News of the Weird By Chuck Shepherd

[Tomspy77]

When I was young, I had the book News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd, a collection of weird news items that Chuck collected and laced into book form.

newsoftheweird.com/index.html

i thought it would be nice to have a thread of some of Chuck's highlights, but make sure to visit the site above and get Chuck's books, these are only some of the weird news items covered in his free email newsletter.

So let's see my faves from this email:

* Energy West, the natural gas supplier in Great Falls, Mont., had
tried recently to raise awareness of leaks by distributing
scratch-and-sniff cards to residents exposing gas's distinctive,
rotten-egg smell. In May, workers cast aside several cartons of
leftover cards, which were hauled off and disposed of by crushing--
which released the scent and produced a massive blanket of odor
over downtown Great Falls, resulting in a flurry of panicked calls to
firefighters about gas leaks. [Great Falls Tribune, 5-8-2013]

Ruben Pavon was identified by
surveillance video in Derry, N.H., in April snatching a grill from the
front porch of a thrift store. Pavon explained to police that the
store's name, "Finders Keepers," indicated to him that the objects
were free for the taking and admitted that he had previously taken
items from the porch.

* Paul Gardener and Chad Leakey were arrested in Tempe, Ariz., in
May and charged with a spree of car burglaries. According to
police, the men were trying various cars' doors, looking for any that
were unlocked, when they inadvertently opened a back door of an
unmarked police car. The men had apparently not noticed (until too
late) that two uniformed officers were sitting in the front seat and
had also failed to notice that cage wiring separated the back seat
from the front seat. [AzFamily.com (Phoenix), 5-14-2013]

[sherlew99]

Ooh, that must have been a K-9 unit. lol

[sherlew99]

Just think what would have happened if it was the Doctor's K-9 in there.

[Tomspy77]

Intruder alert!

How did he get in?

In through the window...

[sherlew99]

I can see K-9's nose laser coming out. That would make the hapless thief take note.

[Tomspy77]

Some new ones here...remember there are a lot more stories at Chuck's website:

* A marriage-encouraging intiative in the Sehore District of India's
Madhya Pradesh state awards gifts and financial assistance to
couples agreeing to wed in mass ceremonies, but the country also
suffers from a notorious toilet shortage. Consequently, the District
announced in May that to qualify for the government benefits, the
groom must submit to officials a photo of himself beside his own
toilet to prove that he and his wife will have home sanitation.
[Times of India, 5-21-2013]

* More than 50 Iowa sex offenders have open-carry gun permits,
thanks to a two-year-old state law that requires any disapproving
sheriff to demonstrate "probable cause" in advance that a sex
offender will use a gun illegally in order to reject his application.
Before that, a sheriff could use a sex offender's previous felony
conviction as sufficient cause. Said Washington County Sheriff
Jerry Dunbar, "[J]ust the presence of a gun on a hip could be a
threat to get [sex victims] to cooperate." [Des Moines Register, 5-5-
2013]

* Congress established the Inter-agency Working Group in 2009 to
set guidelines on advertising of healthy foods to children, and public
comments on the guidelines are now being posted. General Mills
appeared among the most alarmed by the proposals, according to its
comments on the Federal Trade Commission website (as disclosed
by Scientific American in May). Of the 100 most commonly
consumed food and beverages in America, GM asserted, 88 would
fail the IWG standards, and if everyone in America started
following the health recommendations, General Mills would lose
$503 billion per year in sales--unless, of course, it altered part of its
product line). [Scientific American, 5-19-2013]

* Dennis Gholston, 45, with outstanding traffic warrants in
Pennsylvania, decided in May that, even though alone in his car, he
could not resist using a high-occupancy vehicle lane (HOV) on the
New Jersey Turnpike near Carteret. His decision was even more
unsound because, according to the officer who stopped him for the
HOV violation, Gholston was hauling about $4,000 worth of heroin
in the car, and he was charged with intent to distribute.
[Star-Ledger (Newark), 5-31-2013]

