From cate3@netcom.com Tue Mar 14 11:13:09 1995 Subject: Life D.8 To: jwry.dli@netcom.com From: Henry Cate III [cate3@netcom.com] Reply-to: cate3@netcom.com --------------------------------------- Date: 13 Apr 94 10:09:15 PDT (Wednesday) Subject: Life D.8 Chuck Shepherd has a newspaper column called News of the Weird The following selections are from the list: notw@nine.org To add yourself send a request to: notw-request@nine.org ---------------------------------------------------- * In August, a Walnut Creek, Calif., woman unidentified by reporters, caused a three-hour search involving police officers from two towns, a search and rescue team (using hastily-printed photo posters), Explorer Scouts, and several bloodhounds when she reported her 3-year-old daughter missing from the family car during a round of errands. Upon returning home, the woman found the girl and realized that she had not taken her on the errands. [[Oceanside Blade-Citizen-AP, Aug93]] * Dwain C. Johnson, 32, was arrested in Akron, Ohio, in December, and a warrant was issued for his colleague Steven T. Carter, 31, for trafficking in cocaine. The two men had given their car to attendants to be washed and vacuumed, and the vacuum cleaner sucked up a small bag on the front seat containing about 30 rocks of crack cocaine. Police caught Johnson after the men returned to the carwash to force the manager to open up the vacuum canister; Carter escaped. [Akron Beacon Journal, 12-3-93] * In April, when Baltimore's old Vermont Federal bank building was being renovated for the new Harbor Bank, construction workers accidentally locked the safe, which had gathered dust for six years but which Harbor planned to use, and discovered that no one knew the combination. Rather than pay a locksmith an estimated $10,000, or ask an imprisoned safecracker to try his hand, the building owner placed a classified ad in the Baltimore Sun asking to hear from anyone "familiar with" the combination. A former Vermont Federal employee came by and opened the safe. [Baltimore Sun, 4-19-93] * Brazilian legislator Joao Alves, who is the subject of a corruption investigation because he has amassed the equivalent of $51 million on only a legislator's salary, told a congressional panel in October that he accumulated his wealth by winning national bingo and local and national lotteries a total of 24,000 times since 1988. [Pensacola News Journal, 11-3-93] * In July, the Cook Islands, which gained independence from New Zealand in 1965 and is home to 18,000 people, reported its very first armed robbery. A local man took about $24,000 from a hotel, but was quickly captured. [Louisville Courier-Journal, 7-25-93] * In separate incidents in March, police in Washington, D. C., and South San Francisco, Calif., arrested men they encountered running down the street and who aroused suspicion because they happened to be carrying cash registers. One was charged with robbing a convenience store and the other with burglarizing a bakery. [Washington Post, Mar93; Peninsula Times, 3-23- 93] * Damon Washington, 25, was arrested in November in San Francisco and charged with shoplifting cassette tapes at a record store. After an investigation, police said that Washington had just escaped from a medical prison facility and that he needed some tapes to play in the car while riding to his home near Los Angeles. [San Francisco Chronicle, 11-2-93] * In July, a 17-year-old boy, sitting alone on some steps in Manchester, N. H., was approached by a police officer on patrol who wanted to stop to chat. According to the officer, the boy evaded several questions and then began coughing violently. As the officer rubbed his back to ease the coughing, the boy finally spit out about two hundred dollars' worth of cocaine that he had swallowed when he saw the officer approaching. [Valley News (Hanover, N. H.), Jul93] * In November, Carmen Friedewald-Hill, 26, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Frederick, Md., for shooting her boyfriend, Ryan Gesner, to death. She shot him in the stomach during an argument over who loved the other more. [Baltimore Sun, 11-11-93] * The Dallas Morning News reported in September that a tornado near Saginaw, Tex., picked up James Davis's 4- lb. Yorkshire terrier and carried it over two miles, setting it down along a road in view of a passerby. The dog, Sadie, suffered only minor injuries. [Dallas Morning News, Sept93] * According to an official in an investigators' trade association, reported in Woman's Day magazine, parents' hiring private eyes to track their children's whereabouts is up 25 percent. The detectives tap phones, run background checks on their kids' friends, and perform around-the-clock surveillance. [[Woman's Day, Dec93]] * South Korea's Samsung Electronics Company announced in November that it had invented "Bio Television"--a TV set that converts a television's ordinary electromagnetic beams into waves that have an effect similar to that of sunlight on nearby plants and animals. In tests, the longevity of fish, and the freshness of flowers, increased by from 50% to 100% when they were near the Bio TV. [Fairfax Journal, 11- 26-93] * According to trial testimony in January in Santa Ana, Calif., George Edgar Lizarralde, 31, was legally blind in 1985 when the Department of Motor Vehicles issued him a driver's