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News of the Weird

Noteworthy absurdities from around the world

by Chuck Sheperd

LEAD STORIES

According to an April New York Times report, the purchase price in Japan of giant stag beetles has dropped recently to about $300 from a typical price in the early 1990s of about $6,000. The beetles, which resemble 4-inch-long cockroaches, are traditional Japanese pets that, according to insect salesman Katsutoshi Misaki, "have different personalities." Added Misaki, "When I hold it in my hand, I feel real affection for it." One breeder said a rare pet beetle sold in 1993 for about $30,000.

Recently retired Air Force Sgt. Charles O. Hamilton Jr. was arrested in Upper Marlboro, Md., in March allegedly attempting to enter a toddler's bedroom at night. Police believe Hamilton is the serial burglar who sneaks into houses at night, sometimes wearing a diaper under his pants, to observe and photograph young boys sleeping, sometimes after deftly removing their shorts and dressing them in diapers. A storage locker belonging to Hamilton was found to contain photos of his peeping handiwork, along with about a thousand diapers, some of them soiled, many with boys' names on them with photographs inside showing the named boy wearing the diaper.

New Scientist magazine reported in April on how weaker males in two animal species end up fathering almost as many offspring as their studly competitors. Researcher Brian Preston told a conference in Newcastle, England, that strong rams get more sex but that toward the end of mating season, they may literally run out of sperm, leaving females to scrawnier rams. And a team from Liverpool University reported that strong male flour beetles' spiny penises can scrape previously deposited sperm from females, to allow their own sperm to prevail, but that some of the scraped sperm remains on the penis during the male's next conquest (within a matter of minutes). Thus, the subsequent female is sometimes impregnated not by the current male but by the residue sperm of a male she has never encountered.

Berkeley, Calif., Councilman Kriss Worthington announced in April that he would propose that the City Council pass a reparations package to heal sociopolitical wounds dating back to the 1960s. Included were proposals for official apologies to anti-Vietnam war protesters and to Patricia Hearst Shaw, who was kidnapped by (and later joined) the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. Worthington also proposed that the city erect a statue of Hearst Shaw in her notorious gun-toting pose and declare the abduction house in Worthington's district a historic site.

Interesting Workplaces

Unitel Corp. announced in March it was relocating its 100-job telemarketing office from small-town Frostburg, Md., to Florida. Unitel said Frostburg workers' telephone manner is too polite for the telemarketing business.

According to a February Science News profile of University of South Florida pollution microbiologist Joan B. Rose, her career is devoted to flushing fecal-germlike "phages" down toilets and then sending monitoring crews into local waterways to track down where they end up. She has found, for example, that some bacteria flushed into septic tanks can seep into nearby canals within 11 hours.

Another germ ranger is University of Arizona environmental microbiologist Charles Gerba, whose specialty, according to a February New York Times article, is discovering germ patterns in kitchens, bathrooms, and laundries. In random home visits, Gerba found that 25 percent of washing machines are contaminated with fecal matter and that hepatitis A and salmonella survive even a very hot dryer and remain on clothes. He is noted for developing the "commodograph," a visual display of where droplets of water land after they are sprayed into the air when a toilet is flushed. (Hint: Gerba keeps his toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.)

Janice Peck, 50, filed a lawsuit last year in Salt Lake City against the state Division of Wildlife for alienation of affection. The agency had assigned Janice's then-husband, Randal, to partner up with agent Jodi Becker, now 33, as a married, outdoor couple in order to infiltrate a poaching operation. Apparently, the couple was so good at portraying a couple that Randal divorced Janice after 23 years' marriage and married Becker. Randal and Jodi said they initially slept together in their government-supplied trailer only to give their relationship greater authenticity.

Oops!