[Tomspy77]

* Christie's auction house in New York City reported that a May
15th sale of a painting of the late actress Bea Arthur--nude from the
waist up--by the artist John Currin in 1991 had sold for $1.9
million. Currin said that he made the painting from a photograph of
Arthur clothed, and Arthur, known for her roles in TV's "Maude"
and "Golden Girls," appears younger in face and body in the
painting than on the TV shows. [NBC News, 5-17-2013]

* Maryland state troopers caught sight of a drummer working out on
the shoulder of Interstate 695 near Windsor Mill Road in Baltimore
on May 21st, at about 10:30 a.m. According to the troopers, the
man had run out of gas and had decided to set up his drum kit to
practice while he waited for assistance. When a utility truck
arrived, supplying gasoline, the drummer packed up and resumed
his travels. [Baltimore Sun, 5-21-2013]

Philip Garcia, 41,
was arrested in April in Perris, Calif., after he allegedly crawled
naked through the doggy door in a neighboring home and
announced to the female resident that he was there for sex. [New
York Daily News, 5-16-2013] [KCBS-TV (Los Angeles) 4-18-
2013]

A 38-year-old man was arrested in
Wichita, Kan., in June and charged with trying to rob a Spangles
restaurant by presenting a cashier with a demand note. He was
arrested a short time later--and easily, because the demand for
money was written on the back of a check-reorder form that
contained his name and address.

[Tomspy77]

Rewarding the Breast Disguises: (1) An April crime report in San
Francisco, noting that a female driver had rammed another car in a
parking-space dispute, noted that the victim gave officers little help.
The man could not tell officers the model car that hit him, and
certainly not a license-plate number, but he "was able to give a
detailed description of the suspect's cleavage." No arrest was
reported.

In Kobe, Japan, in May, an unemployed, 32-year-old man carried
out a minor theft (stealing a wallet from a parked scooter)
apparently just to be locked up in the world famous city. Besides
being the home of Kobe beef, it is acclaimed for its French,
Chinese, and octopus cuisines, and in fact, Kobe's Nagata Ward
Precinct is renowned for the special gourmet boxed meals prepared
by local bento shops, delivered daily to prisoners, which the thief
said was foremost on his mind. [Japan Today, 5-18-2013]

City councilman Simon Parkes, 58, confessed to a reporter in
June that he had had an extramarital affair--in fact, an
extraterrestrial extramarital affair--with the nine-foot-tall Cat
Queen, and that she had born him a child. Parkes said the Cat
Queen is biding her time until technology is available to bring her
and the child to Earth. Said Parkes, "There are plenty of people in
my position who don't choose to come out and say it because they
are terrified it will destroy their careers." Parkes said his wife
knows about his periodic meetings with Cat Queen and is "very
unhappy, clearly." [Fox News, 6-18-2013] alieno ;;'ufo

[Tomspy77]

* Animal Sacrifice--in America: In September, Orthodox Jewish
communities once again staged traditional kaparot, in which
chickens are killed in a prescribed way for the purpose of
"transferring" a believer's latest sins over to the chicken (whose
death banishes the sins). (In many such ceremonies, the chickens
are donated for food, but protesters in Los Angeles criticized rogue
practitioners who simply tossed carcasses into the trash.) In
November Miami-Dade County animal services found a
severely-injured chicken with a family's 4x6 photograph protruding
from its chest, having been haphazardly "implanted," along with a
note containing several hand-written names, apparently a casualty of
local Santeria services. [Los Angeles Times, 9-11-2013]
[WSVN-TV (Miami), 11-18-2013]

