An entrepreneur in Seoul, South Korea, has opened the Thanks to Nature Cafe, where sheep wander through the dining room. Owner Lee Kwang-ho said his novel business model has attracted visitors from Macedonia, Saudi Arabia and New Zealand, among other countries.
Hey — He’s Gettin’ Paid!
Benito Vasquez-Hernandez, 58, who has been found guilty of nothing has been locked up for 900 days as a “material witness” in a Washington County, Ore., murder case. The prosecutor is convinced that Vasquez-Hernandez saw his own son, Eloy, murder a woman in 2012, and the case is on hold until the victim’s body is found. The judge has told Vasquez-Hernandez he can leave if he pays a $500,000 bond or gives a video deposition. But Vasquez-Hernandez speaks no English and is illiterate in Spanish. His lawyer says he might be mentally incompetent. On the up side, in Oregon, material witnesses earn $7.50 a day.
The Continuing Crisis
— The trendy St. Pauli neighborhood in historic Hamburg, Germany, suffers from uncouth revelers who wander out from nightclubs and urinate in the street. The solution, says the civic group IG St. Pauli, is to paint buildings with an “intensely hydrophobic” product known as Ultra-Ever Dry. The product propels liquid that hits it back to its source. It does this by means of an “air surface” that the product creates. Thus, said an IG St. Pauli official, it’s “pee back” time, and shoes and trouser legs should get splashed.
— We have “139 frogs, toads, lizards, turtles,” Thayer Cuter told Seattle’s MyNorthwest.com in March. She was touting her Edmonds, Wash., amphibian rescue shop. The shop recently saved Rocky, the Texas toad who arrived with stones in his tummy. “He had to have a lot of enemas, but Rocky is rock-free now.” Cuter said turtles are underrated as pets, claiming they are “very social” and love massages and “cuddling.”
— Cockroaches can be either bold or shy and withdrawn, according to recent work by researchers at Belgium’s Universite Libre de Bruxelles, who affixed radio tags to roaches and studied their movements. “Explorers” are bold roaches that are necessary for locating food sources. In contrast, “shy, cautious” roaches are necessary for survival and group stability. A mixture of the types ensures cockroaches’ legendary survivability. A Mother Nature News commentator wrote that understanding roaches’ personalities might make us “less quick to grab a shoe.”
Can’t Possibly Be True
— Ranson IB Middle School in Charlotte, N.C., has a strict dress code. For example, it allows only hunter green outerwear. On Jan. 27, when parent Chanda Spates sent her three children to school in clothes of other hues, in improperly hued coats, Ranson officials confiscated the “contraband” clothing, leaving the three to make their way home after classes with no outerwear at all — even with temperatures in the 30s. Administrators later apologized.
— A female teacher working for the Arizona Dept. of Corrections was brutally assaulted in prison by a sexual predator and has sued the department. But the state attorney general’s office, contested the lawsuit. The AG’s office told the judge that the teacher understood all along that she could get attacked in prison. She was giving inmates a GED exam at the time of the attack. She was not being guarded. She had been given an emergency radio tuned to an unmonitored frequency. But Asst. Attorney General Jonathan Weisbard said, “The risk of harm, including assault, always exists at a prison like Eyman.”
Compelling Explanations
— Debra Mason, 58, was arrested for theft of a pickup truck in Destin, Fla., in January. According to police, Mason said she knew the truck was stolen property but “didn’t think it was ‘that’ stolen.”
— Ten miles away in Mary Esther, Fla., Robert Pursley, 54, was arrested for DUI. He was asked about items in his truck. According to the police report, Pursley insisted that everything was his — “except for anything illegal.” A baggie of cocaine was in the truck’s center console.
USA! USA!
— American sisters Lindsey, 22, and Leslie Adams, 20, were convicted, fined and deported by Cambodia’s Siem Reap Court after taking several nude photos of each other at the Preah Khan temple, apparently for their social media friends. The Angkor Archaeological Park, where the temple is located, is reportedly the world’s largest religious monument.
— Joseph Sledge, now 70, was released from prison in N.C. in January after serving 36 years for a double murder he didn’t commit. Hair samples of the actual killer, which were long thought to be lost, were discovered in a court clerk’s storage room.
— Kirk Odom, 52, served 22 years after a wrongful conviction for rape and robbery. A court awarded him $9.2 million in compensation. But after several prison rapes, he had contracted HIV. Odom is one of several D.C. men convicted of rape or murder based on erroneous analysis by an “elite” FBI hair-analysis unit.
— The U.S. Treasury recently took in more than $40 billion by auctioning off part of the wireless spectrum. One buyer — the Dish satellite-TV provider — got a discount worth $3.25 billion by convincing the Federal Communications Commission that it is a “very small business” (despite its market value of $34 billion). Dish had created a separate company in partnership with a small Alaskan natives’ group, which, said Dish, “managed” the company. Thus, Dish got the benefits of being “very small” while retaining control of a gigantic business. One commissioner said the whole thing was a “mockery” of the FCC’s simple-minded attempt to help small businesses.
Least Competent Criminals
— Tyler Lankford, 21, attempted a robbery of Minerva’s Bakery in McKeesport, Penn., in January. He committed the rookie mistake of laying his gun on the counter so he could pick up the money with both hands. The clerk grabbed the gun, and Lankford fled. He was arrested in March.
