• “Common sense lost its voice on this one,” concluded a Wethersfield, Conn., city councilman, lamenting the local school board’s having spent at least $630,000 to “resolve” an ethics complaint against the board’s chairwoman — all because her son had improperly taken a $400 high school course for free. The town’s ethics board conducted more than 60 hours of hearings over 11 months, incurring $407,000 in legal expenses, and finally voted, 3-2, to uphold the complaint. (However, the ethics board ordered only that the chairwoman reimburse the $400; the school board then voted to pay all her legal expenses.)

• “Science does not trump the testimony of individuals,” said Detroit prosecutor Marilyn Eisenbraun, explaining her office’s decision in April to disregard DNA evidence that the University of Michigan’s Innocence Clinic said exonerates Karl Vinson, 56, who has spent 25 years in prison for rape. Despite the science, Eisenbraun said she had to stick with eyewitness identification by the victim. Although Vinson has been eligible for release for 15 years, the Parole Board keeps turning him down — because he refuses to acknowledge guilt. (Update: In July, the Michigan Court of Appeals declined to order either Vinson’s release or a new trial, but did grant him an extraordinary right to appeal, based on the new evidence.)

• In June, as five young men gathered around the Mount Tabor Reservoir near Portland, Ore., one urinated in it, thus “contaminating” the 7.2 million gallons that serve the city, and, said Water Bureau administrator David Shaff, necessitating that the entire supply be dumped. Under questioning by the weekly Portland Mercury whether the water is also dumped when an animal urinates in it (or worse, dies in it), Shaff replied, certainly not. “If we did that, we’d be (dumping the water) all the time.” Well, asked the reporter, what’s the difference? Because, said Shaff (sounding confident of his logic), “Do you want to be drinking someone’s pee?”

• A 53-year-old man committed suicide in May by wading into San Francisco Bay, 150 yards offshore, and standing neck-deep until he died in the 60-degree water, with police and firefighters from the city of Alameda watching from shore the entire time. Said a police lieutenant, “We’re not trained to go into the water (and) don’t have the type of equipment that you would use ….” KGO-TV attributed the reluctance to budget cuts that prevented the city’s firefighters from being recertified in water rescues.

• Title IX of the federal Civil Rights Act requires universities to offer “equal” intercollegiate athletic access to females, even though finding that many serious female athletes is difficult on some campuses. The easiest subterfuge, according to an April New York Times report, is to pad women’s teams with whimsically enlisted females — and in some cases, with males. Said former university president (and Health and Human Services Secretary) Donna Shalala, “Those of us in the business know that universities have been end-running Title IX for a long time, and they do it until they get caught.” Sample dysfunctional result: When University of South Florida added football (100 male players) a few years ago, it was forced to populate more female teams, and thus “recruited” 71 women for its cross-country team, even though fewer than half ran races and several were surprised to know they were even on the team when a Times reporter inquired.

Great Art!
Britain’s Ben Wilson is one artist with the entire field to himself — the only painter who creates finely detailed masterpieces on flattened pieces of chewing gum found on London sidewalks. Frequently spotted lying nearly inert on the ground, working, Wilson estimates he has painted “many thousands” of such “canvases,” ranging from portraits and landscapes to specialized messages (such as listing the names of all employees at a soon-to- be-closed Woolworth’s store). According to a June New York Times dispatch, Wilson initially heats each piece with a blowtorch, applies lacquer and acrylic enamel before painting — and sealing with more lacquer. And of course he works only with tiny, tiny brushes.

Police Report
Gregory Snelling, 41, was indicted in June for the robbery of a KeyBank branch in Springfield, Ohio, which was notable more for the foot chase with police afterward. They caught him, but Snelling might deserve “style” points for the run, covered as he was in red dye from the money bag and the fact that he was holding a beer in his hand during the entire chase.

The Aristocrats!
(1) Brent Kendall, 31, was arrested in June in Coralville, Iowa, and charged with criminal mischief after he allegedly reacted to a domestic quarrel with his live-in girlfriend by cutting up items of her clothing and urinating on her bed and computer. (2) An employee of Bed, Bath and Beyond at the St. Davids Square shopping center in Radnor, Pa., reported to police on June 5 that, for the second time in two weeks, he had come across a bag (estimated to weigh about 35 pounds) behind the store, filled with human vomit.

Copyright 2011 Chuck Shepherd.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

Latest Religious Messages

• Unclear on the Concept: India’s Ganges River has become famously polluted, in part by reverent Hindu pilgrims who toss “offerings” (such as clothing, statues and the cremated ashes of loved ones) into it in hope of prosperous lives and holy afterlives. Hindu immigrants in New York City, without access to the Ganges, have called upon Jamaica Bay as a stand-in. The formerly quiet waters adjacent to JFK International Airport now ebb and flow with similar offerings that ultimately litter the bay’s federal recreation area shoreline. Hindu community leaders in New York, with only mixed success, constantly urge greater environmental sensitivity.

• From time to time, clever rabbis suggest ways of bypassing ancient Talmudic laws that restrict observant Jews’ behavior on the Sabbath (a day of “rest”). In April, Rabbi Dror Fixler, an electro-optics expert from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said he could foresee a day when even driving a car might be permitted on the Sabbath. The driver would wear an encephalography helmet that could catch brain signals and transmit them to a car’s operating and steering system, removing the need for “action” on the driver’s part (thus theoretically leaving him “at rest”).