* Toilets are always a favorite protest symbol, most recently
employed by David Labbe, disputing a zoning decision by officials
in Augusta, Maine, preventing the sale of his house to Dunkin
Donuts (for, he said, three times what he paid), and he has begun
lining his property with up to 100 discarded toilets. Augusta-native
Labbe says he has given up on his city and his neighbors (who fear
traffic problems if a Dunkin Donuts opens). (On the same day,
coincidentally, toilets made news in Los Angeles, where Yo Yo Li
was about to open the city's first toilet-themed restaurant, patterned
after several in Taiwan in which diners squat at tables and eat off
commode-shaped serving vessels.) [Portland Press Herald, 10-14-
2013] [Los Angeles Times, 10-14-2013]


* In November, Michael Brown, 19, became the most recent person
with poor decision-making skills forced to report to a police station
(this, in College Station, Tex.) in the middle of the night to ask that
officers please remove the handcuffs he had been playing around
with. (Following the officers' mandatory records check, it was
learned that Brown had an arrest warrant for criminal mischief, and
following a mandatory search, that he also had two ounces of
marijuana in his pocket.) [The Eagle (Bryan-College Station),
11-14-2013]

* It was Linda Ducharme's turn in the spotlight in November as one
of a seemingly increasing number of people who commit to
bethrothing themselves to inanimate objects ("objectophiles,"
"mechaphiles"). The Gibsonton, Fla., woman's spouse is a Ferris
wheel called the Sky Diva, and their relationship was chronicled on
the Logo TV channel's show "What!?" (Most famously, Erika La
Tour Eiffel of San Francisco staged her 2008 wedding to the Eiffel
Tower.) [WTSP-TV (St. Petersburg, Fla.), 11-13-2013] [Daily
Telegraph (London), 6-4-2008]

* Many men have fallen for underage-sex stings (tricked by NBC's
"To Catch a Predator" or by law enforcement nationwide), but
perhaps Cliff Oshman, 64, of Daytona Beach is the first to have
brought his wife and young daughter along to meet the girl he was
seducing. Oshman was arrested in October, and as usual, the
"victim" did not exist except as a persona of an undercover cop.
[Orlando Sentinel, 10-5-2013]

* A formal investigation into the strange death of British
intelligence code-breaker Gareth Williams concluded in November
with a police judgment that the death was an accident, despite the
body's having been discovered inside a zippered and padlocked
garment bag in an otherwise unused bathtub in his London
apartment. An earlier inquest into the 2010 death had
unsatisfactorily failed to rule out foul play, setting up the police
examination, but two facts stood out, according to the officer in
charge : The key to the padlock was found within easy reach of the
bag, and, according to experts, even though no usable fingerprints
or DNA was found in the apartment, it had not been "deep-cleaned"
(as might be expected in a death with intel-op implications). [New
York Times, 11-14-2013]

The part about the lady loving the Ferris wheel reminds me of an old News From the Spirit World piece from the site's early days (Those heady days of February 2012 lol):

Woman ‘In Love’ With Statue of Liberty

We all love the Statue Of Liberty, that shining beacon of hope and freedom that greeted so many of the immigrants as they came to America.


But Amanda Whittaker loves Lady Liberty in a way that many might find a bit strange.

Whittaker suffers from objectum sexuality, a rare condition that causes the person to fall in love with inanimate objects rather then people.

[sherlew99]

What happened to the half-dead chicken found in the dumpster is just wrong. I say that if you have to kill an animal, do it quickly and humanly.

[Tomspy77]

I agree, some people amaze me with their cruelty and disregard of life.

But we are only Human, look at our history ya know?

However by now you would think we would have been able to improve on those areas a lot more then we have.

[sherlew99]

Yes, you'd think we would, but alas no. The cruelty of certain members of humankind to fellow humans and other species is appalling.

