.

------------------------------------------------

When an off-duty Detroit police officer shot himself in the shoulder as he
tried to kill a rat that had jumped onto his arm in his garage, ten Detroit
police patrol cars responded to the report of a shooting at the man's house.
The rat escaped unharmed.

A city ambulance crew in St. Louis stopped to pick up a pizza while on
their way to the hospital with a patient suffering from head injuries.  The
ambulance circled the pizza parlor parking lot for about five minutes until
the crew's pizza was ready.

One guest drowned at a pool-party attended by about 100 New Orleans
lifeguards who were celebrating their first drowning-free season in memory.
At the end of the party the body of Jerome Moody was found fully clothed
at the bottom of the deep end of the pool.

A sheriff's deputy in Joliet, Illinois, responding to an accident in which a
car plunged into an unmarked construction pit, accidentally drove his own
patrol car into the pit, landing on top of the accident victim's car and
crushing her to death.

A woman was freed from a pair of designer jeans by San Jose, California,
firefighters who worked for 20 minutes using wire cutters and needle-nosed
pliars.

A Los Angeles man who said later that he was "tired of walking," stole a
steamroller and led police on a 5 mph chase until one officer jumped aboard
and brought the vehicle to a stop.

A 61-year-old retired Army sergeant shot a woman he mistook for his estranged
wife outside a church in Rochester, New York.  "I'm sorry about the other
woman," he told police.  "I meant to kill my wife, but I forgot my glasses."

A man shot and killed his friend Laurel Lange of La Crosse, WI, while hunting,
telling police that he mistook Lange for a squirrel.

Seventy-four-year-old Pavel Navrotsky, a Soviet military deserter during World
War II, was discovered in 1985 after living in hiding for 41 years in a pigsty.
During the 41 years, Navrotsky only went out for a walk once, at night,
dressed as a woman.

Landlord Ugo Putti invited all the tenants of his building in Naples, Italy,
to a picnic in the country.  When they returned home, they found their building
had been demolished.  "I do not regret my action," Putti said.  "I hated my
tenants, and they hated me."

Carl Phillips, one of 10 winners of a 1958 essay contest sponsored by
Louisville, KY, radio station WKAY, had to wait 29 years, until March, 1987,
for the contest's scheduled payoff date to arrive.  And then he failed to
receive the prize promised by the station: An all-expenses-paid trip to the
moon.  The radio station, which had heard from several other moon-flight ticket
holders, told the winners that it was a promotion sponsored by previous owners.

Dr. Ibrahim Shademan performed a surgery on a 20-year-old woman to remove a
4.4 pound hairball from her stomach because it was endangering her pregnancy.
The woman had chewed her hair since she was a child.

By June 1984, Alice Richie of Richmond, CA, had been watering her lawn 24 hours
a day, every day, for more than a year.  Her nighbors took her to court as
their lawns turned into swamps.  Despite a judge's order to stop and utility
bills of $300 a month, Richie continued to water and would not say why.

Edward Jalbert, 25, was struck from behind and killed by a United Airlines
plane as it landed at Cox Municipal Airport.  Jalbert had been walking naked
down the middle of the runway at the time.

A Pittsburgh man on why he was apparently throwing rocks at his wife, who was
struggling not to drown in the Kanawha River:  "I was trying to drive her back
to shore."

Cheung Yun-fuk, 33, of Hong Kong, said that he has been unable to control his
right thumb since his childhood and told a court that it was to blame for
pinching a woman's bottom as he helped her out of a taxi.
 
Pregnant Susan Ann Yasger convinced a judge in Orange County, CA, that her
fetus qualified as a passenger in her car and therefore she was not driving
alone on a freeway lane reserved for cars carrying more than one person.

A house burglar in Logan, Oregon, known as "The Muncher," has broken into rural
homes to eat food, drink beer, watch TV and then clean up after himself.  Local
sheriffs believe that a copycat "Muncher" may also be at work.

After resolving a family feud that left members out of communication for years,
a brother and sister in Duluth, MN, discovered that neither knew the where-
abouts of their 80-year-old mother.  Realizing that neither had been caring for
her, they went to her home and found that her body had been decomposing for a
year.  "It sounds dumb, but that's what happened," said a son-in-law.

Mr and Mrs Joseph A. Carlone had tried unsuccessfully to rid their Ohio home of
a noxious odor since 1964, but it wasn't until 1972 that the 40 gallons of
human excrement that had been accumulating behind their kitchen wall exploded
into their house.  Apparently a telephone installer in 1964 had accidentally
drilled through a waste pipe leading from the upstairs bathroom, allowing the
excrement to fall from the pipe into the wall.

The U.S. Postal Service ruled that a Johnsonville, North Carolina, postmaster
had to repay $44 in stamps and money orders that thieves made off with after he
told them how to open a Postal Service safe at his grocery store.  Four gunmen
had pistol-whipped him, threatened him, his wife and eight others and shot his
son.  The Postal Service said that he failed to "exercise resonable care."

The Consumer Product Safety Commission was forced to recall 80,000 buttons it
had distributed to promote toy safety beause they were found to be a danger to
children.  The buttons, which said, "for kid's sake think toy safety," used a
paint with dangerously high lead content, had sharp edges, and parts that could
be swallowed by a child.
 
The IRS penalized George Wittmeier $159.78 for not paying all his tax with his
return.  Wittmeier underpaid by a penny.

A 19-year-old was twice rebuffed by Texas prison officials when he tried to
turn himself in in an aggravated assault case.  He was turned away one day
because he hadn't made an appointment and on another day because he had arrived
too late.  He was eventually sentenced to a two-year prison term.
 
A female monkey in the city of Kanpur, India, jumped onto a high-tension wire
and electrocuted herself, causing a blackout of the city lasting several hours.
Ten days earlier, her mate had died when he jumped onto the same wire and also
caused a blackout.  The United News of India reported that the female monkey
visited the site of her mate's death daily until jumping herself.
  
Two police officers in Lynn, Massachusetts, tried to arrest the owner of a pit
bull terrier on a robbery charge.  During the struggle, the man, Lugene
Kendricks, bit patrolman William Althen on the arm and Edward Kiley on the
hand.  The dog just watched.
 
Police in Crown Point, Indiana, treated the death of James A. Cooley, 52, as a
suicide for several weeks until public pressure forced a reopening of the case
and its treatment as a homicide.  Police acknowledged all along that Cooley
died as a result of 32 hammer blows to the head.
  
A South Korean police officer took a $6 bribe from a motorist but found himself
blackmailed by two men, including a fellow police officer who saw the bribe.
The officer paid them $28,750 not to report him, but his superiors found out
anyway and demoted him.
 
A onetime winner of a "Foster Parent of the Year" award was sentenced to six
months in jail for sexually assaulting a 9-year-old girl who had been placed
in his family's care.
 
In Crete, Illinois, an 80-year-old man confessed to beating his wife of 57
years to death with a hammer.  He told police that he suffered from a heart
ailment and cataracts, and was afraid he would die and wanted to avoid leaving
his wife a widow.

A former bank manager admitted administering spankings to more than 50
customers of a Pittsburgh bank as punishment for falling behind on their loan
payments.  "I never had any trouble with them afterwards," he said.  He was
later found quilty of misappropriating $88,268 in bank funds.  He told the
court he was forced to use the money to make unrecorded loans when 6 of those
who were spanked threatened to report his action to his superiors.

A British army sergeant was accused of turning young recruits into a human
xylophone by hitting them across the bare buttocks with a baseball bat as they
knelt in a line.  According to the prosecutor at the sergeant's court-martial,
each recruit had to yell a musical note when he was hit, and the sergeant
continued until he had played a tune.

Guests at a wedding reception in Lanzhou, China, heard a scream from the
bedroom and rushed in to find both the bride and groom unconscious on the
sofa.  They were rushed to the hospital, but the bride was dead.  The groom
said he had been kissing his wife on the neck.  According to doctors, the
passion, intensity and length of the kiss caused fatal heart palpitations.
 
Boston Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most went to the doctor for an examination
to see why he was having trouble hearing.  The doctor checked his ear and found
a radio ear plug, which had been in Most's ear for eighteen months.

Dale Eller, 22, of Columbus, Ohio, walked into police headquarters and re-
quested an X-ray in order to locate his brain. He showed the police a hole in
his skull through which he had inserted 3" of wire trying to find his brain
but had failed.  He told them he had made the hole with a power drill.  Police
took Eller to the hopsital, where doctors removed a coat hanger wire from his
head.  A hospital official said Eller was in good condition, although doctors
said he might have personality changes.
 
Four months before he was to be married in 1974, a man was admitted to North
Hills Passavant Hospital in Pennsylvania for surgery to correct a recessed
testicle.  During the relatively routine operation a doctor accidentally
amputated the future groom's penis.  The man was awarded $825,000 in an out-
of-court settlement.
 
Virginia state trooper F L Farney pulled over a weaving car early one morning
and found that its driver wasn't just drunk but also blind.  Farney reported
that the man explained he was driving because his woman companion "was drunker
than he was."  The driver added that she had been directing him.  "He thought
he was driving okay," said Farney, who disagreed and ticketed both of them.
    
In Narooma, Australia, 16-year-old Greg Hammond, who was born with only one
hand, placed second in a men's 100-meter race.  Officials disqualified him,
however, after an appeal noted that he failed to touch the end of the pool with
both hands as specified by international rules.
 
In Houston, Texas, two friends shot and killed each other in a bar after
arguing over how easy it was to get away with murder in the city.  Witnesses
told the police that James Cole claimed it was easy to escape arrest for
murder, whereas Harold Kirkley argued a victim could retaliate by shooting
back.  Cole picked up a pistol, saying he wasn't sure it worked, and fired,
hitting Kirkley, who pulled out a pistol and shot Cole.

Ray County, Missouri, conservation agent George Hiser told his wife to take her
best shot when a turkey came out of the woods while they were hunting.  Marcia
Hiser not only dropped the bird at 40 yards, but she also hit a second turkey
15 yards behind it with the same blast.  Since Missouri law prohibits killing
more than one turkey a week during the spring season, George had no choice but
to issue Marcia a ticket.
     
A Northwest Airlines flight from Seattle to Detroit made an emergency landing
in Salt Lake City after the crew smelled gasoline.  Investigators discovered
the fumes came from a West German tourist who brought an empty gas can aboard
after his car had run out of gas on the way to the Seattle airport.
   
Experienced skydiver Ivan Lester McGuire loaded up with portable video equip-
ment to record a dive near Louisburg, North Carolina, but apparently forgot to
pack his parachute.  After McGuire plunged to his death, a tape of the dive
was recovered, showing him flailing his arms on discovering his oversight.
 
Lawyer Reginald Tucker, 29, was at a party on the 39th floor of Chicago's
Prudential Building when he took off his glasses and started racing through
the corridors with a co-worker.  At the end of one orridor was a window, which
Tucker apparently didn't see.  He kept running, crashed through the window,
and plunged to his death.

In Canada, a woman was charged with hiring a hit man to kill a 19-year-old
neighbor because she was tired of his mufflerless Pontiac roaring through her
neighborhood.  The police also suspected her of poisoning her husband for
threatening to turn her in for hiring the hit man.

In one of his pleas for money, Oral Roberts urged his followers to scribble the
name of Jesus on the soles of their shoes.  "As you put your foot down, know by
your faith you're bruising the devil's head," his letter said.  "The devil
should always see the sole of your shoe coming down on him."  The letter
featured a white space for contributors to outline their shoes.  Within a week
of Robert's letter being mailed, fellow evangelist Billy Graham was admitted to
a Rochester, NY, hostpial with a foot infection.

Mark Wagstaff, 30, co-owner of a company that makes security equipment, was
demonstrating a bulletproof vest and asked his friend to try to stab him in
the chest.  The man's first attempt failed, but the second pierced Wagstaff's
vest, killing him.

In Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, Gan Keng Woong stumbled and fell unconscious while
playing badminton.  The fall jarred his dentures loose, and they lodged in his
windpipe, suffocating him.
  
Fumietsu Okubo, 65, of Toyama, Japan, choked to death after becoming entangled
in his seat belt on the first day of enforcement of Japan's mandatory seat-belt
law.
 
Judge Juan Flores sentenced Jose Lopez of Villarcia, Paraguay, to die before a
firing squad for a shotgun killing, even though it meant that his Siamese twin
brother, Alfredo, joined at the side, would die, too, and despite evidence that
Alfredo had actually tried to prevent Jose from pulling the trigger.

An Alabama judge, attending a national conference of family court judges on
problems of child abuse, was arrested in Providence, RI, and charged with
molesting the 13-year-old grandson of another judge attending the conference.

A Texas District Court judge sentenced a 31-year-old man to 35 years in prison
for stealing a 12 oz. $2 can of Spam in Houston.

A New Jersey police chief was accused of ordering the opening of a grave
because he realized that he had loaned the grieving family a hat for the
casket-viewing but had not gotten it back after the funeral.

A 91-year-old woman sued her 79-year-old husband of 53 years for divorce in
Queens, NY, accusing him of having had an affair with a "younger woman," age
70.  According to the lawsuit, her husband admitted to having been seeing the
other woman for 40 years, and she decided to leave when he became abusive and
threatened to hit her with his cane.  As the moving van pulled up to the house
to take away her belongings, all her husband could say was, "Did you wash my
clothes?"
 
In England, Canon Michael Dittmer, who believes in "balance" in funeral
eulogies, described Fred Clark, 52, as a "very disagreeable man with little
good in him who would not be missed."  Dittmer later apologized.
  
Patricia Spahic, 59, sitting in the third row during a Pittsburgh production
of _Hamlet_, was cut on the head when Hamlet's dagger slipped out of his hand
and sailed into the audience.
   
Tommy Cribbs, the sheriff of Dyer County, Tennessee, was arrested in Van Buren,
Missouri, after police noticed his car in the parking lot of a local motel.  A
car of that description had been used in the theft of two sheep from a nearby
farm.  Officers who were questioning people at the motel were led to Cribbs
after a sheep was thrown from the window of his room.
     
A New Zealand man killed his wife by stabbing her repeatedly in the
stomach with a frozen sausage.

In Beckley, West Virginia, a woman was beaten by a mob of sixth graders
when she visited her son's school dressed as a "Care Bear" on Valentine's
Day.
  
A bank robber in New Haven, Connecticut, was convicted and sentenced
to 80 years in prison.  His bank robbery was foiled when his getaway
car, left idling outside the bank, was stolen.

Death-row inmates at Huntsville, Texas, prison awarded a $280 pot in
commissary privileges to the one who picked the minute inmate James
David Autry would be pronounced dead.  If Autry had won a stay of
execution, he would have won the pot.

British Sunday Express Medals for Dubious
Distinctions in 1992

Tortoise Trophy--
British Rail, which ingeniously solved the problem of lateness in the
InterCity express train service by redefining "on time" to include trains
arriving within one hour of schedule.

Rubber Cushion--
John Bloor who mistook a tube of superglue for his haemorrhoid cream and
glued his buttocks together.

Silver star: Michael Robinson, who rang police to deliver a bomb hoax,
but became so agitated about the mounting cost of the call that he began
screaming "Call me back" and left his phone number.

Bronze star: Paul Monkton, who used as his getaway vehicle a van with his
name and phone number painted in foot-high letters on the side.

Flying Cross--
To Percy the Pigeon, who flopped down exhausted in a Sheffield loft
having beaten 1,000 rivals in a 500 mile race and was immediately eaten
by a cat. The 90 minute delay in finding his remains and handing his
identification tag to the judges relegated Percy from first to third.

Lazarus Laurel--
To Julia Carson who as her tearful family gathered round her coffin in a
New York funeral parlour, sat bolt upright and asked what the hell was
going on. Celebrations were short lived since Mrs. Carlson's daughter,
Julie, immediately dropped dead from shock.

Silver Bullet--
To poacher Marino Malerba who shot dead a stag standing above him on an
overhanging rock,and was killed instantly when it fell on him.



PICK THE RIGHT BANK
You don't want to make the same mistake as the fellow in Anaheim, CA, who
tried to hold up a bank that was no longer in business and had no money.

STUDY YOUR HISTORY
Don't try to stick up the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota.
Jesse James tried it 111 years ago, and the townsfolk took just seven
minutes to kill two and capture three of his gang. Nobody tried again
until 1984, and the customers chased the guy down. They're tight with
their dollar, those Minnesotans.

SPEAK TO THE RIGHT TELLER
One robber in Upland, CA, presented his note to the teller, and her father,
who was in the next line, got all bent out of shape about it. He wrestled
the guy to the ground and sat on him until the authorities arrived.

DON'T SIGN YOUR DEMAND NOTE
Demand notes have been written on the back of a subpoena issued in the name
of a bank robber in Pittsburgh... on an envelope bearing the name and
address of another in Detroit....and in East Hartford, Connecticut, on the
back of a withdrawal slip giving the robber's signature and account number.

DON'T ADVERTISE
A teenage girl in Los Angeles tried to distract attention from her face by
wearing a see-through blouse with no bra while holding up banks.

GO EASY ON THE DISGUISE
One robber, dressed up as a woman with very heavy make-up, ran face first
into a glass door. He was the first criminal ever to be positively identified
by a lip-print.

TAKE RIGHT TURNS ONLY
Avoid the sad fate of the thieves in Florida who took a wrong turn into the
Homestead Air Force Base, drove up to a military police guardhouse and,
thinking it was a toll-booth, offered the security men money.

BE AWARE OF THE TIME
Or the chagrin of the bank robber in Cheshire, Massachusetts, who hit the
bank at 4:30 PM, then tried to escape through downtown North Adams, where
he was trapped in rush hour traffic until police arrived.

CONSIDER ANOTHER LINE OF WORK
Bank robbery is not for everyone. One nervous Newport, RI robber, while
trying to stuff his ill-gotten gains into his shirt pocket, shot himself in
the head and died instantly.

BE STRONG
Then there was the case of the hopeful criminal in Swansea, Massachusetts,
who, when the teller told him she had no money, fainted. He was still
unconscious when the police arrived. His getaway car, parked nearby, had
the keys locked inside it.

Orignally from the San Jose Mercury news, "News of the Weird".

(a) Portsmouth, R.I. Police charged Gregory Rosa, 25, with a
string of vending machine robberies in January when he 1) fled
from police inexplicably when they spotted him loitering around a vending
machine and 2) later tried to post his $400 bail in coins.

(b) Karen Lee Joachimmi, 20, was arrested in Lake City, Florida
for robbery of a Howard Johnson's motel. She was armed with only an
electric chain
saw, which was not plugged in.

(c) The Ann Abort News crime column reported that a man walked into a
Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 7:50am, flashed a gun and demanded
cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn't open the cash
register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk
said they weren't available for breakfast. The man, frustrated, walked
away.

And it gets better:

(d) David Posman, 33, was arrested recently in Providence, R.I.,
after allegedly knocking out an armored car driver and stealing the closest
four bags of money. It turned out they contained $800 in PENNIES, weighed
30 pounds each, and slowed him to a stagger during his getaway so that
police officers easily jumped him from behind.

(e) The Belgium news agency Belga reported in November that a
man suspected of robbing a jewelry store in Liege said he couldn't have
done it
*because he was busy breaking into a school at the same time.* Police then
arrested him for breaking into the school.

(f) Drug-possession defendant Christopher so-and-so, on trial in
March in Pontiac, Michigan, said he had been searched without a warrant.
The
prosecutor said the officer didn't need a warrant because a "bulge" in
Christopher's jacket could have been a gun. Nonsense, said Christopher,
who happened to be wearing the same jacket that day in court. He handed it
over so the judge could see it. The judge discovered a packet of cocaine
in the pocket and laughed so hard he required a five minute recess to
compose himself.

(g) Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz gave himself
five-inch-long welts in March when he tried to iron his polo shirt while
wearing it. "I've
ironed that way five or six times," he said, "and never had it happen."

(h) Dave so-and-so of Anniston, Alabama, was injured recently
after he attempted to replace a tubelike fuse in his Chevy pickup with a
22-caliber rifle bullet (used because it was a perfect fit). However, when
electricity heated the bullet, it went off and shot him in the knee.

News of the Weird, Volume 2, Number 1

In November 1994, Mayor Carty Finkbeiner of Toledo, Ohio, told
reporters that the best solution to the increasing complaints of noise
from the Toledo Aeroport was to relocate deaf people to to high-noise
areas, facilitating their purchase of homes from the complainers
(Several
days later, the mayor apologised).

St. Bernard Parish, La, city equipment driver Bobby Bouffine
resigned under fire in October 1994. According to officials, Bouffine
stopped by an X-rated video store for several hours during the work day
and parked the city's $100,000 25 foot long, 8 ton pothole filling
machine in the parking lot.

Cockpit transcripts from an Aeroflot jet that went down in
Siberia in March revealed that the pilot's two kids, a 16 year-old son
and 12 year-old daughter, had been playing with the controls during the
flight. One of the last communications was the girl asking, "Daddy,
can I
turn this?"

In Islamabad, Pakistan, the gov't banned New Year's celebrations
after Islamic fundamentalists threatened to smash cars belonging to
people having fun.

A report in the San Fransisco Chronicle stated that the muslim
sect Tehrik-a-Nifaz in Pakistan declared in May that that proper Muslims
should not follow the gov't's new traffic regulations and begin driving
their cars on the right side of the road, as everyone in Pakistan drives
ont eh left side. After two weeks and countless serious accidents, the
sect was forced to rescind the decree.

In October, India's leading Hindu holy "roling man", Lotan Baba,
on a pilgrimage to Great Britain, demonstrated how he got his epithet by
rolling on his side for 3 miles through the centre of town for world
peace and eternal salvation. He claims to have rolled over 4000
kilometers in India, through deserts and through monsoon season. One
store owner said of Baba, "I just looked out and there was this idiot
rolling along the ground."

Albert Cohen, of Troy, NY, was awarded a patent last year for his
invention; an artificial arm to be attached to an office desk, floor or
wall and which provides a hand to high five when no one else is
around to
give one to while watching your favourite sports team.

Dr. Bruce Margon, an astrophysicist at Univ of Washington was
quoted in the New York Times on the continuing inability of science to
quantify what the "blackness" in space is, even though, they are quite
sure it must be matter by virtue of its properties: "Its a fairly
embarrassing situation to admit that we can't find 90 percent of the
universe."

Also from the New York Times, in January, suggestions were being
made for greater UN recognition in 1995; its 50th anniversary. Among
them
was one from Boutros Boutros-Ghali; adverts featuring a beautiful woman
in an expensive car driving by the UN building and saying, "Ah, the
United Nations!"

In Spetember, an employee of the Myers Construction Co. was
convicted of misdemeanor assault against the owner of a competing
company, Herbert Miller. While Miller was in his earth-moving machine
working in the Stewardstown Station developement in York, Pa, in 1993,
three Myers employees blocked his path armed with their own bulldozers.
When Miller tried to go over a curb to get around, one followed him,
caught up to him and used the "bulldozer bucket" to lift Miller's
machine
and tip it over.

Pyramids Unlimited, based in central Florida, having been rejected
last year in the town of Bushnell, plans to approach several other towns
with its idea of a 50 story high pyramid shaped tomb to hold 300,000
graves and house a chapel at the summit. Pyramids spokesman Ben Everidge
said "We're not talking some tacky mall, here." The project would cost
$200 million.

Eugene "Butch" Flenough, Jr., was arrested in Austin, Texas for robbery of
a pizza restaurant after employees identified him.  To hide his face during
the robbery, Flenough wore a motorcycle helmet, which had "Butch" and
"Eugene Flenough, Jr." written on it.

Stan Fox, who finished last in the 1990 Indianapolis 500 after traveling
only ten laps before a gear box problem forced him out of the race,
nonetheless earned $108,000.

When the Army tested a new air defense gun called the Sergeant York,
which was designed to home in on the whirling blades of helicopters
and propeller-driven aircraft, it ignored the chopper targets.
Instead, the weapon demolished a ventilating fan on a nearby latrine.

In Oslo, Norway, Jermund Skogstad, fifty, was moving into his new apartment
when he took a break to get something to eat.  He went to a nearby cafe but
forgot to take his wallet, which contained his new address.  He was unable to
find his way home.  "This is embarrassing," he told a newspaper a month
later, hoping word of his plight would reach his new landlady, whom he had
paid a month's rent in advance.

Scientists at the University of California - Irvine believe they have
disproved the theory that limbless animals use less energy than do
legged animals.  Biologist Bruce Jayne and crew monitored the movements
of snakes slithering on treadmills while wearing tiny oxygen masks.

The New York State Lottery had to suspend play on the number 3569 before
noon on December 27, 1989, because it had been played by too many people.
Thiswas the number of the license plate (VR3569) on the truck New York
Yankees manager Billy Martin was killed in days earlier.

The government of China executed twelve male and six female factory
managers by firing squad at a refrigerator plant just outside Beijing in
1989 because the poor quality of their products constituted "unpardonable
crimes against the people of China."  Customers had complained for years
about having to wait for refrigerators that were usually unusable when
delivered.

Happy Perhelion!  At 3:00 pm today (January 3rd). the Earth is at its
closest approach to the Sun for the entire orbit.  One week from today,
the 10th, is the date of perigee for the Moon.

In Duluth Minnesota, carpenter Lanace Grangruth accidentally shot a nail an
inch and a half into his head from his nail gun, tacking his cap to his head.
Said Grangruth, "I didn't actually feel it go in.  I tried to take my had off,
and it wouldn't come off."  The nail penetrataed relatively harmlessly at a
crevasse between the two lobes.

Darrel Brown, 53, was convicted of defrauding the Veterans Administration of
more than $700,000 by feigning paralysis for more than twenty years.  He had
been faithfully reporting to VA facilities during that time in a wheelchair
after having bound his arms and legs tightly for days before visits so they
would temporarily atrophy.

Shirley Koota, 62, of Miami, accompanied her husband Bert, 65, to a pistol
range to learn how to use ther new .22 automatic.  During the lesson, she
squeezed off a round, and the hot cartridge, ejected by the pistol, flew
down the front of her dress.  It startled her so badly that she whirled
around and shot Bert in the leg.

Derrick Johnson, 28, who allegedly stole food over a period of three
months from a Kansas City gas station cooler while yelling "Catch me
if you think you can," was shot and killed by a station clerk.

Two men, aged 16 and 18, after an attempted burglary in Larkspur, CA, in
1989, scaled a chain-link fense outside town to evade police who were
following them, only to discover later that the fence was the outer
perimiter of San Quentin Prison, where guards soon arrested them.

Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, says he experienced a vision
in which a UFO took him from a Mexico mountaintop to a "mother wheel" where
the voice of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the religious sect, told him to tell
the world that then-President Ronald Reagan was planning a war.  Farrakhan
said that the later air attack on Libya was partly foiled by the Mother Wheel.
"The Wheel was, in fact, present and interfered with the highly sensitive
electronic equipment of the aircraft carrier, forcint it to return to Florida
for repairs."

1990 New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Pierre Rinfret had some
difficulty establishing voter name recognition.  A New York Times informal
survey of voters identified Pierre Rinfret as an artist, a perfume, a drug
dealer, a movie star, a fashion designer, a chef, the French ambassador to
the United States, and a goalie for the New York Rangers.

Chef Albert Grabham of the New House Hotel in Wales hid the restaurant's
New Year's Eve earnings in the oven.  He failed to remember that when he
lit the same oven to prepare New Year's Day lunch.

A transient unable to leave a tip for a waitress at a Salt Lake City
restaurant told her, "I'm going to go rob a bank and I'll be right back."
Police arrested him after he walked out of the First Interstate Bank with
$1200 and walked back across the street to leave a $2 tip.

Eighteen-year-old Ronald Kramer of East Wenatchee, Washington, was arrested
along with three friends after they got drunk, dug up a body in a cemetary,
and took it to the home of a friend in the middle of the night as a joke.
The body was at least seventy years old.

Two inmates at the Logan County, Utah, jail were charged with various crimes
in 1990 after having made their third foray of the evening from the jail
(this time to set a fire in the sheriff's evidence roon).  They first escaped
through a crawl hole to get beer from the wife of one of the three, then
returned to jail.  A few minutes later, they left to steal weapons and get
more beer, then returned.  After their third adventure, an officer noticed
empty beer cans outside the office door.

Missouri liquor officials cited Mike Tomlin, owner of Whispers nightclub
in Columbia, for sending letters to University of Missouri fraternities
advertising his club as the place to find "drunk, horny women."

A study of ovine sexuality by University of California at Davis graduate
student Anne Perkins noted the difficulty of determining if lesbianism exists
among sheep "because if you are a female sheep, what you do to solicit sex
is stand still.  Maybe there is a female sheep out there really wanting
another female, but there's just no way for us to know it."

A New Jersey appeals court refused to block a lawsuit filed by Vincent
Vecere atainst Trump Castle Hotel and Casion for negligence.  Vecere said
the hotel was responsible when he swung his hand back (while shaking dice)
and hit a post on the craps table.

New Jersey state police say that a man may have been hit by as many as
twenty-one cars on the Garden State Parkway on the night of September 24,
1990.  A man who pulled off the road to help "continually heard thumps that
he believed to be the body being hit again and again," said police.

According to a 1989 interview, the villagers of Turalei, Sudan, have no idea
of just how successful former villager (and now professional basketball
player) Manute Bol has become.  "If Manute is still alive, tell him his wife
has married another man and most of his cattle were stolen..."  said his
uncle.  "If he has no cows, and he wants to marry an American wife, we can
get the cows together for him," said the deputy chief of the village.  "Just
let us know how many cows the woman's family demands."

David Ashley, charged with raising poultry without a permit, appeared in
court in Seneca Falls, New York, witha rooster tucked under his harm.
When the village justice Gordon Tetor ordered the bird removed, Ashley
told the judge that the bird was his attorney, explaining "it was the
only counsel I could afford."

Portsmouth, Rhode Island, police charged Gregory Rosa, 25, with a string of
vending machine robberies after he inexplicably fled from police when they
spotted him loitering around a vending machine.  Police were pretty sure
they had their man when Rosa later tried to post bail using $400 in coins.

Retired Brig Genl Alfredo Lim, Director of the National Bureau of Investi-
gation, was assigned by Pres. Corazon Aquino to investigate charges of
fixing the Philippines state lottery's Sept 1, 1990 drawing.  At the Sept.
16 drawing, which was specially televised in hopes of restoring public
confidence in the game, Lim stepped forward with the winning ticket to
collect the $200,000 top prize.

The New England Journal of Medicine warned that communion wafers often used
in Catholic and Anglican services might be hazardous.  The report noted
that the wafers are made from wheat flour containing gluten and other
substances that can prompt an attack fo a digestive disorder that prevents
the absorption of nutrients and causes a variety of symptoms.

Deacons of the Greek Orthodox Church in Athens demanded a 15 percent pay
raise in 1985 to compensate them for having to inhale incense smoke
during services.  The complained it was as bad as cigarette smoke.

Floyd Ullie, Seventy-two, king of the fourth Irregular Prune Parade in
El Monte, California, failed to appear at the event after he became ill
from eating too many prunes.

Adelheid Streidel, 42, said she stabbed German political figure Oskar
Lafontaine to get the press to report that "there are people factories
and underground operating theaters in Europe where people from the
population are remolded physically and mentally.  This takes place with
the approval of politicians."

Arthur Valdez was found guilty of attempted escape from California's
Vacaville prison despite his claims that he was only following
instructions from "Domies from the planet Corpus" and had actually
"left his body" at the time.

David Lusco, 42, was ordered to jail after his arrest for kidnapping near
Moscow, Idaho.  Allegedly, he had imprisoned his wife in their pickup truck,
forced her to join him in disrobing, and driven off on a reckless rampage.
When she escaped and donned a passerby's coat, he chased her while wearing
only a hat.

Father Eladio Blanco, 49, refused to accompany a funeral procession from
his church in Pexieros-Os, Spain, to a cemetery, saying "She (the deceased)
has no right to a proper burial because she almost never came to Mass."
When the crowd of three hundred mourners insisted, Blanco drew a pistol and
fired four shots, wounding one.

Thirteen minutes after being pronounced dead, George Barr, 82, started
breathing again.  He was released from a Ridgewood, New Jersey, hospital
several weeks later and intended to continue working on a series of
science books for children.

Taiwan's justice ministry proposed that condemned prisoners who agreed to
donate organs after death be spared the traditional execution (being placed
face down in a sandpit and shot through the heart).  Instead, they could
elect to be executed by a bullet in the head.

Ben Masel's campaign posters for the Illinois Republican gubernatorial
nomination featured Masel nude with the slogan "Nothing to Hide."

Brian Peterson, thirty-five, of New Britain, Connecticut, died after a
woman sat on his lap while he was seated on top of a glass table.  The
glass cracked, with one piece nearly severing one of his arms.

Darius McCollum, twenty-five, of Queens, admitted stealing thirteen buses
from Transit Authority depots in one year.  Described by New York police
as a "bus buff," McCollum was wearing an actual bus driver's uniform
when he was caught.

Late in July of 1989 a kitten with eight legs and two tails was born in the
village of Machala in Ecuador.  Rejected by its mother, it died within
hours.  The devout Catholic population there saw it as a bad sign.  "We are
nearing the end of the world because people are so decadent," said one.

When Jimmie Pettit entered Miami's Channel 4 studios claiming that he had a
bomb, the building was evacuated.  On further inquiry it was understood that
Pettid claimed that the CIA had surgically implanted a bomb in his brain 25
years before, and he was asking for help.  He later said that the bomb had
moved to his rectum.

A group of boys played a game of soccer on a South Bronx streed with a human
head wrapped in rags before the father of one of the boys realized what their
"ball" really was.  They had found it in a box of trash.  Police found
dismembered arems and legs nearby, but no torso.

Julia Schumansky, 64, of Hartsville, Tennesee, underwent surgery for a tumor
in her left buttock.  Instead of a tumor, doctors found a 4-inch pork chop
bone, which they estimated had been there between 5 and 10 years.  describing
herself as "overweight," she speculates she must have unknowingly sat on the
bone, and that the skin grew around it.

Dr. Janis Ashley told a Sedalia, Missouri, newspaper in 1989 that she would
shortly have a sex-change operation so that she could find a wife and raise
a family.  She had been a woman for eleven years, following her first sex
change.

A man in his twenties from Tasmania jumped into the ape enclosure at the
Melbourne Zoo screaming "I've come to kill a gorilla!"  He then kicked
and punched a 220-pound primate before zoo officials locked him in a cage.

New York City police arrested three men in the shooting death of a cocaine
dealer, including Domingo Osario, twenty-two, whom they accused of driving
the getaway car.  Mr. Osariao has no arms.

Washington State Senator Jim West proposed in 1989 to make it illegal for
couples under eighteen to engage in "heavy petting," but the bill was
killed in committee the next year.

To settle a lawsuit involving a man who died in a construction accident in
Houston, his relatives agreed to forgo thier claim of $50,000 from one of
the defendents, Derr Construction Company, if Derr's lawyer would allow each
of them to punch him in the face.

A guest at a party in Kincaid, West Virginia, was trying to explode a
blasting cap, hooked to a battery, in an aquarium.  When it wouldn't go off,
another guest, Jerry Stromyer, 24, said he would demonstrate how to do it.
He put the blasting cap in his mouth and bit down, blowing out all his teeth
and extensively injuring his tounge and lips.

A fist-fight broke out when sixty traditionalist Roman Catholics tried to
take over the main altar at Saint Maclou Cathedral near Paris so that they
could celebrate the mass in Latin.  The brawl lasted over an hour until a
priest agreed to move to a side chapel for his Latin service.

Bill R. Clark, sixty-one, of Jonesboro, Arkansas, was issued a patent for
his invention that embosses numbers on the heels of socks to help identify
them when they come out of the dryer, saving the owner the time needed to
match them up.

Marc Adams, a senior fine arts student at San Jose State University, was
detained by police for indecent exposure after donning a homemade clear
vinyl suit and mask over his nude body and lying down on a table in front
of the university's fine art building.  Adams entitled his work Kinetic
Composition on a Cube.

Police in Kassel, West Germany, checking a car abandoned after an accident,
found its windshield washer bottle full of schnapps and a tube leading to
the dashboard.  When police tracked down the driver, he admitted that he had
been taking swigs of the liquor from the tube before the crash.