The Continuing Crisis

• Mattel revealed that its best-selling fashion doll in the last year, for the age-6-and-up market, has been the teen werewolf “Monster High” model, Clawdeen Wolf, who comes with heavy makeup, a short skirt and high boots, and who supposedly spends her time “waxing, plucking and shaving.” (Says Clawdeen, in promotional materials, “My hair is worthy of a shampoo commercial, and that’s just what grows on my legs.”) Though Mattel claims the doll celebrates girls’ imperfections, a counselor told Fox News she was appalled that the company tells young girls they “need to sculpt, tweeze, wax and … change their bodies” to attract men.

• Cyber Making-Out: Tokyo’s Kajimoto Laboratory has created a tongue-kissing machine to enable lovers to suck face over the Internet, according to a May CNN report. At separate locations, the pair place special straws in their mouths and mimic a deep kiss, which is recorded and transmitted to each other’s straws. Researcher Nobuhiro Takahashi sees profit in “celebrity” tongue-kissing applications, but said more work is needed to establish individual taste, breathing and tongue moistness. (Another team of Japanese researchers, using a harness-type device, reported making similar advances — in Internet “hugging,” with sensors that mimic lovers’ heartbeats and even their spines’ “tingling” and stomachs’ “butterflies.”)

• Tacky: (1) The Columbus, Ohio, school board accepted principal Kimberly Jones’ resignation in May following revelations by The Columbus Dispatch that she, though earning $90,000 a year, swore on federal forms that she made just $25,000 — so that her own two children would qualify for reduced-price school lunches. (2) Prime Healthcare Services, with a reputation for rescuing financially failing hospitals, reported that two new acquisitions, in Victorville, Calif., and Redding, Calif., somehow curiously experienced rates about 40 and 70 times the state average in patients with a rare Third World Ghanaian sickness that, conveniently, qualified the hospitals for enhanced Medicare reimbursements.

Fine Points of the Law
In a pre-trial motion in a Chicago court case in May, the defense lawyer for Exotic Motors Inc., which is being sued over car repairs, complained about plaintiffs’ lawyers’ unusual decision to permit a female paralegal to sit at their courtroom table, especially since she is a “large-breasted woman.” Her “sole purpose” at the table, lamented defense lawyer Thomas Gooch, was “to draw the attention of the jury,” presumably in favor of the plaintiffs. Gooch later told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin that he was concerned only with her “qualifications” to sit at the table.

Questionable Judgments

• The recent Memorial Day weekend was a time of reflection for the residents of Long Island (N.Y.)’s Shelter Island, who were honoring a soldier from the neighborhood who had recently been killed in Afghanistan. The local American Legion placed new, heavy-duty American flags on telephone poles along a parade route, but only afterward was informed that Long Island Power Authority, which owns the poles, is required by state law to charge an unwaivable rental fee for the poles.

Copyright 2011 Chuck Shepherd.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

• Several funeral homes in the United States have drive-thru windows to serve rushed mourners or those stressed by the parlor experience. “Not quite as emotional,” said one visitor to the Robert L. Adams Mortuary in Compton, Calif., referring to the need not to linger in the queue of bereaved, idling motorists. The Adams facility was even more popular during the peak of gang murders in the area, according to an April Los Angeles Times report, because the drive-thru window’s bulletproof glass rendered unnecessary the precarious indoor service in which gangbangers tried to further desecrate late rivals’ corpses.

• Noses Know: (1) In April, two Italian entrepreneurs introduced a perfume meant to evoke the scents of a person’s blood, varying by type (A, B, AB, O) — but with no actual blood. A prominent member of the U.S. “vampire community” fondly described the “intriguing” olfactory sensations of Type B (the “black cherry, pomegranate and patchouli infusions”) and Type O (“raspberry, rose hips and birch”). Another “vampirist” called the whole idea “cheesy.” (2) Artist Charity Blansit (aka Cherry Tree) told AOL News in May that she has been working on a fragrance based on her own urine (although not prepared to bring it to market yet), enhanced mainly with sugar.

Fine Points of the Law
Because of a loophole in Michigan law (which, at press time, legislators were working to fix), a winner of the “Make Me Rich” lottery game in July 2010 (publicized value: $2 million) has been openly receiving the same food-stamp allotment he had been receiving before he won. In May 2011, confronted by WNEM-TV in Saginaw, winner Leroy Fick was defiant about his food stamps. Currently, eligibility is based on regular income, and Fick had taken his payoff last year in one lump sum.
Medical Marvels
(1) Dugan Smith, 13, is almost as good as new, having overcome an extremely rare malignant tumor on his thigh bone. A surgeon at Ohio State’s James Cancer Hospital removed the middle of Smith’s leg, turned the bottom of it around so that the back faces the front, and reconnected the parts. (2) According to a February report in China’s Wuhan Morning News, a 55-year-old farmer from Jiayu county in Hubei province finally has a functioning anus. His congenital condition had required him to restrict his diet severely and to “squeeze stools out with his hands.”
Navel Observatory
The Belly Button Biodiversity project at North Carolina State University has begun examining the “faunal differences” in the microbial ecosystems of our navels, to foster understanding of the “tens of thousands” of organisms crawling around inside (almost all benign or even helpful). An 85-year-old man in North Carolina may have “very different navel life” than a 7-year-old girl in France, according to a May Raleigh News & Observer report. So far, only the organisms themselves and the host’s demographics have been studied; other issues, such as variations by hairiness of navel, remain.
Leading Economic Indicators
Good Jobs: (1) Prison Guard (“the greatest entry-level job in California,” according to an April Wall Street Journal report highlighting its benefits over a typical job resulting from a Harvard University education). Starting pay is comparable; loans are not necessary (since the guard “academy” actually pays the student); and vacation time is more generous (seven weeks, five paid). One downside: The prison system is more selective (Harvard accepts 6.2 percent of applicants versus the guard service’s fewer-than-1 percent of 120,000 applicants). (2) California taxpayers were also astonished to learn in May that several beach communities (led by Newport Beach) pay some lifeguards more than $100,000 annually in salary and benefits. (Generally, those are for long-time and supervisory jobs; ordinary “summer job” lifeguards typically make $16 to $22 an hour.)
Weird Animals