license. He had failed the test three times, and DMV granted the license on the fourth try even though he again failed the vision test. In the January trial, DMV's negligence was found to be the cause of injuries to Deborah Ann Mohr, whom Lizarralde plowed into in a crosswalk in 1990. [Los Angeles Times, 1-21-94] * Firefighters in Canton, Ohio, rushed to the home of Lisa M. Ash, 24, in November to extinguish a fire. They pulled out of her oven a smoldering voodoo doll, made from cloth and twigs, that she said she was using to cast a spell against someone, based on advice she said she received from a telephone psychic line. [Youngstown Vindicator-AP, 11-30-93] * In October, Blue Shield of Idaho and Blue Cross of Idaho demanded the return of payments they mistakenly made to now-suspended psychologist Terry Clapp for treatments of several people with multiple personality disorders. Based on testimony at Clapp's disciplinary hearing, his preferred treatment of that disorder was exorcism, which the insurers said they do not cover. [American Medical News, 10-25-93] * In January, several parents who had been arrested at a cockfighting raid in Dayton, Tenn., filed a $55 million lawsuit against the sheriff's department, claiming that the raid traumatized their children, who were in attendance. Before the deputies arrived, the children were watching 400 people cheering two fights in adjacent rings in which 15 roosters had already been killed. [Knoxville News-Sentinel-AP, 1-6-94] * The epicenter of the January California earthquake is five miles from the United States's largest egg farm, where hens had produced their usual one million eggs in the hours before the quake hit. The damage to the farm was a snapped water line, toppled empty egg pallets, and a total of one broken egg. Said manager Robert Wagner to his employees, "We had a 6.6 earthquake that broke less eggs than you guys do when we're working." [San Francisco Chronicle, 1-31-94] * The Washington Times, citing a Federal Protective Service report, revealed in May that staff and volunteers of the 1993 Clinton inaugural stole $154,000 worth of electronic equipment used for the festivities. [Washington Times, 5-21-93] * A London veterinarian said in January that Eileen Wilson's pet bird Peter died of lung cancer from Wilson's smoking. Wilson disputed the diagnosis, claiming that her previous bird had lasted 12 years despite her smoking and that Peter had only begun to cough during his last days. [Edmonton Journal-Reuter, 1-27-94] * According to the newspaper feature "Earth Week," Australia has recently employed 80 hens as sentinels so authorities will know when an expected invasion of mosquitos on the central Queensland coast has started, and Russia has recently employed rats at the border to munch on samples of Chinese potatoes to check their edibility. [Houston Chronicle, 11-1-93; Rocky Mountain News, Jan94] * The organization Bat Conservation International proposed recently that the former Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire convert 15 vacant nuclear missile bunkers into bat caves. The bunkers apparently have just the proper temperature, humidity, and air circulation to suit bats. [Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 1994] * Last spring, a judge in Clinton, Tenn., suspended the 45-day drunken-driving sentence of Laverne J. Parman after he demonstrated at a hearing that he had given himself up a total of 28 times at the Anderson County jail to serve the sentence but that each time he was turned away. The jail has been cited for overcrowding and had about 500 people waiting to serve sentences at the time. [Knoxville News-Sentinel, 4-15-93] * In October, Canadian environmentalist William Lishman and an associate flew two ultralight aircraft from Blackstock, Ontario, to Gaines, N. Y., and then to Airlie, Va., leading a flock of 18 geese. The two men were demonstrating to the geese how to fly south for the winter. The geese had been raised in captivity and thus lacked migration skills. [Edmonton Journal-CP, 10- 20-93] * In January, James Brindamour, 38, filed court papers in Warwick, R. I., asking to share the proceeds of a $350,000 accidental-death policy on his daughter, who was killed in an auto crash in August. Brindamour abandoned the family in 1983 and owes more than $69,000 in child support. [San Antonio Express-News, 1-15-94] * According to witnesses, a middle-aged man, 6-feet-4, with a gray beard robbed a convenience store in Perryopolis, Pa., in August. As a disguise, he was wearing a large rabbit head, including large, floppy ears. However, the face had been cut out so that the robber's face was fully visible. [The Tennessean, 8-28- 93] * Sarah F. Bates, 58, was arrested in Franklin, Tenn., on Christmas day after she allegedly punched her son- in-law Richard Harrington and threw a stereo at his son (her grandson), injuring him. She was upset because she disagreed with Harrington's decision to let the boy sit at the "grown-ups'" table for dinner. [Nashville Banner, 1-4-94] * Iowa child welfare officials have begun collecting past-due support from the paycheck of Rodney Darnell, 24, of Burlington, Ia., on behalf of 7-year-old Eric Weber. A DNA test proving Darnell is not Weber's father was ruled "irrelevant" by authorities, as was the statement by the boy's mother, Elizabeth