After having been struck by a hit-and-run driver along I-5 near San Diego,
Juan Francisco Camacho spent four days on the median strip signaling for help
as a half-million cars passed him.  During the next few days, Camacho, in
great pain and often delirious, sat up and even managed to stand in full
view of people at nearby businesses.

During his trial for the attempted assination of Pope John Paul II, Mehmet
Ali Agca claimed that he was Christ, and warned that "in this generation,
the days are counted," and said that his attack on the Pope was linked to
the third "Fatima Secret," which he demanded be revealed.

A woman in India agreed to grant her husband a divorce in order to marry
another woman on condition that he first submit to a public beating
administered by her.  He agreed and the court allowed it.

William Curry, 30, of Boston, died of a heart attack two weeks after winning
$3.6 million in the Massachusetts Megabucks Lottery.  "It was the stress of
it that killed him," said a relative.  Curry was reportedly hounded by
accountants, financial advisors, and requests for cash in the days after his
win.

A group of Baltimore teenagers held a contest during the annual March of
Dimes walkathon in which the one who landed the best punch on one of the
charity walkers would receive a cardboard replica of a prizefighter's
championship belt.  The group was linked to eleven attacks on walkers.

After Phoebe Schneider of Carteret, New Jersey, sued her husband Eugene
for divorce in 1976, she filed a second suit charging that he went too
far in dividing their property equally.  She alleged that he used a
chain saw to cut their home in half, rendering it uninhabitable.

Alcide Chaisson, 69, was arrested after allegedly standing near the
Crystalaire Airport northeast of Los Angeles and using a four-foot square
mirror to attempt to reflect the sun into the eyes of pilots landing planes
there.  Chaisson claims that the planes drown out the radio in his trailer
nearby.

Two women giving birth in the Philippine village of Lutayan during a
firefight between government troops and Muslim rebels named their
baby boys Bazooka and Armalite.

Police in Granada Hills CA arrested five Los Angeles housewives, members of
a bowling league, who were betting a couple of dollars a week in their
matches.  Police learned of the bets through a tip from a disgruntled
former league member, and two vice squad officers staked out the bowling
alley for two hours, watching $8 change hands.

Michael Lane, 28, of Providence RI was arrested for driving his car
through the front doors of St. Joseph Hospital and plowing into the
information desk in the lobby, apparently to get immediate attention
for two passengers who had been stabbed.

District Judge Brigita Volopichova, 27, of Pizen, Czechoslovakia, was
disciplined by legal authorities for bringing "disgrace" to judges by
entering a televised "Miss Topless" event.  She came in second.

When actor Corey Feldman was asked for an explanation after being
arrested for cocaine possession, he said he had to take it in order
to get over the news that his girlfriend was dating actors Charlie
Sheed and Corey Haim.

Charles W. Doak, owner of the Wilson CAndy Company in Rocky Mount,
North Carolina, was killed during a robbery after being hit on the
head several times by a nine-pound, two-and-a-half-foot candy cane.

Jerry Lee Dunbar pled guilty to the strangling of a woman in an Alexandria,
Virginia motel.  He hid her body under the floor of the motel room.  In a
pretrial conversation with a psychiatrist, Dunbar said that he is often
surrounded by little people who glow in the dark and that he hears voices
which give him violent instructions.

After adding another "z" to his name, Zeke Zzzyzus (formerly Zzyzus)
retained his place as the last name in teh Montreal telephone
directory.  Zzzyzus beat Zzyzyx, Pol Zzyzzo, and Zzzap Distribution
for last place.

The largest living species of knagaroo has a head the size of a sheep's and
may stand 7 feet tall.  An extinct species reached a height of more than 10
feet.  There are miniature kangaroos, such as the musk knagaroo, that are
no bigger than a jackrabbit.

Police in Washington state labeled Christian Agar's death "suspicious"
when the 25-year-old Seattle man's body was found completely wrapped in
duct tape near U. S. Highway 101.  His body was detected after the
"mummy shaped object" was x-rayed.

After being arrested for shoplifting at least once a month from May 1979
through May 1983, and having been convicted 37 times, LePonds Shaffer,
thirty, told a Chicago courtroom that doctors had implanted a radio
transmitter in his neck by which they distorted his ability to
distinguish right from wrong.

China gave commemorative gold watches to the soldiers who participated in
crushing the 1989 democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.  The watch face
features a soldier on sentry duty, while an inscription says "Commemoration
of the June 1989 Crackdown."

In Massachusetts, the Pittsfield School Committee announced that studends
could fulfill their physical education requirement by reading pamphlets
about exercise.

In Seattle, George Furedi, thirty-seven, was charged with driving his car
up the steps of a Mormon church and through the door.  He explained that
the church's public address system kept him awake at night.

The Los Angeles city attorney accused Daniel Ramos, eighteen, of painting
the word "Chaka" on ten thousand sites in Southern California, from
utility poles to buildings, walls, and traffic signs, causing an
estimated $500,000 in damages.

Adolph Daxboeck, twenty-three, was taking part in a contest in Burnaby,
British Columbia, to see how far a Ping-Pong ball could be blown.  He
inhaled by mistake, and the ball lodged in his throat, choking him to death.

Mafia gangsters suffer worse stress than top business executives, according
to Dr. Granesco Aragora.  The Sicilian pathologist, who spent more than 40
years studying Mafiosi remains, conlcuded that gangsters tend to have
"thickened arteries, kidney failure, stomach ulcers," and livers that are
"yellowish, fatty, and chronically short of glucose."

Amazonino Mendes, governor of Brazil's Amazonas State, announced that he
was fulfilling a campaign promise when he offered to distribute free
power saws to settlers in the Amazon rain forest region.  The saws cut
down trees ten times faster than axes.

Rather than make any statements, Hakic Ceku appeared in a Spanish court
room with his lips sewn shut.  The man, accused of firearms violations
and being part of an armed gang, then attacked his lawer with a glass
ashtray.

A man tried to stick up a cafe in Montpelier, France, with a candy
revolver, but the owner saw it was a fake and called the police.
by the time they arrived, the man had eaten the weapon.

Convicted murderer thomes marston argued in his appeal that conflicts of
interest were responsible for his 1985 conviction in Mendocino county, CA.
First, he submitted evidence that his attorney had fathered the child of the
then-district attorney, who was allegedly hassling the father for support
at the time of the trial.  Then a witness informed the appeals court that
the mother had told her that the real father was not the lawyer, but the
judge in the case.

The Nazi Bar in Bankok, Thiland, adorned with photos of Nazi storm troopers
and caricatures of Hitler, changed it's name in 1988 after complaints by
foreigners.  "We don't want to offend even a few people, so we're
experimenting with a new, neutral name and decor," said manager Aor
Sarayuk of the renamend "No Name" bar.

In Chippewa Falls, WI, Thomas L. Weber announced that financial problems had
forced him to close the office that was the center for a project to raise
$25 million to build a reception station for visitors from outer space.  His
plan called for the station to provide a safe landing area for aliens.  Weber
had counted on a groundswell of financial support and said he did get "tens
of thousands of letters."  Most of th eletters contained no money, however,
just requests for more information, which Weber couldn't afford the postage
to answer.

Harold Womack's Porsche got stuck in a cinder pit at the Sunset Crater
National Monument, and the Phoenix area man thought he could get out by
using a steamroller he spotted nearby.  Womack drove the steamroller over
to his car and hopped off to attach a chain, but the machine kept rolling
and flattened Womack's car.

Suspending Kenneth Worles's driver's liscense after his sixth arrest for
driving under the influence didn't keep the Naples, Florida, man off the
road.  Police arrested him again for drunken driving when he ran a red
light at a busy intersection while riding his 10-HP lawn mower.

When a communist party paper in China hailed Wang Zaoming in 1985 for
successfully breeding a new flower, people either wrote her asking for
seeds, saplings, or outright cash, or else they dropped by her home in
person.  She finally collapsed from the strain of cooking an average of
seven dinners daily for visitors, who also walked off with six hundred
pots of flowers.

Anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution were able to reconstruct
the face of a male skeleton found wearing a woman's dress and stuffed
into the chimney of the Good 'N Loud Music store in Madison, Wisconsin,
in l989.  Police believe the man was killed elsewhere and hidden in
the chimney.

Officials at the Hall Prison outside Stockholm reported the escape
of a skinny inmate who saved all the margarine from his meals until
he had enough to cover himself and squeeze through the bars.

Anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution were able to reconstruct
the face of a male skeleton found wearing a woman's dress and stuffed
into the chimney of the Good 'N Loud Music store in Madison, Wisconsin,
in l989.  Police believe the man was killed elsewhere and hidden in
the chimney.

Stanford University researchers ended a longstanding debate among owl
specialists as to which sense owls rely on most to detect food at night.
In a journal article, they concluded "sight" to be most important
after conducting an experiment in which owls were fitted with eyeglasses.

Diane Montiero, a Greyhound bus passenger, took over the wheel for a trip
from Delaware to New York after the replacement driver admitted that he
didn't know how to drive a manual transmission.

Former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu once responded to critical
anonymous letters written by Romanians to Radio Free Europe by ordering
that handwriting samples be taken from the entire population of more
than 20 million.

In 1984, Walter DeBow won a judgment for $3.4 million in damages against the
city of East Saint Louis, Illinois, for a wrongful beating he suffered while
in city jail, but he was unable to collect, as the city had been bankrupt.
In 1990, as compensation, DeBow was given title to the city's main municipal
building and its 220-acre industrial park.

In a price war on bananas between Twin Valu and Food 4 Less in Cuyahoga
Falls, Ohio, which started at 50 cents per pound, the competitors
repeatedly lowered the prices until Twin Valu began giving bananas
away for free.  Food 4 Less then matched that price but began taping
pennies to each bunch.

The Philippine Broadcasters' Association fined station ABS-CBN $11,600
for a l988 incident in which it sandwiched the 91-second-long
Mike Tyson-Michael Spinks boxing match with one hour of commercials.

A group of five boys in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida, spent four days
rescuing a kitten from a drainage pipe, finally capturing it by
lowering fish tied onto a badminton net.  The boys named the kitten
Baby Jessica Too.

Firefighters in San Jose, California, had to chisel three-year-old
Jennifer Camilleri's foot free from the toilet.  Jennifer had been
standing on the toilet to wash a toy pony in the sink when she slipped
and got stuck.  Two years earlier Jennifer was almost strangled when her
sweater caught on a fence after she climbed a wood pile to reach over
a fence and pet a neighbor's dog.

The wife of Brunswick, Georgia, handyman-inventor Teddie Eli Smith, involved
in a custody dispute with him over their four-year-old daughter, said that
the child was conceived with a homemade artificial inseminator Smith rigged
up with a bulb syringe and hair spray container.  She further said that the
device had been stocked with the sperm of Smith's seventeen-year-old son by
a previous marriage.  Smith's daughter would thus be his granddaughter,
and his current wife could be called his first wife's daughter-in-law.

St. Paul, MN, bank president Michael Brennan filed a $50,000 lawsuit
against the city and a construction company for a mishap in his bank's
restroom.  The construction company had shut off a sewer line without
notifying the bank, and when Brennan flushed, he was suddenly washed
out with "200 to 300 gallons" of raw sewage.  The company offered
only to buy him a new suit.

The Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Massachusetts was shut down for five
days during 1986 at a cost of $250,000 because of workers' horseplay.
Workers had rolled up a pair of gloves and taped them tightly to simulate
a ball, which had been lost during a game because of an overthrow into a
backup safety tank.

Hijackings and crashes aren't the biggest risks airline passengers face,
according to a 1989 British study.  Food poisoning is.  Nearly 25 percent
of all airline meals inspected contained ten times permitted bacteria
levels.  The study acknowledged that, although food poisoning already
is the top cause of pilot illness, fewer than thirty outbreaks of
airline food poisoning have been reported in the past 25 years, but
insisted that such incidents are grossly underreported.

Grant Oliver, 25, was arrested in Torquay, England, in 1989 when police
spotted him punching and yelling at someone on the street.  On closer
inspection, police discovered the victim was a blow-up doll but jailed
Oliver anyway for disturbing the peace.

A Dallas couple, Charlie and Sharon Reed, were happy enough when the police
called to say their stolen car had been found.  After they saw it, they
were even happier.  When it had been stolen 3 months earlier, the banana-
yellow 1976 Volkswagen convertible had a cracked windshield and a smashed
rear end.  When the Reeds picked up the car, it had new bumpers, new
fenders, a new paint job, and a new windshield. It even had a full tank
of gas.  "I think the thieves aligned the front end, too," Charlie Reed said.

A feature of a 1985 soviet trade show was an "exhibition of shame and
disgrace," designed to embarrass producers of defective merchandise.
A prime example was a large shipment of women's boots with high heels
--attached to the toe.

In Renton, Washington, Tanna Barney, 24, concerned that her husband Marc
was overdue on a long motorcycle trip, went looking for him in the family
car.  According to state police, as she rounded a curve she hit him head-on
and killed him.

Jeffrey Allen Hayes, 32, pleaded guilty to strangling Shannon Fay Stevens
in West Seattle, Washington, explaining he mistook her for his ex-girlfriend,
Barbara Dodge.

Seven-year-old Jason Riche drove himself to school in a 1980 Buick
belonging to his mother's boyfriend after complaining that it was
raining outside.  Minutes after telling him to go back outside and
wait for the bus, Jason's mother saw him driving away.  Jason drove
the five-kilometer distance to his Ontario school without incident.

A San Francisco woman was awarded $350,000 by a jury against the city for
injuries sustained when she fell in a public park.  She had been drinking,
took a taxi home, and got the driver to stop en route so she could answer
a call of nature in a clump of bushes at the edge of the park.  She lost
her balance, tumbled down a hill that was obscured by bushes, and
suffered major injuries.

Jennifer Connor, 18, a New York woman with a high hairdo, was diagnosed in
1989 with hearing loss and a "serious" ear infection.  Her physician said
her ears were clogged with hair spray.

A Cairo newspaper reported that Mohammed El Mahdi Essa, 38, was arrested
in a sting operation for selling his son, 3, to raise $700 to buy a
videocassette recorder.  Essa told police he was forced to do it because
of his honesty.  Said he, "I have never stolen in my life."

Canadian tourists Eric Plourde, 19, and Patrick Chartrand, 20, who had
driven from California to New York, stopped their car in the Bensonhurst
section of Brooklyn when they saw a woman in her mid-eighties sprawled
on the sidewalk, calling for help.  After they got out to assist her,
they were attacked by a group of ten to twelve teenagers wielding bats
and pipes who police said apparently thought the Canadians wer mugging
the woman.

An Alaskan Airlines Boeing 737 was struck by a fish on takeoff from the
Juneau, Alaska, airport in March 1987, causing a delay during which the
plane was inspected for damage.  The fish had been dropped by a bald
eagle.

A 17 year old pine tree in the Chinese village of Xinfu, which attracted
forty thousand people with stories of the miraculous healing power of
the water raining down from its leaves, was found actually to be dripping
with the urine of millions of insects.

Postal carrier John Cade was placed on five years' probation for having
hoarded three tons of undelivered mail in his home, much of it buried
in the backyard, for three years.  Cade said he started hiding leftover
mail at home so his superiors wouldn't think he was inadequate at the
job, then saw things start to get out of hand.

Kathy Oliver, Director of a Portland, Oregon, drug treatment program,
commenting on the success of giving free, clean needles to intravenous
drug users:  "It proves that IV drug users are...willing to go out of
their way to protect their health."

The Illinois Department of Conservation created a program, with $180,000
from the legislature, to study the contents of owl vomit to determine
what owls eat during different seasons.

Kevin L. Jones, 20, was arrested in Richmond, Virginia, after walking
into a police station to post bail for a friend.  He and his girlfriend
stared a little too long at the wanted poster featuring his name
and photograph, drawing the attention of officers.

The state of California took four years, 25 drafts, and $600,000, but
finally produced its "Wellness Guide" giving advice on proper living
habits.  Among the guidelines for parents:  "Don't beat, starve, or
lock up your kids."  Among the other advice:  "Don't buy something
you can't afford."  And:  "If you are sexually active and don't want
to make a baby, you may want to use birth control."

Police arrested Emmet Wheat, 47, in the San Francisco suburb of Hayward, CA,
for hitting 18 vehicles with his flatbed truck, injuring 12 people.  His
wife, Karen, said she spoke to him over the truck's two-way radio just
before he crashed into the highway center divider after littering three
miles of the Nimitz Freeway with dented vehicles.  "He said the Lord had
spoken to him," Karen recounted, "and that the Lord told him he could drive
through cars."

As part of the condition of probation for Ronald P. Edwards, who pleaded
guilty to battery in Pineville, Lousiana, Judge Joel Chaisson ordered
Edwards to remove the curse Edwards had placed on him at the time of his
arrest.

Winners of a lottery in the Ukrainian city of Stakhanov often walk away
with rolls of toilet paper, towels, pigs, hens, goats, detergent, and
bath soap as their prizes.  "But don't forget that there are great
shortages," said the newspaper _Literary Gazette_.  "In the city of
Stakhanov, except for the lottery, one cannot get these goods."  Tickets
cost 50 kopeks (about 81 cents), which is more than the cost of many
prizes.

Thomas Lee Jones, 24, was arrested for robbing a Santa Barbara, CA,
restaurant with a note threatening "to shot" ????? employees.  Police
set up a roadblock asking people who fit Jones's description to spell
"shoot" and soon apprehended Jones.

When patrolman Philip Human spotted three children riding in the open
truck of a sedan in Nyack, NY, he stopped the car and found eight more
people were riding in the front seat--five over the legal limit--and
fourteen in the back seat.  He ticketed the driver, Salvador Caban, 47,
who had only one arm.

After a sex change operation in May 1982, Christine Lynne Oliver of
Minneapolis began having second thoughts.  "I started getting feelings
that my old male identity was returning," she said after reverting to
wearing short hair and pants.  "It's like waking up from a bad dream
or something."  That November, she filed a $50,000 suit against four
doctors and the hospital, claiming they never should have allowed the
operation in the first place.  She said they failed to conduct a thorough
enough psychological exam, which would have shown she wasn't really a
woman trapped in a man's body, just a guy having problems getting over
the death of his wife.

In Bossier City, LA, Terry Polk, 26, got into a dispute at a party.  He
challenged his adversary to settle matters with a head-butting duel,
and the two banged each other several times.  Polk died shortly afterward
from a cerebral hemorrhage.

India's _Chandiagarh Tribune_ reported that an unidentified farmer whose
buffalo had eaten $2,000 worth of his wife's gold jewelry twelve years
earlier had just recovered the cache from its belly after waiting
patiently for the buffalo to die.

A judge in Litchfield, Connecticut, ruled that Arthur J. Werley would
be tried for the beating death of Kimberley Labrecque.  According to
court documents, Labrecque was beaten after she spurned Werley's sexual
advances and told him that he looked like Howdy Doody.

From the _Wichita Eagle_ crime column, April 11, 1990:  A man walked into
a gas station, laid $2 on the counter for cigarettes, and while the
attendant turned to get the cigarettes, the man reached into the cash
register, took the entire paper contents, and fled.  The attendant told
police there was a $1 bill on top of the paper compartment, and only
several scraps of paper underneath.  Meanwhile, the man left the $2 on
the counter.

To demonstrate a new insect repellent at a restaurant in London, Diana
Moran, a star of a British television fitness show, climbed into a
glass cage with more than 3000 starved mosquitoes.  The mosquitoes
escaped, however, and attacked the audience of businessmen and journalists,
leaving them bitten, swollen, and itching.  Moran, the only person
protected by the new repellent, wasn't bitten.

Maryland State Police were on the lookout for a man wearing a disposable
diaper and a T-shirt and reportedly driving a sports car with a backseat
filled with cans of whipped cream after reports that he had been seen
crossing over the state line from Pennsylvania.  It was his third reported
excursion into Maryland that year.

The California Supreme Court ruled that cancer patient John Moore was
entitled to profit from the enlarged, cancerous spleen that was removed
by operation in 1976.  After the operation, doctors used the spleen to
develop anticancer drugs and Moore figured the potential profit from
those drugs was more than $3 billion.

When customers complained that a slot machine at a laundromat in
Anchorage, Alaska, was a fraud because it was fixed not to pay off,
the authorities disagreed.  They said the no-payoff feature was what
made the machine legal.  If the customers could have won, the machine
would have been a gambling device, which is illegal in Alaska.

In Deerfield, Florida, Broward County Circuit Judge Lawrence Korda
sentenced Philip Tiger, 77, who was convicted of manslaughter for stabbing
his wife to death and who tried to take his own life, to watch the
movie _It's a Wonderful Life_.

The Tuscola High School marching band in Waynesville, North Carolina,
practicing in the school's parking lot, froze in their steps as an
Oldsmobile Cierra driven by 17-year-old classmate Sean Sojack drove
through their formation.  Sojack's father said that his son, new to
driving to school, simply saw an opening in the ranks and went for it.

Nineteen people ice-fishing on Lake Mille Lacs had to be rescued from a
large ice floe after the ice broke free and carried them more than a
half a mile out into the lake.  The ice-fishers, rescued by boat, left
behind ten ice-houses and three all-terrain vehicles on the floe.

Uganda was rife with coup rumors after a newsman on the state-run radio
was heard to say, "Oh my God!" over the air, followed shortly by "Good
night" and the station going off the air.  He was actually reacting to
the sight of a poisonous snake slithering into the radio studio.

In the Los Angeles suburb of Canoga Park, John A. Anderson, 72, was picking
up an examiner to take his driving test when the car lurched forward.  It
crashed through the wall of the Department of Motor Vehicles building,
careened through the counter area, and came to rest 30 feet inside the
building, but not before sending some 60 people scrambling, injuring six
office workers, and causing $40,000 worth of damage.

After being plagued by dreams that her mother, who had been listed by police
as a missing person for 3-1/2 years, was "in a place where she couldn't
move, either tied up or locked up," Kelly Tyburski, 20, broke into a
locked freezer in the basement of her family's home and found her mother's
body.  A Detroit medical examiner said that she may have been alive when
placed there.  Tyburski's father was charged with the murder.

After the group Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System claimed
responsibility for bombings that killed a federal judge and a lawyer,
Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Thom Robb accused the group of trying to give
the KKK and other racist organizations a bad name.
   Following the 1977 showing of the television special _Roots_, the KKK
requested equal time to present a rebuttal.  "Roots was a biased historical
presentation from a black militant point of view," said the Klan's national
grand dragon, David Duke.  ABC-TV denied the request.

An error by an Arizona court resulted in Bonita Lynch becoming one-fourth
owner of her ex-husband's $2.2 million lottery jackpot.  A paperwork
error delayed their official divorce date for 11 days, and it was during
that time that Mr. Lynch won the lottery.

Francisco Marino, a Mexican citizen who had been in the United States for
six months working as a dishwsher, was hit by a New York City subway train
and lost an arm when he fell drunk onto the tracks.  He sued the Transit
Authority, arguing he wouldn't have fallen on the track if transit officials
had removed him from the platform after observing that he was intoxicated.
After a jury awarded him $9.3 million, Marino exlaimed, "God bless
America."

Night after night for several months, a San Antonio, Texas, homeowner told
a court, a group of men drove up to his house to throw used tires into
his yard until there were about ten thousand of them stacked eight feet
high.  Johnny Crawford, 57, testified that whenever he tried to stop the
men, they beat him up.

After suffering a stroke, a 32 year old Baltimore man suddenly began speaking
with a Scandinavian accent, according to neurophysiologist Dr. Dean
Tippett of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  Tippett said the
man had no experience with foreign languages and seemed to enjoy his new
accent, saying he hoped it would help attract women.  It faded six weeks
after the stroke.

David Posman, 33, was arrested in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island, after
allegedly knocking out an armored-car driver and stealing the closest
four bags of money.  The closest four bags were coins--each containing
only pennies and weighing thirty pounds each, slowing him to a stagger
during his getaway so that police officers easily jumped him from behind.

Police in Plattsburgh, NY, were baffled by a number of cases in which a
man pretending to be a doctor telephoned children and tried to persuade
them to strangle their siblings.  He told one 11-year-old, "If you don't
want your little brother to die, you must strangle him immediately."

Residents of a mobile home park near Brandon, Florida, were pinned down
for nearly two hours by gunfire.  Police who investigated also had to
dodge bullets before discovering the shots were coming from two
out-of-town businessmen making a law-enforcement training video at a
private firing range 1-1/2 miles away.  They were testing an M-16 rifle,
a 9mm Heckler, and a Koch MP5 assault weapon.

The University of Tokyo's medical department has collected at least 120
brains of prime ministers, novelists, artists, and scholars since 1913
to determine what makes the brains of famous people special.  "We'd like
to get many more," said Yutaka Yoshida, the collection's curator.  "I'd
especially like to get brains from mathematicians, musicians, and singers."
About the only thing scientists have been able to conclude from the
collection is that the brains of some famous people were heavier than
those of less distinguished thinkers.  Detailed examinations of the brains
have been limited because of the deep-rooted Japanese reluctance to tamper
with the dead.  "We try, as far as possible, not to cut them," Yoshida said.
"We want to keep them in their original shape."  He admitted, however, "You
can't do much research, just looking at the outside of the brains."

Art collector Ethel Scull, 67, was fined $1000 after pleading guilty to
making 1,208 telephone calls in one week in January 1988 to her financial
adviser, Charles Lewis.  She made the calls -- 485 in one day -- to
complain that she lost money in the October 19, 1987, stock market crash
as a result of his bad advice.  In reality, she had made $300,000.

Ricardo Sanchez, the Mayor of Maicolpue, Chile, was making a speech when
hecklers began shouting antigovernment slogans at him, whereupon he
collapsed and died of a heart attack.

Eight inmates broke out of their cells at the Nashville, Tennessee, city jail.
While trying to escape, they found themselves in the woman's cellblock.
Distracted, they forgot about escaping and engaged in sex with female inmates
until guards tracked them down and apprehended them.

A 1985 bill that proposed legalizing prostitution in Washington state
provided that licenses be issued "only upon satisfactory proof that the
applicant is of good character."

The Air Force announced it was funding a $100,000 project at the University
of Florida to blast simulated jet engines through barns to see how the
noise affects pregnant horses.

Citing the example of Leonardo da Vinci, sleep expert Claudio Stampi of the
Institute of Circadian Physiology in Boston announced that people can get by
on only ninety minutes of sleep a day if they limit themselves to 15-minute
naps every four hours.  He did note that one Italian actor who emulated
the Renaissance artist's sleep schedule had to quit after six months because
he had too much spare time.  "He didn't know what to do with it," Stampi
said, "since he wasn't another Leonardo."

Texas A & M Chemistry Professor Don Sawyer announced he had developed a
commercial process to turn toxic waste into salt.

New York State Trooper Joseph Cyran, bicycling from Los Angeles to Atlantic
City to raise money for drunk-driving victims, was 40 miles short of his
goal when he was struck and critically injured by a drunk driver.

In El Paso, Texas, Drug Enforcement Administration agent David M. Petz was
making a last-minute check of the home he was selling when he found some
boxes the buyer had stashed in a closet.  They contained 415 pounds of
cocaine.  DEA agents arrested the new owner and four other men, who were
part of a drug ring the DEA had been trying to nab for a while.

Bob Engel, a National League umpire, was charged with stealing 4,180 baseball
cards from a store in Bakersfield, California.  Asked by police why he took
the cards, Engel reportedly said, "To collect and trade."

Health services legislation in the Florida House of Representatives was
voted down in 1990, with the deciding vote cast by Representative Mike
Langston's son, 12, who was fooling around with the electronic vote
machine on his father's desk on the floor of the House.  Representative
Langston said he personally would have voted yes but had stepped away to
make a phone call when the vote came up, leaving his son alone.

Soviet psychic E. Frenkel failed in his attempt to stop an oncoming freight
train through the use of his psychic powers.  The train engineer said that
Frenkel jumped onto the tracks in front of the train with his arms raised
and his head lowered.  Investigators found Frenkel's notes, which read,
"First I stopped a bicycle, cars, and a streetcar.  Now I'm going to stop
a train."

Attorneys for accused bigamist Air Force Captain Neil Clark explained their
client agreed to marry the second woman in order to sleep with her because
his overwhelming sexual desire diminished his mental capacity.

Despite the lack of scientific proof that the Loch Ness monster exists,
it generates $42 million a year in revenue from tourists who visit the
Scottich lake each year hoping to see the legendary creature.  Mackay
Consultants of Inverness also pointed out the monster myth creates about

_Fortune_ reported in 1988 that some employees of Merrill Lynch's New York
office were so incensed at its poor mailroom service a few years ago that
they sent interoffice mail via Federal Express.  Wrote _Fortune_, "Memos
were whisked from floor to floor via Memphis."

In India, Moloy Kundu, 32, and his wife, Tapati, 27, reported that each had
sold a kidney to enable them to purchase a desktop publishing machine so
they could resume issuing the weekly newspaper _Bela_, for which no other
financing could be found.

Drug-possession defendant Christopher Plovie, on trial in 1990 in Pontiac,
Michigan, claimed that he had been searched without a warrant.  The prosecutor
said the officer didn't need a warrant because a "bulge" in Plovie's jacket
could have been a gun.  Nonsense, said Plovie, who happened to be wearing
the same jacket that day.  He handed it over so the judge could see that its
material did not make bulges.  The judge discovered a packet of cocaine in
the pocket.

Kouroch Bakhtiari, 27, was arrested for masterminding a three-man escape from
a New York City correctional center, in which he meticulously braided over 15
rolls of unwaxed dental floss to make a rope strong enough to support a 190
pound man.  However, he had neglected to plan for gloves; the floss so abraded
his hands he had to be hospitalized with severed tendons and ligaments.

Czechoslavakia's new government scheduled a striptease dance show for foreign
visitors in Prague in 1989 but then discovered the previous government had
authorized only two women in the entire country to be stripteasers.  One was
located, but she was out of practice and tired after only a few minutes.

Police in Granada Hills, CA, arrested 5 Los Angeles housewives, members of a
bowling league, who were betting a couple of dollars a week in their matches.
Police learned of the bets through the tip of a disgruntled former member,
and two vice squad officers staked out the bowling alley for two hours,
watching $8 change hands.

Police in Granada Hills, CA, arrested 5 Los Angeles housewives, members of a
bowling league, who were betting a couple of dollars a week in their matches.
Police learned of the bets through the tip of a disgruntled former member,
and two vice squad officers staked out the bowling alley for two hours,
watching $8 change hands.

Joseph C. Clemons, 26, housed in a courthouse cell in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
pending a court appearance for breaking into a motel, pried open the cell
door, walked down a hallway and past guards at the front door, and escaped,
all while wearing leg irons.  (He was not discovered missing until a local
citizen called police to report a man walking down the street wearing
shackles.)

When the only law enforcement officer in Arcade, Georgie, Sid Glenn, was
arrested for attempted burglary, in 1989, an _Atlanta Journal_ reporter
called the Arcade police department to find out who had arrested Glenn.
No one answered.

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services began in 1990 to publish a monthly
list of the worst excuses received for nonpayment of child support.  Among
the first winners:  "I can't afford to pay child support (because) I've got
to pay my cable TV bill"; "We only had sex one time (therefore) I couldn't
be the father"; and "I will not allow my ex-wife to get rich on my money
($25 a week)."

Louisianna State Representative Carl Gunter, opposing an exception to an
anti-abortion bill for victims of incest:  "Inbreeding is how we get
championship horses."

A Seattle police officer said a 68-year-old woman arrested for shoplifting
four packs of cigarettes blamed the episode on Judge Wapner of _The People's
Court_.  She said she was driven to experiment after hearing the judge tell
talk-show host Pat Sajak that "everybody steals, at least once in their
life."

A man using an outhouse near Lawrence, Kansas, said he lost his footing while
trying to retrieve his wallet, which had fallen through the floorboards.  He
fell in and had to spend seven hours in three feet of muck before being
rescued.  Douglas County Sheriff Loren Anderson described the man as unhurt
"but in a pretty ugly mood."

Gregory Fensom, 32, was fired by the RE/MAX real estate office in Independence,
Missouri, after he led five people to a sale house listed with his office and
staged a 3 a.m. party with drinking and loud TV.  Fensom did not know that the
owner had not yet vacated the house, and when she appeared from her bedroom,
Fensom said, "I'm the realtor, and I'm showing the house."

Denise and Jeffrey Lagrimas, who were hosting a neighborhood-watch meeting in
their Oroville, California, home, were arrested during the meeting after a
neighbor spotted her stolen TV set in the Lagrimas home and then realized
that Denise was wearing her stolen dress.  Police officers giving a
presentation at the meeting obtained a search warrant and found $9,000 worth
of stolen goods.

Orange County, California, Superior Court clerks discovered in 1989 that they
had failed to complete the paperwork to make nearly 500 pre-1985 divorce
judgments final, thus leaving the parties still legally married.  The worst-
cast scenario for one husband occurred after an error by an Arizona court in
1990 when Bonita Lynch was ruled 1/4 owner of her ex-husband's $2.2 million
lottery jackpot because a paperwork error delayed the official divorce date
11 days, during which time he won the lottery.

A 9th-grade boy was sent into intensive care in Wauwatosa, WI, after a track
meet.  He had just cleared the bar while pole-vaulting when a gust of wind
blew him past the landing pit onto the concrete.

Margaret Weldon, 74 and legally blind, scored a hole-in-one on the seventh
hole at Amelia Island (Florida) Plantation's Long Point course in 1990.
(Her husband coaches her shots.)  The next day, she did it again.

Police arrested jockey Sylvester Carmouche, 28, for fraud after he "won" a
1990 race at Delta Downs in Vinton, Louisiana.  He apparently had taken
advantage of the dense fog that night by laying back at the starting gate
while the other horses circled the track, then joining them for the stretch
run, which his fresh horse won by 20 lengths (in a time 32 lengths better
than her last performance).

In Fort Lauderdale, FL, plastic surgeon Dr Frank Lomagistro saved the fingers
of a woman who had them almost severed when her boyfriend accidentally
slammed the door on them.  Lomagistro attached 35 fat, black leeches to her
fingertips so they could draw blood strongly enough from her hand down to
the fingers that the blood would return to the hand in normal circulatory
motion.  The operation was pronounced a success.

According to an article in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_,
doctors who had advised surgery on a 43-year-old woman to adjust a dislocated
electrode in her heart pacemaker reported that the problem had been resolved
without surgery.  The patient's husband had held the woman upside down with
her head touching the floor and had shaken her up and down violently for five
minutes.  X-rays revealed that the elctrode was back in place.

A 1989 United Nations study disclosed that more than six hundred tons of
bodily waste (from six million people and two million dogs) are released
onto the ground and into the air every day around Mexico City and that
deforestation has eliminated much of the foliage that previously prevented
the fecal dust from contaminating the city.  The colonies of microorganisms
are so numerous that scientsts' equipment lacks the precision necessary to
count them.

Jerry Hodge, Vice Chairman of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, shed much
light on the practice of using prison inmates to train bloodhounds when he
invted friends along on the exercises and had jackets made up with "The
Ultimate Hunt" embroidered on them.  In the training, inmates, called "dog
boys," are released on the prison grounds with a one-hour head start before
the hounds are set on their trail.  As many as ten dogs track one man.  Several
of the inmates, lacking protctive clothing, have been bitten.

Government investigators examined reports that Captain Cesar Garcez, 32, flew
his Boeing 737 off course for three hours before crash landing in the
Brazilian jungle because he was listening to a football match on the radio.

Kevin Ford and Donald McNair were charged with various driving-related offenses
in Buffalo, NY, after Ford's Brother, Montgomery, drove Kevin's car up a
telephone pole guide wire, causing the car to flip over.  Kevin explained that
he had been drinking and turned the keys over to Montgomery, who is blind, but
who "always wanted to drive."

Pamela Jones of Lexington, Kentucky, thought she was marrying San Fransicso
49ers quarterback Joe Montana in a 1986 ceremony, but a suspicious minister
determined that the groom was an imposter.  "But he told me he was Joe, and
had the NFL jacket," Jones reportedly told the minister.  John Ford, 39, was
in fact already married to another woman who believed him to be Hank Williams,
Jr., and he was charged with swindling $10,000 from a third fiancee.

