WEIRDNUZ.508 (News of the Weird, October 31, 1997) by Chuck Shepherd
(As usual, editorial comment at no extra charge.)
LEAD STORIES
* New York City special-effects artist Matt McMullen, 28, has been offering his lifesize, authentically detailed, steel-skeletoned, silicone dolls, under the name "Real Dolls," for several months on the Internet, for around $4,000 each plus options. So far, Stacy, Natasha, Nina, and Leah are available, with choice of hair color, skin color, and height (either "supermodel" or short and voluptuous). His original doll was intended as sculpture until lonely men bombarded him with price inquiries. Said McMullen, "There is no way this can compete with the real thing, but it can fill a deep void in someone's life."
Shouldn't it provide a deep void in someone's life?
* "Mommy!": The Orlando Sentinel reported in August that a man had gotten into a bind at a Winter Park, Fla., massage parlor when he couldn't pay a woman the $150 price for sex and was threatened by the woman's bodyguard. So the man telephoned his mother and asked her to bring the money to a nearby restaurant. And in an Atlanta, Ga., suburb in September, Sherrod Terry, 19, and Akram Muhammad, 20, were charged with armed robbery of a Long John Silver's restaurant after a short stand-off in which police trapped the men inside. Police said one of the robbers, fresh out of ideas on how to handle the siege, had telephoned his mother for advice.
The SWAT team coined him the nickname "Long John Sliver".
* In September in Newmarket, Ontario, a jury foreman announced, "We find the accused [and here, the foreman cleared his throat] guilty," but the judge and other court personnel heard it as "We find the accused not guilty." The defendant, Howard Burke, charged with attempted murder, did not wait around for clarification, but the error was detected within minutes, and Burke finally gave himself up three days later and had the correct verdict imposed.
Good thing the foreman didn't choke to death.
COMPELLING EXPLANATIONS
* St. Petersburg, Fla., Baptist minister Dr. Henry Lyons, president of the National Baptist Convention and who had been accused of misspending church funds and falsifying documents, explained in August why he had told an interviewing committee (when applying for the position of president) that he was single, when actually he had been married and divorced twice: "I forgot [those marriages]." (He noted that the marriages had been brief.)
How conveeeeeeenient.
* Reports surfaced in July from San Francisco social-service organizations that poor kids who participated in a summer lunch program were being served moldy green bologna in sandwiches (for many of the kids, their main meal of the day). According to Dr. Johnson Ojo, the Health Department's principal inspector, what he saw while investigating the complaints was "not that bad," and anyway, moldy bologna will not cause food poisoning.
Not to mention the fact that it gives them a vegetable-like substance with their meat. Now they can eliminate ketchup from the menu.
* John E. Herndon, at his May sentencing (he got 20 years) in Little Rock, Ark., for using two teenage girls in pornographic photos after giving them alcoholic beverages: "They were my muffins and my flowers," he told the judge. "They were earth angels. I renew my promises to the girls as a born-again Christian that I will always love them and protect them."
Only 20 years?
* Lee Walter Nance was arrested in Hood River, Ore., in June on suspicion of public indecency when police found him nude in a parking lot on the complaint of a woman who said Nance was harassing her. According to police, Nance explained that he was merely working on his tan because he was on a church softball team and was afraid that if he didn't have a base tan, he would get sunburned.
He received a probated sentence for his originality.
* At the June attempted-rape trial of Abel Martinez III, 30, in St. Joseph, Mo., the 60-year-old victim described how she fought back, testifying that she missed her first lunge to bite his penis but succeeded on the second, even though she was not able to bite with full force. "I tried," she said, "but my false teeth turned on me."
Hell, they turned my stomache.
WEIRD SCIENCE
* Two high school chemistry students from Skipwith, Virginia, experimenting with a slime they had created in order to play a joke on their teacher in October 1996, accidentally produced an edible plastic, and in June 1997, a company paid them $100,000 for a one-year option on their invention. Fuisz Technologies Ltd. specializes in melt-in-the-mouth medications and believes the substance might make a better capsule, at which point the boys' work would be worth about $1 million.
Don't they know that every restaraunt icemaker produces that very same green slime by the quart?
* The Times of London reported in August that the California firm Interval Research has developed a prototype for a new wristwatch that would be worn not on the wrist but in the wrist. A liquid crystal display, microchip, and battery would be implanted under the skin, close enough to the surface so that the time would be readable. Battery-recharging and time-zone changes would be done by remote control.
Yeah, but can you surf the Web? (Speaking of time zone changes, I happened to be on my (Win95) laptop when daylight savings time ended last month. 2:00 AM rolls around, and Windows pops up this screen that says it has detected a time change, and will gladly adjust my system clock for me. I click OKAY, and it goes away. An hour later, the same little window pops up, with the same little message. OKAY a few more times, and next think I know the sun is rising at 1:30 in the morning.)
* In in a 25-hour operation in September, surgeons in Melbourne, Australia, reattached the face of a 28-year-old woman who had it ripped off in a farm machinery accident. But one week earlier, in London, surgeon Steve Gill described to a British Society of Neurosurgeons audience how in February 1997 he had reattached a woman's entire head after removing it (except for the spinal cord, key blood vessels, and skin at the front of her neck) to correct a crippling condition that was causing her face to point downward. (It took him only 17 hours to take the head off, remove a wedge at the base of her skull, and reattach the head with a metal plate and two screws.)
Wouldn't a simple "face lift" have accomplished the same thing?
FAMILY VALUES
* Mentoring: Luiz Carlos Marra, 47, was arrested in Minneapolis in June after his 12-year-old daughter told hospital emergency-room personnel that she had smoked crack cocaine with him. According to the police report, Marra said he was trying to show the girl the difference between good crack and bad crack. And in July, Dennis Dunn, 46, told sheriff's deputies near Brookings, S. Dak., that he was chasing his stepson's car at speeds near 85 mph only because he wanted to catch up to the boy so he could teach him not to speed.
* The Washington Post reported in May that the D. C. Armory, site of the shock-rock singer Marilyn Manson concert, agreed to provide a waiting room for parents who had to stay around in order to take their under-driving-age kids back home after the show. Thus, wrote the Post, mothers waited patiently, reading and crocheting, while in the arena, thousands of teenagers "waved their middle fingers and chanted 'We love hate! We hate love!'" with some wearing T-shirts that read "Kill Your Parents."
And our parents thought we were misguided?
* In April, the National Olympic Committee of the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines suspended its Olympic coach Orde Ballantyne for four years after his mother ratted him out. She was head of the country's delegation at the Summer Games in 1996 and reported him for violating protocol by refusing to stand for the U. S. national anthem.
It was all a big mistake. You see, the younger Ballantyne's nickname is Jose. He was flabbergasted when all the people stood and sang "Jose can you see, by the dawn's.....
Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate. |