— Cass Alder, 22, was convicted by a court in Canada’s Prince Edward Island of trying to pass $100 bills that had been printed on napkins, then affixed by Alder onto thicker paper.
Weird News Classic: April 2010
Supervisors at the Dept. for Work and Pensions in Carlisle, England, issued a directive in March, 2010, to short-handed staff to ease their telephone workload during the busy mid-day period. Workers were told to pick up the ringing phone and mimic an answering machine by saying, “Due to the high volume of inquiries we are currently experiencing, we are unable to take your call. Please call back later.” Then they were to immediately hang up.
Man’s Best Friend
Researchers are now preparing a study designed to confirm that dog saliva may have health benefits for people. These benefits could include relief from asthma, allergies and inflammation. Specialists from the University of Arizona and University of California San Diego point to evidence of the comparative healthiness of dog-owning families. They suspect that canine saliva, like yogurt, may have unusual probiotic value.
Updates
— Since News of the Weird last visited the judicial backlog in India in 2013, the problem has worsened. The open caseload grew to 31,367,915 by the end of that year. With that quantity, if all of the country’s judges, working around the clock, resolved 100 cases an hour, the backlog would still take 35 years to clear. Bloomberg Business Week reported in January of this year that lawyers needlessly fatten the backlog with multiple filings, mainly to jack up their fees.
— Death-penalty opponents have long sought a clear-cut case in which an a person who was known to be innocent was then intentionally executed. The great state of Texas appears to have provided the case. Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted in 1992 and executed in 2004. Since his trial, the arson evidence used to prove he was guilty of murder has been thoroughly discredited. Recently, an ex-cellmate’s 1996 letter surfaced. In the letter, the prisoner demanded that his prosecutor comply with the sentence reduction he was promised if he claimed that Willingham had confessed the murder to him. The cellmate’s sentence was substantially reduced after he wrote the letter. Prosecutor John Jackson is facing a state investigation for not disclosing the sentencing promise before the trial.
— After seven years of controversy, Iceland’s Road Administration approved a new pathway near Reykjavik that had been delayed by a 70-ton boulder in the right-of-way. The boulder couldn’t be dislodged because it is believed to be a church for the country’s legendary “hidden people” — or elves. The elves’ leading spokeswoman, Ragnhildur Jonsdottir, finally declared, to officials’ relief, that the elves had accepted the boulder’s relocation to the side of the road. She said the elves had “been preparing for this for a long time, moving their energy to the new location.”
— At the beginning of the year, the Belgian prime minister defended his country’s austerity measures. The group of protesters near him responded by throwing large quantities of french fries topped with mayonnaise on him.
— Veterinarians in Scotland charged $750 to perform cancer surgery on two goldfish. And in September 2014, in Melbourne, Australia, a goldfish received “brain surgery” for the bargain price of $200.
Recurring Themes
— Devin Gesell, 17, and two underage accomplices are the most recent burglars to make off with a deceased person’s ashes, believing they had swiped cocaine. They were disappointed from the very first taste, and the remains were immediately tossed from the getaway car. (St. Peters, Missouri, March).
— A 35-year-old woman became the most recent to get stuck climbing down a chimney. She wasn’t a would-be burglar. She was trying to enter the house of a former boyfriend — and father of her three children — who had forbidden her to come in the home. She was naked at the time she got stuck. (Woodcrest, Calif., January.)
Don’t DIY
— Fred Horne of Columbus, Ohio, burned down his house in February in an effort to smoke the bedbugs out of his couch. Only that one piece of furniture caught fire. But Horne got stuck when he was carrying it out of the house, and the blaze spread.
— Near Darwin, Australia, a woman living in an RV came face-to-face with a snake and decided to encourage the serpent to leave by lighting a fire beneath the RV’s floor. The vehicle was destroyed; said the police superintendent, “we don’t know what happened to the snake.”
— Federal law prohibits foreclosures and repossessions against active-duty members of the military. Americans would hardly know that from observing the behavior of creditors. A 2012 Government Accountability Office report found at least 15,000 violations of the law by U.S. financial institutions, small and large, including J.P. Morgan Chase. In February, auto lender Santander Consumer USA agreed to pay $9.35 million to settle charges that it illegally seized cars of 760 service members over the last five years. Some soldiers were deployed in the field when their cars were taken.
— In February, in Hua Hin, Thailand, a 36-year-old woman was arrested for scattering screws on a busy street in order to increase business for her husband’s tire shop.
— Dentist Leopold Weinstein, 63, was arrested in Camarillo, Calif., and charged with suspicion of setting fire to three competing dental offices (one for the fourth time). One victim said the arsonist even drilled holes in the roof and poured in gasoline to accelerate the blaze.
— Padge-Victoria Windslowe, a “Gothic hip-hop” performer known as Black Madam did buttocks-enhancement procedures on the side using industrial-grade silicone and Krazy Glue. She was convicted in Philadelphia in March of the third-degree murder of a patient; silicone had leaked into her lungs. During the trial, Windslowe told the jury she had been called the “Michelangelo of buttocks injections.”
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