An eighth-grade Phoenix girl held her English class hostage for an hour with
a .357 Magnum because she was upset that her girlfriends wouldn't talk to
her.

James A. Vandermeer, 25, was charged with driving while intoxicated after
Rochester police found the body of Gilbert T. Nettles Jr., 26, caught in
the windshield of Vandermeer's car.  Police estimate that Nettles was carried
nine miles on the hood from the site where he was struck.

In a similar accident in Lantana, FL, one year earlier, 74-year-old Stanley
Dobek allegedly drove for four miles with the body of bicyclist John Davis,
42, sticking through his windshield and into the passenger seat of his car.

Californian Enrique Silberg changed his name in 1985 to Ubiquitous Perpetuity
God after a judge refused to allow him to change it to simply "God."

During his campaign for circuit court judge in Sioux Falls, SD, Richard
Hopewell, 53, admitted to a 1978 incident in which he appeared nude in a
local drug store but claimed that he was under the influence of PCP at the
time, administered by a "secret agent of a political adversary."

In 1987, the Atlanta home of William (79) and Minnie (77) Winston began to
bleed.  Police called to investigate blood splashing "like a sprinkler" from
the Winston's bathroom floor could find no explanation.  Steve Cartwright, an
Atlanta homicide detective, said that no bodies were discovered, only
"copious amounts of blood" splattered on walls and floors in at least five
rooms.  A police analysis confirmed that the substance was indeed human blood.

An Arkansas squirrel hunter waited a day to report finding a dead body in the
woods because he thought any investigation would spoil his plans for hunting
the next morning.

When a San Mateo County, California, sheriff's deputy approached Barry
Buchstaber, who was standing beside a car with two broken windows, and
asked for identification, Buchstaber handed the deputy the only official
document he had--a copy of a current arrest warrant against him for
driving with a suspended license.

Two weeks after Kentucky businessman Charles Hayes paid $45 to buy a used
computer system from the U.S. attorney's office in Lexington, the office
informed him that the system's memory might not have been erased and could
contain sealed grand jury indictments, information about federally protected
witnessess and FBI informants, and data about employees in U.S. Attorney
Louis DeFalaise's office.

Joan Raeburn, 26, of West Harrison, Indiana, was traveling by car on a rural
road near the Ohio state line in 1987 when she was the victim of a hit-and-run
pilot, who grazed the roof of her car with his single-engine airplane and flew
off into the night.

Fisherman Josaia Tusoba, 31, was severely wounded in his boat 60 miles from
Suva, Fiji, when a 3-foot-long swordfish, apparently attracted by the sun
reflecting on the boat, leapt from the ocean and speared him in the chest.

Baigio di Crescenzo, 23, smashed his car into a tree near Rome and was badly
injured.  After a motorist took him to a hospital, he was sent in an ambulance
toward another hopsital for further treatment, but the ambulance smashed into
an oncoming car.  A motorist took him to another hospital, where he was again
dispatched in an ambulance for further treatment.  That ambulance smashed into
another car in a suburb of Rome, killing di Crescenzo.

Don Oestreich and Bernice Johnson, distracted by the colors of the fall
foliage while boating on the Mississippi River in Minnesota, shot over a
40-foot dam and into the rushing overflow below, but were rescued by two
fisherman.

A Trenton woman coming out of a New Jersey National Bank branch was robbed
of $91 in food stamps by a tall man wearing a black rubber suit and flippers
who threatened to shoot her.  The woman said she believed the threat because
the man was carrying a long case that could have contained a speargun.

In a 1981 incident, as gunfire rang out in a Last Vegas casino when police
scurried to catch some troublemakers, dozens of officers had to climb over
casino customers, who had dropped to their knees but continued to feed the
slot machines.

Police in Lewisburg, Tennessee, spotted a ten-gallon tub of marijuana plants
but couldn't spare any officers to watch for the owner.  They confiscated
the plants and printed a picture of them in the Lewisburg _Tribune_ with
the caption:  "Have you lost a tub of marijuana?  If you have, you may claim
it at the Lewisburg Police Department."  Police arrested Leroy Chilton, 26,
when he appeared and said the plants were his.

Thomas L. Martin, 22, manager of a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant in Oroville,
California, reported that he was robbed of $307 after work.  He provided
police sketch artist Sergeant Jack Lee with a detailed description of the
subject.  After Lee finished the drawing, he observed "it looked just like
Martin."  Police arrested Martin, who confessed to taking the money himself.

As was its custom, Lakeland, Florida, rewarded city employee James Moran for
his twenty years of service with a pin and a certificate for a free dinner
for two.  Other workers had spent $34-60, but Moran and his fiancee ran up a
$511 tab.  His angry superiors suspended him for two weeks and demoted him to
a position that paid $11,000 a year less.  Moran eventually paid the bill, but
an appeal board upheld the demotion.

In Draperstown, Northern Ireland, Charles Rogers, 67, was watching a grave
being dug for his dead brother when the sides started to cave in.  He reached
down to help a gravedigger and fell himself.  When he hit the bottom, the
headstone fell on top of him, crushing him.

Albert Mangino of New Castle, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 32 days behind
bars for drunken driving in 1987, but because he claimed he gambled on
horses for a living, Common Please Judge Ralph Pratt granted him work release
status so he could leave jail each day to go to a West Virginia racetrack.

At a maximum-security state prison in Shirley, Massachusetts, Gordon
Benjamin III was granted parole but decided to remain behind bars for
another two months to appear as Sir Lancelot in an inmate production of
Camelot.  The cast had already lost four King Arthurs, two Merlins, and
one Squire Dap before opening night because prisoners playing these roles
were transferred.

Donato Causarano, 53, a court clerk in San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy, was
working alone late at night when he reached for some documents and a stack
of files fell on him, trapping him for five hours.

West Delaware High School in Manchester, Iowa, acted to curb students'
rest-room breaks by requiring students on their way to the bathroom to
wear toilet seats around their necks.

A government paymaster showed up at the camp of a band of Cambodian soldiers
who had been stranded in a one-year battle and who had gone four months
without being paid.  But when it was revealed to the soldiers that the
paymaster had brought no money, they killed him and then ate his body.

In India, Zahid Hussein, 23, opened a rent-a-mob service in 1984 charging
$20 per day to supply a large number of mostly unemployed people who will
chant slogans, wave placards, and boo or cheer on cue.  They earn around
5 cents a day each.  If orders call for them to break the law, they get
around 15 cents a day.

Gordon and Jasmine Gelsbrecht opened a restaurant in a suburb of Winnipeg,
Manitoba, called "The Outhouse," built on the theme of toilets.  Toilet
bowls were placed among the tables, and a toilet seat logo appeared on the
menus.  Health inspectors then forced the restaurant to suspend operation
because it lacked adequate rest rooms.

Mackie International withdrew its Chilly Bang! Bang! Juice snack package from
the market after complaints from at least two state agencies.  The Sante Fe
Springs, California, company had developed a pistol-shaped package that allowed
children to drink the juice by holding the barrel in their mouths and squeezing
the trigger.

Annette Montoya, 11, of Belen, New Mexico, and her parents were arrested for
forgery after Annette, in the company of her father, attempted to open a bank
account with a $900,000 check.  The girl told sheriff's deputies that she
earned the money doing "some yard work."  During her interrogation, she crossed
her heart and said, "Hope to die if I'm lying."

Stopped by Massachusetts State Police for driving his car at 120 mph, John
Rosano II, 23, explained that he had just purchased a roast beef sandwich
and he had to get home to eat it before it got cold.

A judge in Louisville decided a jury went "a little bit far" in recommending
a sentence of 5,005 years for a man it convicted of five robberies and
kidnapping.  Judge Edmon Karem reduced the sentence to 1,001 years.

A jury in Nassau County, NY, awarded $425,000 to a 24-year-old bookkeeper who
claimed she lost her hair from the shock of biting into a squirming beetle in
her yogurt.  The woman was watching television and eating raspberry yogurt
when according to her attorney, Abraham Fuchsberg, "she felt a piece of foreign
matter in her mouth.  She knew it was too hard to be a raspberry, and besides
it was moving."

Doctors at Indiana University discovered a patient's anemia was caused by the
man's having swallowed $21.32 in coins, including 80 quarters.  The zinc in
the quarters caused a copper deficiency that led to the anemia, which went
away when the coins were removed.  The patient said he had swallowed the coins
to prevent a gun in his stomach from firing.  The doctors found no gun.

A 26-year-old man was charged with robbing a tavern in New Athens, Illinois,
at gunpoint.  According to sheriff's lieutenant Otto Jakob, after the robbery
the man apparently lost his car keys, so he stripped to his underwear and
went back inside to say he, too, had been robbed.  He was nabbed because he
couldn't disguise his voice enough to fool the people he had just held up.

Four members of a Buffalo, New York, junion firefighters' club admitted to
setting twelve fires and reporting thousands of false alarms over a three-
year period because they wanted to aid firefighters who complained of
boredom.

After a dorm-room inspection by an environmental health hygiene officer, four
University of MN football players were evicted.  In the room of freshman
flanker Pat Tingelhoff and junior defensive tackle Mike Pihlstrom, the officer
found dried blood, animal entrails, an empty beer case filled with maggots,
and body parts from a beaver, squirrels, and other animals, along with ground
glass, at places an inch deep, ripped mattresses, and smashed furniture.  An
unnamed source told the student newspaper that a deer's head filled with
maggots had been taken from beneath a bed just prior to the inspection.
Tingelhoff, a wildlife management major, denied there was a deer head or
entrails in his room but disclosed that he had removed the fat from a beaver
skin there.

Shortly after Frederick Warren argued with the driver of a tractor-trailer at
a Marylad truck stop, he ran after the driver's slow-moving truck as it was
leaving the stop and stabbed the left rear tire with a hunting knife.  When
the knife punctured the tire, the blade was blown directly back at Warren,
stabbing him in the throat.  He staggered for about 100 feet and died.  The
driver, apparently oblivious to what had happened, drove away.

The Michigan Board of Medicine gave a two-week suspension to Dr. Leonard Wolin
after he allowed his 14-year-old son to assist him with a bladder operation on
a 50-year-old woman.  Wolin let his son feel a catheter balloon in the woman's
bladder and had him put in two stitches when he was sewing a layer of tissue.

Murder suspect Dennis J. Hannuksela, 29, escaped from police custody in
Duluth, MN, when, being taken for a hopsital visit, he dropped his crutches
and took off "like a jack rabbit."  Said Sgt. Tom Person, the county jail
supervisor, "The deputy didn't have him in handcuffs because you don't
handcuff a man on crutches."

A 17-year-old Memphis woman was married for four months before discovering
that her husband was a 19-year-old woman.  According to a clergyman involved
in the case, the woman said that her husband never let her see "him" naked
because he was supposedly deformed by a football injury.  The bride reportedly
became suspicious when some of her husband's friends referred to him as
"Harriet."

Pro golfer Homero Blancas once hit a ball out of the rough in a tournament and
saw hit a palm tree and then lodge in the brassiere of a female spectator.
(Blancas asked fellow golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez what he should do, whereupon
Rodriguez reportedly replied, "I think you should play it.")

Eight years after being convicted of arson, 31-year-old David Dilorio was
appointed to the North Providence, Rhode Island, fire department.  A police
check had failed to turn up any criminal record because Dilorio's name was
misspelled.

Commenting on the scene of a truck accident in which 44,000 pounds of pig
carcasses were dumped over the highway near San Bernardino, California
Highway Patrol officer John Savage said, "These little piggies didn't make
it to market."

Ohio veterinarian Marshal Pettibone, who uses a freeze-drying machine to
preserve dead pets, said, "There's no sense in getting a new cat every ten
years or so when you can have the same one for 50 or 60 years!"  Said Oramae
Lewis, who had her cat Felix freeze-dried after he was run over by an 18-wheel
tractor-trailer, "He's just like he was in real life except he's a little
flatter in the middle."

In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Sandra Kaushas stabbed her husband Edward five
times after he refused to go out for pizza during the first half of a 1985
Miami-New England football playoff game.  He told police he had offered to
get chicken at halftime, but that didn't satisfy her.

Jurgen Hergert, 44, known as the "King of Snakes," broke his old record when
he sat in a glass cage of snakes for 100 days.  Inside the cage were 24 rattle-
snakes, vipers, puff adders, and cobras.  During his stay, one Indian cobra
killed three other snakes.  While in the cage, he lost nine pounds and
averaged only two or three hours of sleep per night, and his girlfriend
called off their engagement.

A Lewistown, Pennsylvania, woman who weighed nearly 600 pounds and who had to
be taken to the hospital by fire and rescue workers had a 280-pound cyst
removed.  When called to the home, one rescue worker thought "there were two
people lying in bed."  Workers had to knock down a wall to extricate her from
the house.

Doctors worked more than seven hours to close farmworker Chris Haines's
mouth in Little Thurlow, England, after he had yawned too widely and couldn't
get it closed.  Haines could only make gurgling noises during the procedure
and thus could not communicate with doctors.

Lynn Ray Collins, mute for 17 years after being hit by a car, regained his
speech after falling against a glass door in Albertsville, Alabama.  He was
moved to speak to paramedics as he watched three pints of blood gushing from
his head wound.

In l981, the image of Christ being crucified attracted crowds to Santa Fe
Springs, California.  It was eventually determined that the image was caused
by two streetlights shining on a bush and a real estate sign.

Officials in Jacksonville hired twenty-three people to work the weekend before
Christmas 1989, doing nothing but flushing the 503 toilets at the Gator Bowl
to prevent the stadium's water pipes from freezing.

In Dallas, a 25-year-old police officer posing as a high school student as
part of an undercover drug operaton was nabbed for being tardy and sent to the
principal's office.  Told he could choose between a paddling and detention,
the officer was forced to take the spanking because detention would have
interfered with a scheduled drug buy.

Two men had little trouble robbing an armored van in Livornia, Michigan.  They
simply pulled open the van's back doors, which were unlocked and held shut by
rubber bands, which police said the van's security guard used to avoid going
to all the trouble of unlocking and locking the doors at each stop.

In 1989, a woman eating a tunafish sandwich in her 31st floor apartment in
Philedelphia was hit in the arm by a bullet.  Police determined that the
bullet entered the apartment window on an even trajectory but there are no
neighboring buildings at the same height.  "We have no idea where this bullet
came from," said Capt. Richard Kirchner.  "If you look out, the only thing in
that area that's really tall in the Arco burn-off tower," which is two miles
away.

After the New Jersey Department of Transportation began construction on a 7.2
mile stretch of Route 55, the following things occurred:  One construction
worker was run over by an asphalt roller truck; another was blown off a bridge
overpass; one inspector died on the job of a brain aneurysm; one worker's feet
mysteriously blackened; one worker's wife miscarried; a van carrying five
workers burned and exploded; one worker's parents were killed in an auto
accident the night after the project began; the brother and father of one
worker died on the same weekend.  Carl Pierce, chief of the Delaware Indians,
said that the construction desecrated an ancient buriel ground.

A 1986 report by a U.S. Department of Education panel on a history curriculum
designed for students to react to the genocide of Jews during World War II
criticized the content of the curriculum as "unfair" to Nazis and the Ku Klux
Klan.  The report stated, "The program gives no evidence of balance or
objectivity."

Donald J. Talmont, 20, was charged with criminal damage to property after he
rammed his car into ten trees and three street signs in Milwaukee on the
night of a lunar eclipse in 1989.  Police quoted him as saying that he only
gets that way when there is a lunar eclipse.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, 90% of the data transmitted from
U.S. space missions (enough tapes to fill the floor space of 50 football
fields) has never been analyzed and cannot be because the data can only be
read by computers that are now obsolete.

The Smith and Wesson Company opened a golf driving range for its employees
in Springfield, Massachusettes, on October 18, 1984, but was forced to close
it a week later after flocks of sea gulls began bombarding company executives,
motorists, and neighbors with hundreds of golf balls they would pick up, fly
up into the air with, and drop.

Two men stole $25 from a Cincinnati restaurant armed with a cicada.  They
thrust the bug at the cashier, 22-year-old Marquisa Kellogg, who then fled,
leaving the cash register unattended.

Authorities in Wisconsin Rapids, WI, investigating the death of 30-year-old
Mary Herman, said the woman was killed by a "crushing type injury" that looked
like a car ran over her but left no tire marks.  They concluded that an
elephant was the fatal weapon and charged two animal trainers from a circus
that had passed through town when the woman was killed.

When the late Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was jailed in Charlotte, North Carolina,
on charges of immigration fraud, he immediately requested special food and a
throne for his jail cell.

In 1987 California Highway Patrol officer Dave Guild stopped a car traveling
50 mph on the San Diego Freeway because its hood was open and a man was under
it working on the engine.  The men said that they had been having trouble with
the gas pedal and that the man under the hood was keeping the engine running
by working the carburetor control.  Neither could understand why they were
being ticketed.

The U.S. Department of Energy spent $1.4 million sending the entire 25-pound
8,800-page environmental impact statement on the superconducting supercollider
to 16,000 citizens who had expressed interest in the project in 1988, when
only the mailing of a summary of the statement was required by law.

Researchers at Georgia Tech paid volunteers $15 to tumble down a flight of
stairs as part of a project to find out how a body falls.

A 30-year-old California man committed suicide in 1980 with an overdose of
drugs because, according to a suicide note, "I just can't live another four
years with Reagan."

Students in Stuttgart, West Germany, resorted to deliberately infesting
themselves with head lice to get themselves barred from school.  The German
Education Ministry reported the students were paying the equivalent of $2.60
for the parasite.

In China, two brothers with a gambling addiction sold their mother to a
peasant in Kwangsi province after tricking her into affixing her thumbprint
to a bill of sale.

A man was arrested and accused of a wave of hair-snipping crimes in South
Dakota, Wyoming, and New Jersey.  He allegedly would sit behind women in
movie theaters, snip a braid of hair, and then dash off.  Police found four
shoeboxes full of snipped hair in a search of his house.

Postal carrier John Douglas Hansford pleaded guilty to robbery in a London
suburb for snatching glasses off the faces of 38 young women in a spree
several years ago.  "I don't know why I did it," he said.  "I just fancy
girls who wear glasses."  A court psychiatrist said Hansford had at least
five years of counseling ahead of him.

Preston Womack of Mableton, Georgie, was arrested by Cobb County police after
he sat in a restaurant wearing a pair of jockey shorts on his head and would
not leave when asked.  Police Sgt. M. Toler said later that "other than
wearing jockey shorts on his head and socks on his hands, he was well behaved."

A 1982 United Nations report warned that sex education lessons were failing
in certain remote Asian villages.  Ovservers found that men were swallowing
birth control pills and, to mimic the health educators' demonstrations, had
placed condoms on their fingers and on bamboo poles.

Thirty minutes after Thomas James Rosney was released from jail in Boulder,
he was arrested in the jail's parking lot for attempting to break into a car.
In Seattle, police charged an 18-year-old man, who has just been released in
court by Judge Philip Killien, with stealing Killien's car from the courthouse
parking lot on the way home.

John Wayne Gacy, 45, on death row in Illinois and suspected of killing 33
young men and boys, announced his engagement in 1988 to Sue Terry, 43, of
Centralia, Illinois.  Said Terry, who is the mother of eight children, of
the charges against Gacy, "I don't believe hardly any of it."

In Lusk, Wyoming, a 76-year-old woman whose license expired in December 1982
was arrested five times in the following five months for driving without a
license.  She had failed the eye exam required for renewal, which officials
said she could have passed by wearing corrective lenses.  She refused,
insisting that eyeglasses were "a communist plot.  Commies will land here
someday and control everybody by taking away our glasses."

In l980 Harry Zain, a fundamentalist Christian and sometime political candidate
in W. Virginia, undertook an intensive lobbying campaign for a federal law to
lower the marriage age for girls from 16 to 12.  He wanted to wed his dream
girl, whom he had met four years earlier in Charleston when she was 9, and in
support of his proposal, visited at least 60 members of Congress at their
homes in the Washington area before the FBI began envouraging him to stop.

The barbaric tradition of the annual Gotmaar Festival continues in Pandhuma,
India, despite the village's increasing modernization (10,000 TV sets among
its 45,000 population).  After a full moon in early September, all village
activity stops and males divide into two groups to gather rocks and then spend
the rest of the day throwing them at one another, attempting to kill or injure
as many as they can.  At sunset, they stop, nurse the wounded, and return to
normal life.  In l989, 4 were killed and 612 wounded.

Chinese soldiers burned 20 tons of used clothing donated from abroad on
November 12, 1985, kicking off two weeks of officially sponsored burnings
of donated foreign clothing.

The town of Grantham, New Hampshire, which had two streets named Stoney Brook,
changed Stoney Brook Drive to Old Springs Drive and Stoney Brook Lane to Old
Springs Lane.

Randy Myer, city public information director of Lexington, Kentucky, paid
$400 for a set of steel-belted tires designed to be bulletproof, bombproof,
and spikeproof, then he had a flat after running over a ballpoint pen.
"It still wrote," Myer said.

A 22-year-old female cab driver in San Francisco who was raped at gunpoint in
her cab was fired for not screening her customers carefuly enough.  "I can't
afford to take any chances," her boss, Guey Wong, told her in front of a
reporter.  "I'm lucky the cab wasn't hurt.  You might endanger my insurance,
you might increase my rates."

In Laurel Park, North Carolina, a 25-year-old man was charged with the ax
murder of his mother a month after she posted $10,000 to bail him out of
jail on a charge of killing his stepfather.

Professional psychic Judith Richardson Haimes won more than $1 million from a
Philadelphia jury because, she said, a faulty CAT scan at Temple University
Hospital robbed her of her ability to see the future.  When a Temple lawyer
announced after the trial that Temple would appeal, Haimes incorrectly
predicted that Temple would lose that appeal.

Terry and Deborah Shook sued the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for $115,000
because their son's second-grade teacher forced him to lick saliva off the
playground during recess as punishment.

In a 1988 ABC-TV poll of 17-year-olds, one girl answered that the Holocaust was
"that Jewish holiday last week, right?"  Another thought the Ayatollah was a
Soviet gymnast, and yet another thought Chernobyl was Cher's full name.

Forewarning of a decline in morality, civic leaders and parents in Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia, had to quell a fad in 1986 in which children banded together dressed
as Michael Jackson, mimicked his movements, and marauded through the city and
suburbs causing disturbances.  Boys were wearing rouge and lipstick.

One group that responded to an appeal to donate clothing to survivors of the
December 1988 earthquake in Armenia was the Potomac Rambling Bares, a
Washington, D.C., area nudists' club.

A student in an anatomy class at the University of Alabama School of Medicine
in Birmingham informed the school's director that one of the cadavers being
dissected in the class was her great aunt.

Dallas city councilor Roland Tucker, known as a crusader for crime prevention,
had his parked car stolen after leaving the keys in the ignition.  The car
contained Tucker's research material on crime prevention, including information
pertaining to a proposed ordinance making it illegal to leave the keys in the
ignition of an unattended car.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Baptist minister Dwight Rymer used electric shocks to
help him teach the Bible to chilren.  He asked for young volunteers to sit on
a stool wired to a 6-volt lantern battery in order to demonstrate that
sometimes God "can shock you into hearing His word."

London police investigating the death of 56-year-old Leslie Merry, who was
fatally injured by a turnip thrown from a passing car, said the attack
apparently was carried out by a gang whose members toss vegetables at random
at passersby.  Investigators noted that three months before Merry's death,
another man suffered stomach injuries when he was hit by a cabbage.

A 30-year-old woman was accused by Oakland police of shooting her husband in
1989, after tailing him on a freeway and pulling alongside his car.  Police
say that the incident started earlier in the evening when the husband rolled
a gutter ball while bowling, causing them to lose by six pins to another
couple.

A 13-year-old boy pulled a loaded .357 Magnum on his teacher because the
teacher refused to publish a photograph in the La Crescente, CA, junior high
yearbook of the boy wearing his "Anarchy Now" T-shirt.

Pittsburgh councilman William R. Robinson proposed a leash law for cats,
calling felines vicious animals known to "suck the breath out of a child"
when they smell milk on the child's lips.  Local veterinarians disputed the
basis for the statement, despite Robinson's insistence that critics "look at
all the incidents" in which a cat has sucked the breath out of a child.

The three children of Marion, NC, street preacher David Strode were suspended
from school repeatedly during fall 1988 for preaching hellfire and damnation,
disrupting their classes in school.  Especially galling to school officials
was their use of words like "adulterer" and "fornicator."  The father said the
family does not attend church because traditional ministers are "compromising
cowards."  "Besides," he said, "no church will have us."

R. Leonard Vance, director of health standards for the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, told a committee of Congress in 1986 that he could not
turn over logbooks involving allegedly improper meetings he might have had with
industry representatives because his dog had thrown up all over them.

In Pennsylvania in 1988, Kelly Kyle, 17, was at home alone in the living room
when she noticed deer in the yard.  One suddenly crashed through the living
room window and was followed by four others, after which all five proceeded to
trash the house.  At the time, Kelly's father was out deer hunting.

Bob Holt, 20, hired to dress up as a duck to advertise a Seattle radio station,
was attacked on a downtown street by a man who spun him around by one wing,
pulled off his duck bill and beat him over the head with it, then ran off.  "I
didn't speak to him," Holt said.  "I didn't flap my wings, I didn't do
anything like that."

Loren Tobia, news director for WSAZ-TV in Charleston, was covering a news
conference by H. John Rogers, a candidate for the U.S. Senate who had just been
detained four days at a Wheeling mental health center for spitting in the face
of a police chief.  Following his speech, which he interrupted to berate
another TV reporter for not paying attention, Rogers asked if there were any
serious questions.  Tobia asked the first one:  "Do you think your recent stay
in a mental institution will hurt your candidacy?" Rogers strode over to Tobia.
"Was that a serious question?" he asked, then punched Tobia in the face.

In Atlanta, a daring thief stole $8,900 worth of cameras and accessories from
an exhibit booth at a convention for crime-detection experts.  His getaway was
delayed by having to pretend to be a salesman and give a 45-minute sales pitch
to a security guard who had seen him walking off with the goods.

Police in Tulsa, responding to an emergency call that a man was holding a woman
at knifepoint, surrounded the wrong house.  The man was in the house next door.
He tried several times to surrender, but the police, thinking he was just a
nosy neighbor, kept ordering him back inside.  After about an hour, a newspaper
photographer who lived nearby alerted police to their mistake.

Undercover police in Pompano Beach, Florida, arranged to sell two pounds of
cocaine.  The buyers turned out to be undercover officers from the Fort
Lauderdale police.

In Florida, Dade County and Jacksonville officials discovered that their new
$34 million jail was being built with 195 cells -- but no cell doors.  Michael
Berg, city-county director of jails and prisons, said he wasn't sure how the
oversight occurred.  And at the Ontario County Jail in Canandalgua, NY,
installation of new cell doors was halted when officials discovered the bars
were too far apart and prisoners could slip through them.

In Baton Rouge, a man was sentenced to five years' probation for trying to pass
a counterfeit $20 bill that he had made by cutting the corners off a real $20
and pasting them on a $1 bill.  Federal Judge John Parker called him "the most
inept counterfeiter I ever heard of."

A New York City woman paid two men $20,000 to beat her husband to death with a
baseball bat.  He survived.  She paid the men $150,000 to shoot him.  He took
six bullets but survived.  Then the hit men charged her $300,000 for another
try, promising this time to get it right.  The police arrested all three.

The resident safety expert for the Kansas Fish and Game Commission, who was
wearing an orange cape with "Kansas Safe Hunter" printed on the front and
fluorescent orange clothing, was shot accidentally in the arm and shoulder
while bird hunting--by a co-worker.

In Laguna Hills, California, Brinks guard Hrand Arakilian, 34, was crushed to
death while riding in the back of an armored car when $13,000 in quarters,
weighing 832 pounds, fell on him.

Cellist Augustinas Vassiliauskas of the Soviet Vilnius string quartet was
climbing the podium at the 1980 Kuhmo Music Festival for a third round of
applause when he tripped and fell on his prized Ruggieri cello, breaking the
300-year-old instrument beyond repair.

In Toronto, Franco Brun choked to death on a pocket Bible.  The medical
examiner speculated that the 22-year-old man had tried to swallow the 874-page
Bible to purge himself of the Devil.

An 81-year-old woman in Arkwright, South Carolina, died of smoke inhalation
after apparently mistaking an end table in her mobile home for a fireplace
and setting a fire under it.

A Minnesota Supreme Court justice was charged with cheating on a 1983 multi-
state bar exam that he took while trying to qualify to practice law in other
states.  He was given special permission to take the exam in his office but
then admitted to peeking in a book to help him answer a question.  He later
explained that he thought it was okay to peek during the bar exam.

In Palermo, Italy, the funeral of Antonio Percelli was halted when Percelli,
mistakenly declared dead, climbed out of the casket.  Percelli's move so
startled his mother that she died on the spot of a heart attack, and was
buried later at the gravesite that had been ordered for Percelli.

Walter Davis, 75, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1986 in the
murder of his wife.  According to testimony, she had harangued him for five
hours one day about a conversation he had had, in her presence, with a woman
in a grocery store on how to preserve unused portions of a loaf of bread.

Rev. Jim Brown of Ironton, Ohio, told the First Church of Nazarene congregation
in 1986 that the theme song to the old TV show, "Mr. Ed," played in reverse,
contains satanic messages.  According to Brown, "A horse is a horse, of course,
of course," backwards, is "the source is satan."

In 1978, a Paris grocer stabbed his wife to death with a wedge of Permesan
cheese.

In Birmingham, Alabama, a man was convicted of assault and battery after
hitting his wife over the head repeatedly with their 1-1/2 pound chihauhau
during a domestic dispute.

Kerry Shea, 14, "just lost control" of her toothbrush and swallowed it, but it
was retrieved shortly afterward by a DePere, WI, doctor.  Shea offered only
that she was "brushing the back of my tongue because I saw on TV that it helps
to get a lot of sugar that way" when "it just slipped and I swallowed it."

In Houston in 1987, a 10-year-old boy shot and killed his father, Edward Simon,
45, and wounded his mother, Mary Simon, 47, with a .38-calibre revolver when
they refused to let him go outside and play.

In a 1987 poll asking South Korean children to name their favorite things, the
children ranked their mothers first but put their fathers third--behind a
serving of beef.

In 1987 Rep. Will Green Poindexter introduced a bill in the Mississippi
legislature to permit dwarfs to hunt deer with crossbows during archery season.

Alaska State Senator Bob Ziegler introduced a bill to make it illegal for a dog
to impersonate a police dog.  No dog other than a police dog could use police-
dog facilities, eat police-dog food, bite criminals, or loiter in the vicinity
of a fire hydrant.

A California firm markets solar-powered tombstones that talk back to graveside
visitors with recorded messages that play perpetually.

Willie Homes of Hillsborough, CA, developed a snorkel and tube for guests in
high rise buildings in which fires break out.  Using the snorkel, guests could
reach down through the toilet trap to the water line in the tank to use the
oxygen in the air vent that runs to the roof until they could be rescued.

A London bill-collection agency, Smelly Tramps, Ltd., duns deadbeats by sending
foul-smelling vagabonds to sit in the debtor's office until he agrees to pay
up.  The firm, which uses a special "stomach-churning" chemical that makes the
office virtually uninhabitable within 10 minutes, claims a 90% success rate.

Among the items at a 1987 Japanese inventors' fair was "six-day underwear" --
a garment with three leg holes and instructions for the user to rotate it 120
degrees each day for three days and then turn it inside out for another three
days.

Nino Placenza, 75, tried to kill himself in Bradenton, Florida, by drilling a
hole in his head with a power drill, but only wound up in intensive care.

A 38-year-old Orland Park, Illinois, man, distraught over an argument with his
girlfriend about buying drapes, killed himself by cutting a hole in his
waterbed, sticking his head through it and drowning himself.

Patrolman Robert D'Ascanio of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, apprehended a purse-
snatcher he was about to lose one night by barking like a dog and then shouting
"Okay, let the dog loose!"  That caused the suspect to stop in his tracks.
The Pittsfield police department had eliminated its K-9 unit (consisting of
one dog) three years before.

A 350-lb. man attempted to rob a Long Island jeweler with a gun, but before
the loot was handed to him, he tripped and fell and was unable to get back to
his feet before the police arrived.

Two men with guns fired a total of twelve shots at each other at point-blank
range in a Cleveland apartment, but no one was injured.  Police speculated that
the men, aged 76 and 77, missed because one had glaucoma and the other had to
prop himself up with a cane each time before firing.

In Hudiksvall, Sweden, police arrested a 31-year-old father, charging him with
stealing $6 from his 3-year-old son's piggy bank.

Fire crews responding to a call in Smethwick, England, found George Thurlow
standing at a door waving furiously.  He directed firefighters upstairs to the
back bedroom, where they found, in thick smoke, Thurlow's wife and two elderly
daughters sitting calmly in the burning room, watching the American TV show
_St Elsewhere_.  One daughter was smoking a cigarette.

A 47-year-old woman, described as "large," was convicted of shoplifting items,
including a $695 color TV set and fur coats, that she concealed between her
legs as she walked from stores.  According to court testimony, the TV set was
balanced between her knees, and when she bent over to pick something up, a
store employee saw the outline of the TV set under her dress.

A Parisian nightwatchman killed his second wife because, police theorized, she
overcooked a roast.  Seventeen years earlier he killed his first wife because
she had undercooked a meal.

Two California women, Judy Schwartz and Rickey Berkowitz, were shipwrecked in
the Java Sea in 1985.  For three weeks, they lived on nothing but toothpaste.
After their rescue, Colgate-Palmolive gave them 400 tubes of its toothpaste.

A Washington, D.C., man was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of
committing five bank robberies.  A common link in three of the robberies was
his poor spelling in a note which he handed to the tellers, telling them to
put the money in the bag and that he meant "no bullshirt."

A would-be robber tried to stick up an Oakland bank.  The teller gave him a
dummy bag with marked bills and an explosive set to detonate at the bank's
door.  He stuffed the bag down the front of his trousers, and the device
worked.

A 32-year-old suspect wanted by the FBI on charges of murder and assault and
for questioning in more than a dozen murders and 50 beatings, was arrested by
FBI agents as he jay-walked in front of their car in Oakland, CA.  The agents
had his picture on the front seat of their car when he walked past and they
recognized him.

------------------------------------------------

When an off-duty Detroit police officer shot himself in the shoulder as he
tried to kill a rat that had jumped onto his arm in his garage, ten Detroit
police patrol cars responded to the report of a shooting at the man's house.
The rat escaped unharmed.

A city ambulance crew in St. Louis in stopped to pick up a pizza while on
their way to the hospital with a patient suffering from head injuries.  The
ambulance circled the pizza parlor parking lot for about five minutes until
the crew's pizza was ready.

One guest drowned at a pool-party attended by about 100 New Orleans
lifeguards who were celebrating their first drowning-free season in memory.
At the end of the party the body of Jerome Moody was found fully clothed
at the bottom of the deep end of the pool.

A sheriff's deputy in Joliet, Illinois, responding to an accident in which a
car plunged into an unmarked construction pit, accidentally drove his own
patrol car into the pit, landing on top of the accident victim's car and
crushing her to death.

A woman was freed from a pair of designer jeans by San Jose, California,
firefighters who worked for 20 minutes using wire cutters and needle-nosed
pliars.

A Los Angeles man who said later that he was "tired of walking," stole a
steamroller and led police on a 5 mph chase until one officer jumped aboard
and brought the vehicle to a stop.

A 61-year-old retired Army sergeant shot a woman he mistook for his estranged
wife outside a church in Rochester, New York.  "I'm sorry about the other
woman," he told police.  "I meant to kill my wife, but I forgot my glasses."

A man shot and killed his friend Laurel Lange of La Crosse, WI, while hunting,
telling police that he mistook Lange for a squirrel.

Seventy-four-year-old Pavel Navrotsky, a Soviet military deserter during World
War II, was discovered in 1985 after living in hiding for 41 years in a pigsty.
During the 41 years, Navrotsky only went out for a walk once, at night,
dressed as a woman.

Landlord Ugo Putti invited all the tenants of his building in Naples, Italy,
to a picnic in the country.  When they returned home, they found their building
had been demolished.  "I do not regret my action," Putti said.  "I hated my
tenants, and they hated me."