• Cat Failing to Know Its Role: In Cleveland, Texas (near Houston), a man had to be airlifted to an emergency trauma unit after losing a fight with a house cat. He was even armed with a knife as he took on the beast, but somehow the attacking cat caused him to lose his balance and fall on the blade.

• Procreation Interventions: (1) Because female giant tortoises are lackadaisical about mating, the Knoxville (Tenn.) Zoo in May temporarily moved its two males, Al and Tex, to Zoo Atlanta to encourage Knoxville females Patches, Corky and Standup to yearn for them. Tex, by the way, is 90 years old, and Al is 130 (and hasn’t had a date since 1983, according to a May Knoxville News-Sentinel story). (2) Hopewell Township, N.J., officials, responding to noise complaints in April, passed an ordinance limiting rooster access to hens to only 10 days a year. (The chickens also must, of course, be “disease-free.”)

Copyright 2011 Chuck Shepherd.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

Ellenbeth Wachs, 48, was arrested in Lakeland, Fla., in May on a complaint that she “simulated” a sex act in front of a minor. In a March incident, Wachs, after receiving medication for her multiple sclerosis, was awakened at 8:30 a.m. by her 10-year-old neighbor boy’s clamorous basketball game, near Wachs’ window. After unsuccessfully beseeching the boy for quiet, Wachs — hoping, perhaps, to make a point about noisy neighbors — began moaning out the window (while remaining out of sight), “Oh, John! Oh! John!” over and over at increased shrillness as if in the throes of orgasm. The basketball-playing stopped, but the incident was not a teaching moment. The boy’s father, Otto Lehman, called the police and filed for an order of protection against Wachs.

Compelling Explanations

• Dalia Dippolito, 30, of Boynton Beach, Fla., was convicted in May of hiring a hit man to kill her husband, but not before offering an ultra-modern defense: Her lawyer told the jury that it was all a fake scheme to pitch a reality-TV show about one spouse’s ordering a hit on the other (and that her husband, Michael, had originally come up with the idea). As Dippolito’s plan unfolded, her boyfriend alerted police, who set up a sting and witnessed Dippolito dictating exactly what she wanted done. (In fact, the sting itself was captured on video for the “Cops” TV show.) Michael denied any involvement, and the jury appeared not to give her story any credence.

• Quite a Disease, That Lyme: (1) Marilyn Michose, 46, was referred for medical evaluation in May after she was spotted roaming the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City wearing neon pink panties on top of her street clothes, with a .25-caliber Beretta visible in her jacket pocket, and speaking gibberish. According to Michose’s mother, Marilyn had overmedicated for her Lyme disease. (2) A restraining order, to keep away from Sarah Palin and her family, was extended in May against Shawn Christy, 19, of McAdoo, Pa., by a magistrate in Anchorage, Alaska. Christy has admitted to traveling to Alaska to meet Palin, to making numerous telephone calls to her, and to once threatening to sexually assault her. According to a 2009 psychiatric evaluation ordered by the Secret Service, Christy appeared to suffer from “latent onset” Lyme disease.

Ironies

• Erie County (N.Y.) jail officials suspended guards Lawrence Mule, a 26-year veteran, and James Conlin, a 29-year veteran, after they scuffled at the County Correctional Facility on April 21, reportedly over a bag of chips. An inmate had to break up the fight.

• An anti-terrorism drill scheduled for Pottawattamie County, Iowa, in March, which was to practice community co-ordination after an attack by a hypothetical white supremacist group angry about illegal immigration, had to be canceled. The sheriff said callers claiming to be white supremacists were angry at being picked on as “terrorists” and had threatened a school in Treynor, Iowa, with an attack that closely resembled the kind of imagined attack that would have preceded the simulated drill.

• In April, officials in the northern Swedish city of Angermanland temporarily shut down the operator of a colonic cleansing service, and issued fines because it was not up to code. It had insufficient restroom facilities, thus requiring some of its clients to cleanse their colons in front of other clients.

I Demand My Rights!
The lawyer for Charles Wilhite expressed shock in a formal motion before the court after his client’s murder trial in Springfield, Mass., in April (in which Wilhite was convicted). How could it be, he asked the judge, that despite having to evaluate 19 witnesses and examine 55 pieces of evidence, the jury could so quickly have decided (three hours total) that Wilhite and his partner Angel Hernandez were guilty? (The lawyer insinuated that the jury had thus been inattentive or biased, but did not mention the possibility that Wilhite and Hernandez were so obviously guilty that no more time was necessary.)