[Tomspy77]

* The Bank of England, arguing before the UK's Parliamentary
Commission on Banking Standards in October, warned against
limiting the bonuses that bankers have come to expect from their
lucrative deals--because that might encroach on their "human
rights." The Bank suggested it is a human-rights violation even to
ask senior executives to demonstrate that they tried hard to comply
with banking laws (because it is the government's job to prove
violations). [Huffington Post UK, 10-8-2013]

* Slick Talkers: (1) A young woman, accosted by a robber on
Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill in October, told the man she was a
low-paid intern--but an intern for the National Security Agency and
that within minutes of robbing her, the man would be tracked down
by ubiquitous NSA surveillance. Said she, later (reported the
Washington Examiner), the man just "looked at me and ran away
[empty-handed]."

A 29-year-old employee of Sullivan East
High School in Blountville, Tenn., swore to police on the scene in
October that she was not the one who took money from a co-
worker's purse, and she voluntarily stripped to near-nakedness to
demonstrate her innocence. "See, I don't have it." Moments later,
an officer found the missing $27 stuffed in the woman's shoe.

Larry Poulos was stopped on an Arlington, Tex.,
street in September, bleeding from a head wound and complaining
that he had just been robbed by two men. A friend of Poulos later
corroborated that, but police also learned that the money Poulos had
been carrying was the proceeds of his having robbed a credit union
earlier that evening. He was treated for his wounds and then
arrested.

A 27-year-old yoga fanatic in St. Austell, England,
drowned in a pit in May during a well-publicized attempt to create
an "out of body experience" to get as close to death as possible but
without going over the line. [San Francisco Examiner, 9-4-2013]
[Cornish Guardian (Cornwall), 10-30-2013]

www.WeirdUniverse.net, WeirdNews at earthlink dot net, and
P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679.

[Tomspy77]

* America's foremost advocate for frontal lobotomies as
"treatment" for mental disorder, the late Dr. Walter Freeman,
performed an estimated 3,500 during the 1940s and 1950s before
opposition finally solidified against him, according to a December
2013 investigation by the Wall Street Journal. At the peak of his
influence, he was so confident that he demonstrated the procedure
to skeptics by hammering an icepick ("from his own kitchen," the
Journal reported) into both eye sockets of an electrical-shocked
patient and "toggl[ing]" the picks around the brain tissue certain
that he was severing "correctly." For years, Freeman (a neurologist
untrained in surgery) marshaled positive feedback from enough
patients and families for the procedure to survive criticism, and he
spent his final years (until his death in 1972) securing patient
testimonials to "prove" the validity of lobotomies. [Wall Street
Journal, 12-13-1013]

* Each November 1st is a day (or two) of craziness in the isolated
mountain village of Todos Santos Cuchumatanes, Guatemala, where
Mayan tradition commands continuous horse races through town,
jockeyed by increasingly drunk riders, until only a sober-enough
winner remains. Collisions occur in the "Race of the Souls," and
occasionally someone dies, but the misfortune is met with a
collective shrug and regarded as a spiritual offering for fertile crops
during the coming year, according to an eyewitness this year
reporting for Vice.com. Ironically, for the rest of the year, the
village is largely alcohol-free except for that on hand to sell to
tourists. [Vice.com, 11-5-2013]

* In criminal cases, DNA is usually a smoking gun for the
prosecution--except, of course, if there is an "evil twin." In
November a judge in Colorado Springs ruled that a suspect, Army
Lt. Aaron Lucas, should have the opportunity to blame his brother
Brian for a string of sexual assaults because the DNA might be
Brian's. Brian has not been charged and denies any involvement,
but Aaron said Brian was in two crime-scene states that Aaron was
never in. Said a Denver defense lawyer, "The only time I have
[ever] seen [the evil-twin defense] was on Law and Order: SVU.'"
[Associated Press via USA Today, 11-16-2013]