Carl Phillips, one of 10 winners of a 1958 essay contest sponsored by
Louisville, KY, radio station WKAY, had to wait 29 years, until March, 1987,
for the contest's scheduled payoff date to arrive.  And then he failed to
receive the prize promised by the station: An all-expenses-paid trip to the
moon.  The radio station, which had heard from several other moon-flight ticket
holders, told the winners that it was a promotion sponsored by previous owners.

Dr. Ibrahim Shademan performed a surgery on a 20-year-old woman to remove a
4.4 pound hairball from her stomach because it was endangering her pregnancy.
The woman had chewed her hair since she was a child.

By June 1984, Alice Richie of Richmond, CA, had been watering her lawn 24 hours
a day, every day, for more than a year.  Her nighbors took her to court as
their lawns turned into swamps.  Despite a judge's order to stop and utility
bills of $300 a month, Richie continued to water and would not say why.

Edward Jalbert, 25, was struck from behind and killed by a United Airlines
plane as it landed at Cox Municipal Airport.  Jalbert had been walking naked
down the middle of the runway at the time.

A Pittsburgh man on why he was apparently throwing rocks at his wife, who was
struggling not to drown in the Kanawha River:  "I was trying to drive her back
to shore."

Cheung Yun-fuk, 33, of Hong Kong, said that he has been unable to control his
right thumb since his childhood and told a court that it was to blame for
pinching a woman's bottom as he helped her out of a taxi.

Pregnant Susan Ann Yasger convinced a judge in Orange County, CA, that her
fetus qualified as a passenger in her car and therefore she was not driving
alone on a freeway lane reserved for cars carrying more than one person.

A house burglar in Logan, Oregon, known as "The Muncher," has broken into rural
homes to eat food, drink beer, watch TV and then clean up after himself.  Local
sheriffs believe that a copycat "Muncher" may also be at work.

After resolving a family feud that left members out of communication for years,
a brother and sister in Duluth, MN, discovered that neither knew the where-
abouts of their 80-year-old mother.  Realizing that neither had been caring for
her, they went to her home and found that her body had been decomposing for a
year.  "It sounds dumb, but that's what happened," said a son-in-law.

Mr and Mrs Joseph A. Carlone had tried unsuccessfully to rid their Ohio home of
a noxious odor since 1964, but it wasn't until 1972 that the 40 gallons of
human excrement that had been accumulating behind their kitchen wall exploded
into their house.  Apparently a telephone installer in 1964 had accidentally
drilled through a waste pipe leading from the upstairs bathroom, allowing the
excrement to fall from the pipe into the wall.

The U.S. Postal Service ruled that a Johnsonville, North Carolina, postmaster
had to repay $44 in stamps and money orders that thieves made off with after he
told them how to open a Postal Service safe at his grocery store.  Four gunmen
had pistol-whipped him, threatened him, his wife and eight others and shot his
son.  The Postal Service said that he failed to "exercise resonable care."

The Consumer Product Safety Commission was forced to recall 80,000 buttons it
had distributed to promote toy safety beause they were found to be a danger to
children.  The buttons, which said, "for kid's sake think toy safety," used a
paint with dangerously high lead content, had sharp edges, and parts that could
be swallowed by a child.

The IRS penalized George Wittmeier $159.78 for not paying all his tax with his
return.  Wittmeier underpaid by a penny.

A 19-year-old was twice rebuffed by Texas prison officials when he tried to
turn himself in in an aggravated assault case.  He was turned away one day
because he hadn't made an appointment and on another day because he had arrived
too late.  He was eventually sentenced to a two-year prison term.

A female monkey in the city of Kanpur, India, jumped onto a high-tension wire
and electrocuted herself, causing a blackout of the city lasting several hours.
Ten days earlier, her mate had died when he jumped onto the same wire and also
caused a blackout.  The United News of India reported that the female monkey
visited the site of her mate's death daily until jumping herself.

Two police officers in Lynn, Massachusetts, tried to arrest the owner of a pit
bull terrier on a robbery charge.  During the struggle, the man, Lugene
Kendricks, bit patrolman William Althen on the arm and Edward Kiley on the
hand.  The dog just watched.

Police in Crown Point, Indiana, treated the death of James A. Cooley, 52, as a
suicide for several weeks until public pressure forced a reopening of the case
and its treatment as a homicide.  Police acknowledged all along that Cooley
died as a result of 32 hammer blows to the head.

A South Korean police officer took a $6 bribe from a motorist but found himself
blackmailed by two men, including a fellow police officer who saw the bribe.
The officer paid them $28,750 not to report him, but his superiors found out
anyway and demoted him.

A onetime winner of a "Foster Parent of the Year" award was sentended to six
months in jail for sexually assaulting a 9-year-old girl who had been placed
in his family's care.

In Crete, Illinois, an 80-year-old man confessed to beating his wife of 57
years to death with a hammer.  He told police that he suffered from a heart
ailment and cataracts, and was afraid he would die and wanted to avoid leaving
his wife a widow.

A former bank manager admitted administering spankings to more than 50
customers of a Pittsburgh bank as punishment for falling behind on their loan
payments.  "I never had any trouble with them afterwards," he said.  He was
later found quilty of misappropriating $88,268 in bank funds.  He told the
court he was forced to use the money to make unrecorded loans when 6 of those
who were spanked threatened to report his action to his superiors.

A British army sergeant was accused of turning young recruits into a human
xylophone by hitting them across the bare buttocks with a baseball bat as they
knelt in a line.  According to the prosecutor at the sergeant's court-martial,
each recruit had to yell a musical note when he was hit, and the sergeant
continued until he had played a tune.

Guests at a wedding reception in Lanzhou, China, heard a scream from the
bedroom and rushed in to find both the bride and groom unconscious on the
sofa.  They were rushed to the hospital, but the bride was dead.  The groom
said he had been kissing his wife on the neck.  According to doctors, the
passion, intensity and length of the kiss caused fatal heart palpitations.

Boston Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most went to the doctor for an examination
to see why he was having trouble hearing.  The doctor checked his ear and found
a radio ear plug, which had been in Most's ear for eighteen months.

Dale Eller, 22, of Columbus, Ohio, walked into police headquarters and re-
quested an X-ray in order to locate his brain. He showed the police a hole in
his skull through which he had inserted 3" of wire trying to find his brain
but had failed.  He told them he had made the hole with a power drill.  Police
took Eller to the hopsital, where doctors removed a coat hanger wire from his
head.  A hospital official said Eller was in good condition, although doctors
said he might have personality changes.

Four months before he was to be married in 1974, a man was admitted to North
Hills Passavant Hospital in Pennsylvania for surgery to correct a recessed
testicle.  During the relatively routine operation a doctor accidentally
amputated the future groom's penis.  The man was awarded $825,000 in an out-
of-court settlement.

Virginia state trooper F L Farney pulled over a weaving car early one morning
and found that its driver wasn't just drunk but also blind.  Farney reported
that the man explained he was driving because his woman companion "was drunker
than he was."  The driver added that she had been directing him.  "He thought
he was driving okay," said Farney, who disagreed and ticketed both of them.

In Narooma, Australia, 16-year-old Greg Hammond, who was born with only one
hand, placed second in a men's 100-meter race.  Officials disqualified him,
however, after an appeal noted that he failed to touch the end of the pool with
both hands as specified by international rules.

In Houston, Texas, two friends shot and killed each other in a bar after
arguing over how easy it was to get away with murder in the city.  Witnesses
told the police that James Cole claimed it was easy to escape arrest for
murder, whereas Harold Kirkley argued a victim could retaliate by shooting
back.  Cole picked up a pistol, saying he wasn't sure it worked, and fired,
hitting Kirkley, who pulled out a pistol and shot Cole.

Ray County, Missouri, conservation agent George Hiser told his wife to take her
best shot when a turkey came out of the woods while they were hunting.  Marcia
Hiser not only dropped the bird at 40 yards, but she also hit a second turkey
15 yards behind it with the same blast.  Since Missouri law prohibits killing
more than one turkey a week during the spring season, George had no choice but
to issue Marcia a ticket.

A Northwest Airlines flight from Seattle to Detroit made an emergency landing
in Salt Lake City after the crew smelled gasoline.  Investigators discovered
the fumes came from a West German tourist who brought an empty gas can aboard
after his car had run out of gas on the way to the Seattle airport.

Experienced skydiver Ivan Lester McGuire loaded up with portable video equip-
ment to record a dive near Louisburg, North Carolina, but apparently forgot to
pack his parachute.  After McGuire plunged to his death, a tape of the dive
was recovered, showing him flailing his arms on discovering his oversight.

Lawyer Reginald Tucker, 29, was at a party on the 39th floor of Chicago's
Prudential Building when he took off his glasses and started racing through
the corridors with a co-worker.  At the end of one orridor was a window, which
Tucker apparently didn't see.  He kept running, crashed through the window,
and plunged to his death.

In Canada, a woman was charged with hiring a hit man to kill a 19-year-old
neighbor because she was tired of his mufflerless Pontiac roaring through her
neighborhood.  The police also suspected her of poisoning her husband for
threatening to turn her in for hiring the hit man.

In one of his pleas for money, Oral Roberts urged his followers to scribble the
name of Jesus on the soles of their shoes.  "As you put your foot down, know by
your faith you're bruising the devil's head," his letter said.  "The devil
should always see the sole of your shoe coming down on him."  The letter
featured a white space for contributors to outline their shoes.  Within a week
of Robert's letter being mailed, fellow evangelist Billy Graham was admitted to
a Rochester, NY, hostpial with a foot infection.

Mark Wagstaff, 30, co-owner of a company that makes security equipment, was
demonstrating a bulletproof vest and asked his friend to try to stab him in
the chest.  The man's first attempt failed, but the second pierced Wagstaff's
vest, killing him.

In Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, Gan Keng Woong stumbled and fell unconscious while
playing badminton.  The fall jarred his dentures loose, and they lodged in his
windpipe, suffocating him.

Fumietsu Okubo, 65, of Toyama, Japan, choked to death after becoming entangled
in his seat belt on the first day of enforcement of Japan's mandatory seat-belt
law.

Judge Juan Flores sentenced Jose Lopez of Villarcia, Paraguay, to die before a
firing squad for a shotgun killing, even though it meant that his Siamese twin
brother, Alfredo, joined at the side, would die, too, and despite evidence that
Alfredo had actually tried to prevent Jose from pulling the trigger.

An Alabama judge, attending a national conference of family court judges on
problems of child abuse, was arrested in Providence, RI, and charged with
molesting the 13-year-old grandson of another judge attending the conference.

A Texas District Court judge sentenced a 31-year-old man to 35 years in prison
for stealing a 12 oz. $2 can of Spam in Houston.

A New Jersey police chief was accused of ordering the opening of a grave
because he realized that he had loaned the grieving family a hat for the
casket-viewing but had not gotten it back after the funeral.

A 91-year-old woman sued her 79-year-old husband of 53 years for divorce in
Queens, NY, accusing him of having had an affair with a "younger woman," age
70.  According to the lawsuit, her husband admitted to having been seeing the
other woman for 40 years, and she decided to leave when he became abusive and
threatened to hit her with his cane.  As the moving van pulled up to the house
to take away her belongings, all her husband could say was, "Did you wash my
clothes?"

In England, Canon Michael Dittmer, who believes in "balance" in funeral
eulogies, described Fred Clark, 52, as a "very disagreeable man with little
good in him who would not be missed."  Dittmer later apologized.

Patricia Spahic, 59, sitting in the third row during a Pittsburgh production
of _Hamlet_, was cut on the head when Hamlet's dagger slipped out of his hand
and sailed into the audience.

Harold Womack, 51, of Phoenix, thought he could get his Porsche 924 out of a
cinder pit at the Sunset Crater National Monument by using a 20-ton steamroller
he spotted nearby.  Womack drove the steamroller over to his car and hopped
off to attach a chain.  The steamroller kept rolling and flattened the car.

Tommy Cribbs, the sheriff of Dyer County, Tennessee, was arrested in Van Buren,
Missouri, after police noticed his car in the parking lot of a local motel.  A
car of that description had been used in the theft of two sheep from a nearby
farm.  Officers who were questioning people at the motel were led to Cribbs
after a sheep was thrown from the window of his room.

A New Zealand man killed his wife by stabbing her repeatedly in the
stomach with a frozen sausage.

In Beckley, West Virginia, a woman was beaten by a mob of sixth graders
when she visited her son's school dressed as a "Care Bear" on Valentine's
Day.

A bank robber in New Haven, Connecticut, was convicted and sentenced
to 80 years in prison.  His bank robbery was foiled when his getaway
car, left idling outside the bank, was stolen.

Death-row inmates at Huntsville, Texas, prison awarded a $280 pot in
commissary privileges to the one who picked the minute inmate James
David Autry would be pronounced dead.  If Autry had won a stay of
execution, he would have won the pot.



In December, surgeon Isam Felahy removed an inch-long tree sprig from
the right lung of 16-year-old Tracy McIntyre in Stockton, Calif.  Tracy
had apparently inhaled it in 1980 from the family Christmas tree.  The
sprig, which was still green, was apparently also the source of Tracy's
notoriously bad breath.

The city of Bacolod in the Philippines endured a rash of cemetery thefts
during the summer, as a gang of thieves dug up graves to steal corpses'
kneecaps, which are thought by some Filipinos to have magical
properties.  The kneecaps were ground into powder and burned outside
homes in order to put residents to sleep so they would be easy targets
for the gang's burglaries.

A judge in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, jailed Frank Edward Gould, 48, in
November for 45 days on a DUI charge.  A police officer spotted Gould's
truck weaving on the highway, and as Gould pulled into a gas station,
the officer drove in behind him.  According to the officer, Gould got
out, became disoriented, walked back to the patrol car, leaned in, and
told the officer, "Fill 'er up."

In Peterborough, Ontario, Gerald Dixon, 26, was sentenced to six years
in prison in February for robbing a Bank of Montreal branch.  He was
arrested a few hours after the robbery as he attempted to deposit his
loot into his account at the same bank.

Nashville, Tenn., police were called to a laundromat in January after a
customer reported that a man had come in from the rain, soaking wet, put
a few coins in a dryer, climbed in, and was getting tumble-dried.

In October, a Redondo Beach, Calif., police officer arrested a driver
after a short chase and charged him with drunk driving.  Officer Joseph
Fonteno's suspicions were aroused when he saw the white Mazda MX-7
rolling down Pacific Coast Highway with half of a traffic-light pole,
including the lights, lying across its hood.  The driver had hit the
pole on a median strip and simply kept driving.  According to Fonteno,
when the driver was asked about the pole, he said, "It came with the car
when I bought it."

Police in Philadelphia in October said a 14-year-old boy was stabbed in
the cheek by a 15-year-old near Northeast High School.  Police said the
younger boy was in the process of stealing a bicycle when the older boy
approached and informed him that he was going to steal the bicycle,
himself.  The two then fought; the younger boy got in a shot with his
bolt cutters before the older boy stabbed him.

Recent distracted burglars:  In Canton, Mass., "Soft Foot," a burglar
who committed several jobs in 1995 (during some of which he cooked a
meal in the kitchen without waking the residents) remained on the lam.
And in Sacramento, Calif., in December, accused burglar Brett Woolley,
25, allegedly had lined up the owner's stereo and other items by the
front door ready to go but then decided to draw a bubble bath; he fell
asleep in the tub, the owner returned, and police were called to awaken
Woolley.

Donuts in the News:  The Los Angeles International Airport police
department opened an investigation over a January incident in which one
of its officers allegedly passed a fatal freeway accident scene, at
which no officer was yet present, in order to continue on his way to the
Dough Boy donut shop for a cup of coffee.  And in December, the police
chief of Quebec City, Quebec, ordered his officers to stay away from
donut shops during their breaks so as to improve the department's image.
Such was the outcry in protest that he rescinded the order the first
week in January and apologized to the Dunkin' Donuts chain for using its
name generically for "donut shop."

* Terence Cunningham, a Palo Alto, Calif., Unitarian, embarked earlier
this year on what he estimated was a $70 million fundraising campaign to
build a rocket ship and lunar landing vehicle for the purpose of placing
an indestructible copy of the Holy Bible on the moon for safekeeping.
There, Cunningham told the newspaper Mountain View Voice, the Bible
would be preserved against tampering or in case civilization is
destroyed on Earth from plagues, wars, or, in his words, "acts of God."
[Mountain View Voice, 7-28-95]

* Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., hosted the first
International Tuba-Euphonium Conference in June.  One composition
included a crescendo that required 750 tubas to play at once.  [Chicago
Sun Times, 5-10-95]

* In May, over the opposition of state Sen.  Joe Neal, the Nevada Senate
passed a bill to prohibit people from carrying guns while drunk.  Neal
argued that the bill would hurt activities of gun clubs, some of which
permit drinking during target-shooting socials.  [USA Today, 5-2-95]

* In May, researchers at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory proposed
to the nuclear weapons plant in nearby Aiken, S. C., that certain bantam
chickens could be raised in radiation- contaminated areas without harm
to later human consumption-- because the chickens' bodies metabolize out
the dangerous levels of radiation in about ten days.  Said one
researcher, "If . . . you call it radioactively cleaned meat and you put
it on the [grocery] shelf for half price, I bet people in this country
would eat it."  [The Observer (Charlotte, N. C.)-AP, 5-6-95]

* In April, a 54-year-old truck driver filed a $10 million lawsuit in
Gallatin, Tenn., over a defective penile implant that he says "took all
the manhood from me."  The man said he suffered blisters, bruising,
infection, and embarrassment.  According to his attorney, "He could be
just walking down the street, and it would erect on its own."
[Tennessean, 4-2-95]

* Larry Wayne Harris, a septic-tank inspector in Dublin, Ohio, and a
member of the Aryan Nations white supremacist group, was charged in May
with purchasing vials of freeze-dried bubonic plague under false
pretenses.  He had told American Type Culture Collection in Rockville,
Md., that he owned a lab and was a serious researcher of bubonic plague.
[N.  Y. Post, 5- 17-95]

* Driver David Zaricor, 19, was charged with manslaughter in July in
Jefferson County, Mo., in connection with a November auto collision that
killed a 70-year-old woman in another car.  Highway Patrol records
reveal that Zaricor had told a trooper at the scene that he lost control
of his car when his girlfriend bit him during a sex act.  [St.  Louis
Post-Dispatch, 7-28-95]

* In July, Reuters news service reported that a Leeds, England, dentist
named Garrett had been fined about $300,000 in damages for unnecessary
and painful dental work designed to boost his income.  One patient,
starting at age 15, over 25 sessions treating 13 teeth, had 18 pins, 10
crowns, and two root canals.  [Reuters wirecopy, 7-26-95]

* Among the budget cuts that Albany, N. Y., mayor Thomas Whalen III made
during his term of office was the closing of a certain firehouse--to the
sharp protests of its neighbors.  In January, after Whalen left office,
his car caught fire near the former firehouse and burned up.  [USA
Today, 1-27-95]

* In January in Baltimore, Md., Michael Wayne Heim, 26, pleaded guilty
to arson.  In June 1994, he had stolen his ex- wife's car, intending to
set it on fire in the street and aim it into the home of her mother.
However, the flames got out of hand with Heim still in the car, and the
resulting crash and fire left Heim in a coma for 23 days and caused him
to require several skin grafts.  [Baltimore Sun, 1-13-95]

* Vicente Vinarao, director of the Bureau of Corrections in the
Philippines, complained in July that he was having trouble carrying out
his duties because his Bureau lacks funds.  There are 54 people on death
row, sentenced to die in a gas chamber, but there is no gas chamber.  An
emergency bill last year authorizes that executions be carried out by
electrocution until such time as a gas chamber is built, but the
electric chair was destroyed several years ago by lightning.  [San Jose
Mercury News-Reuters, 7-24-95]

* Newspaper editor Glenn Sorlie died on May 2 in Belgrade, Mont., of a
staph infection, but his wife failed to notify anyone until May 4 so his
obituary would be published first in his weekly newspaper, the High
Country Independent Press.  If she had notified authorities earlier, the
Bozeman Daily Chronicle would have published the story first.  Said Mrs.
Sorlie, "[H]e wouldn't want to get scooped on his own death."  [AP
wirecopy, 5-8-95]

* Accused smuggler Morteza Farakesh, 48, was convicted in May of
possession of $2 million worth of morphine during a 1993 layover at
Kennedy Airport in New York.  According to the prosecutor, Farakesh was
on his way to California and could have picked a less Customs-intense
airport than JFK but chose to make his connection there in order to take
advantage of an Alitalia super-saver fare.  [New York Daily News,
5-26-95]

* The Washington Post reported in April that the Defense Department is
testing two anti-vomiting drugs that it hopes will allow soldiers, for
the short-term after a nuclear attack, to continue to perform their
mission before they ultimately die of nuclear radiation.  [Washington
Post, 4-27-95]






















WEIRDNUZ.468 (News of the Weird, January 24, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright information at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* The Brooklyn, N. Y., organization Shalom Bayis ("Household
Peace" in Hebrew) closed down its 24-hour mistress hotline in
January after an unfavorable New York Daily News story.  A
Shalom Bayis spokesman said the hotline's purpose was to place
its 40 volunteer mistresses with unsatisfied husbands in order to
stop the "plague of divorce" menacing Jewish couples.  Although
Shalom Bayis claimed to take no fee for its services, it did admit
that after the Daily News story, most of the hotline callers were
single men and happily married men who just wanted sex.

* One Man, One Vote:  Because of an obscure state constitutional
amendment that few voters and politicians noticed, the terms of
office of the four incumbents on the Loretto, Ky., City Council
automatically expired in November without their having had an
opportunity to campaign for re-election.  Travis Greenwell, 23,
voting by absentee ballot, was perhaps the only person in town
(population 800) who read the voting literature and thus cast the
only votes in the election.  For the four slots, he wrote in the
names of his mother, his uncle, a friend, and a local character
who runs a hardware store.  (All except the hardware store guy
declined to serve.)

* Wrong Place, Wrong Time:  Phoenix, Ariz., cosmetic surgeon
Steven Locniker, on the lam for avoiding child-support charges,
was arrested in September after he called attention to himself as
Cosmopolitan magazine's "Bachelor of the Month."  And
Thomas Georgevitch, 22, on the lam for impersonating a police
officer, was arrested in Bay Shore, N. Y., in October after a
detective heard him call in to a radio station to make a song
request (Johnny Rivers's "Secret Agent Man").  And Tom
Tipton, 63, wanted on two warrants in Minneapolis, was arrested
in November when a sheriff's officer recognized his name as the
man singing the national anthem before the Vikings-Broncos
game.

THE LITIGIOUS SOCIETY

* Chris Morris filed a $1 million lawsuit against the state of
Michigan in November, claiming that he caught a cold in the
rotunda of the state Capitol while viewing an art exhibit there
earlier in the year.

* Dale L. Larson's $41,000 trial-court award was upheld by a
Wisconsin appeals court in October, which agreed with the trial
court that the Indianhead golf course in Wausau was 51 percent
responsible for Larson's needing nine root canals and 23 dental
crowns.  Larson tripped on his golf spikes and fell hard on his
face on a brick path outside the clubhouse, and he argued that he
wouldn't have fallen if it had been a smooth concrete sidewalk
rather than a brick path.  The trial court had found that only 49
percent of the accident was due to Larson's having consumed 13
drinks that evening, which left him with a blood-alcohol level of
0.28 90 minutes after the fall.

* Andrew Daniels filed a $500,000 lawsuit against M&M/Mars
Company and an Cleveland, Ohio, retailer because one of the
M&M Peanuts he bit down on had no peanut in it, and as a
result, his teeth bit through his lip, which required his
hospitalization and various surgery bills.  One claim against the
retailer is under the legal theory of "failure to inspect" the candy.

* In August, Julie Leach filed a lawsuit in Macomb County,
Michigan, seeking at least $10,000 from the owners of a beagle
named Patch, which Leach said was constantly enticing Leach's
German shepherd Holly to chase him.  In 1995, during one of
Patch's escapades, the pursuing Holly was run over by a car and
killed.  Leach says Patch's owners should pay for permitting their
dog to harass Holly.

* Jamie Brooks, 18, filed a $5 million claim against Kiowa
County, Okla., in June, asserting that it is the county's fault that
she became pregnant six months earlier while housed in the jail
awaiting her murder trial.  She said the father is inmate-trusty
Eddie Alonzo, who had access to the hallways and who she said
impregnated her through the bars of her cell.

* In July Alex Alzaldua filed a $25,000 lawsuit against Dennis
Hickey in Raymondville, Tex., alleging injuries caused by his
"suddenly without warning" having tripped over Hickey's dog in
the kitchen of Hickey's home.  According to the lawsuit, Hickey
should have warned Alzaldua that he was walking around in the
kitchen "at his own risk" and that Hickey had failed to warn
Alzaldua of "the dog's propensity of lying in certain areas."

CLICHES COME TO LIFE

* Trucker Franciszek Zygadlo was committed to a mental
institution in Rochester, N. Y., in November after he led police
on a 280-mile, high-speed chase in his trailerless cab through
three states in September.  According to police, after finally
driving the truck into Irondequoit Bay, Zygadlo ran toward the
officers and proclaimed himself a hero for defusing a bomb on
the truck that he said would have exploded if he had ever slowed
to less than 40 mph.

* On October 17 firefighters took two hours to extinguish a fire
at the Cal-Compack Foods plant in Las Cruces, N. Mex., that
started when a silo full of red chile powder grew so hot that it
began to smolder.

* In August, the Caron family of Sandown, N. H., was granted
an extension of time to file a quarterly federal tax return after
they discovered that their home had been ransacked by the
family's pet pygmy goats while they were on vacation.  Among
the items the goats had eaten were toilet bowl cleaner, a
lampshade, a telephone directory, and all of the family's income
tax paperwork.

* Jeen Han, 22, was charged with conspiracy to commit murder
in Irvine, Calif., in November, against her twin sister, Sunny.
According to a police lieutenant, the "evil twin" was angry that
the "good twin" had snitched on her regarding stolen credit cards
and thus wanted to kill her and assume her identity.

THINNING THE HERD

* In November, a 60-year-old Polish man in the village of
Kosianka Trojanowka, identified only as "Czeslaw B," was
accidentally shot to death by two homemade guns he had
mounted on his garage door to ward off trespassers (just 2 of 28
booby traps in his house). And in Slidell, La., in December,
Jason Jinks, 20, decided to open his car door and back up at 25
mph in order to look for his hat that had just fallen off; when he
hit the brakes, he fell out on his head and, three days later, died.

CONTEMPORARY WISDOM

* Veteran Belleville, Ill., jail inmate Kelvin Lewis, asked by the
Belleville Journal in January to evaluate the jail's new black-and-
white, thick-horizontal-striped uniforms, graded them an 11 on a
10-scale:  "I like their style.  The younger generation will like
[the rolled-up cuffs]."


==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
(Please, please, please walk up to the clerk and announce in a
loud voice, "You know what I really need?  A Concrete Enema."
Please.)  Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.469 (News of the Weird, January 31, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright information at end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* Clarence Mulloy, weary of doctors who don't keep their
appointments, filed a lawsuit in November against one of them,
Dr. Lawrence Amato of Round Lake Beach, Ill., and won $10
plus court costs.  Mulloy claimed that Dr. Amato once canceled
merely because his nurse was away and he didn't want to have to
hook Mulloy up to a heart monitor all by himself.

* In December, McDonald's opened restaurants in its 100th
country, Belarus, amid about 4,000 eager customers and 500
protestors, and a few days later, in its 101st, Tahiti.  According
to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, no two
countries with McDonald's restaurants have ever gone to war
against each other--because, as Friedman theorizes, countries
prosperous enough to support a McDonald's are surely stable
enough to resist most provocations.

* Texas A&M student Jonathan Culpepper and his fraternity
Kappa Alpha were indicted in College Station, Tex., in
December on a criminal hazing charge because of a severe
"wedgie."  The grand jury found that fraternity members lifted a
candidate, unnamed in news reports, off his feet by the waistband
of his briefs, causing the man to require the surgical removal of a
testicle.

CAN'T POSSIBLY BE TRUE

* The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported in December that a
female inmate at the Yell County Jail in Dardanelle had been
receiving regular shipments of methamphetamines via Federal
Express.  Jail officials had finally become suspicious and
obtained the necessary search warrant to check her frequent
deliveries.

* During the Christmas Handicap race at a track in Melbourne,
Australia, the horse Cogitate threw its rider and bumped the
horse Hon Kwok Star sending Hon's jockey, apprentice Andrew
Payne, into the air.  To break his fall, Payne grabbed the neck of
Cogitate and then climbed into the stirrups and rode that horse
across the finish line (though the official records would show that
both horses were disqualified).

* The Miami Herald reported in September that David
McAllister, 77 and blind, a nursing-home invalid in North Miami
Beach, Fla., receives daily visits from Chris Carrier, 32, who
reads to McAllister from the Bible.  Their only previous
relationship occurred during a few days in December 1974, when
McAllister kidnapped young Carrier at a bus stop and left him for
dead in the Everglades with cigarette burns on his body, icepick
holes in one eye, and a gunshot wound that left him blind in the
other eye.  Said Carrier, "I don't stare at my . . . potential
murderer.  I stare at a man, very old, very alone and scared."

* In November, ballroom dancing champion Michael Keith
Withers was convicted in Perth, Australia, of the attempted 1994
murder of his wife-dance partner, Stacey Larson.  He had said it
was an accident, but the jury found that he had doused her with
gasoline (set aside to use in a Whipper Snapper lawn trimmer he
had borrowed from a neighbor) and set her afire, burning 70
percent of her body.  Larson testified that she had not seen
Withers since the incident, but under cross-examination finally
admitted that she had slept with him 15 times since then, and
another witness said Larson had bought Withers Christmas gifts
in 1995, including his very own Whipper Snapper.

* Results of a University of Minnesota study, announced in July
and pertinent to the dispute between large animal feedlots and
their neighbors who object to the smell, showed that home values
nearer the feedlots were higher than those further away.  (No
explanation was given by researchers, but some experts
interviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune said increased
employment opportunities at feedlots had driven up demand for
housing.)

* A 1985 lease fixed the annual rent the U. S. pays for its
Moscow embassy at 72,500 rubles.  That was worth about
$60,000 at the time, but now with nine years to go on the lease,
the devaluation of the ruble has reduced the rent to the equivalent
of $22.56 a year.  In August, the Russian government stepped up
its demands to renegotiate, but the U. S. continues to resist.

INEXPLICABLE

* The New York Times reported in December on a Jordanian
company that employs veiled Palestinian women stitching
together women's exotic underpants for Victoria's Secret stores
and catalogs.  Adding to the irony is that the products, which in
1997 will also include brassieres, are sold with a "Made in
Israel" label in order to take advantage of Israel's favorable trade
status with the U. S.

* In December, Frederick Lundy was to report for a court
hearing in Akron, Ohio, in which he had been told:  Plead not
guilty to a parole violation and be released until trial, or plead
guilty and go to jail immediately.  Lundy pleaded guilty and was
abruptly led away.  That decision could be explained, perhaps,
by Lundy's desire to get on with his punishment.  What was not
explained was why he had come into the courtroom under the
circumstances with 41 rocks of crack cocaine in his pocket,
which were discovered in a routine, pre-incarceration search.

* In November at the Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque,
Anthony Valencia and Fitzgerald Vandever, both age 20, were
arrested and accused of roaming the Intensive Care Unit, looking
to steal patients' food off warming carts.  (Said a hospital
spokeswoman, "Actually, we've got some pretty good [food]
down there."

* In December in London, England, the first fraud cases against
the parent company of Hoover vacuum cleaners went to trial,
four years after the company's disastrous giveaway campaign in
which it promised two free air fares with all vacuum cleaners,
which retailed for as little as about $165 in Great Britain.  The
company sold over a half million units during the campaign and
has so far paid out about $72 million in airline tickets to about a
third of the purchasers.

UPDATE

* In 1995 News of the Weird listed four cities in which
entrepreneurs had begun businesses to fly couples around for an
hour so that they could have sexual intercourse while airborne.
In December 1996 several homeowners near Van Nuys (Calif.)
Airport complained vociferously to the Los Angeles Daily News
that one of the four, Mile High Adventures (whose flights now
start at $429), flies so frequently and low that they are extremely
irritating.  Said one homeowner, "What people do in their own
bedroom is their business.  What they do over our heads is the
community's business."

THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

* In January, disbarred Parsonburg, Md., lawyer Paul Bailey
Taylor, 61, finally snapped after years of erratic behavior and
barricaded himself inside a church, armed with a rifle, for five
hours before police convinced him to surrender.  When he was
working, Taylor ran his law practice from the bathroom of his
unheated rural trailer, where he had set up a desk over the toilet
so that he could sit for long periods of time because of an
intestinal disorder.  A social worker once described the place as
"clean," in that Taylor's 12 cats were neatly housed in cardboard
boxes and his legal papers were filed in an orderly fashion in the
bathtub.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.470 (News of the Weird, February 7, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright information at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* An ancient fear of penis-shrinking sorcery periodically surfaces in
Ghana, the latest instance in December.  Mobs beat seven men to
death in Accra and injured others in Tema, all on rumors that the
men had the power to make others' genitals disappear by a mere
touch.  Police said the rumors were spread by criminal operatives
so that crowds of hysterical men would gather, making it easier for
the criminals to pickpocket wallets.

* Japanese researchers at Tokyo University and Tsukuba
University said they will begin in February testing a project to
surgically implant microprocessors and electrode sets, and
eventually microcameras, into American cockroaches for a
variety of possible missions, including espionage surveillance and
searching for victims in earthquake rubble.  The equipment,
which can also receive remote-control signals to command the
cockroach's movements, weighs a tenth of an ounce, twice a
typical roach's weight but still only a tenth of what it potentially
can carry.

* In December, the Idaho High School Activities Association
rejected a proposal by the superintendent of public instruction for
extracurricular firearms competition in junior high schools.  But
in January in neighboring Wyoming, a House committee
approved a bill that would lower the minimum age for big-game
hunters to 12.

SEEDS OF OUR DESTRUCTION

* The New York Times reported in January that the Taliban
movement in Afghanistan is presiding over such a bankrupt
economy that a viable career field now has men (women are
forbidden to work at all) raiding cemeteries of human bones, which
are then sold to dealers in Pakistan as animal bones to be fashioned
into cooking oil, soap, chicken feed, and buttons.  Skulls must first
be broken up to preserve the ruse that only animal bones are
involved.

* Recent Inappropriate Nudity:  In September, dozens of
schoolteachers from the state of Bihar stripped in front of the
Indian parliament to protest low wages.  And the Defense
Intelligence Agency, in a memo disclosed by the Washington
Post in October, reported the emergence of a Liberian leader
known as "General 'Butt Naked,'" "from his propensity for
fighting naked," which he "probably believes terrorizes the
enemy and brings good luck."  And Meaux, France, high school
philosophy teacher Bernard Defrance was suspended in January
for his pedagogical game in which he removes an article of
clothing each time a student stumps him with a riddle (sometimes
losing everything).

* In a July soccer game in Tripoli, Libya, a team sponsored by
the eldest son of Muammar Qaddafi suffered a questionable
referee's call and began beating the official and the other team.
After spectators jeered, Qaddafi and his bodyguards opened fire
on them, and some spectators shot back.  The death toll was
somewhere between eight and fifty, including the referee, and
Muammar Qaddafi declared a period of mourning, the hallmark
of which was that Libyan TV was to be in black and white only.

* Role Model Gains:  In October, Marcia Fann, 37, won the
prestigious Bass'n Gal Classic Star XX bass-fishing tournament
in Athens, Tex.  Fann cheerfully discloses that she was formerly
a man, having been surgically changed sometime in the 1980s.

* In December, the entire 300-man paramilitary police force of
the 83-island, South Pacific nation of Vanuatu was arrested for
kidnaping a visiting Australian official in order to increase its
leverage in an overtime-pay dispute with the government.  The
force had been suspended in November for kidnaping Vanautu's
deputy prime minister for the same purpose, and in October,
several members of the force had kidnaped Vanautu's president
and held him for almost a day before releasing him because of
the populace's seeming indifference.

* A July Wall Street Journal story reported that the city jail
(capacity 134) in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Wash., does a brisk
business charging petty criminals from around the state $64 a day
to serve their sentences of up to 40 days in comfortable settings.
Reservations are recommended, and the policy is cash only.

