Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009

News of the Weird

One Industry That Needs No Stimulus: (1) Drug officials in California’s Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties (north of San Francisco) estimated in January that two-thirds of the area’s economy is based on probably illegal marijuana farming (illegal under federal law, but permitted for medical use by the state). One federal agent told MSNBC, “Nobody produces any better marijuana than (they) do right here.” (2) In January, the director of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime acknowledged that during the bleak banking days of September and October 2008, with panic in the economy over the shortage of cash, often the main source available to some banks was drug dealers’ steady deposits of money to be laundered.

the continuing crisis

Community Property: (1) As part of a highly contentious New York divorce, surgeon Richard Batista, who in good times had donated a kidney to his wife, demanded in January that she either give it back or compensate him with $1.5 million in consideration of the rarity of his kidney match. (2) Also in January, Thomas Rowley, 28, went on trial in Victorville, Calif., for his allegedly more direct approach two years ago after he and his girlfriend split. According to prosecutors, Rowley said that since he had paid for her breast implants, he felt entitled to recover them, allegedly by carving them out of her body (and consequently was charged with attempted murder).

Intimate Health Care: (1) A sex-education advocacy organization in Sweden complained in November about the government’s program that, finally after years of resistance, provides prosthetic penises to newly transgendered males. The policy was nonetheless termed unfair because the devices are cosmetic only and do not “work.” (Regulations prohibit taxpayer money for “sexual aids.”) (2) In October, five employees of the health-care provider New Zealand Care resigned when the company ordered them to provide (as routine service to developmentally disabled patients who request it) assistance in masturbating.

bright ideas

London’s Gymbox in Bank athletic club, recognizing that lifting weights can be a boring way to exercise, introduced “human barbells” recently, hiring five men of various sizes (including two dwarfs) that customers could use for weights instead of the iron. One advantage of the humans is that, on request, they shout encouragement to the customer with each lift. The largest of the five is a 37-year-old, 340-pound man.

family values

The sheriff in El Dorado, Kan., asked in January for help from the public in locating a missing boy named Adam. According to the sheriff, Adam’s parents, Doug and Valerie Herrman, only recently reported him missing, even though they had not seen him since he ran away in 1999, when he was 11. The Herrmans’ attorney said that his clients were nonetheless “very worried about him.”

recurring themes

Apparent closure was reached in 2006 in a long-running News of the Weird story in which, for sexual thrills, a man periodically telephoned managers of fast-food restaurants and, pretending to be a police detective, persuaded the manager to strip-search one or more employees, supposedly to recover stolen merchandise, and to describe the search over the phone. In January, another man, John Brady, 49, was arrested and charged on New York City’s Staten Island with telephoning women at random and instructing them to perform digital rectal exams on themselves, claiming that he was doing research on the digestive system. At least one woman complied.

least competent criminals

Life Imitates the Three Stooges: In January, inmates Regan Reti, 20, and Tiranara White, 21, who had been booked separately for different crimes on New Zealand’s North Island and were handcuffed together for security at Hastings District Court, dashed out of the building and ran for their freedom. However, when they encountered a streetlamp in front of the courthouse, one man went to the right of it and the other to the left, and they slammed into each other, allowing jailers to catch up and re-arrest them. (A courthouse surveillance camera captured the moment, and the video has been a worldwide sensation.)

Visit Chuck Shepherd daily at NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com.