Signs of the Times
“Dog Stylist” Dara Foster (“I show people how to live together with their dogs in a stylish way”) told a TV audience recently that some dog owners are dressing their pooches in “’80s-inspired punk,” “giving way to a grunge movement in dog fashion — I swear to God.” The ubiquitous TV guest and apparel designer estimates that since Americans already spend $47 billion a year on pets, they need more than ever to know what’s hot — fluorescent styling gel, for example, and precooked meals for dogs, and owners getting matching tattoos with their dogs, and a recently spotted synthetic mullet wig for dogs.

Putting Fannies in the Pews: Two Strategies
(1) To hype attendance for Easter services this year, Lindenwald Baptist Church in Hamilton, Ohio, raffled off $1,000 on Easter Sunday. As a result, attendance more than doubled, to 1,137 (including 1,135 raffle losers). (2) A month earlier, Pastor John Goodman of the Houston Unity Baptist Church tried a different approach, calling on parishioners to cede their income-tax refunds to the church and warning that anyone who failed to come to the aid of the church is a “devil” and could be
refused communion.

Copyright 2011 Chuck Shepherd.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

Government in Action!

• Imprisoned rapist Troy Fears, 55, had another four years tacked onto his sentence in April by a federal judge in Phoenix after he was convicted of swindling the IRS out of $119,000 by filing 117 fake tax returns from 2005 to 2009. According to prosecutors, IRS routinely dispatched direct-deposit refunds while indifferent to matching the payment recipient with the person whose Social Security number was on the return. (In fact, Fears was caught not by the IRS but by a prison guard who happened upon his paperwork.)

• Apparently, the federal government failed to foresee that fighting two wars simultaneously, with historically high wound-survival rates, might produce surges of disability claims. Just in the last year, according to an April USA Today report, claims are up over 50 percent, and those taking longer than two months to resolve have more than doubled. (Tragically, Marine Clay Hunt, who was a national spokesman for disability rights and who suffered from post-traumatic stress, killed himself on March 31, ultimately frustrated that the Department of Veterans Affairs had lost his paperwork. “I can track my pizza from Pizza Hut on my BlackBerry,” he once said, “but the VA can’t find my claim for four months.”)

Great Art!
Occasionally (as News of the Weird has reported), patrons of art galleries mistake ordinary objects as the actual art (for example, solemnly “contemplating” a broom inadvertently left behind by a janitor), and sometimes the opposite mistake occurs. At the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam in May, a wandering patron absent-mindedly traipsed through a re-creation of Wim T. Schippers’ floor-level Peanut Butter Platform (a 40-square-foot installation of creamy spread). (The museum manager had declined to fence in the exhibit, which he said would spoil its beauty.)
Police Report
(1) Homeless Charles Mader, a convicted sex offender in Albuquerque, was arrested in May for failure to report his change of address, as required by law. Mader had moved out of his registered address, which was a Dumpster, into a community shelter. (2) Robert Norton Kennedy, 51, was arrested in Horry County, S.C., in May and charged with assault and battery, despite the humble tattoo on his forehead referencing a Bible verse and reading, “Please forgive me if I say or do anything stupid.”
Cavalcade of Rednecks
(1) Sharon Newling, 58, was arrested in Salisbury, N.C., in April and charged with shooting at her stepson with a .22-caliber rifle. She denied shooting “at” him, but said she was just shooting toward him “to make him stop working on his truck.” (2) In April in Greensboro, N.C., Stephanie Preston and Bobby Duncan were married in front of family and friends at the local Jiffy Lube. (3) A 25-year-old man in Okaloosa County, Fla., was arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing after he entered the Club 51 Gentlemen’s Club, from which he had been banned after a February incident. The man told police that he knew he had been banned from a strip club but couldn’t remember which one.
Chutzpah!

• A college senior in Colorado complained long-distance in March to the Better Business Bureau in Minnesota’s Twin Cities because EssayWritingCompany.com, headquartered in Farmington, Minn., failed to deliver the class paper she ordered (at $23 per page). (The meaning of “academic dishonesty” is evolving, but it is still a sometimes-expellable offense to submit someone else’s work as one’s own.)

• Filipino Henson Chua, working in the U.S., was indicted in March for illegally bringing back into the country an American-made military spy plane and openly offering it for sale for $13,000 on eBay. Sophisticated equipment such as the RQ-11B “Raven” Unmanned Aerial Vehicle requires high-level government approval to prevent acquisition by U.S. enemies.

Democracy in Action
(1) Lisa Osborn was one of only two candidates who qualified to run for the two vacant seats on the Bentley (Mich.) Board of Education in May, yet she did not win. One vote would have put her on the board, but she got none (having been too busy even to vote for herself that day because of her son’s baseball game). (2) Monika Strub began campaigning for a state parliament seat in Germany in March as a member of the Left Party. Until 2002, Strub, then “Horst Strub,” was with the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, but then decided he was really a female, underwent surgery and became Monika, a socialist. Not surprisingly, she has been harassed by some of her former colleagues.

Copyright 2010 Chuck Shepherd.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

The Continuing Crisis

• The Montana House of Representatives passed a tough drunk-driving bill in March to combat the state’s high DUI rate, but it came over the objection of Rep. Alan Hale (and later, Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy). Hale, who owns a bar in Basin, Mont., complained that tough DUI laws “are destroying small businesses” and “destroying a way of life that has been in Montana for years and years.” (Until 2005, drinking while driving was common and legal outside of towns as long as the driver wasn’t drunk.) Furthermore, Hale said, people need to drive home after they drink. “(T)hey are not going to hitchhike.” Sen. Windy Boy said such laws put the legislature on “the path of criminalizing everyone in Montana.”