* A United Nations spokesman in Sarajevo disclosed in
November a recent marital quarrel that escalated out of control
"in classic Bosnian style" and reflected the war-saturated quality
of life.  During an argument, the wife of Pero Toljij fled to a
neighbor's home, but Toljij chased her with a bazooka he
happened to have on hand, fired at her, missed, and hit the
couple's own house.  He was arrested.

BOTTOM OF THE GENE POOL

* In October in Massapequa Park, N. Y., four men, ages 19-21,
intending to follow a recipe in the Underground Steroid
Handbook, failed to wait patiently until the Drano-like
concoction had reached a satisfactory pH level to make it milder.
The four were hospitalized with bad internal burns, and the
concoction also burned rescuing police officers when the four
men vomited on them.

* In November in Santa Maria, Tex., Luis Martinez, Jr., 25, was
stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle by his uncle, allegedly to
punish Martinez for not sharing his bag of Frito's.  In October a
20-year-old man was hospitalized in Guthrie, Okla., after
encouraging his friend Jason Heck to kill a millipede with a .22-
caliber rifle; after two ricochets, Heck's  bullet hit the man just
above his right eye, fracturing his skull.

* Phillip Johnson, 32, was hospitalized in Prestonburg, Ky., in
December with a gunshot wound just above his left nipple, which
he inflicted upon himself because, as he told paramedics, he wanted
to see what it felt like.  When the paramedics arrived, said the
sheriff, they found him "screaming about the pain, over and over."

I DON'T THINK SO

* David S. Peterson filed a lawsuit against New Mexico Gov.
Gary Johnson in August for racketeering, seeking three times the
sum of money that Peterson had given his girlfriend to buy him
clothes but which she had lost gambling at an Indian tribal
casino.  Peterson said Gov. Johnson was so much a supporter of
the Indian gaming industry that it was his fault Peterson was out
the money.

NO LONGER WEIRD

* Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which
now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from
circulation:  (15) The burglar with poor planning skills who
attempts to enter a building after hours through a chimney or vent
and gets stuck, as Baltimore, Md., police say Dwayne Terry, 33,
did at a convenience store on Christmas morning.  And (16)
certainly the thousands of times a year (about 50 the past year in
Fremont, Calif., alone) that trial-bound defendants and others
cheerfully place their belongings on the X-ray machines at the
entrances of courthouses, only to have their illegal drugs
detected.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.471 (News of the Weird, February 14, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright information at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* Still More Italian Justice:  In November, a judge in Rome ruled
that a 24-year-old man was entitled to live with his mother even
though she doesn't want him to.  Said the woman, "If he comes
home then I'm [leaving]."  In a 1996 case reported by the
Associated Press in December, Italy's Supreme Court refused to
convict several of a 6-year-old girl's relatives who had had sex
with her, citing the strangeness and "particular[ity]" of the family
environment.  The court said the family's ordinary relationships
were wild, "dominated uniquely or almost always by instinct."

* In January, Jack Petelui, 43, claiming to hear God, stripped
down to his underwear, climbed the ornate facade of the Ansonia
Hotel in New York City, resisted police efforts for more than an
hour to talk him down, and finally jumped.  Cynical New
Yorkers were said to be astonished at the dozens of bystanders
who were actually yelling "Don't jump!"  (Petelui was spared
serious injury when he landed on a police department rescue
airbag.)

* Life Imitates Crime Movies:  In January, six inmates, including
two convicted murderers, tunneled out of the maximum security
state prison in Pittsburgh, Pa., 15 feet below ground, using tools
from the prison machine shop.  And in January, the Banco
Credito Argentino in Buenos Aires was robbed of about $25
million by a gang that had made a 165-foot-long tunnel under a
street over the previous several months.  It was Buenos Aires's
55th tunnel-related bank robbery since 1990.

POLICE BLOTTER

* Police in Allentown, Pa., discovered in September that a man
who was recently arrested at the bus station with 280 small bags
of heroin in his luggage had chewed off the skin of seven
fingertips after being jailed.  Said a police sergeant, "It certainly
is a strong indication that somebody somewhere is looking for
him."

* Armed and Dangerous:  A man robbed a variety store in
Guelph, Ontario, in December wielding only a three-foot-long
tree branch.  And in Columbia, Mo., in December, Eric O.
Criss, 31, fortified only with a socket wrench, failed in his
alleged attempt to rob a grocery store.  And in Calgary, Alberta,
in December, a man brandishing only a bottle of household
cleaner robbed a Bank of Nova Scotia.

* A 21-year-old, allegedly intoxicated man was spotted by police
on an Austin, Minn., street in January urinating on a car but was
let go with a warning when he persuaded police it was his own
car.  A few minutes later police returned and arrested the man for
DUI, having figured out that he was urinating on the car's door
lock to melt the ice so that he could get in and drive away.

* Roger Augusto Sosa, 23, was charged with burglary early on
Christmas morning in Chevy Chase, Md.  Scott Kane and his
wife had heard a prowler in the house and called 911.  Despite
the clamor of several squad cars arriving and seven officers
rushing into the living room with guns drawn, Sosa by that time
reportedly was seated under the tree, blissfully opening the
Kanes' presents.

* In October in Great Falls, Mont., Tina Rae Beavers, 19, was
arrested on the lawn separating the jail and the courthouse and
charged with indecent exposure.  According to a sheriff's deputy,
she was energetically complying with her jailed husband's request
to remove her clothes, lie down in the grass, and make suggestive
movements so that he could see her from his cell window.

* Slaves to Love:  In December in Hong Kong, Yuen Sai-wa, 33,
pleaded guilty to bank robbery but said the only reason he did it
was that he felt challenged to keep his girlfriend, who was about
to leave him.  And in San Diego, Calif., in January, Michael
William Smith, 26, and Danny Mayes, 20, were charged with
arson for fires they said they set at the behest of Tammy Jo
Garcia, 27, who they said became sexually aroused by the fires, to
their benefit.   (She was also charged.)

GOVERNMENT IN ACTION

* The New York Daily News reported in January that a fire hydrant
had recently been installed at the busy intersection of Tremont
Avenue and Boston Road in the Bronx but that it was installed in
the street, five feet from the curb, requiring all traffic to go around
it.  A city spokesman said the hydrant was installed properly and
that eventually a sidewalk would be built in what is now the curb
lane, but because of engineering delays and bad weather,
construction has not yet been scheduled.

* Helen Stanwell, a 23-year-veteran park ranger in Seattle,
Wash., was suspended for 6 days in November because she
worked after hours without pay to help a historical society
member look for a local site.  (It is illegal in Washington to work
more than 40 hours without claiming overtime.)  And in January,
Wallingford, Conn., city employee Millie Wood, 72, was
suspended for one day because she voluntarily trimmed the
town's Christmas tree during Thanksgiving holiday.  (It is illegal
to be in the building after hours.)

* In March Amy Howe, 25, was the victim of a hit-and-run
driver in Washington, D. C., and suffered a broken leg.  Three
witnesses immediately supplied police with the car's tag number,
and shortly afterward Howe's husband used public records to
identify for police the car that was assigned that tag.  In
September 1996, upon inquiry by the Washington Post, a police
spokesman said that despite having the pertinent information
virtually handed to it, the department was only then almost ready
to begin its investigation.

* In October, the Associated Press uncovered several military
construction projects that continued to be fully funded by the
Pentagon long after the facilities on which they are housed had
been designated for permanent closing.  Included were a $5
million Navy chapel in San Diego, a $3 million Army classroom
building near Chicago, a $13 million Navy dining hall in
Orlando, and a $5 million Air Force fire station and training
facility in Indianapolis.  Said a Navy spokesman in San Diego,
"[The taxpayers] are going to have to pay for it anyway, so why
not complete [it]?"

* The town of Colma, Calif., just south of San Francisco, has a
population of 1,000 in an area of about 2.2 square miles, but
three-fourths of the land consists of cemeteries in which a million
people are buried.  In October citizen Robert Simcox announced
he would gather signatures to secure a ballot referendum for 1997
that would impose a municipal tax on the dead, in the form of a
levy on cemetery owners of $5 per grave per year.

UPDATE

* In August 1996, News of the Weird reported on a group of
New York City police officers who had availed themselves of
expensive and hokey tax-resistance kits that would allow them to
be regarded as nontaxable aliens while still being law-
enforcement officers.  Six subsequently pleaded guilty, but in
January 1997, in the first case to go to trial, Officer Adalberto
Miranda testified that he owed no tax because New York was
merely a geographic area, not a government entity, and a short
ways into his testimony, Miranda took it upon himself to
disqualify Federal Judge Denny Chin because Chin seemed
"upset" and then to "arrest" Chin from the witness stand and to
give Chin his "Miranda [no relation] warning."


==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.472 (News of the Weird, February 21, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright information at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* The Associated Press reported in January on the three-year-old
anti-smoking policy of Kimball Physics of Wilton, N. H., which
not only forbids lighting up at work but subjects each employee
and visitor to a sniff test of his breath and clothing performed by
receptionist Jennifer Walsh.  Those with an odor so strong that it
is likely they smoked within the last two hours or so are not
allowed in.

* In February, Schenectady, N.Y., patrolman Robert J. O'Neill
reportedly retired.  He had been on sick leave since 1982, at full
salary that now has reached $508,000, because of psychological
problems related to his Vietnam Marine experience that allegedly
made him a danger to the public.

* Modernday Stagecoach Robberies:  Reuters news service
reported in January that the 400-mile route from Moscow to St.
Petersburg, Russia, is being worked by gangs of armed thieves
who rob and hijack cargo trucks.  And in August on the runway
at the airport in Perpignan, France, gunmen halted a taxiing Air
France airliner that had just landed with 167 passengers and stole
moneybags containing about $800,000.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY

* In a November Associated Press dispatch from Payiir, Sudan, a
reporter described the local competition among unmarried Dinka
men to gorge themselves (and refrain from exercise) to become
fat, which is regarded as a way to win females because it
demonstrates that the man's cattle herd is large enough for him to
consume extra milk and meat.  The typical Dinka is tall and reed-
thin--former basketball player Manute Bol is a Dinka--and some
men gain so much unfamiliar weight so quickly that they have
been known to topple over.

* The hottest selling computer software in Japan in November
was a "love simulation" game in which boys try to get a virtual
17-year-old girl, Shiori, to fall in love with them.  There is even
a magazine, Virtual Idol, devoted to supplying fictional
biographical tales of Shiori and other virtual girls.  Wrote one
young man, Virtual Idol "is just the right kind of magazine for a
person like me who's not interested in real girls."  By January,
several news services had reported on an equally popular Japanese
computer craze, the Virtual Pet, a $16 electronic "bird" the size of
an egg that responds to nurturing instincts in many teenage girls.
By pushing buttons, the owner can feed it, play with it, clean up
after it, and discipline it.

* According to an October Associated Press story, young mothers
in large Japanese cities have adopted the city park as a forum for
vying for status.  Some young mothers interviewed claimed they
were "scared" to take their toddlers to the parks (to make their
"park debut") because of the established cliques of mothers who
dominate the facilities.  Guidebooks teach the proper "park
behavior"; department stores feature the proper "park clothing";
and a recent satiric movie depicted a park ruled by 50
authoritarian mothers.

* In Singapore, which is so pristine that even public gum-chewing
is illegal, police expressed concern in February about the recent
crisis of apartment-dwellers in high-rise buildings who casually
toss their belongings out the window.  Fifty-one people were
arrested last year for throwing objects ranging from TV sets to
tricycles to flower pots.

* The Times of London reported in December that Bombay
(whose name was recently changed to Mumbai) became the first
city in India to ban public spitting, which the reporter described
as "one of the two most ubiquitous of male habits" in India (the
other being public urination).  According to the Times, "Boys
barely old enough to walk can be heard practicing guttural
sounds, which is regarded as macho."

* A September Los Angeles Times story described what
Argentine writer Tomas Eloy Martinez called the country's
obsession with "emotional" necrophilia toward its prominent
citizens.  Frequently, corpses of luminaries such as Juan Peron
are dug up and either celebrated or desecrated, to excite national
pride.  (The hands of Peron's corpse were sawed off by a zealous
grave robber in 1987 and have not been recovered; last fall, a
judge ordered Peron's body to be disinterred yet again so that a
DNA sample could be taken as evidence in a woman's claim that
she is Peron's illegitimate daughter.)

* According to a June China Daily story, 40 million Chinese live
in caves, but many are leaving for regular houses, putting a strain
on the available arable land in some areas.  Thus, architects
working for the government are designing futuristic cave homes
in Gansu, Henan, and Shanxi provinces to encourage the cave
dwellers to stay put.

ANIMALS

* A team of Chinese surgeons from Zhengzhou, Beijing,
Shanghai, and Shenzhen reported in January that, in a 17-hour
operation three months earlier, they had reattached an elephant's
trunk that had been severed in an accident and that the elephant
was now feeding itself again, though the trunk was 16 inches
shorter.

* In October, Annie Wald and a partner opened Total Dog, Los
Angeles's first canine fitness center.  For a fee of up to $800 a
year from owners too busy to walk their dogs, the pooches work
out on treadmills, in swimming pools, and on an obstacle course,
and massages are available.

* In August firefighters in Kelso, Wash., listed the official cause
of the fire at Matthew Gould's home as Sadie's playing with
matches.  Sadie, a 5-month-old German shepherd mix had
probably gnawed into a box of matches but failed to drool enough
to douse the sparks.  And in Spencer, Ind., in December, James
E. Baker was shot in the heel by his Akita, Boo Boo, which had
jumped on the trigger of a 20-gauge shotgun on the floor of
Baker's pickup truck as he sat in the driver's seat.

UPDATE

* In December 1996 News of the Weird reported that Los
Angeles County authorities had decided not to charge Texan
Robert Salazar in the death of his employee Sandra Orellana, who
fell from an 8th floor hotel balcony railing on which the two were,
according to Salazar, having sex.  In January, after dropping
mannequins from the railing to see how they fell and examining
the wounds on Ms. Orellana's body, the county coroner called the
death a homicide, and police sought Salazar for more questioning.

CRIES FOR HELP

* In an eight-day period in January in towns less than 100 miles
apart (Bakersfield and Fresno, Calif.), police found the corpses of
elderly mothers that continued to be treated as integral parts of the
family by their adult sons.  The Bakersfield woman, who died at
age 77 around September, was thought by her son to be merely
"demonically depressed" and therefore liable to wake up at any
minute and thus had been propped up on the sofa.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.473 (News of the Weird, February 28, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See Copyright Notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* In January, the owners of KZZC-FM, Tipton, Calif., ended 18
consecutive months of being an all-"I Heard It Through the
Grapevine" station, playing various versions of that song all day,
7 days a week (except once, when it played the Eagles' "New Kid
in Town" for a whole weekend).  The station was pending sale,
and the owner needed just to keep the frequency occupied, but
negotiations dragged on much longer than expected.

* Life Imitates Lawyer Jokes:  Because of overcrowding at the
Chilliwack, British Columbia, courthouse, jury selection
in a January manslaughter case was removed to a local community
center, but because of other court business taking place there, jury-
selection was further removed to the center's men's room.  Said
prosecutor Henry Waldock, "When you start holding hearings in a
bathroom, I fear it may diminish the respect for the justice system
in the eyes of the public."  And in Miami, Fla., the gargoyles on the
24th floor of the Dade County  courthouse have been suffering
since November the dreaded swallows-at-Capistrano-like invasion
of several thousand migrating vultures.

* The Associated Press reported in January that many handicapped
and deformed kids from the village of Murshidabad, India, were
being sold by their parents to middlemen who would place them in
Saudi Arabia cities as street beggars.  For those who didn't have
such children but still wanted a piece of the action, the traffickers
took on private investors, offering a 50 percent return within a few
months.

COMPELLING EXPLANATIONS

* David Schames, a founder of the Association of Coupon
Professionals, explaining to columnist Martin Sloane in
November why so many companies have switched from overseas
processors to prison-labor processors:  "Employee stability is
always an issue overseas, but most of the inmates [working for
coupon companies] are serving long terms."

* Palm Harbor, Fla., elementary school teacher Patricia Locke
beat a DUI rap in November, and was reinstated by the school
board as a result, when she argued successfully that the reason
she appeared disoriented while driving was that a silicone breast
implant ruptured and poisoned her nervous system.

* In December, Dr. William D. Cone, 71, went on trial on 19
counts of sexual assault in West Plains, Mo., allegedly committed
against a 37-year-old female patient.  According to the patient,
Cone's "re-parenting theory" of counseling (i.e., regressing the
patient to the age when parental flaws are prominent and then
overcoming them) required him to play the role of her mother
and to allow her to suckle him to compensate for her not having
been breastfed.

* A state Appellate Division court In Albany, N. Y., ruled in
January that a trial judge was correct in denying as irrelevant the
request of accused rapist Edward Hendrix Jr. to enter into
evidence the size of his penis.  Hendrix said he thought that size
was an important consideration to the issue of whether the woman
consented to sex.

* Darlie Routier, recently convicted in Kerrville, Tex., of
murdering her 5-year-old son, but indignantly insisting that she is
innocent:  "If I had [killed him], I would be the first person to
stand up and say, 'Oh, my gosh!'"

* In October, a University of New Hampshire business major, in
a letter to the school newspaper, blamed his recent drunken
driving on a police crackdown on underage drinking in the
University's home of Durham.  Because he has to drive to
another city to drink, the student wrote, "[I] can expect to be
doing a lot more drunk driving."

SMOOTH REACTIONS

* In November in Lancaster, Pa., comedy club customer Judy K.
Strough, seething at insults about where she is from (Arkansas)
by comedian Al Romero, walked to the stage and slugged him.
Two weeks earlier, comedian Timothy Ward filed a lawsuit in
New York City against Prince Ranier of Monaco, who Ward says
slapped him during a 1995 show in which he was making fun of
the Prince's son's bald spot.

* In December, Bowling Green (Ohio) State University instructor
Patrick Stearns, 32, was suspended after allegedly punching a 25-
year-old student who showed up late for Stearns's class.  And in
January, the Medical Board of California issued a public
reprimand against Dr. Edward A. Thistlewaite of San Marino,
Calif., for slapping a 9-year-old boy he was treating for Attention
Deficit Disorder.

* In September, world-renowned composer Jon J. Polifrone, 59,
sent a letter to 2,500 colleagues in classical music announcing he
was abruptly quitting the business and limiting the availability of
his work, solely because administrators at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute (where he is a professor) told him he needs to spend
more time on his teaching.  (Colleagues interviewed by the
Roanoke Times said the VPI review was merely a suggestion and
that he was not in danger of losing his job.)

* In October in Leonia, N. J., Maria Graef became so enraged
that her next-door neighbor's sprinkler was forming a puddle in
her yard that she rammed his garage with her car and then
barricaded herself in her home for 20 hours in a standoff with
police.  After attempting several schemes to get her out, police
got the idea to turn on Graef's own sprinkler, which enraged her
so much that she came running out of the house in her nightgown
and was captured and charged with several crimes.

UPDATE

* In June 1996 News of the Weird reported that the federal
government had indicted the sellers of a box with a car-radio-
antenna-like device (the Quadro Tracker) that was being sold as a
divining rod, for up to $8,000 each, to school officials and small-
town law enforcement officers as an aid to finding illegal drugs.
The FBI showed that the Tracker was merely a piece of plastic
(and besides, it had been offered to golfers as a device to help
them find lost balls).  In January, after a trial in Beaumont, Tex.,
the sellers were found not guilty of fraud.

UNDIGNIFIED DEATHS

* Weight Problems:  In January, Michigan state security officer
Canute Findsen, 43, was shot to death in Lansing by fellow
officer Virginia Rich, 51, but then he shot Rich to death just
before he died; police believe Rich was upset that Findsen had
made one comment too many about her being overweight.  And
in January in Providence, R. I., Ricardo Guerrero killed himself
rather than face prison for shooting and wounding Johanny
Urbaez at a nightclub; according to police, Urbaez had
precipitated the incident by referring to Guerrero as "fatso."


==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first

WEIRDNUZ.474 (News of the Weird, March 5, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright information at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* In 1978 the Oakland Raiders' Jack Tatum made a "clothesline"
hit on New England Patriots' receiver Darryl Stingley's neck,
causing permanent paralysis.  At the time, Tatum arrogantly
defended the play as legal and warned other opponents that they
could expect the same.  In January 1997, Tatum applied for
disability benefits of  $156,000 a year from the NFL Players'
Association, pointing to the mental anguish he has suffered having
to live with the incident.  (The $156,000 "catastrophic injury"
category is the NFLPA's highest; it is the same category that
Stingley is in.)

* Dick Shields made the Pittsburgh, Pa., newspapers on his 75th
birthday on January 11 for his remarkable recuperative powers.
Among the medical traumas from which he has recovered:  in a
coma near death for a week after a burst appendix; three times a
broken neck (once while falling out of bed during recuperation
from a previous broken neck); a broken back; triple-bypass heart
surgery; a grapefruit-sized blockage of a blood vessel; a fungus that
ate the skin off his feet; and duty during World War II that
included hand-marking of active mines.  Said Shields, apparently
without irony:  "I'd have to say I've been truly blessed."

* Beyond Fingerprints and Earprints:  Lavelle Davis, 23, was
convicted of murder in Geneva, Ill., in February.  Prosecutors
showed how Davis and an accomplice rehearsed the murder at the
scene just beforehand, including how the accomplice placed duct
tape over Davis's mouth just as they would later do to the victim.
Davis was linked to the crime scene when his lip prints were
found on the piece of tape.

THE CONTINUING CRISIS

* Member of the First Husbands Club:  In October, welfare
workers found a 50-year-old man living alone in a cave in Ifsahan
province in Iran.  According to the workers, he had moved there
30 years ago when his wife dumped him.

* Reuters news service reported in October that seven women and
eight newborn babies were being held in the King Baudoin
Hospital outside Kinshasa, Zaire--some for as long as three
months--because they could not pay their maternity bills.  Said a
hospital official, "We are obliged to use unusual means to force
the patients to find the money."

* In January, the wife of Dr. Michael Baden--he is the head of
the New York State Police's forensics unit--filed papers in her
divorce action against him in New York City.  (Baden testified on
behalf of O. J. Simpson that the victims' knife wounds probably
were caused by more than one assailant.)  According to his wife's
papers, Baden once performed a pair of autopsies on the couple's
dining room table, once asked her permission to impregnate his
girlfriend, and once told her he could kill her and make it look
like a natural death.

* In October, a court in Fort Worth, Tex., awarded former
patient Jeannie Warren, 23, $8.4 million in her lawsuit against
the now-defunct Psychiatric Institute of Fort Worth because of its
"rage reduction therapy."  The treatment involves restraining the
patient and creating a rage "in a controlled and loving
environment," said the Institute, so that any underlying anger will
be exposed.  Warren said that, in two dozen lessons, Institute
personnel pinned her down, punched her in the abdomen and
ribs, and demanded continually to know what she was angry at.
Said Warren, "I couldn't think of anything except, 'You!'"

* Pro wrestler Don Harris, 36 (6'6", 275 lbs.), who with twin
brother Ron performed as the Bruise Brothers, went to trial in
Nashville in January in his lawsuit against plastic surgeon Glenn
Buckspan.  Harris had wanted his pectorals tightened but wound up
with misplaced nipples such that he now says he is mortified every
time he takes his shirt off in public and now wrestles only in a vest.

* The University of Arizona turned down a $250,000 scholarship
gift in November that was to be available to female American
Indians.  Four-year Sally Keith scholarships would be given on
the basis of personality rather than grades, and preference would
be given to virgins, a point that caused the University to balk
because, said a University official, "We can't dictate morals."

* A woman in Seoul, South Korea, identified only as Mrs. Lee, age
35, was granted a divorce in November on the ground that her
husband  frequently called out his mistress's name while asleep,
and made what were described as "diverse" expressions used in
lovemaking but which Mrs. Lee said he had never used with her.

* Taking "Amateur Night" Too Far:  In Betulia, Colombia, an
annual festival in November includes five days of amateur
bullfighting.  This year, no bull was killed, but dozens of matadors
were injured, including one gored in the head and one Bobbittized.
Said one participant, "It's just one bull against [a town of] a
thousand morons."

* Randy Farmer of a Houston, Tex., suburb was one of the
millions of people around the world who felt compelled to
welcome in 1997 by firing off a few gunshots just after midnight.
Farmer shot at a backyard tree, but then the gun jammed, and he
went back inside to unjam it.  He mishandled his gun and
accidentally shot and killed his 7-year-old daughter.  Said Farmer,
"God had a hand in this.  He had to.  It was like God called my
baby home to be with him, and God used me as a tool to bring her
to him."

* On February 21, the Court of Appeal of Singapore ruled that
oral sex is illegal as a substitute for "natural" intercourse but
permissible if it is merely foreplay leading to such intercourse.
The ruling came as part of a decision against a 47-year-old man
who had convinced a 19-year-old woman that the only way to
disgorge poisons in her system was to perform oral sex on him.

THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

* Buffalo State University professor Scott Isaksen, 44, was
arrested in December, allegedly in connection with his
coursework, which is described in the University's bulletin as
"original thinking" and "approaching situations with innovative
techniques."  According to police, he had given a truant male
student the option of writing a paper on stress or actually meeting
with Isaksen in private for a series of stress exercises, and the
student chose the latter, which included allowing Isaksen to
handcuff him and to put a rope around his neck in a motel room.

UPDATE

* Convicted child molester Lou Torok, who made News of the
Weird in 1995 from his Kentucky prison cell for persuading
several governors to declare Oct. 7 as "Love Day," has written a
"powerful new screenplay," he says, about the Salem witch trial.
"One of the main characters, who is believed to have innocently
incited the famous trials and eventual hangings of 19 accused
witches, is a Carib Indian woman from Barbados, modeled after
the personality of Whoopi Goldberg."  Torok also says he is
working on a second script, "The Burley Boys," "the story of
comedian Bob Hope's sponsoring a home for troubled boys in
Cincinnati."

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.475 (News of the Weird, March 14, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* Medical Breakthroughs:  In February, surgeons removed a
cataract from the eye of the National Zoo's 6-foot-long Komodo
dragon "Muffin" in the hope that she could better see how studly
the male "Friendty" was and thus would mate with him.  And in
January, doctors in Johannesburg, South Africa, performed spinal
surgery on a 10-foot-long python, which had been run over by a
car.  (Contrary to what one's eyes tell us, the python has 306
vertebra and 268 ribs.)  And in Jackson, Mich., in February
veterinarian Timothy England fitted a stray rooster with artificial
legs after he had to amputate his natural ones because of frostbite.

* Gas in the News: Janesville, Wis., police responded to a 911
call in December over a domestic disturbance begun, said the
wife, when the husband inappropriately passed gas as they were
tucking their son into bed.  And in January in Perth, Australia,
John Douglas Young, 47, was convicted of a child-abuse charge
for attempting to hire two boys for $5 each to pass gas in his face
so that, according to the man, he could later masturbate to the
"mental picture" of the encounter.  (Young's unsuccessful
defense was in part to recite a long list of movies, literature, and
TV shows in which gas-passing was a popular theme, e.g.,
"Benny Hill.")

* In March, Ms. Nadean Cool won a settlement of $2.4 million
in her lawsuit in Appleton, Wis., against her former
psychotherapist Dr. Kenneth Olson.  She claimed that he had first
persuaded her that she had a Multiple-Personality Disorder (120
personalities, including Satan and a duck) and then billed her
insurance company for "group" therapy because he said he had to
counsel so many people.  (Olson, seeking greener pastures for his
psychotherapy business, had since moved to Montana.)

CREME DE LA WEIRD

* In October, the Washington Supreme Court reversed on a
technicality the conviction of Benjamin R. Hull, who had been
found guilty of defrauding the state worker compensation office.
Hull admitted that he gpt a friend to help him blast a hole in his
left leg below the knee with a shotgun, but insisted it was not to
get compensation (he received $96,000) but because the knee has
been so painful to him since 1973 after it was injured in an
accident.  (Five years earlier, he had tried to take the leg off with
a chain saw, but got only part-way through because the saw kept
malfunctioning.)

* In January, the Australian Medical Journal reported a case of
lead poisoning by an electrician who chewed electrical cable to
satisfy his nicotine urge when he was forced to work in no-
smoking buildings.  The man said he chewed almost a yard of
cable a day for nearly ten years because it had a sweet taste,
especially near the center.

* Larry Doyen, 22, was hospitalized in December after chaining
himself to a tree just outside the town of Mexico, Maine.  He was
rescued by the state Warden Service after spending two weeks
with the tree.  It was the third time he had done that in recent
months.

* In November, a 50-year-old man was arrested in Albuquerque,
N. Mex., on a complaint by his 13-year-old stepdaughter that he
made her perform a series of bizarre acts written out on index
cards and which were supposedly to toughen her in her quest to
get a learner's driving permit.  According to the complaint, the
girl was allowed to drive the truck until the man turned up an
index card with an instruction, which she had to follow before
driving some more.  Among other things, the cards called for her
to pour shampoo and dirt into her hair; wear a dog collar; do sit-
ups; stand naked in the glare of the truck's headlights; and stand
tied to a bar and with a ball in her mouth.

FEUDS

* Continental Airlines filed a lawsuit in November in Newark,
N.J., against Deborah Loeding, who the airlines said endangered
passengers in order to get revenge on her ex-husband/pilot.  Ms.
Loeding had baked him some bread, but unknown to him, had
laced it with marijuana so that he would fail the airline's drug test
and get fired, which did happen, although he was later reinstated
when Continental learned what happened.

* In October, a judge in Baton Rouge, La., abruptly called a
mistrial in the 8-year-old lawsuit filed by Mary Ann Turner, now
56, against ex-husband (and anesthesiologist) Alan Ostrowe,
proclaiming that her testimony was overly theatrical.  According
to Turner, when she was hospitalized for birth-canal surgery in
1972, Ostrowe, without her permission, persuaded the surgeons
to remove her clitoral hood because, according to the couple's
eldest son, his father needed to "control my mother's sexuality in
order to compensate for his sexual inadequacies."

* In Jakarta, Indonesia, in January, Reuters news service reported
that a 29-year-old woman, upset with her unfaithful boyfriend
(identified only as Tu), went to the crowded karaoke bar where
he works and released a half dozen cobras onto the premises.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

* On an Israeli TV program in January, Hamas militant Rashid
Saqqer, who was captured by the PLO last year before he could
carry out a scheduled suicide bombing in Israel, waxed rhapsodic
about his love of soccer.  He said he was such a fan that "I
couldn't [kill myself] in [an Israeli] soccer stadium.  Yes, they
are Zionists [and] unbelievers.  But I couldn't do it [there]."

* According to Vladimir Zelentin, 40, testifying in January in
New York City against his cousin Rita Gluzman, 47, Rita
planned the murder of her husband, talked Zelentin into being the
hit man, and calmly bought all the murder supplies at Home
Depot.  However, according to Zelentin, when he went to light
up a victory cigarette in her kitchen after the ax-slaying, she
screamed at him, "No smoking [in here]!"

* The New York Times reported in November on the project by
the Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway Township, N. Y., to create
more environmentally friendly bullets while still maintaining the
bullets' killing power.  (Three years ago, the federal government
closed a nearby firing range because spent, leaded bullets were
contaminating the soil so as to endanger people and animals.)

UPDATE

* In 1995 the Brazilian government's AIDS-awareness campaign
made News of the Weird because several men named Braulio had
complained publicly of their humiliation that the main character
in the advertising spots--a talking penis--was named Braulio.  In
January 1997, the campaign re-emerged with the main character
an unnamed, variously-costumed turkey (which is itself a double
entendre).

LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINAL

* In January, Michael Coulter, 32, was arrested for shoplifting in
Cookstown, Ireland, having made off with shoes, socks, and
boxer shorts.  Coulter was not difficult to spot during his
getaway.  He is reported to be the tallest man in Ireland, at 7-
foot-5.  Said one officer, "Everyone knows him, and you can see
him coming a mile away."

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.476 (News of the Weird, March 21, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* Former Gotti crime-family hitman Sammy "The Bull" Gravano
cooperated on author Peter Maas's Gravano biography,
"Underboss," to be published in April.  Despite the fact that
Gravano's testimony helped send Gotti to prison for life without
parole, and 36 others to the slammer, and despite the fact that he
admits to making 19 hits for the Gotti family, Gravano reportedly
quit the Witness Protection Program and said he'll take his chances
on the street.  Though he had plastic surgery after he went
underground, he agreed to show off his new face in the book,
perhaps, said Maas, because the recently divorced Gravano would
like to hear from any interested ladies.

* Unclear on the Concept:  The Multnomah County, Ore., school
system was scheduled to begin in March test-marketing the idea of
paying parents of chronic truants to help their kids get to school
($3 if they stay the whole day, $1 for a half day).  And in February,
the University of Maryland's Student Honor Council, crusading
against academic dishonesty, offered local-merchant discount cards
to students who pledged in writing not to cheat.  (Said a critic, "By
the time you get to bribing, you're already pretty far gone.")

* Despite a lengthy development period and a year on the market,
the Reebok shoe company realized only in February that its new
line of Incubus athletic shoes for women was named for a
mythological demon who raped slumbering females.  And
Walgreen's drug stores distributed discount-coupon books
nationwide in February to honor Black History Week; among the
product specials was skin-bleaching cream directed to the
African-American market.

FAMILY VALUES

* In Woodbridge, Va., in January, a 35-year-old woman was
charged with sexual abuse of her son, age 9, and according to
police, she also arranged at least one sex instruction session
between herself, the son, her daughter, 15, and her boyfriend,
34.  According to the boyfriend, she was motivated by wanting to
spare her kids from having to learn about sex on the street.  (A
year ago, she became a grandmother as a result of the boyfriend-
daughter liaison.)

* Raymond Taylor was sentenced to 40 years in prison in El
Paso, Tex., in March after his conviction for attempted murder of
his ex-wife.  According to trial testimony, Taylor ordered his two
kids, ages 10 and 12, to set his ex-wife's house on fire and
instructed them how to do it and how to disable the home's
smoke detectors.

* Parenting License Revocations:  According to police in Cairo,
Egypt, Ibrahim Mohei Eddin, 40, pushed his 7-year-old son
under a moving train and left him for dead at the behest of his
brand-new, 23-year-old second wife.  (The boy survived, but lost
both legs.)  And in January, in Williamsport, Pa., David W.
Crist, 38, was convicted of pushing his deaf 9-year-old daughter
into an oncoming truck in order, said prosecutors, to collect on
an insurance policy.  (He is also charged with trying to
electrocute another daughter in 1990 and hiring a hit man to kill
his brother in 1982, all allegedly for insurance money.  Both kids
survived; the brother didn't.)

IRONIES

* In October, Richard E. Clear, Jr., 32, was arrested in Tampa,
Fla., for shooting his gun toward a neighbor who had complained
about Clear's barking dog.  Clear runs a martial-arts studio and
advertises his experience in "stress management."

* In October, the Des Moines Register reported that Daniel
Long, 35, had been fired from his job as a greeter at a local Wal-
Mart.  According to records in the state unemployment appeals
agency, Long had called one customer a "snob," told another she
had to be "smarter than the cart" to get two carts unstuck, and
called another a "fat elephant."

* In November, retired police department custodian Jay Pfaff, 73,
was fired from his job as school crossing guard because, said a
police spokesman, "a number of parents" complained that they
were uncomfortable because he was too nice to their children.

* Sascha Rothchild, 20, known on campus at Boston College for
her trademark five-inch-high platform shoes, clomped hurriedly
down the platform at Providence (R.I.) Station in December and
leaped unsteadily for her just-departing train.  She slipped and
suffered a broken pelvis.

PEOPLE IN THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME

* In October, sewage truck driver Ricky Walter, 19, collided
with another vehicle in Waukesha, Wis., pinning Walter inside
and sending his load directly into the cab of his truck.  Walter
was forced to marinate for half an hour before rescue workers got
to him.