In November in Lake St. Croix Beach, Minn., firefighters assisted a 13-year-old boy who had gotten his lip stuck in an eggbeater. And in Taipei, Taiwan, in February, doctors removed a chopstick from the eye socket of Japanese tourist Satoshi Kinoshida; it had penetrated more than an inch. And in December, firefighters in Gosport, England, were called to a home to extricate teacher John Gueran, 42, who had become stuck headfirst with, according to London's Daily Telegraph, his "backside in the air," behind a pantry trying to retrieve his son's Christmas gift.

Latest Highway Truck Spills: 36 tons of Tootsie Rolls, Blow Pops, and other candy, near downtown Nashville, Tenn., January; thousands of surgical scalpels, scattered over a half-mile stretch of Route 10 near Walton, N.Y., January (puncturing the tires of a dozen motorists); and 8 million dimes near Gore, Okla., en route from the Denver Mint to the Federal Reserve Bank in Little Rock, Ark., in March.

Anyway, They Survived the Crash

A 22-year-old woman in an automobile collision in Pendleton, Ore., in January was placed in an ambulance, but seconds later a tractor-trailer skidded into it, crushing it, and killing the woman. And a 36-year-old man survived a head-on crash into a utility pole in Miami Beach, Fla., in January, and was waiting to be picked up when the pole fell on top of him, killing him. And a 72-year-old man was slightly injured when his car went off the road near Penicton, British Columbia, in December, resting on a ledge; when a rescuer attempted to reach him, the car slipped off and fell 30 feet, killing the man.

Leading Economic Indicators

In January, a pair of popular dolls was introduced in Japan from the firm Mataro, consisting of a female with her hands out asking for a loan and a male banker in a business suit rejecting her. And in Mompos, Colombia, in March, local teachers stole about 50 Easter figurines from a church and vowed not to return them until the city issued their six-months-overdue paychecks. And Nike announced in March to great fanfare that it was raising the minimum wage for its Indonesian workers, to about $37 per month, which in the U.S. buys one-fourth of a pair of Air Jordans.

Things Are Not as They Seem

In January, a jury in Ringgold, Ga., acquitted Alvin Ridley, 56, of murdering his wife. Because most neighbors and relatives of the couple had not seen Virginia Ridley in 25 years, and because Alvin was an eccentric loner living in a dilapidated, roach-infested house in the Appalachian mountains, rumors long had it that Alvin had enslaved Virginia shortly after their wedding and eventually killed her. However, Alvin said Virginia died of an epileptic seizure and persuaded the jury of the couple's love by showing Virginia's prolific diaries, which describe her simple lifestyle, passion for privacy, and intense, almost high school crush-like obsession with her husband.

After decades of failed or meaningless "studies" by advocates of the medical effectiveness of relieving pain by attaching magnets to various parts of the body, a New York Medical College researcher announced one in January that some authorities believe actually passes muster. In a report on 24 patients with diabetes, Dr. Michael I. Weintraub wrote in the American Journal of Pain Management, those with magnets enclosed in foot pads reported less pain than those with simulated magnets in the pad. Weintraub theorized that a certain nerve in the foot might be responsive to the electrical energy created by the magnetic waves.

Recurring Themes

Last year "News of the Weird" reported on a Missouri woman's begging a judge not to imprison the man who had shot her in the head (and thus sent her into a coma and killed her fetus) because she nevertheless loved him and had since married him (and produced a replacement child). In San Francisco in January 1999, Anthony Tyrone Davis, 42, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for smashing a woman with a hammer, so severely that he left a skull indentation in the shape of the head of the hammer. The victim subsequently married Davis and refused to testify against him, but he was convicted on a doctor's testimony and the 911 tape of the incident.

The late Bennie Casson's unsuccessful lawsuit against a Sauget, Ill., stripper's club for neck injuries caused by a dancer's swinging her breasts at him was all over the news in 1997. In February 1999, Mark Kent, 28, filed assault charges against the Kappa Kabana club, Kappa, Ill., after a dancer tried to wrap her legs around his neck while holding onto a pole on stage, causing Kent to fall off a bar stool and hit his head and elbow.