• Why Unions Are Unpopular: The police officers’ union in Scranton, Pa., filed a state unfair labor practice complaint in April against Chief Dan Duffy because he arrested a man whom he caught violating a warrant and possessing marijuana. According to the union contract, only union members can “apprehend and arrest” lawbreakers, and since the chief is “management,” he should have called an officer to make the arrest. The union president suggested that, with layoffs threatened, the chief doesn’t need to be taking work away from officers.

• Conventional academic wisdom is that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to homicide, but according to accused murderer Dmitry Smirnov, it deterred him from killing Ms. Jitka Vesel in Oak Brook, Ill. — until March, that is, when Illinois’ death penalty was repealed. Prosecutors said Smirnov, from Surrey, British Columbia, told them he decided to come to Illinois and kill Vesel (in cold blood, over an online relationship gone bad) only after learning through Internet research that the state no longer had capital punishment.

Cavalcade of Rednecks
(1) Shelly Waddell, 36, was cited by police in February in Waterville, Maine, after “a couple of” drivers reported seeing two children riding on the roof of the van she was driving early one morning. Waddell told police she was in fact delivering newspapers to customers, but denied that the kids were on the roof. (2) At the Niceville, Fla., Christmas parade on Dec. 4, a municipal employee was arrested when he stepped up onto a city truck that was part of the parade and challenged the driver (who apparently was a colleague). The employee accused the driver of “taking (my) overtime” hours for the previous two years and ordered him out of the truck so he could “whip your ass.” (The employee was charged with disorderly intoxication.)
Bright Ideas
Louis “Shovelhead” Garrett is an artist, a mannequin collector and a quilter in the eastern Missouri town of Louisiana, with a specialty in sewing quilts from women’s panties, according to a report in the Hannibal Courier-Post. After showing his latest quilt at a women’s luncheon in Hannibal in March, he told the newspaper of his high standards: “No polyester. I don’t want those cheap, dollar-store, not-sexy, farm-girl panties. I want classy — silk or nylon.”
Oops!

• Arifinito (he goes by one name), a member of the Indonesian parliament, resigned in April after a news photographer in the gallery zoomed in on the tablet computer he was watching to capture him surfing Internet pornography sites. Arifinito’s conservative Islamic Prosperous Justice Party campaigned for a tough anti-pornography bill in 2008 (which the photographer’s video shows Arifinito likely violating).

• Wheeee! (1) In March, in Pierce County, Wash., a sewer worker, 37, came loose from a safety line and slid about 3,000 feet through a 6-foot-diameter sewer pipe at the Chambers Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. He “could have drowned,” according to one rescuer, but he was taken to a hospital with “minor injuries.” (2) Firefighters in Gilbert, Ariz., rescued Eugene Gimzelberg, 32, in March after he had climbed down a 40-foot sewer hole — naked. Gimzelberg said he had smoked PCP and marijuana and consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms. He was hospitalized in critical condition.

Chutzpah!

• Jacob Barnett, 12, an Asperger’s-syndrome-fueled math genius who maxed out on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and is now enrolled at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis), told an Indianapolis Star reporter in March that his next project is about proving the Big Bang theory all wrong. But if not the Big Bang, asked the reporter, how do we exist? Said Jacob, “I’m still working on it.” “I have an idea, but … I’m still working out the details.” (Hint: Jacob’s major point of skepticism is that the Big Bang doesn’t account neatly for carbon.) Said his (biological) mother, Kristine Barnett, 36: “I flunked math. I know this did not come from me.”

Copyright 2010 Chuck Shepherd.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

The cure for emphysema is cigarette smoke piped directly into the lungs, according to chemist Gretha Zahar, whose clinic has treated 60,000 people in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the past decade. Zahar modifies the tobacco smoke with “nanotechnology” to remove “free radicals” and adjust the mercury levels – and touts her “divine cigarettes” as cures for “all” diseases, including cancer, with only a wink of the eye from the government (which opposition leaders say is in the pocket of Indonesia’s tobacco industry). Though 400,000 Indonesians die yearly from smoking-related causes, nicotine “addiction” was only reluctantly and subtly mentioned in recent regulations. One pharmacology professor said he had never heard of anyone dying of smoking, which he called a “good, cheap alternative” to expensive drugs.

Unclear on the Concept

• Marla Gilson, 59, was fired in April after her employer callously rejected her offer to work from home in Chevy Chase, Md., at reduced salary, while she recovers from chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant for her leukemia. Gilson’s job was chief executive of the Association of Jewish Aging Services of North America, which serves 112 facilities that help frail and elderly Jews during their final years. Gilson’s termination also made her health care much more expensive and potentially made her uninsurable in the future if her treatment is successful. (Nonetheless, the board of directors thanked her for her service and wished her a “speedy recovery.”)

• Thomas Cavender, 60, of Bessemer City, N.C., pleaded unsuccessfully with a judge in March to remove him from the National Sex Offender Registry, to which he had been assigned as part of his sentence in 2000 for molesting a third-grade girl. Cavender told the judge that he had become a preacher and evangelist and that it “hurts my ministry when you’re in the pulpit, and someone goes to the computer, and there you are.”