* Many were shocked to learn in November that some accused
"satanic cult" child molesters were still in prison--even though
proven by time, journalism, and medical knowledge to have been
innocent victims of widespread 1980s' and 1990s' hysteria.
Arrangements have finally been made to release Austin, Tex., day-
care operators Fran and Dan Keller (after 21 years) and four San
Antonio, Tex., women (imprisoned for 14 years for "assaulting" two
adolescent girls). In both cases, juries and judges had been
persuaded by testimony about scarring on girls' hymens, and,
frightened by the era's high-profile "McMartin School" and other
cases, issued long prison terms. (The Austin case's doctor later
admitted he had mis-diagnosed the scarring, and the San Antonio
doctor's conclusions were vanquished by the Texas Innocence
Project and a relentless Canadian researcher.) All six said they
intended to pursue full legal exoneration. [Austin American-
Statesman, 11-26-2013; Associated Press via Yahoo News, 11-19-
2013]

[Tomspy77]

* Many medical professionals are certain that Dr. Stanislaw
Burzynski, 70, is a quack, treating cancer patients with expensive,
FDA-unapproved substances, giving false hope to the terminally-ill
and in some cases diverting them from better-regarded treatments.
However, according to a December USA Today investigation, Dr.
Burzynski enjoys enthusiastic support from a small but dedicated
group of patients, and neither regulators in Texas (where he is
licensed) nor two juries (who turned back indictments against him)
have been able to stop him. FDA regulators have been inconsistent
toward him but appear to be gaining aggressiveness following
recent inspections of his facilities. (Dr. Burzynski manufactures his
own proprietary drugs, charging around $10,000 a month to patients
who can pay.) [USA Today, 11-17-2013]

One Rule Fits All: Jim Howe, father of two boys at South
Cumberland Elementary School in Crossville, Tenn., was
handcuffed and briefly detained by a sheriff's deputy in November
after mistakenly believing that he could walk his kids home when
class let out at 2 p.m. Actually, the school allows 2 p.m. departure
only for kids being picked up in cars; pupils who leave on foot must
wait until 2:35. (Howe assumed that the waiting period was only to
protect young pedestrians from pick-up traffic.) Deputy Avery
Aytes said a rule is a rule and that if Howe failed to cooperate, he
would be jailed. [WATE-TV (Knoxville), 11-18-2013]

* Police finally arrested William Footman, 55, in October as the
person who somehow managed to swipe inside-front-door mats
from at least 37 New York City banks between March and May
2013. No money was ever taken, and some banks were slow to
realize the thefts--unobservant that they had even had front-door
mats in the first place. "I sell them to bodegas," Footman told a
reporter. "Their floors get wet." [New York Times, 10-26-2013]
www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/nyregion/a-bank-robber-who-s
truck-37-times-but-never-took-a-dime.html?_r=0

* When a pickpocket shared a taxi ride with him recently in China's
Hunan province and somehow managed to lift Zou Bin's iPhone,
Zou was frightened that he had lost all of his beverage-industry
business contacts and began text-messaging desperate pleas to the
thief. Several days later, in the postal mail, Zou received a list of
his contacts, apparently carefully copied from the phone, totaling 11
handwritten pages of names and numbers, and as the story broke on
Chinese social media, the earnest thief was referred to as "the
conscience of the [robbery] industry," and by one member of the
People's Liberation Army as the model conscientious citizen that
the Chinese should aspire to. [BBC News, 11-25-2013]

* Iowa lawyer Robert Allan Wright, Jr., was suspended for a year by
the Attorney Disciplinary Board in December for mishandling client
funds. One client had received a "Nigerian inheritance" letter in
2011, and Wright apparently jumped at the opportunity to receive
"$18 million," seemingly unaware of what almost everyone else in
the developed world knows about unsolicited Nigerian business
deals. By December 2013, Wright had looted accounts of other
clients in order to pay the "fees" necessary to free up the $18
million. He was spared a more onerous punishment only because
the Board concluded that Wright "honestly" "continues to believe"
that the inheritance is real--that "one day a trunk full of . . . one
hundred dollar bills is going to appear upon his office doorstep."
[AboveTheLaw.com, 12-6-2013]