"News of the Weird" reported in 1993 that a Santa Monica, Calif., cafe was selling $130/pound Kopi Luwak coffee, produced from choice beans that have been run through the digestive tract of a Sumatran marsupial before being processed for sale. A March 1999 Wall Street Journal story from Vietnam reported on a similarly made "caphe cut chon" (fox dung coffee), employing a mongoose-related civet cat, whose taste in finding the finest coffee beans in a field is said to be uncanny. (The coffee is in shorter supply lately because Vietnamese diners are finding the civet cat, itself, tasty.)

"News of the Weird" has reported several times on capital punishment in China for crimes somewhat less serious than murder. Among the latest: Gao Yunliao, executed in January in Henan province, for stealing a statue. Executive Tang Mihong and his employee Zhao Jian, executed in December in Beijing, for smuggling computers. And Jie Hua Huang, 34, granted asylum in Canada in November because he faced a certain death penalty in China for tax fraud.

Stories demonstrating different smell tolerances have once again been in the news. In February, a 52-year-old woman in Hong Kong gave in to the smell after a week and turned her dead husband's body over to authorities; she had held on to the body in the hope that he would revive. And in January, authorities in Thunder Bay, Ontario, recovered the body of an 85-year-old man, dead for four years, which had to be extricated from a house that one officer called "a tremendous biological soup of garbage and debris"; the neighbors had noticed a smell a few years ago but did not think it was bad enough to report.

Thinning the Herd

A 54-year-old woman was run over and killed in February by an Amtrak train in San Jose, Calif.; she was walking on the tracks wearing headphones listening to the radio. And an unidentified middle-aged man was killed in Nairobi, Kenya, in March when he accidentally ran in front of a bus while escaping from the All Saints Cathedral, where he had just stolen the contents of collection plates. And a 73-year-old man was killed in a fistfight in Las Vegas in February; he had just challenged a 69-year-old man over who was tougher.

The Litigious Society

Lucia Kaiser filed a lawsuit in February against the Ohm restaurant in New York City, claiming that her 400-guest birthday party there in December (among the guests, Harry Belafonte and Quincy Jones) did not meet her expectations. The restaurant owner said it was a lovely party and that he fully complied with the contract, but Kaiser said she was so unfulfilled that she wants $30 million in damages.

In Belleville, Ill., Rochelle Chouinard sued booking agent Patricia Neuf for $227 for failing to supply a satisfactory stripper for her husband's 50th birthday party. Chouinard said she specifically asked for a woman with at least a 40-inch chest and who would do a nurse-like act, but received what she estimated to be a 36A woman who merely did a traditional striptease. In February, a judge tossed out Chouinard's lawsuit.

In Edwardsville, Ill., in February, Joseph Schrage filed a lawsuit against a local Pizza Hut for the "mental anguish" caused when he got a bad pizza one night in 1997. He said the pizza made him sick, but he offered no proof when he made his initial claim against the company. The Pizza Hut manager said Schrage's experience hasn't driven him away: "He's still a current, regular customer. He comes in about twice a week."

In February, a jury in New Britain, Conn., awarded convicted rapist-murderer Kevin King, 27, more than $2 million in damages for injuries suffered when he tried to escape from prison in 1996. In that attempt, King had attacked a female guard with a homemade knife, but a little while later, two other guards subdued King, causing some bruises and a cut below one eye, but also, according to his lawyer, causing him "anxiety" and "terror" that he would be further roughed up by the guards. King's lawyer had sought to settle for $20,000, but the six jurors saw fit to award him 100 times that amount.

In November, inmate Luis Romero, 38, filed a lawsuit against jailers in Farmington, N.M., for injuries he suffered when he fell out of his bunk and hit his head while trying to change a light bulb in his cell. And two months earlier, inmate Guadalupe Mendoya was turned down by a Wisconsin Court of Appeals in his lawsuit against Green Bay jailers for injuries he suffered when he fell out of bed while still inebriated from the 25 drinks he had had earlier that night.