Weber, that Darnell was not the father. The state's case rests on a paternity ruling in 1987 that Darnell was the father, but he failed to attend that hearing because, he said, he was in high school at the time and had received no notice of the hearing. [Des Moines Register, Jan94] * People Weekly magazine reported recently that Avon cosmetics company has more than 36,000 sales representatives in the Amazonia region of Brazil, with sales growing at 50% a year. Photographs showed an expedition by zone manager Sonia Pinheiro to introduce her products to the Tembe indians in Tenetehara. Avon representatives in Amazonia sell the complete range of Avon products, from lipstick, moisturizer, and mascara, to men's bikini briefs, and accept for payment almost any barterable item, such as fish. [[People Weekly, Dec93]] * The New York Times reported in January on the fashion design "business" of Connecticut's Ed Kirko, who sells clothing that he has fired rounds through with rifles, handguns, and shotguns. Very popular is the Stetson hat with the single hole that appears to have penetrated the wearer's skull, for $75. [New York Times, Jan94] * Last year, Bobby Hughes won $800,000 from a lower court in Virginia to cover injuries he suffered when he tripped over a railroad trestle. He was trespassing at the time, and his major injuries were scraped hands and knees. In January 1994, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the award. [USA Today, 1-10-94] * Los Angeles lawyer Gary P. Miller won an $85,000 disability payment from Equitable Life Assurance Society for his claim that he has been allergic to courthouses for two years and therefore cannot work at his profession. His disability stems from his arrest in 1992 on insurance fraud charges; he claims that exposure to the criminal justice system now causes him stress, mood swings, and physical sickness. The insurance company is now trying to get its money back. [Columbus Dispatch-AP, Dec93] * In January, a jury in Toronto awarded over $2 million to David Stringer, 36, in his lawsuit against David and Lisa Ashley after he broke his neck jumping off the Ashleys' roof into their swimming pool. According to testimony in the trial, the Ashleys warned Stringer not to make the jump, but four times he climbed through a window, ascended to the roof, and jumped. Stringer's own lawyer termed his client's behavior "idiotic." The Ashleys are insured for only one-fourth the amount of the judgment. [Globe & Mail-CP, 2-2-94] * In December, Atlanta, Ga., attorney Dennis Scheib stopped by the prosecutor's office on his way to court to represent a new client in a criminal case. Just outside the office, he saw two officers chasing a man down the hall, and he joined in to help. After the three men caught the escapee and handcuffed him, Scheib learned the man was the client he had been on his way to court to represent. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 12-29-93] * A veterinarian in Berwick-Upon-Tweed, England, told the Associated Press in February that the cause of attrition among swans that have populated the River Tweed since medieval times is recent clean-water rules. Dr. David Rollo said the swans' main food--effluent from the decaying of barley--is no longer abundant in the river. And the Environmental Protection Agency recently ordered the city of San Diego, Calif., to stop its cleanup of a portion of the Tijuana River because the efforts would cause irreparable harm to the "sewage-based ecology." [St. Louis Post-Dispatch-AP, 2-8-94; Insight, 1-17-94] * About 15 customers had gathered their grocery items at a Safeway in Oxon Hill, Md., shortly after 10 a.m. on Christmas morning and were lined up at the checkout lanes, but no cashiers were on duty, and no one answered calls to the back of the store. Local police were called and after investigating found that the store was supposed to be closed but that the Christmas Eve crew had accidentally left the lights on and the doors unlocked, giving shoppers the impression it was open. [Washington Post, 12-26-93] * The victim of a car theft while visiting Omaha, Neb., in February, Algona, Iowa, judge Joseph Straub walked into the lobby of a local police station around 10 p.m. to file a report rather than wait for officers to come to the scene. According to the judge, he pushed the buzzer on the locked front door several times, and saw officers moving around inside, but no one answered. Using the pay phone in the lobby, he called the station to ask that an officer open the door and take his report. Ten minutes passed before an officer opened the door. He went back inside, and ten more minutes passed before another officer appeared. Then he left, and nothing happened for ten more minutes. Exasperated, the judge, still in the lobby, called 911. A few minutes later, a sergeant came out, then went back in, and finally, a few minutes after that, an officer drove up to the front of the building, got out of her squad car, and took Straub's report. [Des Moines Register, Feb94] ---------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1994, Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved. Released for the personal use of readers. No commercial use may be made of the material or of the name News of the Weird.
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