• In April, two police constables in North London, England, threatened Louise Willows with arrest for criminal damage and forced her to clean her artwork from a city sidewalk. Willows had cleared off 25 deposits of droppings that dog-walkers had failed to remove and in their place drawn pink cupcakes in chalk (with a nearby message, “Dog owners, Please clear up your dog’s mess. Children walk here”).

Can’t Possibly Be True

• The notorious U.S. military contractor KBR, prominent for having earned several billion dollars from no-bid contracts during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and which has been accused of numerous employee sexual harassment cover-ups (including nine pending lawsuits filed by female employees), has apparently been voted by readers of Woman Engineer magazine as one of the top 50 places for women to work. (KBR and other companies on the list made announcements in April, but at press time, Woman Engineer’s issue containing the list had not been published.)

• Nursery school teacher Elizabeth Davies, 48, was fired from Hafod Primary School in Swansea, Wales, accused of spraying pine-scented room-freshener on kids who passed gas and on Bangladeshis who had come to class reeking of curry and onions. Of the latter, she reportedly said, “There is a waft coming in from paradise.”

Zero Tolerance?
Recently, public school students were expelled in Spotsylvania, Va. (possession of homemade tubing for launching plastic “spitballs” in lunchroom horseplay) (December); arrested in Hammonton, N.J. (a 7-year-old, for bringing to class a Nerf-type “gun” that fired soft balls) (January); and arrested in Arvada, Colo. (for drawing violent stick figures, which was recommended by his therapist as a way to tamp down harmful thoughts) (February). Meanwhile, in March, at the other end of “zero tolerance,” a judge allowed Ryan Ricco, 18, to play for his school in a big basketball tournament despite being on modified house arrest after being charged with threatening to blow up two other high schools in the Chicago suburbs.

Cavalcade of Rednecks
(1) In April, Robert Hohenberger, 64, was arrested in Clayton County, Ga., for shooting a neighbor’s dog with a BB gun after complaining that he was tired of the Chihuahua “pooping” in his yard. The neighbor, Leticia Mendoza, told police that her dog was innocent, in that Casey had actually relieved himself inside right before she let him out. (2) Jonathan Avery, 31, was arrested in Benson, N.C., in February for hitting his son, 6, on the head with a spoon, drawing blood with a cut that became infected. Hospital personnel treating the kid called police, as Avery had apparently attempted to suture the wound with fishing line.

Inexplicable

• Thanks to a loophole sanctioned by the Iowa Court of Appeals, Matt Danielson and his wife, Jamie, now own their home in Ankeny, Iowa, outright (value: $278,000) after making just one monthly mortgage payment. Iowa law regards a home mortgage by a married couple as automatically void if only one spouse has signed it, and a thusly voided mortgage is treated as fully satisfied. (The purpose was to prevent one estranged spouse from exploiting the other, but the voiding is automatic regardless of the circumstances.) Legislators are currently trying to change the law to leave the discretion of voiding up to judges.

• On April 13, a customer who had been watching videos at the Golden Gate Adult Superstore in San Francisco ran from the store into the street engulfed in flames. No explanation for the fire was given, but the man was taken to St. Francis Memorial Hospital suffering from third-degree burns.

Copyright 2010 Chuck Shepard.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

NOTE: From time to time, News of the Weird reminds readers that bizarre human adventures repeat themselves again and again. Here are some choice selections of previous themes recently recurring:

• “Man’s best friend” sometimes isn’t, as when a playful dog hops onto a gun on the ground, causing it to fire a round. John Daniels, 28, took a bullet in the knee from his dog, for example, in Raleigh, N.C., in January. Dogs betray in other ways, too. Motorist Joel Dobrin, 32, was pulled over in a traffic stop in February in Moro, Ore., and rushed to hide his alleged drug stash, which was in a sock. However, his dog intercepted the sock for an impromptu game of dog-tug-of-war in the car. Dobrin won but lost his grip, and the sock flew out the driver’s window, right in front of the officer. Dobrin was cited, and later indicted, for drug possession.

• At least three jihadist groups in recent years have published full-color Arabic magazines lauding the Islamist struggle, with articles and essays to recruit fighters and offer personal advice for women on the importance of raising proper families and catering to mujahideens’ needs. The latest, Al-Shamikha (“The Majestic Woman”), which surfaced in March, featured interviews with martyrs’ wives and advised women to stay indoors, both for modesty and a “clear complexion” (advice that earned the magazine its nickname “Jihad Cosmo”).

• Prevailing medical authority 20 years ago warned that few humans could survive blood-alcohol readings above .40 (percent), but in recent years, drivers have rather easily survived higher numbers (curiously, many from Wisconsin, such as the man in February in Madison, Wis., with a .559). (In 2007, an Oregon driver was found unconscious, but survived, with a .72 reading.) The plethora of high numbers might indicate mistaken medical teaching, or nonstandard machine measurements — or an evolutionary hardiness in American drinkers.

• Snowmobilers fall through thin ice every season because the ice’s thickness is difficult to estimate, especially at night. Less understandable is that every season, when other snowmobilers come to rescue the downed snowmobiler, they drive their vehicles as close as they can to the spot of the fall — which, of course, is right at the lip of thin-ice-break, thus virtually assuring that their vehicle, too, will fall in, such as the four people who fell through the ice in a pond near Holyrood, Newfoundland, in February.

