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From: Oliver Stockley/RSUK
<Oliver_Stockley/RSUK%RSUK%RUS%RSD@notesgw.compuserve.com>
Date: 17 Feb 97 9:38:32
Subject: News of the Weird [466] - 10Jan97
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--
---------------------- Forwarded by Oliver Stockley/RSUK on 17/02/97 09:33
---------------------------
Roger Lucas
17/02/97 09:11
To: JCOGMAN @ farnboro02.datasci.co.uk @ internet@cserve, PDM @
realtime.demon.co.uk @ internet@cserve, Peter Bosman/RSUK, Alexander
Chamberlain/RSUK, Mark Cossins/RSUK, Dean Jenkins/RSUK, Abdul Khadbai/RSUK,
Richard Petrie/RSUK, Martin Robinson/RSUK, Stuart Rogers/RSUK, Jonathon
Sole/RSUK, Oliver Stockley/RSUK, Kevin Wood/RSUK
cc:
Subject: News of the Weird [466] - 10Jan97
WEIRDNUZ.466 (News of the Weird, January 10, 1997)
by Chuck Shepherd
See copyright information at end of this transmission.
LEAD STORIES
* Can't Hold It In: The school board in Durham, N. C.,
suspended a substitute teacher at Hillside High School in
November after she urinated into a trash can during class,
allegedly because of a medical condition. And 5th-grade teacher
Dow Ooten, 36, was suspended in Charleston, W. Va., in
December after he brought his soiled trousers to a school board
meeting to show what he was forced to do because the faculty
restroom door was locked. And in November, a similarly-soiled
Tom Pak won a $45,000 settlement from Los Angeles County,
whose property tax office clerks made him wait at a desk,
without a restroom break, in retaliation for his having arrived 15
minutes before closing to make payments on more than 200
properties.
* Latest Ear Technology: In November, police in Independence
Township, Mich., arrested a 45-year-old man and charged him
with peeping into windows at the Clarkston Motor Inn, basing the
arrest on the earprints he allegedly left on the windows. And one
month later, in Vancouver, Wash., Judge Robert L. Harris ruled
that the prosecutor could use an earprint found on the bedroom
door of a murder victim in the trial of his suspected killer.
* Actress Anya Pencheva announced in November a plan to
divert her fellow Bulgarians' attention from grim economic
problems: She would have a plaster cast made of her breasts, to
display in the National Theater in Sofia. Said Pencheva, "It is a
pity to focus everything on [budget cuts] when there are such
beautiful breasts around."
THE CONTINUING CRISIS
* According to a September report in Toronto's Globe and Mail,
the University of Toronto's medical school employs actors and
other people for $12 to $35 per hour to be practice patients for its
students. Bob LeRoy, 45, commands the top pay because he is a
rectal-exam patient. Said LeRoy, "I always hope the student with
the biggest finger goes first."
* The Wall Street Journal reported in September that about 100
"laughing clubs" had sprung up in India in the last year based on
the philosophy of Dr. Madan Kataria, who says the ancient yoga
breathing and laughing exercises can help people shed inhibitions,
build self-confidence, stop smoking, alleviate high blood pressure
and arthritis, and stop migraine headaches. After conventional
stretching, adherents engage in silent laughs, out-loud laughs
with their lips closed, and the roaring "Bombay laugh." Dr.
Kataria worries only that some day, the government might try to
tax laughter.
* Suicide Chic: A September story in London's Sunday Times
described Venice, Italy, as a new trendy site for unhappy
Europeans' and Americans' suicides, inspired by the movie
"Death in Venice." (About 50 people attempted suicide in the
past year; all but a half dozen were unsuccessful, usually because
the canals into which they leap are deceptively shallow.) And the
San Francisco Examiner reported in September that 11 people in
the previous 18 months had rented handguns at local gun ranges
and killed themselves on the premises.
* According to an August dispatch by Britain's Guardian News
Service, the family of Chiang Kai-shek (the Chinese ruler who
was chased out by the communists, to Taiwan, in 1949 and who
died in 1975) is growing weary of the "temporary" storage of his
skeleton in Taiwan, where it has been kept in preparation for its
triumphant return to the mainland upon the fall of the communist
government. According to practitioners of the art of feng-shui,
the spirits are upset that the skeleton is kept in a box in the
living
room of the family estate instead of being buried in China.
* Students rioting in August at South Korea's Yonsei University
apparently found weapons in short supply and used whatever was
available. When police finally quashed the protest, the geology
department faculty discovered that about 10,000 rare rocks,
collected over 30 years and considered irreplaceable, were
missing. A few were recovered from the streets, chipped or
broken.
* In September, David Cook of Caledonian University (Glasgow,
Scotland) told the British Psychological Society's annual
conference that his three-year study shows that politicians have
significant behavior patterns in common with criminal
psychopaths. Cook said that criminals were relatively easy to
analyze but that he did not have as much data as he would like on
politicians: "[They] don't like to be studied."
* In October, Miss Canada International, 20-year-old Danielle
House, was removed from further competition after being
charged in St. John's, Newfoundland, with punching out her ex-
boyfriend's current girlfriend in a bar. Ms. House said she had
been in counseling recently for "low self-esteem."
* In Santa Fe, N. Mex., Christine Bodman announced in
November that a group of massage therapists has formed the
Massage Emergency Response Team to minister for free to
stressed-out firefighters, police officers, and paramedics.
* Latest Bobbittizations: On the evening of November 17, Ms.
Renu Begum, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Ms. Raquel Nair
Lucio, in Tiete, Brazil, at about the same hour on the clock (but
10 time zones apart) severed their respective husbands' genitals in
jealous rages.
* In August, a federal judge in Springfield, Mo., dismissed the
lawsuit of Jennifer Stocker Jessen, now 24, who had claimed that
repressed memories of childhood abuse by her step-grandfather
returned to her in 1988. The triggering mechanism, she said,
was her hitting an opossum in the road with her car.
THE WEIRDO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY
* In September in East Orange, Vt., Christie's auction house sold
almost $2 million worth of automobiles (including 33 Stutz
Bearcats) that belonged to eccentrics A. K. Miller, who died at
87 a few years ago, and his wife Imogene, who died in 1996.
The couple left millions more in gold and silver and other
valuables but lived like paupers, sometimes eating dog food or
bread made of flour they had swept off the floor, sometimes
shopping at yard sales, sometimes dressing in rags. As treasurer
of his church, Mr. Miller had once refused to accept a small
increase in electricity rates and converted the entire church to
kerosene lamps. The Millers paid property taxes but no other
ones, and the federal and state governments are now claiming
$8.2 million.
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: (13) The gun expert who accidentally shoots himself
while demonstrating safety techniques, as did Constable Randy
Youngman, who took a shotgun blast in the leg while teaching a
safety class in Medicine Hat, Alberta, in December. And (14)
the periodic warnings about global warming caused by excessive
methane production by flatulent livestock, as was announced in a
European Commission strategy paper released in November in
Brussels.
==============================