* In Lincoln, Neb., in February, two men attempted to shoplift
shoes from an Athlete's Foot store, but a clerk and the manager
ran them down outside.  Clerk Dave Olson is captain of the
University of Nebraska men's track team, and manager Robb
Finegan is an Olympics-class marathoner.  And two weeks
earlier, near Warsaw, Poland, highway robbers forced off the
road a car in which the coaches of the Belarussian and Russian
biathlon (skiing and shooting) teams were riding.  Following
right behind, however, was the teams' bus, and as all of the
athletes grabbed rifles, the robbers quickly scurried away.

* On September 29 in rural northeast Vermont, the car in which
Michael O'Keefe, 44, was riding was hit by a 700-lb. moose.
O'Keefe was taken for treatment of cuts and returned to the road
a few hours later in his own truck, which was then hit by another
moose.

UPDATE

* In 1995 News of the Weird reported that the European Court of
Human Rights had agreed to examine whether Britain's assault
convictions against three men for engaging in consensual sado-
masochism orgies (in which severe pain was inflicted on the
genitals of apparently grateful recipients) were oppressive.  In
February 1997, the Court decided not to intervene, saying Britain
had a right to protect its citizens from themselves, analogizing to
the requirement of motorcyclists to wear helmets.

THINNING THE HERD

* Sylvester Briddell, Jr., 26, was killed in February in Selbyville,
Del., as he won a bet with friends who said he would not put a
revolver loaded with four bullets into his mouth and pull the
trigger.  And in February, according to police in Windsor, Ont.,
Daniel Kolta, 27, and Randy Taylor, 33, died in a head-on
collision, thus earning a tie in the game of chicken they were
playing with their snowmobiles.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.477 (News of the Weird, March 28, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* In February, a California Court of Appeal upheld the 1995 ruling
of a judge in Marin County that admitted to probate the will of
Sam Zakessian, leaving $2 million to his girlfriend rather than to
relatives.  The lower court was persuaded that scribblings on a 4"x
4" piece of paper contained the deceased's instructions, despite
their being hard to read in the first place and then overwritten with
what appear to be obliterations.  The court said the overwrites were
Mr. Zakessian's initials written 21 times (some rotated, some
sideways, some upside-down), three different dates (one sideways
over three lines of text), and two signatures written diagonally.
The appeals court conceded that the will "is not easily described."

* In March, the New York Times reported on a recent spate of
what it called really bad Japanese TV shows, among them one in
which bikini-clad young women attempt to crush aluminum cans
by squeezing them between their breasts and another in which a
young child was brought on stage and told that his mother had just
been shot to death--for the purpose of seeing how many seconds
would elapse before he started crying.  Said a leading TV critic,
"The more nonsensical [the programs] are, the more interesting I
find them."

* The Los Angeles Times reported in February on a dramatic
business success:  the astute marketing decisions by Colombian
drug cartels to increase their market share in U. S. heroin sales.
The cartels at once reduced price, to bring in more retail customers,
and increased quality, so that HIV-phobic customers could achieve
an adequate high by smoking rather than risk disease from
injecting with sometimes-dirty needles.  The U. S. government
estimates the Colombians have now captured two-thirds of the East
Coast market despite producing only 2 percent of the world's
heroin.

OBSESSIONS

* Larry Bottone, a coach, teacher, and private tutor of kids for
almost 20 years in Norwalk, Conn., pleaded guilty in October to a
charge of child pornography based on a videotape of himself with a
teenage boy.  According to the police, other videos showed
Bottone whipping nude, blindfolded boys, sticking objects under
their fingernails, and rubbing their bodies with hot olive oil.
Bottone contended that he was conducting serious research into
how much punishment someone could endure when asked by an
authority figure.

* Jason Christopher Zepeda, 19, in a holding cell following his
arrest for graffiti vandalism in Fremont, Calif., in February, was re-
arrested when sheriff's deputies noticed on a TV monitor that he
was writing his name all over the walls of the cell.

* Michael Ronson, 23, was sentenced to five months' probation in
Brantford, Ontario, in October for violation of a previous probation
by again smearing an unsuspecting woman with shaving cream.
He is once again forbidden to possess any "compressed-air-
impelled shaving cream container."

* Carlton Bradley, 56, was indicted in November in Plattsburgh,
N.Y., for  stealing underwear from a certain neighbor woman.
According to police, over a three-year period and stealing one item
at a time, he had amassed 42 bras, 41 pairs of underpants, and 14
negligees.

* In a radio interview in February, a woman in London, England,
said treatment at the Great Ormond Street children's hospital had
finally cured her 7-year-old son of his three-year habit of eating
nothing but jam sandwiches (strawberry or raspberry, on white
bread).  His fear of other foods was such that he would tremble and
sweat and become nauseous at the sight of them.

* In February in Charlotte, N.C., skydiving instructor J. C.
Cockrell lost by default a lawsuit filed by a former student, Erin
Crabtree, 21, who had accused him of fondling her breasts during a
tandem jump in which he is harnessed to her and she must hold on
to the parachute lines above her head.

NOT MY FAULT

* In February, credit union manager Cathleen Byers, charged with
83 counts for embezzling $630,000 over a six-year period, told a
Eugene, Ore., jury, through her lawyer, that her hands may have
taken the money but that her "heart, mind, and spirit" were
innocent, because some other personality within her did it.
According to the prosecutor, only a handful of multiple-personality
cases have ever been diagnosed in Europe, versus "tens of
thousands" in the U. S.

* Kurt Irons, 28, was arrested in December in Wausau, Wis.,
and charged with vehicular homicide.  Reportedly, Irons was
driving a stolen truck and had been drinking and crashed head-on
into another truck, killing a 37-year-old woman.  According to
the Marathon County Sheriff's report, Irons was surprised that he
was arrested, saying, "Dudes, it's just a girl, man.  It's a girl,
nothing but a girl."

* Jeremy Dean and his parents, of Burney, Calif., filed a lawsuit
in January against Shasta County for at least $700,000 for
Jeremy's total disability that resulted from a car crash.  Dean and
some friends had been out drinking.  Dean was in the back seat of
a car and had stuck his head out the window to vomit just as the
driver veered off the road ramming Dean's head into a tree.  The
lawsuit claims that it was the county's fault that the tree was so
close to the road.

* In November, Gallup, New Mexico, high school football player
Gilbert Jefferson, 18, was arrested after he reacted to his ejection
from a game (two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties) by tackling
a referee, causing the man to flip over and land on his head,
knocking him unconscious.  Four days later, Jefferson's mother
Darlene told reporters it was the referees' and coaches' fault:
"[Gilbert] has no bad temper.  My son has never been that type of
boy."  It's just that he "was tired and frustrated."

CAN'T POSSIBLY BE TRUE

* According to a recent Walt Disney World newspaper
advertisement, an Ashland, Ohio, couple, Bill and Vicky
Meredith, have been journeying to the park since 1974 and spend
10 days of every month there, staying in the same room at the
Caribbean Beach Resort.

UNDIGNIFIED DEATH

* According to police in Dahlonega, Ga., ROTC cadet Nick
Berrena, 20, was stabbed to death in January by fellow cadet
Jeffrey Hoffman, 23, who was trying to prove that a knife could
not penetrate the flak vest Berrena was wearing.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[These notices unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write 74777.3206@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.478 (News of the Weird, April 4, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* Saddam Hussein filed a libel lawsuit in February in Paris
against the magazine e Nouvel Observateur for its September
1996 story in which he was described by other Arab leaders as
stupid and incompetent and referred to, among other things, as an
"executioner," a "monster," a "murderer," "a perfect cretin," and
a "noodle."

* In March, a judge in York, Pa., sentenced a woman to a first-
offender rehabilitation program for assaulting her 10-year-old son
by giving him what she called a "titty twister."  According to a
police report, she asked the boy, "What's worse than a tornado?"
and then pinched and twisted his nipples, causing soreness and
noticeable damage.

* In February, the electric co-op in the Philippine province of
Illocos Norte shut off power to the refrigerated crypt of former
president Ferdinand Marcos because his wife, now a member of
the legislature, is about $215,000 behind in the electricity bill.
The government will not permit Marcos to be buried in Manila
because he was suspected of having appropriating billions of
dollars during his 20-year reign that ented in 1986.  Shutting off
power, said Mrs. Marcos, was "the ultimate harassment, the
harassment of the dead."

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

* Each December for four months, the Ice Hotel residential igloo
opens in the Lapland region of Sweden, housing about 40 people
at about $130 a night for a double room, and with a bar,
restaurant, conference facilities, and a bridal suite.  Room
temperatures range from 27-45 degrees F, and sleeping bags are
used, cushioned by spruce boughs and reindeer skins.

* According to a trade association of prostitutes in Harare,
Zimbabwe, massive layoffs in the economy have led to an
oversupply of women taking up prostitution and a reduction in
men's spending power, causing them either to ignore prostitutes
or to visit bars only to drink and flirt before going home to the
wife.  To save their jobs, the association recommended in
January that prostitutes raise their price from about $2.80 to
about $4.60 but also requested that wives loosen the pursestrings
to allow husbands to spend more when they go out.

* The Associated Press reported in February on the Time
Machine lounge in Tokyo, and the "relief room" at the
Yamanakako resort, in which stressed-out workers pay from
about $80 to $125 for a few minutes of satisfaction by smashing
fake ceramic antiques in a museum-like sitting room.  Often, say
the proprietors, the names of tyrannical bosses or unfaithful
spouses will be yelled out as the destruction takes place.

* A February Associated Press story described how two mid-
career, Berkeley, Calif., professionals (nurse Raphaela Pope, 52,
and lawyer Sam Louie, 36) became prosperous telepathic "pet
psychics."  Pope charges $40 per half-hour by telephone, which
sometimes includes talking directly to the pet.  Said one of her
customers, "I learned [from Pope] that Scarlette [the cat] thought
I didn't want her around.  Scarlette changed immediately after
talking [sic] to Raphaela, and we're happy again."

* Locksmith Harley Hudson filed a claim for damages against the
city of Wenatchee, Wash., in November, saying that he is due
about $250,000 in damages for lost business because the friendly
police department helps for free motorists who lock themselves
out of their cars.  Hudson calls this kindliness an
"unconstitutional gift of public funds."

I'VE GOT MY RIGHTS

* In February, the Palm Springs (Calif.) Regional Airport
Commission issued hygiene rules for cab drivers serving the
airport,  including requiring drivers to shower daily with soap,
brush with toothpaste, and eat breath mints.  After vociferous
complaints, the Commission softened the specifics on "fresh
breath" and "pleasant body odor."  Said cabbie Ken Olson to the
Commission, "You're not my mother."

* Six nurses at a government health care for the disabled facility
in Barrie, Ontario, were fired in December for disobeying new
countywide rules that required them to provide sexual assistance
to their patients (e.g., helping them masturbate, positioning
couples for sex, assisting to put on a condom).  In January, the
agency said it would reconsider the rules, but the women remain
jobless and have filed a lawsuit.

* In November, the European Commission on Human Rights
rejected the appeal of Manuel Wackenheim, aka "The Flying
Dwarf," whose stage show was banned in France because it
consisted of allowing customers to pay to toss him around.
Wackenheim said his show "is part of a French dwarf tradition,"
but authorities said it "damages human dignity."

* According to an October Chicago Tribune report, Illinois and
most other states interpret the federal "motor voter" law to
require mental health agencies to help all clients register and vote
in national elections, even those with mental ages down to 5 or 6.
The only ones who cannot vote are clients formally declared by a
court to be mentally incompetent (about half of Illinois agencies'
clients).  One woman in the Tribune story, now qualified to vote,
took 20 minutes to write her first name at the registration desk;
another was registered despite the fact that his only
communication ability seemed to be to repeat the last words he
hears.  Relatives fear the clients will be ridiculed at the polls and
that agencies' personnel, while "assisting" them to vote, will
simply complete the ballots as they wish.

* In February, the staff of the San Francisco Human Rights
Commission found that The Cafe, a gay and lesbian bar, had
illegally discriminated in an August incident in which a straight
man and woman were ushered out the door for smooching too
heavily.  According to a witness, the bartender told the couple,
"What you're doing is very offensive to people here," even
though gays and lesbians freely make out on the premises. (The
Cafe says it has since adopted a policy barring heavy kissing by
anyone.)

CHUTZPAH

* In November, attempting to influence an Arlington, Va., jury
to give him a light sentence for 20 counts of credit card fraud,
Oludare Ogunde, 28, at first asked for mercy but then said the
jury should keep him out of prison because if he were locked up,
he would just teach other inmates--the "hardened criminals"--how
to commit credit card fraud.  "And," he reminded the jury,
"we're trying to prevent crime in America."

UNDIGNIFIED DEATH

* In February, Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed in Lompoc,
Calif., as he fell face-first through the ceiling of a bicycle shop he
was burglarizing.  Death was caused when the large flashlight he
had placed in his mouth (to keep his hands free) crammed against
the base of his skull as he hit the floor.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.479 (News of the Weird, April 11, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* The (Nashville) Tennessean reported in February on state
government engineer Ken Robichaux's lonely, 10-year crusade to
wipe out both the English system of measurement and the metric
system, in favor of one that combines weight, length, and volume
into a single set of measures denominated as (not surprisingly)
"robies."  (For example, 25 robies could stand for any of 8 ounces,
1 cup, 250 ml's, 250 grams, or 250 cc's.)  He said Al Gore, when he
was a senator, once called his ideas "intriguing."

* In Milwaukee, Wis., the family of Robert Senz demanded shortly
after his burial last July that Borgwardt Funeral Home dig up the
body because his wallet was missing.  Sure enough, the wallet
containing $64 and credit cards was still in Senz's pocket. In
February 1997, Borgwardt sent the family a reburial bill for
$2,149, but then decided the whole thing was the county medical
examiner's fault and sent the bill there, but that office has denied
responsibility.

* In March, four strippers at the Scene Karaoke and Coconut
Karaoke bars in Pattaya, Thailand, were fined a total of about $80
for indecency for an act in which live ducklings were placed inside
plastic "eggs" (with air holes) and inserted into the women's bodies
so that in the course of their routines, they would "lay" the eggs,
which would then "hatch."

OOPS!

* In February in Redwood City, Calif., Rachel Landa, 48, got out
of her van to pump gas, but when she realized the hose wouldn't
reach, she instructed her 14-year-old daughter to get behind the
wheel and back it up.  By the time the girl wrestled the van to a
stop, the mother had been run over three times (broken ankle, foot,
and finger), and the van had crashed into a traffic signal box
adjacent to the station.

* Latest Highway Truck Spills:  Several hundred thousand apples
near Brighton, Mich., in November; a tractor-trailer full of Hills
Bros. ground coffee in downtown Louisville in December; a truck
hauling spaghetti sauce and ranch dressing (colliding with a
truckful of computers) on I-35 in Austin, Tex., in January; and
during a November ice storm, a tractor-trailer full of nuclear
weapons near Brownlee, Neb. (an accident kept secret for a month
by the federal government).

* John O'Neill, 73, had to be rescued by firefighters in Huntington,
N. Y., in February after he wandered out of a bar late at night and
somehow got wedged between two buildings overnight.  He was
stuck so tight that he had to be pulled out from above.

WELL-PUT

* A breathalyzer company executive testifying in a Knoxville,
Tenn., DUI trial in September, disputing the defendant's contention
that an untimely belch yielded a falsely positive reading:
"Belching?  I frankly have never seen a belch that brought alcohol
up into the oral cavity."

* Honduran Congressman Julio Villatoro, reacting in February to
the bigamy charge filed by his wife:  "[I] have problems with my
wife, even though she knows a handsome man is not for one
woman but for several.  God gave me a physique attractive to
women, and I take advantage of it."

* Employees who have become ill in asbestos-laden workplaces
have their own class-action lawsuit so lawyer Michael V. Kelley
filed one in January in Cleveland, Ohio, on behalf of employees in
those workplaces who are perfectly healthy (in case they someday
become ill).  Said Kelley, "It's very pro-active."

* King Letsie III, 33, king of Lesotho, imploring other southern
African monarchs and dignitaries in December to help him find a
wife:  "The pressure on me to find a wife soon is heavy, especially
[from] my mother."  "[I] sometimes feel jealous when I see other
leaders getting partners with such remarkable ease."

RECENT CRIMINAL MOTIVES

* Kevin Carter, 21, and Michael Harrison, 26, were charged with
murder and armed robbery in Boynton Beach, Fla., in December.
Motive:  to raise money to attend the police academy

* Darrel Voeks, 38, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in
Appleton, Wis., in December for stealing $100,000 worth of pigs
from his farmer-employer.  Motive:  to pay for breast implants for
a stripper at a club he patronized

* Michael Pollina, 26, pleaded guilty in Chicago in February to
three bank robberies.  Motive:  to pay for a lavish reception that he
and his fiancee had planned for their upcoming wedding

* Jack Swint, 42, pleaded guilty to passing bad checks in Roanoke,
Va., in November (while he was awaiting trial on other bad-check
charges).  Motive:  needed to pay for counseling sessions to help
him kick his bad-check habit

UPDATE

* The famously dysfunctional Sexton family, headed by Eddie and
Estella, of Canton, Ohio, and Tampa, Fla., made News of the
Weird in 1994 and 1996 based on almost unimaginable charges of
incest, child molestation, and murder.  In March 1997, son Willie,
26, was found to be "competent" after two years in the Florida state
mental hospital, and now will stand trial for killing his sister's
husband (as allegedly ordered by Eddie, who feared the husband
would turn Eddie in for killing the man's baby, whose crying
annoyed Eddie).  Ostensibly, the dead baby was Eddie's own
grandson, but according to trial testimony in an case against
Estella, the baby was actually Eddie's own son, the result of a
father-daughter coupling.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally
syndicated newspaper column distributed by Universal Press
Syndicate.  Individuals may have the columns mailed to them
electronically, free of charge, approximately three weeks after
the cover date, which is the date when most subscribing
newspapers will publish the column.  Send a message to notw-
request@nine.org with the Subject line of Subscribe.  To read
these News of the Weird newspaper columns from the past six
months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html  (That site
contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no audio.  Just
text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.480 (News of the Weird, April 18, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* Family Values:  In March the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
reported that a local woman, 66, and her husband are searching for
a surrogate mother for their deceased son's sperm so that they can
fulfill their longing to be grandparents.  And three days earlier, a
Milan, Italy, newspaper reported that a 35-year-old woman was
three months' pregnant with the fetuses of two couples, whose
children she agreed to bear because of a shortage of surrogate
mothers.  She said blood tests after birth would determine which
baby is which.  (The Vatican and Italy's health minister announced
they were appalled.)

* Life Imitates Monty Python:  The Salem (Mass.) Evening News
reported in March on an incident in which Ms. Carmen LaBrecque,
51, had to outrun a rabid skunk, which was literally snapping at her
heels, for 15 minutes before an animal control officer arrived to
shoot it.  Unable to slow down enough even to open her front door
and get inside, LaBrecque circled her yard 12 times, a foot or two
in front of the skunk.  On one pass by her front door, LaBrecque's
elderly mother handed her a cell phone, which LaBrecque
pantingly used to call 911.

* In March, at the height of the civil unrest in Albania, when the
U.S. diplomatic mission was evacuating personnel for safety
reasons, the Washington Post reported that the State Dept. had just
sent a cable to the diplomats in Tirana reminding them of the
department's "[evacuation] policy for safeguarding of sterling silver
flatware (cutlery)."

NEWS OF THE JUDGMENT-IMPAIRED

* The public-service goal of an advertising campaign by England's
Children's Society was to enlighten people that child sex abuse
could occur in anyone's town and not just in notorious sex-tourist
spots in the Far East.  However, its slogan, announced in billboards
released in February, came out this way:  "Why travel 6,000 miles
to have sex with children when you can do it in [the English town
of] Bournemouth?"  When questioned by a reporter, a Society
spokesman expressed pride in the campaign and said it would be
extended to Manchester and Leeds.

* In January, motorist John Tanayo, 30, was stopped in New York
City, and a search of his car turned up 573 lbs. of cocaine, worth
about $5 million.  He only drew cops' attention when, in traffic in
front of a police cruiser, he failed to signal a right turn.

* A 38-year-old apartment building manager was arrested in
Whitewater, Wis., in January and charged with surreptitiously
videotaping a female tenant with a camera hidden in the ceiling of
her shower.  The 20-year-old tenant had become suspicious
because of the fixture the manager had installed in order to
disguise the lens:  Why, she thought, was a smoke detector placed
in the ceiling of a shower?

* The Robles family placed an ad in a newspaper in the town of
Leon, Guanajuato, north of Mexico City, in January, to the
attention of robbers who had been breaking into their house and
stealing things.  In exasperation, but perhaps unwisely, the family
begged robbers to stay away, announcing that they had been
cleaned out except for the TV, the VCR, and the refrigerator.

* In November, Washington, D. C., inmates Antwan Hudson (drug
charges) and Kingsley Ellis (a Texas credit card fraud suspect), in a
holding cell, apparently thought they were each in less trouble than
the other and thus agreed to a scheme to swap identities for an
upcoming court appearance.  Ellis was shocked to learn in court
that Hudson was also wanted on several more drug charges and for
threatening his wife.  Hudson was even more shocked to find that
Ellis was facing deportation to Jamaica and thus blew the whistle
on the scheme.

* In a Virginia case reported in the December Mental Health Law
News, Susanna Van de Castle was awarded $350,000 against her
psychiatrist-husband Robert for malpractice.  According to the
lawsuit, after having diagnosed her as suffering from Multiple
Personality Disorder, he then married her and continued the
therapy but also sought deals for a book and a movie about her, in
addition to staging public lectures (charging admission) in which
she was showcased as his subject.

* In November, Brownsville, Tex., insurance agency owner Raquel
Cantu Garza was charged with impeding IRS agents who had come
to seize her business on a tax matter.  According to the prosecutor,
Garza instructed the two employees on duty at the time to leave
and lock the agents inside.  When one agent pounded on the door
to get out, a Garza employee allegedly said, "Call a locksmith," and
walked away.

* In Guthrie, Okla., in October, Jason Heck tried to kill a millipede
with a shot from his .22-caliber rifle, but the bullet ricocheted off a
rock near the hole and hit pal Antonio Martinez in the head,
fracturing his skull.  And in Elyria, Ohio, in October, Martyn
Eskins, attempting to clean out cobwebs in his basement, declined
to use a broom in favor of a propane torch and caused a fire that
burned the first and second floors of his house.

* Early New Year's morning, a 16-year-old girl in Kalamazoo,
Mich., was arrested for erratic driving in a car she allegedly stole
from Patricia Conlon.  The girl was unaware that the next day
Conlon would begin a term as county juvenile court judge.  Also in
Kalamazoo on New Year's Eve, Derrick Demones Gunn was
sentenced to one to five years in prison for attempting to escape
from a halfway house one day before his original sentence was up.

* In October, Heber C. Frias, 20, on the lam from a first-degree
murder charge in Florida, saw his freedom come to an end in an
Arlington, Va., 7-Eleven when he tauntingly stole a candy bar right
in front of a clerk, provoking a call to the police, who apprehended
Frias just outside the store.

UPDATE

* North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge made News of the
Weird in 1995 when he denounced state funding for abortions for
rape victims as unnecessary in that a woman who is "truly raped"
doesn't get pregnant because "the juices don't flow, the body
functions don't work."  In March 1996, North Carolina House
Speaker Harold Brubaker appointed Aldridge co-chair of the
Committee on Human Resources, which oversees abortion
funding.

PERSEVERANCE

* In March, Shulamit Dezhin, 82, passed her driver's test in
Ashdod, Israel, after 35 failures.  She said she originally wanted to
learn to drive so she could get to Tel Aviv to visit her parents, but
it took so long to get her license that now they're dead.  And in
February, Sue Evans-Jones, 45, of Yate, England, passed her
driver's test after only three failures.  However, she had taken 1,800
lessons over 27 years with 10 instructors, most of whom had told
her she was such a bad driver that she should not even attempt the
exam.  (Her policeman-husband explained her problem to a
reporter:  The first thought crossing her mind about crashing, no
matter what the circumstances, causes her to flail wildly at the
brakes and steering wheel.)


==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.481 (News of the Weird, April 25, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* The Times of London reported in March that when an employee
of the James Beauchamp law firm in Edgbaston, England, recently
killed himself, the firm billed his mother about $20,000 for the
expense of settling his officework.  Included was a bill for about
$2,300 to go to his home to find out why he didn't show up at work
(thus finding his body), plus about $500 for identifying the body
for the coroner, plus about $250 to go to his mother's home, knock
on her door, and tell her that her son was dead.  (After unfavorable
publicity, the firm withdrew the bill.)

* In April, commenting on the breakthroughs in cloning, Ann
Northrop, a columnist for a New York lesbian and gay publication,
argued that cloning could give women total control over
reproduction:  "Men are now totally irrelevant," she wrote.  "Men
are going to have a very hard time justifying their existence on the
planet."  And a week later, two Rutgers University researchers
reported confirming that an alternative nervous-system route to
sexual arousal exists, from the cervix to the neck to the brain, thus
accounting for why some spinal-cord-injured people can
nevertheless have orgasms.  One of the researchers said it might
thus be possible to induce orgasm chemically by stimulating the
specific neurotransmitter.

* University of North Carolina law professor Barry Nakell, 53, a
nationally-known expert on death-penalty law, was fired in
February after pleading guilty to shoplifting food and a book from
a store in Chapel Hill.  He had also been charged with shoplifting
in 1991, but the charge was dismissed after he performed
community service.

GOVERNMENT IN ACTION

* The Los Angeles Times reported in December that nearly 2,000
criminals, "hundreds" of them violent or repeat offenders, have
escaped in the last two years from a lackadaisically-run work-
release program of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
In most cases, inmates were merely asked if they preferred work-
release, with no examination of their criminal records.

* In a September statement, Joseph Sniezek, an official of the
Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Injury
Prevention, lamented the serious injuries suffered by rodeo bull
riders and suggested a solution might be to require helmets.

* In November, as part of a growing trend to micromanage school
curricula, the New York legislature required that all public school
students age 8 and above receive formal instruction in the Irish
potato famine of the 1840's.  That follows a requirement that
students be given instruction weekly on how animals fit into "the
economy of nature."  (New Jersey already requires instruction on
the potato famine, via amendment to its law requiring instruction
on the Holocaust.)

* In January in an experiment to exercise better crowd control over
opposition-party demonstrations in Jakarta, Indonesia, the local
police chief put seven cobras in a glass case in front of the main
police station and said they would be used to intimidate protesters.
He said police would wave the cobras at the crowd, but it was not
clear whether officers relished handling the snakes in the first place
or that such crowds would allow the officers to get close enough
for the snakes to strike.

* The National Wilderness Institute charged in January that the
Department of the Interior has failed to remove several plant and
wildlife species from the government's endangered list despite the
common knowledge that they (such as the "Maguire daisy")  do not
exist.  The government resists because it says it costs $37,000 to
remove a name from the list but meanwhile has added hundreds of
new ones in recent years.

* The governing commercial body of Europe, the European Union,
ruled in February that despite a six-century tradition, wooden shoes
manufactured in the Netherlands would no longer be permitted in
the workplace unless they could meet the same standards as steel-
toed safety shoes.  Shoe manufacturers warn that Dutch clogs
might soon disappear altogether.  As one shoe executive said, "It
would be like Paris without the Eiffel Tower."

* In December, the Canadian Defence Department issued a 17-
page set of guidelines for manufacturers who wish to compete for
new contracts to supply underwear to the military.  Among the
most challenging requirements are that one pair must be able to be
worn for six-month stints in the field and that the garment must be
invisible to night-vision goggles so that a skivvy-clad soldier does
not offer a target to snipers.

SEEDS OF OUR DESTRUCTION

* The Sunday Times of London reported in December that 300
tons of humanitarian aid from Western countries was sitting in
Bosnian warehouses because it is useless.  Included were birth
control pills with an expiration date of 1986, weight-reduction
tablets from Britain, mouthwash from the U. S., and chemical
waste from Germany.  According to the Times, some war-zone
drivers have been killed transporting these supplies, and the
German chemicals by law cannot be returned, thus creating a
hazardous-waste disposal problem for Bosnians.

* The Associated Press reported in February on Ms. Myassar Abul-
Hawa, 52, the first female taxicab driver in Jordan.  Her business is
brisk, in part because some devout Muslim men ask for her by
name to chauffeur their wives and daughters so they won't be alone
with male drivers.  (As is sometimes the case in the U.S., Abul-
Hawa turned to taxi-driving when she could not put to use her
degree in English literature.)

* In the last six months, several reports have surfaced from the old
Soviet Union countries that nearly-bankrupt factories have been
forced to pay their workers merchandise instead of cash.  Included
were eggs paid to farm workers in Klyuchi, Siberia; old train cars
given to railroad workers in Ukraine; salaries of from 33 to 42
brassieres a month by an underwear factory in Volgograd, Russia;
and, from another Volgograd factory, rubber dildos (which are in
surplus, according to The Economist magazine, because the market
has turned to electronic vibrators).

UPDATE

* Carrying on a 40-year tradition, Filipinos in the village of San
Pedro Cutud recently conducted their Easter audience-participation
crucifixion ceremonies, with 12 volunteers nailed to crosses with
sterilized 4-inch spikes in a show of absolution.  As News of the
Weird reported in 1990, for several years the Philippines
Department of Tourism was an official sponsor of the event.

IDENTICAL ALL THE WAY

* In March in Lipovljani, Croatia, twin brothers Branko Uhiltil and
Ivan Uhiltil, 57, committed suicide in separate incidents within
hours of each other, apparently with utterly no knowledge of each
other's plans.   And in January, Jim Hare, 65, driving his identical
twin brother, Tom, near Bellefontaine, Ohio, lost control of the car,
and in the ensuing crash, both were killed instantly, at the same
moment.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally
syndicated newspaper column distributed by Universal Press
Syndicate.  Individuals may have the columns mailed to them
electronically, free of charge, approximately three weeks after
the cover date, which is the date when most subscribing
newspapers will publish the column.  Send a message to
notw-request@nine.org with the Subject line of Subscribe.  To read
these News of the Weird newspaper columns from the past six months,
go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html  (That site contains no
graphics, no photos, no video clips, no audio.  Just text.  Deal
with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.482 (News of the Weird, May 2, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* In April, the town council of Cambre, in Galicia state in northern
Spain, voted legal, marriage-like status to nontraditional unions,
but the controversy was not over a same-sex couple.  The
precipitating event was the recent nuptials of Daniel Pena and his
sister Rosa Moya Pena, who have lived together for 18 years and
have kids aged 5 and 11.  The council's decision provoked outrage
almost everywhere else in Spain.

* On April 3, less than 24 hours before he was due to be executed
for beating three people to death with a bowling pin in 1991,
Phillip Wilkinson was taken off North Carolina's death row and
sent for mental evaluation because guards found two suicide notes
in his cell.  According to prison authorities, that is, a person
scheduled to die the next day but who wants to kill himself the
night before might be insane and therefore cannot be executed.
And on April 1 in Texas, convicted murderer David Lee Herman
slashed his throat a day before his scheduled execution, but he was
patched up and, a day later, given his lethal injection.

* In April, Leslie Joseph Moran, 20, was sentenced to probation in
Regina, Saskatchewan, for shoplifting, but on condition that he
dress himself in other than designer-label clothing for the next two
years.  Moran is said to find Nike and Chicago Bulls items
irresistible.

THE LITIGIOUS SOCIETY

* Valerie Nicolescu filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police
Department in April for letting her son (one of the two heavily-
armed, armor-suited men in that February 28 bank robbery and
shootout) bleed to death by not giving him medical care soon
enough after he was shot by officers.  (Nicolescu is also in court
these days because police, in a separate matter, found that a
mentally retarded women in her care had been locked in a room in
Nicolescu's basement, along with several toilet-buckets.)

* Chris Steen filed a $55,000 lawsuit against the town of Ipswich,
S. D., in February after he fell on a sidewalk that had rough edges.
He claims the town failed to maintain the sidewalk in good
condition, which is not an unusual claim except that Steen is the
mayor of Ipswich.

* Carolyn Strauss filed a $1 million lawsuit against the New York
Lottery in March because she was offended by its Lotto subway
advertisements.  Strauss is 5-foot-7 and weighs 200 lbs. and felt
personally insulted by the ad that suggested the lottery was a less
onerous way to make money than marrying "the client's big-boned
daughter."

* A 1994 lawsuit, filed by Judge Philip Espinosa, 44, of the
Arizona Court of Appeals against singer Barry Manilow, will
finally go to trial in September.  Espinosa said he still has a painful
ringing in his ears from a Manilow concert in Tucson.  He admitted
that his wife was upset at the lawsuit:  "She loves Barry."  And in
February, a New York judge tossed out the lawsuit by Clifford
Goldberg against Motley Crue because a 1990 concert was too
loud, giving him a "searing pain" through his ears.  The judge said
everyone at a Motley Crue concert knows it's going to be loud.

* Five people filed a lawsuit in March in Nagoya, Japan, against
Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto for about $950 in damages,
claiming that his support for smoking causes them mental anguish
and deprives them of the healthy life they are entitled to under
Japan's constitution.  Hashimoto had promised the nation that since
cigarettes are heavily taxed, he would continue to smoke frequently
while in office.

* In October, Kim Novacs told reporters she would file a $1
million lawsuit in West Palm Beach, Fla., against an alligator that
her husband killed the year before.  The 6-foot-long gator scared
the couple's little girl, causing Keith Novacs to shoot it, for which
he was convicted of poaching.  Mrs. Novacs cited a 1993 Florida
court case in which an endangered species animal was the named
plaintiff in a case and argued that if such an animal can be a
plaintiff, it can be a defendant, with the state Game and Fish
Commission liable for any damages.

* In January, Wayne Wooden filed a lawsuit in Indio, Calif.,
against actress Nanette Fabray, and later in the month Evelyn
Amato filed a lawsuit in New York City against actor David
Hibbard.  Both plaintiffs were seated close to stages, and the actors
are accused of injuring them as part of the play between actors and
audience--Fabray in a musical revue and Hibbard in the Broadway
show "Cats."

GREAT TIME TO BE SILVER

* A 20-year-old man and three teenagers broke into the Moses
Lake, Wash., home of Dorothy Cunningham, 75, and Ms. Marty
Killinger, 61, in February, allegedly to rob them.  However, both
women happened to be armed and drove the guys away with
warning shots.  The four were arrested a short distance from the
home.

* The Associated Press reported in March that Mario Dulceno, 81,
of New Orleans believes he can continue his avocation as a stripper
for another "two, three years."  According to the dispatch,
"Although time has wrinkled his skin, there's little flab, his legs are
nicely shaped, and he sports an even tan."  Said a club owner, "The
women went crazy over him.  I call him super Mario."

* In Ashdod, Israel, a 93-year-old woman was arrested in March
for peddling heroin to police officers who had knocked on her
door.   According to police, the woman's eyesight is failing, and
she thought they were her regular customers.  And in Adrian,
Mich., in January, Lillian Howard, 84, was arrested for attempting
to smuggle marijuana in her underwear to her son during a visit to
Gus Harrison Prison.

LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINAL

* Jeffrie Allen Thomas, 35, was arrested and charged with robbing
a Signet bank in Baltimore, Md., in April.  An employee called
police during the robbery, and two officers on foot patrol arrived
quickly to find Thomas still in the bank, standing beside a teller's
station counting his money.  (Thomas was also charged with
robbing the same bank a month before.)

NO LONGER WEIRD

* Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which
now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from
circulation:  (17) The burglar who sneaks into a home or building
intending to loot the place but who falls asleep before he can get to
work, as allegedly did Brian Hodgson, 28, who was arrested in
September after the ceiling at a Pompano Beach, Fla., McDonald's
gave way, disturbing his slumber.  And (18) the family that leaves
behind one or more members at a highway rest stop and fails to
realize they are short-handed until way down the road, as happened
in April to a 9-year-old boy whose father left him in Lloydminster,
Manitoba, and did not miss him until he got home in Red Deer,
Alberta, nearly 200 miles away.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.483 (News of the Weird, May 9, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* In February, Michael Knowles, awaiting trial in Virginia for
killing his wife, filed a $100 million lawsuit against advice
columnist Ann Landers, charging that she had defamed him by
publishing his letter on how tough the Internet can be on marriages.
Wrote Knowles, "Today is my wife's 44th birthday, but she is not
around to celebrate it.  I took her life because of an affair that
started on the Internet."  Said Knowles's lawyer Max Jenkins, who
had pleaded Knowles not guilty, the letter "hurts my case."