• Young girls “grow up” prematurely, often aided by hungry retailers such as the U.S.’s Abercrombie & Fitch and the British clothiers Primark and Matalan, each of which this spring began offering lines of padded bras for girls as young as 7 (8 at Abercrombie & Fitch for the “Ashley Push-Up Triangle”), with Matalan offering one in size “28aa.” Child advocates were predictably disgusted, with one Los Angeles psychologist opining that permissive mothers were trying to compensate through their daughters for their own lack of sexual appeal.

• In 2002 News of the Weird mentioned a theme park near Mexico City in which potential emigrants to the U.S. could test their survival skills in an obstacle course mimicking the rigors one would endure sneaking across the border. Recently, Owlchemy Labs, a Massachusetts technology company, announced plans to release an iPhone/iPad app, “Smuggle Truck,” a video game in which players compete to drive a pickup truck full of illegals over rocky terrain from Mexico into the U.S. without too many passengers bouncing out (and with in-game “additions” consisting of pregnant women giving birth enroute). Special “green cards” are awarded to winners. (Update: At press time, Apple rejected the app, and Owlchemy said it would alter the game to one of animals escaping from a forest.)

• Chutzpah! Thieves usually pick out easy jobs, but occasionally they go bold — for example, breaking into the prison at New Plymouth, New Zealand’s North Island, in March (carrying off a large TV set) or breaking into a police station in Uddingston, Scotland, in April (carrying off uniforms and radios).

• Carelessness sometimes begets tragedy, as when motorists survive terrible accidents but then, while awaiting help, they are hit and killed by emergency vehicles. In December, near Ocala, Fla., a 39-year-old driver survived a rollover but was accidentally run over and killed by a responding Marion County sheriff’s deputy, and in April in Baldwin Park, Calif., an arriving ambulance fatally struck a 22-year-old accident victim who was, until that moment, not seriously hurt.

Updates

• In 2007, Australian Wayne Scullino, then 30, quit his job in Sydney and somehow convinced his wife they should sell their house and move to Wisconsin for the sole purpose of rooting for the Green Bay Packers, about which he had enjoyed an inexplicable fascination since age 15. Said Scullino, “At some point, you’ve got to … start living the life you want to.” After one season, the Scullinos returned home, but in February 2011, he was of course back in the U.S., on hand in Dallas for the Packers’ victory in Super Bowl XLV. Scullino says his Australian friends are still bewildered. “I try to talk to them about it,” he said, “but they just don’t get it.”

Copyright 2010 Chuck Shepard.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

Cultural Diversity

• The longstanding springtime culinary tradition of urine-soaked eggs endures in Dongyang, China, according to a March CNN dispatch. Prepubescent boys contribute their urine (apparently without inhibition) by filling containers at schools, and the eggs are boiled according to recipe and sold for the equivalent of about 23 cents each. Many residents consider the tradition gross, but for devotees, it represents, as one said, “the (joyous) smell of spring.”

• The port town of Kumai, Borneo, consists of low-rise shops and houses serving a population of 20,000 but also many tall, windowless box buildings perforated with small holes. The structures are actually birdhouses, for the town’s chief industry is harvesting the nests of the hummingbird-like swiftlet, constructed of its own saliva, which, properly processed, yields a sweet-tasting paste with alleged medicinal qualities and highly revered throughout Asia, according to a January BBC News report.

• In January, while the Texas Legislature debated budget cuts that would almost certainly cost Allen High School (just north of Dallas) at least $18 million and require layoffs of teachers and other school personnel, construction was continuing on the school’s new $60 million football stadium. Noted a New York Times report on the stadium (which 63 percent of voters approved in a 2009 bond referendum), “(O)nly football supersedes faith and family (among Texans).”

Latest Religious Messages

• Former stripper Crystal Deans, who said she learned the trade at age 18 but later retired and turned to God for help through a rough patch of her life, now offers free pole-dancing classes in Spring, Texas, near Houston, expressly for Christian women. Her gyrations may be the same as when she was working, she said, but now everyone is clothed, and she dances only to “Christian music.”

• Youth pastor Brent Girouex, 31, was urged to confess by his minister in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in February to an apparently lengthy series of sexual experiences with boys and young men, which he initiated by suggesting that ejaculating would help the victims gain “sexual purity” by (as he explained to detectives) “getting rid of the evil thoughts in their mind.” Eight victims reported multiple purification sessions, with one estimating as many as 100.

Questionable Judgments

• For Career Day in April at Shady Grove Elementary School in Henrico, Va., kids heard a local plastic surgeon describe his specialty, but not until afterward did parents learn that the surgeon had brought along as props saline breast implants (which he passed around for the kids to handle). Many parents were outraged, and even one calmer parent commented, “Career Day sure isn’t what it once was.”

• The End Is Near, But How Near? In March in Owensboro, Ky., James Birkhead, 52, was sentenced to 5 1/2 months in jail for making survivalist bombs to protect his family after he became alarmed by the movie “2012,” which portrays the chaos expected next year when the world ends (as supposedly foretold by the Mayan calendar). By contrast, Edwin Ramos of Vineland, N.J., is busy traveling the East Coast in his RV trying to warn people that the end will not be in 2012 but actually this month –  May 21, 2011. (The discrepancy would not exist if there had been a biblical year “0” after B.C. and before A.D.) Ramos’ father apparently does not share his son’s view because he accepted ownership of Ramos’ successful construction business as Ramos concluded that it had no future.