* In March, the president of a demolition company said he was
about to hire a psychic to help explain the strange things being
reported by his workers tearing down the old Troutman's
department store building in Connellsville, Pa.  He said doors were
slamming without reason, tools disappeared and turned up in
unlikely places, and stuck, locked doors spontaneously opened,
among other things.  At about the same time, employees at the San
Francisco Bureau of Building Inspections brought in a Buddhist
priest, a Catholic priest, and a psychic to commune with the
building after several workers and family members had recently
been stricken with serious illnesses.

* The Wall Street Journal reported in April on the growing
academic discipline of "whiteness studies," whose pioneering
professors and students met recently at the University of
California, Berkeley.  Among the aspects under study:  Spam diets,
gun shows, and the white dominance of shopping malls and the
Internet.  Said a doctoral student, rejecting the suggestion that
whiteness studies lacks seriousness:  "They said that about . . .
'Madonna studies,' too."

THE CONTINUING CRISIS

* David Price, 34, serving life in prison in Edinburgh, Scotland, for
the 1984 rape-murder of his girlfriend on Valentine's Day, got a
chaperoned, one-evening pass in February so that he could go
downtown to the Demarco European Arts Center to attend the
premiere of the opera "Odyssey," which he wrote while behind
bars.

* In December, store manager Wiley Berggren was presented
awards for sales and productivity at a Southwest Convenience
Stores company dinner in Odessa, Tex.  About two hours later, he
was fired because of his actions the night before:  When three kids
tried to steal a case of beer and one of them attacked him,
Berggren bearhugged the attacker to the ground, thus violating the
company's rule of not challenging thieves.

* In February, anesthesiologist Frank Ruhl Peterson, 45, was
sentenced in Hazelton, Pa., to 10-23 months in prison for severely
diluting the narcotics for 12 surgery patients, thus exposing them to
virtually anesthesia-free operations.  According to police, Peterson
stole the drugs to feed his own habit and said he actually shorted
more than 200 patients.

* In January, Ludwig Fainberg, the owner of the Porky's strip club
in Hialeah, Fla., was indicted as the middleman in various drug
schemes, including the attempted purchase of a $5.5 million,
black-market, Russian attack submarine by Colombian drug lords,
who allegedly wanted it to run cocaine into California.

* Ireland's first legislation permitting divorce took effect February
27, but a man in Dublin apparently was so eager to shed his wife
that he petitioned a court in January for a divorce in advance, on
the ground that he was seriously ill and might not live to see his
freedom.  (In fact, he married again a few days after the court
granted his petition, and a few days after that, he died.)

* In December, according to a Washington Post report, Greg Piper,
the owner of the Exposed Temptations tattoo shop of Manassas,
Va., complained to his landlord in an industrial park that the
newly-arrived, next-door tenant, the Blessed Victory Pentecostal
Church, was out of place in the building and making so much noise
with its music that it was affecting his work.  Said Piper,
"[Tattooing's] like any kind of art.  You want to focus on the
concentration and the client."  In January, the them-or-us dilemma
was resolved when the church announced it was moving.

* The Associated Press reported in February on the egg collection
of wealthy businessman Ed Harrison of Los Angeles, who owns a
skyscraper, runs an oil company, and manages real estate.  He has
more than one million eggs, from 3,600 species.  "I've had plenty
of people laugh at me," he said, but collecting "took a lot of guts.
I've swung down over cliffs and risked my neck plenty of times [to
steal eggs]."

BAD TIMES FOR GOOD SAMARITANS

* In January, Ron Seaward stopped, along with a police officer, to
help a driver whose car was in a ditch near London, Ontario.
While he was pushing that car out, two cars hit his truck, and as the
officer was writing up the report for Seaward's insurance company,
he discovered that Seaward's driver's license had expired (for
which he was later fined).

* Trial began in March in the lawsuit of Linda Jean Schneider, 49,
against two physicians and the John Muir Medical Hospital near
San Francisco, for their negligence in actually saving her life:
Schneider has a slowly-terminal, degenerative neurological
disorder (Melas syndrome) that causes seizures, and she had
wanted to die, but the doctors kept feeding and caring for her.
She's now expected to live another 15 years, though with a poor
quality of life.

* In December in Louisville, Ky., four men robbed the National
City Bank but were halted during their getaway by Danny Johnson
at a store next door and thus dropped the money and fled.  Johnson,
despite the temptation to skim at least a little off the top to take
care of his Christmas bills, stood guard over all the loot until police
arrived.  National City Bank people called Johnson three days later
to inform him that his loan application for $500, submitted before
the bank robbery, was denied.

* The owners of the Garden Juice Bar in San Francisco told a state
labor official in February that on most days for the past year they
had provided neighborhood hanger-on (and perhaps homeless)
Eugenia McCoy free meals.  However, in January McCoy filed a
state labor claim that she had not been paid for all the on-premises
"work" she had been doing, such as, for the last "40 minutes" of
each "shift," standing outside to make sure no one broke the
restaurant's windows.  Despite the owners' vehement denials that
McCoy ever worked for them, the labor official set the matter for a
formal hearing (largely because she doubted that restaurant owners
could be so generous).

NAME IN THE NEWS

* Hawaii's Big Island closed out its 1996 highway death toll at 35
(compared to 23 in 1995) on December 26 with the one-vehicle
crash in Hamakua of motorcyclist Hy Hoe Silva, 41.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.484 (News of the Weird, May 16, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.

LEAD STORIES

* The New York Times, describing several civil sub-wars now
raging in Zaire as President Mobutu's 30-year reign ends, reported
in April on the "quixotic on-and-off conflict waged by Mai-Mai
guerillas, who hide in the jungle and smoke large quantities of
marijuana."  People fear the Mai-Mai because it is believed that
bullets turn to water before hitting them, and stories circulate about
how the mere threat of the Mai-Mais' appearance causes forces to
retreat and surrender.  However, the Times reported, "When the
Mai-Mai were killed in [a recent battle], it was speculated that they
might recently have had sex, which, some Zairians say, destroys
the Mai-Mai's protection from bullets for a day or two."

* Sony Pictures Studios sought a court order in April to keep
Raymond R. Taylor off the set of the TV show "Wheel of Fortune."
He had been a contestant in 1993, but keeps coming to the tapings,
sneaking onto the set, and annoying the audience and staff (and
four times has managed to get his face shown on the air).

* The Associated Press reported in April that the United Arab
Emirates's National Avian Research Center, funded at a generous
level by ruler Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, has hired
scientists from around the world to use state-of-the-art tracking to
save the endangered houbara bustard bird.  However, the only
reason for the Sheik's concern appears to be to assure that they are
plentiful enough for rich Arab hunters.

GREAT ART!

* The Tokyo-based company OM2, in a performance at the
Kitchen in New York City in October, set up 11 mobile pens inside
which the audience sat while the 20 cast members stared at them
and moved the cages from place to place.  The goals, said the New
York Times, were "blurring the line between artist and audience,
and the ever-popular audience discomfort."

* South Korean artist Bul Lee's display at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City in March, which consisted only of rotting
fish in sealed bags and glass cabinets, was abruptly pulled by
officials after only several hours' display because the ventilation
equipment failed.  The show was entitled "Majestic Splendor."

* In April, Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik opened a two-
week show, "I Bite America and America Bites Me," in which he
stayed in character as a dog from the time his plane landed in New
York City until the time he left town.  Kulik holed up in a gallery
cage wearing only a dog collar and exhibiting the gamut of dog
behaviors and emotions, and visitors could enter the cage to play
with him only after putting on protective padding in case Kulik bit
them.  Kulik has been arrested in three countries for biting his
audience.

* In a February show at San Francisco's Capp Street Project
building, artist Glen Seator reproduced to exact scale the outside of
the Capp Street Project building and the street that abuts it.  Seator
used 115 tons of gravel, 30 tons of asphalt, and 100 tons of sand
and recreated details down to the placement of poster staples on a
telephone pole.  And sculptor Lowell Davis, who made News of
the Weird in 1995 when he burned down his studio because he was
dissatisfied with his career, was apparently reborn this winter when
he finished constructing a 50-acre town, of old buildings he had
bought elsewhere and moved, in the middle of a Missouri
cornfield.

* In March, University of Pittsburgh art history teacher Jack
Sheffler put three tons of Hostess cupcakes and Sno Balls into 113
square feet in the school's library gallery to make the point, of
course, of the similarity between ancient architecture and pop art.
And last winter, the Institute of Visual Art in New York city toured
six cities with its Yugo Art show featuring non-car uses (e.g., a
piano, a fireplace, a church confessional, and a car wash with
working shower) of discarded models of the very unpopular 1985-
1992 car.

* In May, at a SoHo gallery in New York City, Bill Scanga showed
taxidermized dead mice propped up in tiny chairs or on the floor,
gazing at artwork in miniature rooms that were exact replicas of
rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and watching a small
TV set that plays "Tom and Jerry" cartoons, and observing live
mice in small cages in a zoo-like setting.

* In March at a Penn State University gallery, student Christine
Enedy's "25 Years of Virginity . . . A Self-Portrait," supposedly a
monument to the importance of Catholicism in her life, was hung,
to the consternation of at least one state senator.  The work consists
of 25 pairs of underwear with red crosses sewn into the crotches.

CAN'T POSSIBLY BE TRUE

* In November, a jury in Dallas, Tex., awarded about $15 million
to two men who were badly injured when their car rear-ended
another vehicle that had stopped in a traffic lane to read American
Airlines's flight information signs at Dallas-Fort Worth
International Airport.  The jury said the crash was only 2 percent
the fault of the driver of the men's car for following too closely, 32
percent the fault of the driver who stopped his car, and 66 percent
the fault of American for putting the signs up (and American was
assessed an additional $10 million in punitive damages).

* The Chicago Tribune reported in December that local convicted
felon Frank Evans had fraudulently obtained a credit card under the
name and Social Security number of Richard F. Johnson about 20
years ago and had used it regularly without detection since then
because he always borrowed modestly and made the minimum
monthly payment.  A few weeks before the Tribune story was
published, Evans shot himself to death with a gun registered in the
name of Richard F. Johnson.

* Former magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, 44, passed away
unexpectedly in March, about a week after his memoir went on
sale.  Bauby had been paralyzed since 1995 (as the result of a
stroke) and dictated the entire 137-page book by blinking his left
eye according to a code because that was the only part of his body
that he could move.

INEXPLICABLE

* The New York Times reported in December that Odell Sheppard,
a "middle-aged handyman," had just passed his ninth consecutive
year of incarceration in Cook County Jail in Chicago, even though
he has not been charged with a crime.  He was sent to jail for
failing to reveal the whereabouts of his daughter Deborah, who was
the subject of a child-custody dispute between Sheppard and
Deborah's mother, but Sheppard maintains he has no idea where
the girl is.

BOTTOM OF THE GENE POOL

* Toby L. Sanders, 34, was charged with aggravated battery in
Carmi, Ill., in January for chopping off the right middle finger of
Lester E. Massey, 35.  According to police, each man agreed to let
the other chop off a finger, but apparently Sanders reneged after he
saw how bad Massey's hand looked.  (Police said alcohol was
involved in the original agreement.)

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.485 (News of the Weird, May 23, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* In May in Santa Fe, N. Mex., schoolteacher Roger Katz, 50, was
sentenced to 18 months in prison for having sex with a 14-year-old
female student.  He was convicted despite his compelling
explanation that had fallen in love with her after she saved him in a
previous life (Tibet, 640 A.D.) when she, then older than he, had
stepped in front of an arrow meant for him.  Said Katz's attorney
Aaron Wolf, "I hope my daughters find men who love them as
much as he loves her."

* In the British elections in April, the usual fringe parties were in
evidence, such as the "Blackhaired, Medium-Build Caucasian
Party," but the longest-standing alternative, the Monster Raving
Loony Party, ran the most candidates.  Its main platform plank this
year was to tow Britain 500 miles into the Mediterranean Sea in
order to improve the country's climate, and 50 other MRLP
candidates for various offices made proposals such as requiring
dogs to eat phosphorescent food so that pedestrians could more
easily avoid stepping in their poops.

* Unclear on the Concept:  In January, Bamrer Pong-insee, a
spokesman for the Professional Comedians Association of
Thailand, said its members will soon be prohibited by rule from
being impolite on stage.  Especially barred are obscene language,
physical humor in which pain is implied, and being disrespectful to
a colleague's parents.

SEEDS OF OUR DESTRUCTION

* The New York Times reported in February on the extraordinary
worthlessness of Zairian currency (denominated in "zaires"), noting
that the new 100,000-zaire notes, worth about 66 cents at that time,
were so undesirable to hold as cash that they were called
"prostates"--after the terminal cancer with which the widely-
disliked President Mobutu has been stricken.

* The Providence (R.I.) Phoenix newspaper reported in February
that the latest fad at Providence College is handcuff parties, where
men and women are randomly cuffed and must accompany each
other the rest of the evening, no matter what (even for restroom
breaks).  At nearby Brown University, whose legendary concern
about gender equality would rule out such symbolic ownership, the
fad is "naked" parties at which there is virtually no sexual activity.

* In Mill Valley, Calif., in March, tenth-grader Ari Hoffman, who
had just won first place in the Marin County science fair for his
study finding that exposure to radiation decreased the offspring of
fruit flies, was disqualified for cruelty when it was learned that
about 35 of his 200 flies died during the three-month experiment.
Hoffman was disappointed because he had used extraordinary
efforts to keep the flies alive, by, for example, maintaining a
tropical temperature for the flies during the entire experiment.

* The New York Times reported in February that despite the
troubles in Serbia, business was thriving for a transvestite fortune
teller named "Kleo Patra," 36, who charges about $80 a session (a
month's salary for the average Serbian) and includes as a client
Mrs. Sloboban Milosevic, whose husband Mr. Patra supports.  A
week before the great winter flooding in the Ohio Valley and two
months before the North Dakota floods, Mr. Patra predicted the U.
S.'s future was rosy except for impending floods.

* As of February, about 1,500 prisoners in four Bolivian jails were
participating in hunger strikes to protest delays in getting to trial on
drug-trafficking charges.  To improve their chances of sticking to
the strike, several prisoners in San Pedro jail in La Paz sutured
their lips together.

* American William Ping Chen was sentenced to 10 years in
prison in January in Shanghai, China, for smuggling.  Though the
reason was not explained, Chen had tried to bring 238 tons of
medical waste and ordinary garbage into the country by labeling it
paper.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY

* A Crime Waiting to Happen:  In February, in Sirnak, Turkey,
thieves stole the 210 pairs of shoes left by entering worshipers
outside the Vali Kamil Acun mosque.

* In January, in Bangkok, Thailand, Wien Sudpleum, eight months'
pregnant, crawled under the belly of an elephant three times, which
is supposed to bring good luck in her delivery.  However, the third
time she was gored.  The owner agreed to pay her about $240
compensation, but it was not reported whether the baby survived.

* In January, American long-distance hot-air balloonist Steve
Fossett had to set down in the village of Nunkhar, India, well short
of his around-the-world goal.  However, according to media
reports, villagers were very helpful and friendly despite their first
impression of him, which was awe, because they thought this
descending figure was the second coming of their monkey god
Hanuman, arriving in a space-station temple.

* In February, Judge Salamo Injia ruled in Papua New Guinea that
a quaint custom among some tribes in the south of the country--the
use of young girls and women as a medium of currency to pass
from one tribe to another--was illegal.  Miriam Willingal, 18, had
been sent, with another woman plus some pigs and some cash, to
compensate a neighboring tribe for a shooting death.

UPDATE

* In 1995 News of the Weird reported that some New York City
dermatologists were offering a treatment to reduce facial wrinkles
by injections of the bacteria that causes often-fatal botulism, in
order to deaden the tissue.  The New York Observer reported in
May 1997 that some of those dermatologists now tout a side-effect
of the $800 treatment:  that it so deadens the forehead that it
prevents scowling, which some patients say is a benefit to keeping
a "poker face" during business negotiations.

BOTTOM OF THE GENE POOL

* Derrick L. Richardson, 28, was charged in April in Minneapolis
with third-degree murder in the death of his beloved cousin, Ken E.
Richardson.  According to police, Derrick suggested a game of
Russian roulette and put a semiautomatic pistol to Ken's head
instead of a revolver.  (For the gun-unschooled:  There is much less
mystery to the game if played with a semiautomatic, in which the
one bullet automatically goes to the firing chamber.)



==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.486 (News of the Weird, May 30, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
(Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject line reading
Unsubscribe)

LEAD STORIES

* Ms. Courtney Mann, the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of White People, who is
a tax preparer and single mother, was rebuffed in an attempt to join
a Ku Klux Klan-sponsored march in Pittsburgh in April, according
to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  Though she has been in the
NAAWP for at least four years, the Pennsylvania KKK Grand
Dragon turned her down because Mann is black.  "She wanted me
to send transportation [for the rally]," said the Grand Dragon. "She
wanted to stay at my house [during rally weekend].  She's all
confused, man.  I don't think she knows she's a black."

* April's annual religious fertility celebration in Nagoya, Japan,
designed to improve the rice harvest, featured as usual a 12-foot-
long, bright pink, plastic penis, carried through the street, followed
by displays of smaller organs and a giant banner of a blood-
vesseled penis, testicles, and pubic hair.  Souvenir candy of the
same shape was sold during the event, and at the end of a parade,
the giant organ was placed on the fertility shrine.

* In mid-April, five weeks before the national elections, the
governing party in Indonesia announced, via "scientific
calculation," according to one leader, that President Suharto had
won re-election with 70.02 percent of the vote.

COURT DOCKET

* Edmond James Ramos had his first-degree burglary charge
(burglary of an occupied dwelling, a more serious crime than
burglary of a vacant dwelling) thrown out in Los Angeles in
January by an appeals court.  Ramos's lawyer had demonstrated
that the only "occupant" that night had passed away of natural
causes minutes prior to Ramos's entry; thus, the dwelling was
legally empty.

* In February, Maryland circuit court judge Thomas Bollinger Sr.
agreed to wipe the record clean of Charles Weiner's spousal battery
charge after he completes probation--for the sole purpose of
helping Weiner join the Chestnut Ridge Country Club, which had
until then rejected him because of his criminal record.  (In 1993,
Bollinger gave a rapist probation for an attack against a drunken
woman, remarking that finding an unconscious woman on a bed
was "the dream of a lot of males, quite honestly.")  Four days later,
Bollinger reversed his decision and removed himself from all
domestic violence and sexual offense cases.

* In April, the science journal Nature reported that, for the first
time, non-human DNA was used in a criminal trial and was the
crucial link that convicted Douglas Beamish of murdering his
estranged girlfriend on Prince Edward Island, Canada.  A single
strand of hair from Beamish's cat Snowball was found on a jacket
which contained the victim's blood and which had not yet been
proven to be Beamish's.

* A Texas district judge in Houston declared a mistrial in March in
the murder trial of John Bradford Crow, 25, based on the
misconduct of prosecutor Craig Goodhart.  During his closing
argument to the jury, while sarcastically referring to Crow's
claiming to be a good guy, Goodhart walked over to the defense
table and slapped Crow aggressively on the back, eliciting gasps
from the spectators and rendering Crow's attorney momentarily
speechless.

* In Santa Cruz, Calif., in February, Mr. Danis Rivera, 25, rejected
a plea bargain that would have sent him to prison for one year for
having sex with underage girls.  However, at his trial he was in
such a foul mood that he constantly spit at court personnel and
finally had to be outfitted with a Hannibal Lecter-type bonnet over
his face.  He was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
And in a Providence, R. I., courtroom in April, Latin King gangster
George "Animal" Perry, on trial for murder and racketeering and
frustrated at the length of the prosecutor's closing argument, which
denied him a much-needed restroom break, rose from his chair,
unzipped his fly, and took one, anyway.

SCHEMES

* In March, Donna Skinner, 30, was arrested at a pay phone in
Irwindale, Calif., and accused of having made 1,500 obscene calls
since August to a local Home Savings of America bank.  Police
confiscated a script they say she had been reading from, though
they gave no motive.

* In March, border guards discovered a plastic tube running from
the home of a bootlegger in Latvia to a field 400 meters away in
Estonia and through which flowed the vodka they accused him of
smuggling.  The Latvian man was taking advantage of a 60 percent
price premium in Estonia.

* In October, the Unitarian Universalist Church and heirs of
Jonathan Holdeen settled their 20-year-old dispute on the
disposition of Holdeen's estate, which was created in 1945 as a
series of trusts that eventually would have amassed so much money
they would allegedly have funded the entire federal government
and rendered taxation unnecessary.  In fact, the Church, which was
a nominal beneficiary of the trusts, argued for their abolition in
1977 on the ground that they would soak up so much of the world's
money that the administrators of the trusts would become too
powerful.

* St. Charles Catholic Church (Picayune, Miss.) and nearby St.
Margaret Mary Church (Slidell, La.) posted security ushers at the
doors in February to make sure that parishioners were not
pocketing communion wafers.  Devil-worshiping ceremonies often
use wafers for symbolic desecration, and when six people were
seen leaving St. Charles in December with their wafers, the
churches' leaders began to fear a local Satanic conspiracy.

* In April in Houston, Tex., Robert Perry Russell, Jr., 44, was
sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexual assault and diapering of a
14-year-old boy, but police say the number of victims may have
been as many as 10.  According to police, Russell liked to take
boys out in a boat, tell them a tale about a headless killer seeking to
rescue a toddler from the dangerous lake and who kills all other
people, and suggest that putting on the diapers he happens to have
with him would be a good way, should the killer appear, of
convincing him of his toddler status.

FEUDS

* In October, after over three years of litigation and 18 days of
trial, a judge in Chicago awarded condominium unit owner Eleanor
Mellick $217,000 in her lawsuit against the condo board.
According to the lawsuit, the board president had moved a
dumpster away from his own parking space, resulting in a
narrowing of Mellick's space from 111 inches in width to 93, and
parking in the cramped space had aggravated her arthritis.

DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES

* Dishwashing:  In March, a busboy at a Key West, Fla., Marriott
resort allegedly shot and killed a supervisor who had apparently
made some constructive criticism of the busboy's loading of the
dishwasher.  And in May, police in Helena, Ark., detained a 15-
year-old boy they suspect shot his older sister to death after a
dispute over which one would wash the dishes.



==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.487 (News of the Weird, June 6, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
To Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* A German television station reported in January that as many as
50,000 former Nazi SS troopers might be receiving up to $600 a
month in German government pensions for World War II injuries
(including more than 3,000 who live in the U. S.)--while no
comparable government benefit exists for concentration camp
survivors.  One example cited by the Washington Post was that of
Heinz Barth, 80, an SS officer serving a life sentence for his part in
a 1944 massacre in France, who gets $450 a month because he lost
a leg.

* Sexual Rejuvenations:  The Hong Kong Standard newspaper
reported in February  on the thriving business of a Dr. Liu, who
runs a virginity- (hymen-) restoration practice in Ghangzhou
province, China, charging about $500.  "So many Hong Kong girls
come to us," she said. "They come just before their wedding.  They
don't want their husbands to know they had many boyfriends in the
past."  And New Scientist magazine reported in January that the
German government, fearful of immune-system reactions and the
spread of "mad cow" disease, has banned the popular sheep-fetus
injections that men and women have been receiving to firm up
their buttocks.

POLICE BLOTTER

* Following in the footsteps of her completely unsuccessful
predecessors (Mr. Mellon E. Bank and Mr. Roadway V. Express,
reported in News of the Weird in 1989 and 1996, respectively),
Keisha Yvette Gregory was arrested in Durham, N. C., in March
and charged with theft of a check made out to the Tension
Envelope company, which she tried to pass off as a personal check
made out to Ms. Tension Nicole Envelope.

* Tacky, Tacky, Tacky:  The trial of National Institutes of Health
police officer Bruce Blum ended in a hung jury in April on the
December 19 accusation (based on a surveillance videotape) that
he stole the current issue of People magazine from the NIH library
in Bethesda, Md.  And Rhode Island state traffic court clerk-typist
Sharon James, 30, was fired in March for stealing a bag of potato
chips and some coins on the counter of a blind vendor in the traffic
court building.

* In March, in cases in San Diego, Calif., and Norfolk, Va.,
prosecutors came under fire for allegedly allowing witnesses in a
gang murder case and drug case, respectively, to have numerous
conjugal visits in government offices after business hours while in
custody as part of deals to coax their testimony.
.
* A 24-year-old, unidentified woman was arrested in Waukesha,
Wis., in April on suspicion of child abuse.  Her son had
complained of a nose infection, which she said was caused by acid
from a wristwatch battery that he had put in his nose several
months earlier but which she had declined to help him remove until
the battery started leaking.

* Peter Lerat, 33, was arrested in Toronto, Ontario, in May and
charged with two robberies, one in a donut shop while he was
carrying a goose and one on the street while he had a raccoon.  In
each case he threatened to kill the animal unless someone gave him
money.  He cleared $60 from a woman in the donut shop, but a
prospective victim in the second robbery ran to call police, and
Lerat was captured nearby.

* In January, West Palm Beach, Fla., police officer Ed Wagner
filed a lawsuit against the city for removing him from the SWAT
team following a complaint he made about a neck injury.  The
injury occurred at an car-crash scene in 1993 when one of
Wagner's colleagues playfully grabbed his head and gave him a
noogie.  And Franklin, Tenn., water and sewer director Eddie
Woodard was suspended for three days in February after he goosed
police chief Jackie Moore at a fire scene.

* Richard Lee Hamrick, 28, was picked up in Longview, Wash., in
February, suspected of being the guy who robbed a Safeway a few
minutes before.  Not only was the robber wearing bikini briefs on
his head, backward, with eye holes cut in the derriere, but,
according to the officers who had to book the evidence, they were
soiled.

CLICHES COME TO LIFE

* Life Imitates the Three Stooges:  Julio Guaman, 31, landed in a
tree, with a broken pelvis, after a five-story fall from his Queens,
N.Y., apartment in December.  According to his wife, Julio had
lunged at her in a fight in order to push her out the window, but she
ducked, sending him out.

* Life Imitates Prison Movies:  Joshua John Jaeger, 25, housed the
Queen Street Mental Health Centre in Toronto in January, and
David Anderson, housed at the California Medical Facility in
Vacaville in April, became the latest inmates to escape by tying
bedsheets together and lowering themselves to the ground.
(Anderson even left a pillow-and-blankets dummy in his bed as a
decoy.)

* Marsha Watt, a 1990 graduate of Northwestern University
School of Law and formerly an associate at the prestigious
Winston & Strawn law firm in Chicago, had charges filed against
her in February by the Illinois Bar Association's discipline
committee over her most recent conviction for prostitution (i.e., the
kind involving sex, for which her published rate, according to a
personals ad, was roughly three times what the law firm billed for
her).

NO LONGER WEIRD

* Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which
now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from
circulation:  (19) The person easing into the parking lot of the
driver's license office, either arriving for the exam or just
completing it, who accidentally crashes into the office's storefront,
as  a woman did in Hillsboro, Ore., in May and a man did in
Barrie, Ontario, in March.  And (20) the burglar attempting to enter
an establishment from the roof via a vent pipe but who gets stuck
and must be rescued by the police, or, as with a 20-year-old man in
Dayton, Ohio, is December, who suffocates.

DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES

* Guns in the Reading Room:  In April in Chandler, Ariz., Johnel
Trinidad, 18, sitting on the toilet inspecting a gun he planned to
buy from a friend, accidentally shot himself in the knee.  Said
police Sgt. Matt Christensen, "Bathroom gun safety and gun safety
in general pretty much dovetail."  It was Chandler's second such
shooting in a year.  In July, Harold Hughes, 52, was on the toilet,
his gun on the counter and his pit bull lounging nearby, when the
dog became startled and knocked the gun to the floor, where it
fired a shot into Hughes's leg.


==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.488 (News of the Weird, June 13, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
To Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* The Federal Emergency Management Agency reported in May
that only 946 households out of more than 10,000 in Grand Forks,
N.D., were covered by flood insurance when the recent floods hit.
Four months earlier, FEMA had begun issuing numerous advisories
about imminent flood danger and spent $300,000 on a media
campaign about ominous snow-melting conditions.  However, the
FEMA campaign convinced only 73 Grand Forks homeowners to
buy policies.

* The first copies of the European Union's 24-page user's manual
for boots recently hit the market in England, reported The Daily
Telegraph in May.  The booklet comes with the shoes and advises
the consumer how to choose footwear, how to use and care for the
boots, and how to wear them safely.  It also explains how to read
the EU-mandated boot comfort ratings, though it also advises,
"Each boot should be tried for fitting before use."

* Dueling Misjudgments:  In April, expecting a $3 million gift
destined for Children's Zoo in Central Park from philanthropists
Edith and Henry Everett, the New York City Art Commission
nonetheless approved only a small donor-name plaque on one
entrance marker to the zoo, rather than the slightly larger plaque
requested by the Everetts.  Consequently, the Everetts snatched
back their gift, jeopardizing the zoo's long-overdue renovation.

COMPELLING EXPLANATIONS

* One of the members of the Mug House players pub darts team in
Worcester, England, commenting in February on his team's 50-
match losing streak:  "I think we all drink too much [during the
matches].  One regular feature [of our games] is to miss the board
completely."

* Fernando Magana-Rodriguez, 24, pleading not guilty to bigamy
in Kelowna, British Columbia, in January:  "I'm Mexican.  I never
knew you could go to jail for marrying two women, or I never
would have done it."

* John H. Bergantini, a candidate for tax assessor in Exeter, R.I.,
commenting in March on his being sued by the town for $2,678 in
back property taxes:  "My ability to write a check for a certain
amount of money has nothing to do with [my ability to judge] how
much a piece of property is worth."

* Rochester, N.Y., Assemblywoman Susan John, who is the chair
of the Assembly's Alcohol and Drug Abuse committee, upon her
guilty plea in March for driving while impaired:  "This will give me
additional insights into the problem of drinking and driving, and I
believe, will allow me to do my job even more effectively."

* Owatonna, Minn., elementary school principal Kevin A.
Thompson, 37, was charged in January with peeping into the
window of a home and was apprehended hiding under the deck of
another house.  According to police, Thompson said he was merely
checking street addresses in connection with the redrawing of
school-bus pickup boundaries.

* Public television's "Frugal Gourmet," Jeff Smith, has denied that
he sexually molested any of the five men who have since January
filed complaints against him for having fondled them as boys.  One
of the men, Keith Thomas, who had worked for Smith in the 1970s
as part of a high school work-study program, said that at the time
he had shrugged off Smith's hugs and kisses as "weird, but [I
thought] maybe that's the way it is with people in the food
business."

LEAST COMPETENT PEOPLE

* According to the Berlingske Tidende newspaper of Copenhagen,
Denmark, in January, an unidentified man drove his car onto the ice
at the Augustenborg Fjord 120 miles to the south, but it broke
through.  The man managed to escape in the shallow water, though,
and then minutes later attempted the crossing with a four-wheel
drive vehicle, with the same result.  He next tried it with a tractor
(same result), then with another tractor (same).  It took rescuers
seven hours to pull the four vehicles out.

* Daniel Sutherland of Indiana, Pa., accidentally shot himself in the
mouth in February while he was blowing down the barrel of a gun
to see whether it was loaded.  Said Sutherland, haltingly, to a
reporter, "You know that hanging-down thing in the back of your
mouth [the uvula]?  I lost mine."

* According to a police report in the Providence (R.I.) Journal-
Bulletin in February, a man wearing a flowered dress, swearing and
making obscene gestures, was subdued by police officers but only
after he had softened himself up by accidentally running smack into
a car and then a brick wall.  At the police station, he tried to escape
but wound up colliding with the wall in a stairwell.

* In Bozeman, Mont., in March, according to Gary Gerhardt, the
owner of County Lanes bowling alley, a man walked in, told the
cashier he had just gotten out of prison for having robbed County
Lanes several years before, and said he would like to look around
on top of the ceiling to see if he could find the wallet he had
dropped during that job.  When Gerhardt ordered him to leave, the
man just shrugged and walked away.

* Brothers Patrick and Daniel Worthing were charged in December
with attempted corporate espionage.  Patrick was a supervisor for a
cleaning contractor working for PPG Industries in a suburb of
Pittsburgh, Pa., and in a letter full of misspellings and grammatical
errors allegedly offered to sell many PPG corporate secrets to
competitor Owens Corning.  According to the prosecutor, Patrick
had sent PPG's financial statements (actually "finacial" statements,
providing "intimant details" that would be "of intrest"), asked only
$1,000 for all the information Owens Corning could use, and had
given PPG's fax number for any return calls.  At his first court
appearance, Patrick asked the magistrate, "If we, like, fully
cooperate with all the details, is there, like, a lesser sentence?"

EXTREMELY FORGETFUL PEOPLE

* Cleveland, Ohio, county clerk Gordana Giovinale was suspended
for 3 days in April as punishment for leaving $65,000 in taxes and
fee receipts in a bag in the restroom stall he was using.  After
finishing his business, she apparently just forgot that she had been
headed to another office to drop off the money.  And Mike
Shreckengost appeared in court in Somerset, Pa., in April to
reclaim the $20,000 that he had tossed onto the side of a road in
February 1996 as a trooper approached his stopped car.  He drove
off without the money and made no inquiries about what happened
to it until he heard in August 1996 that the trooper was claiming the
money under a "finders-keepers" law.

CAPITAL OF BAD RELATIONSHIPS

* Carrollton, Ga.:  In March, a sheriff's investigator learned that
Jodi Denman Cecconi had elaborately faked the leukemia death of
her two-year-old daughter (hospital vigils, funeral arrangements,
grave-site selection, obituary in the newspaper, etc.) to win back
her estranged boyfriend Neal Casey, who bought onto the story for
a while before learning that the child was in good health.  And the
next month, Carrollton country-music radio station manager Amy
Bullington, 23, who was charged with shooting her boyfriend to
death, surrendered to police only after having aired her favorite
song "Has Anybody Seen Amy?"


==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.489 (News of the Weird, June 20, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
To Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* Ms. Dale Gray, 41, claimed in her sexual harassment lawsuit
against the University of Alabama that a female professor's having
lured her into an affair caused her severe emotional problems.  At
her trial in Tuscaloosa in May, Gray (who had her breasts
removed, takes testosterone, and now sports a beard "to hide the
little girl," she said) disclosed that she was married three times to
men and once to a woman with whom she planned a "fantasy" child
(a faked pregnancy that she said was common among lesbians) that
she eventually "killed off," and had a five-year sexual relationship
with her mother.

* In March, armed with evidence that a drug dealer had been killed
with a single gunshot during a robbery by two men, Torrance,
Calif., district attorney Todd D. Rubenstein obtained separate jury
convictions of both men for firing the fatal shot.  Both robbers' guns
had fired, but one missed, and a conclusion as to which one could
not be drawn from ballistics tests.  Rubenstein asserted confidently
to one jury that Stephen Edmond Davis, 19, shot the man, and just
as confidently to the other jury that it wasn't Davis, but rather John
Patrick Winkleman, 19.

* Correen Zahnzinger, 24, filed a lawsuit in Santa Ana, Calif., in
May against her boyfriend of three years (and husband of one year),
Ms. Valerie Inga, 29, who pretended the whole time to be a man.
("They did have a sexual relationship," said Zahnzinger's attorney,
"but I'm not allowed to say how it was perpetrated.")  And two
weeks earlier in Arlington, Va., Margaret Hunter, 24, was awarded
$264,000 in her lawsuit for fraud against her ex-husband, Ms. Holly
Anne Groves, 26, who had posed as a man in their four-month
marriage in 1996.

THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

* According to the 1997 platform of the Natural Law Party (based
on teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) in Canada, released in
May, people should stop using the south and west entrances to their
homes because they are inharmonious and should instead use north
and east entrances.  Furthermore, Canadians entering the U. S.
should do so from Niagara Falls, whose entrance (from the east) is
the only nonsouthward entrance in the country.  The Party proposes
to eliminate the federal deficit by "eliminating problems" and to
create an "invincible" national defense through yogic flying (which
resembles hopping like a frog).  The Party got 84,000 votes in
1993.

* In October, Jay Urdahl, an incumbent running for county
supervisor in Mason City, Iowa, was charged with criminal trespass
while out campaigning.  According to homeowner Debbie Opheim,
Urdahl just walked right into her house to meet her without the
benefit of an invitation or a knock on the door.  Said Opheim, who
heard a "hello," "I ran down the stairs, and he was standing in my
living room."  After Opheim ordered him out, she said, "He looked
at me like I was insane."

* In March, arguing for the legalization of holiday fireworks in
Arizona, state Rep. Richard Kyle denounced opponents who said
sparklers were dangerous:  "I put them in my hair.  I have stuck
them in my clothes.  They do not burn."  (He lost.)

* In April, North Providence, R. I., Council member Charles A.
Lombardi was charged with misdemeanor vandalism--according to
police, the drive-by egging of a car owned by a relative of his
political opponent, Mayor Ralph Mollis.  Said Lombardi, "This is
politics in North Providence."

* In a March New York Times story on vote-buying in Dodge
County, Ga., a spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State
tried to describe the depth of the problem: "We literally had people
who said they had no idea that selling your vote was illegal.  One
guy said, 'It's my vote, I can do what I want with it.'"

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT

* In January, the U. S. Postal Service in Miami, Fla., issued
bulletins announcing a $25,000 reward for the return of something
stolen from a mail carrier, but refused to say what it was, referring
to it only as a "device."  Said a postal inspector to a reporter, "I
can't tell you what it is.  I can't tell you what it's used for."

* Former Prestonburg, Ky., school board member Wood R.
Keesee, 59, filed a lawsuit in May against a female court clerk to
whom he had allegedly loaned money in 1996.  Under the terms of
the $1,800 loan, according to Keesee, she was to have 18 sexual
encounters with him, but when she stopped after three, he filed the
lawsuit.

* One week apart in March, in Ardmore, Okla., and San Francisco,
Calif., schools disciplined female students who reported that they
were raped on campus.  A 15-year-old girl had been briefly
suspended from Ardmore High for having sex at school despite the
fact that her clothes were soaked in blood, as was the locker room
area where she said the rape occurred.  An 18-year-old woman was
threatened with eviction from San Francisco State University
housing because she had kept a hunting knife in her room, illegally,
which she used to chase off the alleged rapist.

* Among the recipients of the American Lung Association's
"Thumb's Up" motion-picture awards, presented at the time of the
Oscars in  March to honor those films and characters who present a
no-smoking image, was Woody Harrelson for his role in
discouraging his movie wife from smoking in "The People Vs.
Larry Flynt."  However, in the movie, both Flynts are heavily
addicted to illegal drugs and seem to be indifferent to sharing
needles for injecting them.

* A leading TV news program in Bogota, Colombia, reported in
January that Jimmy Pacheco had been kidnapped for a month in the
city of Cucuta in a scheme to pry undisclosed concessions from
either friends or co-workers, but that to keep things low-key,
Pacheco was permitted to return home every night so as not to
alarm his family.  The kidnappers would watch Pacheco's house at
night and snatch him again in the morning as he left for work.

LEAST JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDES

* In February, Avi Kostner, 52, pleaded guilty in Newark, N. J., to
the murders of his kids, aged 10 and 12, which he said he
committed because he feared his ex-wife would not raise them as
Jews.  (In arguing successfully against the death penalty, Kostner's
lawyer continually referred to Kostner in front of the jury as merely
"less than perfect.")  And in May, Harry Charles Moore was
executed in Oregon for the 1992 murders of his in-laws because he
was afraid they would persuade his ex-wife and infant daughter to
move to Las Vegas and possibly get involved in prostitution and
drugs.

DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES

* Smoking:  In April, authorities on North Carolina's Figure Eight
island said they suspected the cause of the fire that destroyed the
vacation home of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company president
Andrew J. Schindler was a lighted cigarette butt.  And after a New
Year's Day domestic argument in Campinas, 60 miles north of Sao
Paulo, Brazil, Silas Leite da Silva was Bobbittized by his wife
because, among several reasons, according to police, he would not
stop smoking at home.


==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.490 (News of the Weird, June 27, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
To Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* In May, the Russian press reported that 76 top aviation officials
flying to the U. S. had declined to take the national airline Aeroflot
because of safety concerns, instead flying Finnair.  And in March, a
Stavropol Airlines passenger jet literally fell apart in the air because
of rust, and crashed, killing 50 and becoming the latest Russian
airline tragedy.  And in May, courageous U. S. astronaut Michael
Foale took his turn on the aging Russian space station Mir, which
has been in orbit for 11 years despite a predicted life of three and
which just in 1997 alone has experienced a fire, a breakdown in the
main oxygen system, a partial power loss, and the overheating of
one of its air purification systems.

* In 1993 India Scott dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon
Ventimeglia when she lived in Detroit and moved in with Fletcher
in 1994 when she was about to give birth.  Neither man knew about
the other, and she told each he was the father.  For two years, Scott
managed to juggle the men's visitation rights, but in March 1997
when she announced she was marrying another man and leaving the
area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of
"his" son.  Only then did Ventimeglia and Fletcher find out about
each other.  They took blood tests to determine which was the real
father of the boy they had caring for for more than two years, and
in May the blood test revealed that neither was.

* Connecticut Police Academy:  Robert Jordan filed a lawsuit in
May against the New London, Conn., police department for illegal
discrimination, claiming he was rejected as an officer solely because
he scored too high on an intelligence test, which the department
claims is evidence that Jordan would get bored on the job and be a
bad officer.  And an Associated Press report from New Haven, 50
miles away, revealed that new-recruit police classes include training
in the arts (watercolor drawing, ballet, etc.), which was the
brainchild of former police chief Nicholas Pastore, who himself
resigned in February after admitting that he had fathered a child
with a prostitute.

I'VE GOT MY RIGHTS!

* More than 200 students at Molalla (Ore.) High School petitioned
officials in May to overturn the school's mandatory-brassiere policy
after two girls were sent home for not wearing them.  Protesters
complain that the dress code is not fairly enforced, in that more-
heavily endowed violators are more frequently punished than less-
endowed violators.

* The National Labor Relations Board ruled in December that
Caterpillar Inc. workers who were on strike from June 1994 to
December 1995 were entitled to be compensated for the popcorn,
sodas, ice cream, and other snacks that the company provided
workers who remained on the job during that time.

* In February, the student government at Oxford University in
England appointed a person to patrol the grounds and stop couples'
public displays of affection.  In one place, petting was banned from
the dining hall, and another facility was divided into heavy- and
light-petting-allowed zones.  The government also banned sexual
intercourse in libraries between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m. (although no
student leader claimed to have actual knowledge that it had ever
occurred).  The actions were taken because some students who did
not have dates found the behaviors offensive.

* Two inmates serving life sentences at the Louisiana State
Penitentiary at Angola filed a lawsuit in February claiming officials
have denied them the chapel space and equipment necessary to
observe their religion of Satanism.  Even though they allegedly
cannot practice faithfully, their credentials for the Satanic afterlife
seem substantial:  One plaintiff is in for first-degree murder and the
other for rape, robbery, and kidnapping.

NOT MY FAULT

* According to police in Mesa, Ariz., Jean K. Dooley opened fire
with a handgun in Valley Lutheran Hospital in 1995, intending to
kill her husband, who was a patient there.  (She missed but
managed accidentally hit a nurse and a paramedic.)  In January
1997, she filed a lawsuit against the hospital for negligently failing
to stop her from bringing the gun inside.

* In March, the New York Appellate Division of the Supreme
Court unanimously took away the $15 million award that a jury had
made to Jose Barretto, who is paralyzed from the waist down.
Barretto sued Richmond Hill High School in New York City for
not stopping him from horsing around before volleyball practice in
1988, when, with the coach momentarily out of the gym and
allegedly to show off for his friends, he ran toward the net from 30
feet away, dived over it, and landed on his head.  Said Barretto, "I
accept part of the blame, but what about the responsibility of the
teacher and the school?"

* Federico Perales, 52, was arrested in Fort Worth, Tex., in April
and charged with stabbing his wife to death in front of their two
teenage kids because he was angry that the three of them started
dinner before he arrived at the table.  According to the Peraleses'
son, Perales's last words to his wife were, "You pushed me to the
limits.  You did this to yourself."

CREME DE LA WEIRD

* In April, Mary Durante, the inheritor of a house in Newark, N. J.,
found 133 neatly stacked boxes upon her first visit to the attic, each
with the remains of a cat wrapped in newspapers that dated back to
1945.  She was startled by the discovery but said she knew the
house once belonged to the late Newark Star-Ledger pet columnist,
William H. Hendrix.

* Sandra L. Archer, 35, was sentenced to two years in jail in April
in Omaha, Neb., for disorderly conduct and cruelty to animals after
videotapes surfaced of her having sex with her boyfriend (Mark W.
Williams, 36, who is awaiting trial) atop groups of dogs, including
sick ones, that had been obtained from local shelters.

* The Mainichi Daily News (Tokyo) reported in April that a 24-
year-old local man from Adachi-ku was arrested and charged with
assaulting a 17-year-old schoolgirl on her way home.  According to
police, the man rubbed saliva in the girl's hair as an expression of
anger because her socks were too loose around her ankles.  Police
quoted him as saying, "When I saw those socks, I just went crazy."

* According to a recent Canadian documentary film, Troy
Hurtubise, a scrap-metal dealer from North Bay, Ontario, was so
disappointed at his 1984 first encounter with a grizzly bear that he
embarked on a 10-year, $100,000 project to build a safety suit that
would enable him to wrestle and defeat a grizzly.  He has not yet
found a bear to wrestle, but he has spent money so obsessively on
the suit that he recently had to file for bankruptcy.

WELL-PUT

* Michael Forgue, a Jackman, Maine, restauranteur, expressing
doubt in May that his neighbor James Darrow was guilty of the
murder for which he had been arrested and to which he had
allegedly claimed credit for:  "They don't call [him] 'Big Jim the
Liar' for nothing.  You name it, he lied about it."

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.491 (News of the Weird, July 4, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
To Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* A California pro-prostitution organization called the National
Sexual Rights Council made a fundraising appeal in April for its
benevolent campaign to get teenage hookers off the streets.  For a
$250 donation, the Council's Pretty Woman Committee gives the
donor a T-shirt and a membership card, but for $150,000 (which it
points out is the price of a White House fundraising sleepover), the
seven prostitutes on the committee promise to sleep with the donor,
in Nevada.  (Critics note that the campaign, ostensibly to save
wayward children, would also result in less competition for the
Council's constituency.)

* In April, the London, England, human rights organization African
Rights accused two Roman Catholic nuns from the Benedictine
abbey in Maredret, Belgium, of ordering dozens of frightened Tutsi
refugees out of their compound in Sovu, Rwanda, into the custody
of Hutu soldiers, who almost immediately killed them.  According
to African Rights investigators, the sisters helped the Hutus
willingly in order to protect their compound.

* One aspect of Israeli-Palestinian relations is running smoothly,
according to a May Boston Globe story:  car theft.  Israel has the
highest per capita car theft in the world, and police say several
Israeli-Palestinian car-theft rings operate almost effortlessly fencing
cars and parts to dealers on both sides of the border.

JUST CAN'T STOP MYSELF

* Todd Jacob Sherman, 24, pleaded guilty in Norfolk, Va., in
March to swindling an elderly woman out of $70,000.  Not only did
the woman fall for the initial pitch, in which she would have to wire
Sherman "advance taxes" on a $130,000 sweepstakes prize, but
according to the prosecutor, she continued to wire him money, over
100 times during the next 33 months.

* Lewis Ecker II, a diagnosed sexual sadist, was turned down in his
release bid from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D. C., in
December even though he has made considerable improvement
during his stay, even winning elective office in D. C. in 1990 (and
being re-elected twice since) as an Advisory Neighborhood
Commissioner.  However, according to hospital officials, Ecker
hurt his chances of release by secretly composing 21 sexual-sadist
narratives (discovered in a search of the office he had been given
the privilege of using) that featured himself as the protagonist who
humiliated and injured female victims.

* The executive director of the New York State Council on
Problem Gambling told the New York Times in May that printing
its 800 telephone number on lottery tickets in case gambling addicts
need to call for help has resulted instead in many calls from players
desperate for help in selecting the winning numbers.  And operators
of the Casino Niagara in Niagara Falls, Ontario, told the Ottawa
Citizen in April that customers' urinating around slot machines has
become a severe problem.  (Reluctant to leave a machine that they
are certain will soon pay off, some customers urinate into the
plastic coin cups supplied by the casino, some wear adult diapers
into the casino, and some merely urinate on the floor beside the
machines.)

* Paul Millhouse, 49, pleaded not guilty in February to assault on
an animal after he was arrested in Lakeside, Calif., near San Diego.
He is suspected of being the man sought for 11 years for various
horse stalkings (the very first one of which was reported to police
by Joan Embery, the San Diego Zoo spokesperson who frequently
appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson).
According to police in the latest incident, Millhouse was videotaped
entering a private pasture, taking off his clothes, and fondling a
horse.

PEOPLE WITH TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS

* In December, a man from southern England named Nigel paid
about $128,000 at a London auction for the personalized license
plate "N1 GEL."  Eighty other plates brought in about $2.7 million.
A month before that in London, the much less wealthy Dave Parker
spent about $40 to have a plate matching his name:  He paid a filing
fee to change his name legally to [Mr.] C 539 FUG, which is his
current license plate.

* The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario) reported in February that
local physician Ron Charach, who is the author of a volume of
poems by Canadian doctors, recently had one of his works selected
to be published in the prestigious British medical journal, The
Lancet.  The title of the poem is the same as the last two words in
this passage:  "In silence after heavy rain / you can hear prostates
growing."

* In a brief interview published in Fortune magazine in February,
Todd Sloane, a marketing executive with Publishers Clearing
House (the $10 million sweepstakes people) was asked whether
entrants worry that the PCH prize patrol can't find them if they win:
"We get thousands of calls from entrants warning us their house is
hard to get to [or] they'll be at Uncle Jack's, whatever."

* TV Mania:  According to research commissioned by the Weather
Channel cable TV channel and disclosed by a company executive in
April, one in five viewers watches the channel for at least three
hours at a sitting.  The company calls these people "weather-
involved."   And Andrew Thomas, 27, apparently healthy except for
depression at being laid off four years earlier at his job in
Glamorgan, Wales, died in April of natural causes in front of the
TV set he had watched almost constantly since then.

* In a poll of Ontario residents commissioned by Global Television
and reported by the Toronto Star in December, it was revealed that
a majority believe in miracles, although the Star pointed out that
some respondents' standards are lower than others, such as in one
man's example of a miracle he had witnessed: "I went to someone's
house and got a good deal on a power tool that I wanted for a long
time."

WELL-PUT

* Patricia Walsh, Carmel, Calif., defending in May her decision to
spend $6,000 to dress up a rock she found to look like Gen.
Douglas McArthur:  "I'm an old lady, and I can amuse myself doing
whatever I like."

* In April, Sir Roger Penrose, a British math professor who has
worked with Stephen Hawking on such topics as relativity, black
holes, and whether time has a beginning, filed a copyright-
infringement lawsuit against the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, which
Penrose said copied a pattern he created (a pattern demonstrating
that "a nonrepeating pattern could exist in nature") for its Kleenex
quilted toilet paper.  Penrose said he doesn't like litigation but,
"When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by
a multinational to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the
work of a Knight of the Realm, then a last stand must be taken."

* Philip Morris president James Morgan, in a lawsuit deposition
released in May, pointing out why he believes cigarettes are not
addictive:  "I love Gummi Bears [candy]. . . and I want Gummi
Bears and I like Gummi Bears and I eat Gummi Bears and I don't
like it when I don't eat my Gummi Bears, but I'm certainly not
addicted to them."

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.492 (News of the Weird, July 11, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
To Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* At a May hearing, the Ohio State Medical Board began
considering whether to discipline Toledo pediatrician Gary F.
Gladieux, 43, who was accused of having sex with three women
during their visits to his office.  The Board cited a 1991 American
Medical Association ruling that physician-patient sex is unethical,
but Gladieux says the ruling doesn't apply to him because he had
sex not with his patients but with their mothers, who had brought
the patients in for their appointments.

* Brothers Geoffrey and Aaron Kuffner were arrested in New
Orleans in June and charged with terrorism as the ones who had
recently mailed or hand-delivered suspicious packages to local
government and news media offices.  The packages contained
innocuous items (which nonetheless were frightening enough that
two offices called for evacuations) and a four-page manifesto
vowing that "Violent Acts of Consciousness Have Only Begun."
According to police, the men's goal was to call attention to public
ignorance of poetry and that among their demands was that all state
inaugural speeches be written in iambic pentameter.

* According to a March dispatch from remote Sabah, Malaysia, in
London's Daily Telegraph, one or two orangutans disappear from
the Sepilok nature rehabilitation park every month, and some have
been found in the homes of childless plantation workers and
wearing toddlers' clothes and with their heads shaved to look more
human.

OOPS!

* In May, alarmed employees of the Women's Community Health
Center in Little Rock, Ark., called for emergency police coverage
after a car carrying three nuns pulled into its parking lot.  The
Center feared the nuns were the first stage of a large protest against
the abortions performed there, but after several squad cars
converged on them, the nuns disclosed that they were part of a
cloistered order on the way to a doctor's appointment when their
car developed alternator trouble.

* Latest Terrible Heating-Oil Accident:  In December, while Tom
Deline was away, his home in Madoc, Ontario, took delivery of 800
liters of heating oil, which was unfortunate because he doesn't use
heating oil anymore.  The delivery was meant for the house two
doors down.  Deline still has his old standpipe outside but no
storage tank; he said he hopes cleanup work on his basement will
be done in time for him to move back in by the end of 1997.

* In March in Memphis, Tenn., Brandon B. Hughes, 18, in court to
challenge traffic violations that would probably have earned him
only a fine, was arrested on far more serious charges when he
raised his hand on the witness stand to take his oath, and a packet
containing a gram of cocaine fell out of his pocket.

* Latest Highway Truck Spills:  a load of french fries in Prince
Edward Island, Canada, in April; fortune cookies and duck sauce
on state road 20 outside Charlottesville, Va., in April; five tons of
chicken innards on Interstate 64 in Hampton, Va., in June; 20 tons
of canned Campbell's soup on Interstate 5 in San Diego in
February; 200 gallons of human waste on Interstate 270 in
Columbus, Ohio, in April; and the next month in Columbus, and a
little too late, 22 tons of plastic garbage bags.

* Phillip Michael was acquitted of a murder charge in Edmonton,
Alberta, in May, despite a damaging jailhouse letter he had written
to a friend explicitly orchestrating the testimony Michael needed so
that he would beat the rap.  The letter was never received by the
friend, however; according to the prosecutor, Michael had missed
the friend's street address by one digit, and the letter was returned
to the jail, where it was lawfully opened and thus used in court.

OVERREACTIONS

* Dental patient Nelson Berrios, 48, suffered a minor back injury in
New York City in April when he improvidently bolted out of the
chair and jumped out a second-story window after police came
rushing into his dentist's office.  (They were after the dentist.)  And
in March, seven people jumped out of a second-story window in
New York City after they mistakenly thought a police drug raid
next door was meant for them.  (Police arrested those seven, as
well, after they found a bound, kidnapped woman in the apartment
from which they jumped.)

* James Shenkel was charged with aggravated assault in Pittsburgh,
Pa., in May after rushing to his sister's defense in a domestic
dispute.  Michael Stefanowicz had allegedly promised to cook
manicotti for his wife Mary (Shenkel's sister) but instead fixed the
less-complicated spaghetti, provoking her to call him lazy, which
caused Michael to call her a fat pig, and when it started to get
physical, Shenkel allegedly fired a shot at Michael that missed.

MEDICAL MILESTONES

* Two Swiss neuroscientists, writing in the May issue of the journal
Neurology, presented findings on several dozen people who were
previously indifferent to so-called fine food but who developed a
passion for it following injuries to the right front quadrants of their
brains.  Citing analogous cases of teetotalers who became
alcoholics after such brain damage, the researchers theorized that
the injury suppresses a control mechanism.

* In an April Times of London report on his forthcoming book Why
Is Sex Fun?, UCLA physiology professor Jared Diamond claims
that technology will soon permit men to breastfeed their children,
though psychological barriers will remain (that is, the men will be
ridiculed).  Diamond says men have an undeveloped ability to
produce milk and that there are thousands of instances on record in
which hormonal imbalances have produced actual male lactation.

* Bogota (Colombia)'s leading newspaper El Tiempo reported in
May that doctors had spotted a pair of surgical tweezers on a
stomach x-ray of Silvio Jimenez, 67, and set an appointment to
remove them.  They were mistakenly left there during an operation
in 1950, but Jimenez said that only in recent months had he begun
to feel abdominal pain.

* In April researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine announced they had created a strain of mice twice the
usual size, with broad shoulders and massive hips.  The researchers
knocked out a gene that inhibits muscle growth and believe the
same thing can be done for chickens and cattle.

* In February, sailor Peter Goss, 35, 1,300 miles off the coast of
Chile in an around-the-world yacht race, performed surgery on
himself to repair an inflamed tendon, operating only on instructions
faxed to him from a French doctor.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.493 (News of the Weird, July 18, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
To Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* It took 26 years, but in June, former inmate Frank Smith, 64,
became the first person to win damages based on the deadly riot at
Attica prison in New York in 1971.  A jury awarded him $4 million
based on injuries from his torture by guards after they recaptured
the prison from the inmates.  1,280 other Attica-related claims
against the prison are pending, totaling $2.8 billion.

* In May, the Minnesota Court of Appeals reversed a $1 million
award by a jury that had found parishioner Dale Scheffler, 30, to
have been molested at age 14 by Catholic priest Robert Kapoun,
finding that Scheffler's lawsuit was barred by the statute of
limitations.  Two weeks later, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and
Minneapolis announced that it had filed with the court a claim of
$4,937 against Scheffler to recover part of its legal expenses since
the Archdiocese is now regarded as the winning party.  Father
Kapoun filed for $1,081.

* The Meadowdale High School (Dayton, Ohio)'s girls 1600-meter
relay team was disqualified in the semifinals of the state
championship meet in June because it violated the rule that requires
matching colors when two or more members of a relay team decide
to wear apparel that can be seen under their uniforms.  Two
Meadowdale runners were wearing white sports bras, and two were
wearing black ones.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

* In May, the Convent nightclub opened on Armitage Street in
Chicago, a traditional dance club but themed after the Catholic
Church.  The non-Catholic owners, sisters Surita and Shar
Mansukhani, feature restrooms labeled Hymns and Hers, house
drinks called "Holy Water" and "Confessionals," waitresses in
typical Catholic schoolgirl outfits (plaid skirt, white blouse, knee-
high stockings), and bartenders in priests' collars.  The VIP rooms
are Heaven (upstairs) and Hell (lower level).  Said Surita, "We're
certainly not intending to be sacrilegious in any way."

* Bangkok's largest English-language newspaper, The Nation,
reported in February on a raging war by coffin sellers in the
southern Thailand city of Nakhon Si Thammarat.  Eight shops are
located across the street from the city's largest hospital, and bribes
of hospital personnel for clients are common.  A television station
reported that one shop's agent sneaked into several hospital rooms
to disconnect oxygen to terminal patients whose relatives were
already known to the shop and thus might have given that shop
their business.

* In a May San Jose Mercury News story, local death-scene
cleanup professional Neal Smither recalled his most trying cases:
(1) the April 1997 case of an 82-year-old hermit whose house
contained 16 dead chickens, 2,000 dead rats, two inches of rat feces
in all kitchen cabinets, and a bathtub and toilet filled and rock-hard
with human feces and (2) the September 1996 case of a man dead
for a week in his unventilated apartment and whose body had
essentially oozed into the sofa.

* An April issue of New Scientist magazine reported that
Australia's national research organization CSIRO has already made
three sales of its "phalloblaster" device (at about $3,500 [U.S.])
that inflates the genitalia of dead insects to make it easier to classify
them.  Its official name is the "vesica everter," and it will work on
genitalia as small as those of moths with wingspans of 2 millimeters.

* An April Wall Street Journal story reported on the work of
Japanese engineer Dr. Hiroshi Kanamori, who has been pulverizing
simulated moon rocks for the last two years in order to develop
cement that would be used for building condominiums on the moon
(with golf courses, naturally).  Several Japanese construction
companies have spent $40 million on moon-based projects.

FAMILY VALUES

* Parents of the Year:  In May, a 7-year-old girl was murdered in a
restroom stall at a Primm, Nev., casino at 4 a.m. while her father,
Leroy Iverson, gambled; security guards had already asked him
twice to take custody of the girl, who had been roaming the casino
for hours.  And in June, authorities in Cincinnati, Ohio, removed
three toddlers from the feces-strewn bedroom they were locked
into for up to 12 hours a day; their mother, Sandra Hacker,
allegedly did not want them disturbing her while she was on the
Internet.  And in Chicago in May, Dianna Meeks, 25, was charged
with manslaughter for ignoring a doctor's order to take her 2-
month-old, severely malnourished son straight to a hospital; instead,
Meeks went shopping and then had a manicure at the Sunny Nails
shop, where the boy died.

* Charles S. Wooton, 27, was arrested in May and accused of
putting out a contract to have his mother killed for insurance money
on Mother's Day as she left work in the cafeteria at a hospital in
Hazard, Ky.  (The place was important because Wooton reportedly
wanted also to be able to sue the hospital for lack of security.)  Said
Det. Dan Smoot, in Wooton's defense, "I'm not convinced he knew
it was Mother's Day."

* Manalapan, N. J., kindergarten teacher Lawrence Cohen, 31, was
arrested in April and charged with making Internet arrangements to
meet an 11-year-old boy for sex (which turned out to be a police
sting).  At a hearing in Newark, he was ordered back to jail pending
trial, and upon being led away spotted his parents in the courtroom,
whereupon he lashed out at them in a tirade for declining to put up
their home as bail.  "How could you!" he reportedly shrieked at
them.

* At a child-custody hearing in May in Calgary, Alberta, mother
Caroline Johnson-Steeves said her relationship with father Dr. King
Tak Lee of Toronto was clearly defined by contract:  He would
provide the sperm and $300 per month in support, but she would be
the sole parent, though he could drop by to see the child if he were
ever in Calgary.  Johnson-Steeves said Dr. Lee had  recently begun
to give orders on such things as immunizations for the child, how to
wash dishes, and how to dispose of grass clippings in the yard.  A
judge granted Dr. Lee limited access to the child, based on his
financial support.

INEXPLICABLE

* Elementary school principal Lyla Ann Wolfenbarger, 46, was
charged with misdemeanor trespass in Pocatello, Idaho, in February
based on photographs Richard Clothier took in an effort to find out
who had been running onto his property since September 1996 on
Sundays and defecating, even once taunting him as she ran by.
Clothier said he was "floored" to learn of the woman's occupation
and says he had never met her.  Wolfenbarger pleaded not guilty.

* Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper reported in May that
Britain's world-renowned, government-owned broadcaster BBC
will spend about $8.6 million in public money for a new logo, in
which its letters will stand up straight instead of at their present 17-
degree tilt.

* According to USA Today in May, a bill pending in the Texas
legislature would allow anyone with a record of mental illness
nonetheless to obtain a concealed weapon permit if approved by a
doctor.

==============================

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICES
[Except for the last paragraph, giving a new, alternative address
for Chuck Shepherd's CompuServe mailbox, these notices
unchanged since December 27, 1996]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD, founded in 1988, is a nationally syndicated
newspaper column distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Individuals may have the columns mailed to them electronically,
free of charge, approximately three weeks after the cover date,
which is the date when most subscribing newspapers will publish
the column.  Send a message to notw-request@nine.org with the
Subject line of Subscribe.  To read these News of the Weird newspaper
columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html
(That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no
audio.  Just text.  Deal with it.)

COPYRIGHT:  Neither the name News of the Weird nor any
issue of News of the Weird nor any portion of any issue of News
of the Weird may be used for any commercial purpose
whatsoever.  One example of such prohibited use is to use part or
all of an issue of News of the Weird as material on a commercial
Web page or on a commercial message.  ("Commercial" includes
Web sites or messages that contain any paid or bartered
advertising.)  If a Web site or message contains utterly no
commercial content, and it is freely accessible by the public with
no fee charged, portions of News of the Weird may be used
without prior permission provided that the portion(s) is(are)
accurately quoted and identified on the Web site or message as
from News of the Weird and this copyright notice is affixed at
some point:  Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

BOOKS BY CHUCK SHEPHERD:  The Concrete Enema and
Other News of the Weird Classics by Chuck Shepherd (Andrews
and McMeel, 1996, $6.95) is now in bookstores everywhere.
Or you can order by mail from Atomic Books, 1018 N.
Charles St., Baltimore MD 21201 (add $2 postage for the first
book, $3 for two to the same address, $4 for 3, and $5 for more
than 3) (credit card orders 1-800-778-6246,
http://www.atomicbooks.com).  Or by credit card  from
Andrews and McMeel, 1-800-642-6480 (they bill $2 postage per
book).  Also by Chuck Shepherd and available at only the larger
bookstores in America:  News of the Weird (Plume Books, 1989,
$9), More News of the Weird (Plume, 1990, $9), Beyond News
of the Weird (Plume, 1991, $9), and America's Least Competent
Criminals (HarperPerennial, 1993, $9).  (The 1989, 1990, and
1991 books were co-authored with John J. Kohut and Roland
Sweet.)

HARDCOPIES:  The weekly newspaper columns, as well as
Chuck Shepherd's weird-news 'zine View from the Ledge (now
in its 16th year) are available in hardcopy, but unlike with
cyberspace, they're not free.  Send a buck for sample copies to
P. O. Box 8306, St. Petersburg FL 33738.

AUTHENTICITY:  All news stories mentioned in News of the
Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the
U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in
other countries or other reputable magazines and journals).  No
so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended
to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

ADDRESSES:  To send mail and messages to Chuck Shepherd,
write Weird@CompuServe.com or P. O. Box 8306, St.
Petersburg FL 33738.



WEIRDNUZ.493 (News of the Weird, July 18, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright notice at the end of this transmission.
To Unsubscribe:  notw-request@nine.org with subject Unsubscribe

LEAD STORIES

* It took 26 years, but in June, former inmate Frank Smith, 64,
became the first person to win damages based on the deadly riot at
Attica prison in New York in 1971.  A jury awarded him $4 million
based on injuries from his torture by guards after they recaptured
the prison from the inmates.  1,280 other Attica-related claims
against the prison are pending, totaling $2.8 billion.

* In May, the Minnesota Court of Appeals reversed a $1 million
award by a jury that had found parishioner Dale Scheffler, 30, to
have been molested at age 14 by Catholic priest Robert Kapoun,
finding that Scheffler's lawsuit was barred by the statute of
limitations.  Two weeks later, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and
Minneapolis announced that it had filed with the court a claim of
$4,937 against Scheffler to recover part of its legal expenses since
the Archdiocese is now regarded as the winning party.  Father
Kapoun filed for $1,081.

* The Meadowdale High School (Dayton, Ohio)'s girls 1600-meter
relay team was disqualified in the semifinals of the state
championship meet in June because it violated the rule that requires
matching colors when two or more members of a relay team decide
to wear apparel that can be seen under their uniforms.  Two
Meadowdale runners were wearing white sports bras, and two were
wearing black ones.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

* In May, the Convent nightclub opened on Armitage Street in
Chicago, a traditional dance club but themed after the Catholic
Church.  The non-Catholic owners, sisters Surita and Shar
Mansukhani, feature restrooms labeled Hymns and Hers, house
drinks called "Holy Water" and "Confessionals," waitresses in
typical Catholic schoolgirl outfits (plaid skirt, white blouse, knee-
high stockings), and bartenders in priests' collars.  The VIP rooms
are Heaven (upstairs) and Hell (lower level).  Said Surita, "We're
certainly not intending to be sacrilegious in any way."

* Bangkok's largest English-language newspaper, The Nation,
reported in February on a raging war by coffin sellers in the
southern Thailand city of Nakhon Si Thammarat.  Eight shops are
located across the street from the city's largest hospital, and bribes
of hospital personnel for clients are common.  A television station
reported that one shop's agent sneaked into several hospital rooms
to disconnect oxygen to terminal patients whose relatives were
already known to the shop and thus might have given that shop
their business.

* In a May San Jose Mercury News story, local death-scene
cleanup professional Neal Smither recalled his most trying cases:
(1) the April 1997 case of an 82-year-old hermit whose house
contained 16 dead chickens, 2,000 dead rats, two inches of rat feces
in all kitchen cabinets, and a bathtub and toilet filled and rock-hard
with human feces and (2) the September 1996 case of a man dead
for a week in his unventilated apartment and whose body had
essentially oozed into the sofa.

* An April issue of New Scientist magazine reported that
Australia's national research organization CSIRO has already made
three sales of its "phalloblaster" device (at about $3,500 [U.S.])
that inflates the genitalia of dead insects to make it easier to classify
them.  Its official name is the "vesica everter," and it will work on
genitalia as small as those of moths with wingspans of 2 millimeters.

* An April Wall Street Journal story reported on the work of
Japanese engineer Dr. Hiroshi Kanamori, who has been pulverizing
simulated moon rocks for the last two years in order to develop
cement that would be used for building condominiums on the moon
(with golf courses, naturally).  Several Japanese construction
companies have spent $40 million on moon-based projects.

FAMILY VALUES

* Parents of the Year:  In May, a 7-year-old girl was murdered in a
restroom stall at a Primm, Nev., casino at 4 a.m. while her father,
Leroy Iverson, gambled; security guards had already asked him
twice to take custody of the girl, who had been roaming the casino
for hours.  And in June, authorities in Cincinnati, Ohio, removed
three toddlers from the feces-strewn bedroom they were locked
into for up to 12 hours a day; their mother, Sandra Hacker,
allegedly did not want them disturbing her while she was on the
Internet.  And in Chicago in May, Dianna Meeks, 25, was charged
with manslaughter for ignoring a doctor's order to take her 2-
month-old, severely malnourished son straight to a hospital; instead,
Meeks went shopping and then had a manicure at the Sunny Nails
shop, where the boy died.

* Charles S. Wooton, 27, was arrested in May and accused of
putting out a contract to have his mother killed for insurance money
on Mother's Day as she left work in the cafeteria at a hospital in
Hazard, Ky.  (The place was important because Wooton reportedly
wanted also to be able to sue the hospital for lack of security.)  Said
Det. Dan Smoot, in Wooton's defense, "I'm not convinced he knew
it was Mother's Day."

* Manalapan, N. J., kindergarten teacher Lawrence Cohen, 31, was
arrested in April and charged with making Internet arrangements to
meet an 11-year-old boy for sex (which turned out to be a police
sting).  At a hearing in Newark, he was ordered back to jail pending
trial, and upon being led away spotted his parents in the courtroom,
whereupon he lashed out at them in a tirade for declining to put up
their home as bail.  "How could you!" he reportedly shrieked at
them.

* At a child-custody hearing in May in Calgary, Alberta, mother
Caroline Johnson-Steeves said her relationship with father Dr. King
Tak Lee of Toronto was clearly defined by contract:  He would
provide the sperm and $300 per month in support, but she would be
the sole parent, though he could drop by to see the child if he were
ever in Calgary.  Johnson-Steeves said Dr. Lee had  recently begun
to give orders on such things as immunizations for the child, how to
wash dishes, and how to dispose of grass clippings in the yard.  A
judge granted Dr. Lee limited access to the child, based on his
financial support.

INEXPLICABLE

* Elementary school principal Lyla Ann Wolfenbarger, 46, was
charged with misdemeanor trespass in Pocatello, Idaho, in February
based on photographs Richard Clothier took in an effort to find out
who had been running onto his property since September 1996 on
Sundays and defecating, even once taunting him as she ran by.
Clothier said he was "floored" to learn of the woman's occupation
and says he had never met her.  Wolfenbarger pleaded not guilty.

* Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper reported in May that
Britain's world-renowned, government-owned broadcaster BBC
will spend about $8.6 million in public money for a new logo, in
which its letters will stand up straight instead of at their present 17-
degree tilt.

* According to USA Today in May, a bill pending in the Texas
legislature would allow anyone with a record of mental illness
nonetheless to obtain a concealed weapon permit if approved by a
doctor.