• Marie Stopes International is a prominent London charity that robustly promotes a woman’s right to choose abortion, but a whimsical public service campaign in January has created unusually savage criticism. The organization partnered with the British comedy music band The Midnight Beast to produce a video suggesting anal sex as a contraceptive of choice. Among the lyrics of one song, “One up the bum, and it’s no harm done/One up the bum, and you won’t be a mum.”

Least Competent Criminals

• A man stole Waltham, Mass., student Mark Bao’s notebook computer in March, but Bao used his automatic online-backup service to access the hard drive while the thief was using it, to discover a performance video of a man (presumably the thief) dancing (lamely, thought Bao) to a pop song. Bao uploaded the video to YouTube –  where 700,000 viewers showed it the proper disrespect –  and also tracked down the thief’s e-mail address and informed him of his new Internet “stardom.” Shortly afterward, the still-unidentified thief turned in the notebook to Bentley University police with an apology to “Mark,” begging him to take down the video.

Copyright 2010 Chuck Shepherd.
Distributed by Universal UClick.

Laney Wallace, 16, won the beauty contest at the 53rd Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, in March and the next day fulfilled the first duty of her reign: to behead and skin a western diamondback. “You have to make sure you don’t pop the bladder,” the 2011 Miss Snake Charmer said shortly after taking a few swipes with a machete. “That (would be) a huge mess.” (Three years ago, News of the Weird informed readers of the annual beauty-contest/muskrat-skinning festival in Maryland’s Eastern Shore region, in which the “beauty” part and the “skinning” part are separate – but in which that year, two teenage girls entered both, with Dakota Abbott edging out Samantha Phillips for the crown.)
Compelling Explanations

• Record companies have enjoyed recent successes in court by suing individuals who have shared music by trading files through specialized websites that avoid paying copyright licensing fees, including LimeWire (which shut down last year). Thirteen record companies won a summary judgment last year, and, applying a formula they believe was set out in federal law, the companies demanded that LimeWire pay damages of up to $75 trillion – an amount more than five times the entire national debt. In March 2011, a federal judge said the companies should modify the formula and lower their expectations.

• Waterloo, Iowa, schoolteacher Larry Twigg was arrested for “lascivious conduct” with a teenager, a crime that requires proof of “sexual motivation.” Though Twigg allegedly had a teenage boy strip, take a chocolate syrup “bath,” make a “snow angel” while in his underwear, and play a video game nude, his lawyer said in March that the court-appointed psychiatrist would testify that Twigg had no sexual motivation.

• Convicted heinous Minnesota sex offender John Rydberg, 69 and still detained after having served his sentence because he is still a “danger,” exhibited an upbeat demeanor for a three-judge panel in March, hoping for release. He said his number of victims was far fewer than the “94” he previously admitted to, explaining that he offered a purposely high number because he was afraid underplaying his crimes might make it appear that he was lying. “What can I say?” offered Rydberg. “I’m a work in progress.”

Ironies

• On March 30, several hours before addressing the nation on TV about Libya, President Obama received a prestigious open-records award presented by five freedom-of-information advocate organizations for running a commendably “transparent,” accessible administration. However, news about this award came about only because the presenters leaked it to the press. As noted by the Washington Post the next day, there was no White House notice to the press; the presentation was not on the President’s calendar; no photos or transcript were available; and the award was not mentioned on the White House website.

• Go Figure: (1) The author of most of the text of The New York Times obituary on Elizabeth Taylor, published on March 23, was Times reporter Mel Gussow, who passed away almost six years before Taylor. (2) At George Washington University’s men’s basketball game on March 5, accountancy department professor Robert Kasmir was honored at halftime for being one of the elite financial donors to the university, but he was not around for the end of the game. He was ejected from the stands in the second half for harassing a referee about the officiating.

Leading Economic Indicators

• According to a February 2011 analysis of 2007 IRS statistics by a columnist for Tax Notes, the average taxpayer residing in New York City’s posh Helmsley Building (owned before her death by Leona Helmsley, who once reportedly said that “only the little people pay taxes”) paid only 14.7 percent of his income in federal taxes while New York City janitors and security guards (such as those employed by the Helmsley Building) paid about 24 percent. Helmsley residents were taxed less for Social Security and Medicare, and much of their $1.17 million average income was in capital gains, which are taxed at the same rate as the wages of modestly paid (up to $34,000 a year) workers.

• In February, Wisconsin state Rep. Gordon Hintz was caught up in an ongoing investigation of prostitution at the Heavenly Touch Massage Parlor in Appleton that resulted in six arrests. Police merely issued Hintz a municipal citation (indicating that he might just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time). Nonetheless, Hintz refused to discuss the matter. “I am willing to take responsibility for my actions,” he said, but “(my) concern right now” is not to be “distract(ed) from the much more important issue” of “stand(ing) up for Wisconsin’s working families.”

The Litigious Society

• The family of the late Roger Kreutz filed a lawsuit in St. Louis in March over the fatal head injuries he received when a car knocked him down in a Starbucks parking lot in 2008. The driver was Aaron Poisson, who was trying to get away from Kreutz, but Poisson was not sued. According to the lawsuit, the cause of the fatal injury was negligence by Starbucks — because it had mindlessly placed its tip jar in full view on a counter, thus (according to the theory of the lawsuit) goading Poisson into snatching up the money and running out the door, and inspiring Kreutz, as a good Samaritan, to chase Poisson and try to retrieve the employees’ tips.

Copyright 2010 Chuck Shepard.
Distributed by Universal UClick.