The late Dennis “Stalking Cat” Avner incrementally cut, chipped, tattooed and pierced his body in an effort to make himself look like a human feline. Newer to the body modification scene is Britain’s Ted Richards, 57, who is working to become a human parrot. With 110 colorful tattoos, 50 piercings and a split tongue, he currently seeks a surgeon who can turn his nose into a beak. Even without the beak, though, Richard says becoming parrotlike “is the best thing that has happened to me.” London’s Daily Telegraph published astonishing photos of Richards, and asked, rhetorically, whether we’ve reached “peak plastic surgery.”
This Stuff’ll Kill Ya
High school principal George Kenney believes he has a gift to aid students’ ability to concentrate by using hypnotism on them. He practiced hypnotism extensively at North Port High in Sarasota, Fla., until 2011, when three of his students died in separate incidents — two by suicide. While Kenney enjoys retirement in North Carolina, the Sarasota school board didn’t close the chapter until October, 2015, when it granted $200,000 settlements to the families of the three students. The lawsuits against Kenney complained of Kenney’s unlicensed “medical procedure,” which, attorneys said, altered the “underdeveloped” teenage brain. But Kenney pointed to improvements in studying by other students.
Snitch On Board
In September, Audrey McColm, 25, was pulled over in Randolph County, Indiana, for driving “erratically.” She was ratted out by her child. When Mom denied having been drinking, her daughter, 7, blurted out, “Yes, you have, Mom.” McColm registered 0.237; had nearly hit another officer’s car head-on; and was so hammered she “urged” an officer to “shoot her in the head.”
The Comforting Tarantula
Untrained “comfort animals” are used by those diagnosed with panic attacks or depression. In an October report on college students hoping to keep their pets in dorms, The New York Times noted that school officials have entertained student requests for such comfort animals as lizards, potbellied pigs, tarantulas, ferrets, guinea pigs and “sugar gliders” (nocturnal, flying, six-ounce Australian marsupials). Informal Justice Department guidelines rule out only animals that are aggressive or destructive or that trigger other students’ allergies.
Matching Alcohol Levels
In October, an intoxicated 20-year-old man in Macomb Township, Mich., accidentally swerved into the midst of a sheriff’s deputies’ roadside stop of another alleged drunk driver. Coincidentally, both arrestees registered 0.17 blood-alcohol readings.
Justice
A 2015 decision of the Georgia Supreme Court has created a puzzle for the policing of drunk drivers. In Georgia, blood alcohol tests are “voluntary.” But the Georgia court has ruled that a “consenting” driver might be “too” drunk to appreciate the notion of consent. In that case, the test results would be inadmissible in court. Prosecutors would be forced to argue that the driver who was too drunk to handle a motor vehicle was sober enough to give conscious consent. Atlanta’s WSB-TV reported in October that judges statewide are grappling with the issue.
Familiar Weird Behaviors
— Funerals and burials aren’t always staid. One man was lowered into the ground inside his beloved Cadillac. It’s not unheard of for corpses to be dressed in fanciful outfits (such as that of the Green Lantern). In October, after Jomar Aguayo Collazo, 23, was killed in a shootout in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the family outfitted his body in his favorite blue tracksuit and propped him up at a table in his mother’s tavern. He appeared to be playing dominoes. Friends and relatives passed by to pay their respects.
— A chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals demanded that Pennsylvania officials erect a roadside grave marker near Lancaster at the spot where a tractor-trailer hauling 80 pigs overturned, killing several pigs. The “terrified animals” that suffered traumatic deaths should be memorialized by the community, PETA said. The pigs, of course, would have eventually found their way to a slaughterhouse, and it is possible that the ones euthanized as a result of the accident died more peacefully than the survivors will.
— In October, a truck driver in Ashton, England, was working for a company called Dachser Intelligent Logistics when his tractor-trailer got stuck in a narrow alley to which he had been directed by his GPS system. It wasn’t the first time satellite navigation had directed a vehicle to the same alley. The town has even placed a traffic sign at the approach to the alley: “Do Not Follow Sat Nav Next Left.”
Problems Of The Super-Rich
Among those struggling with psychological issues in modern America are the rich “one-percenters” (especially the mega-rich “one-percent of one-percenters”), according to counselors specializing in assuaging guilt and moderating class hatred. London’s The Guardian, reporting from New York, found three such counselors, including two who barely stopped short of comparing the plight of the rich-rich with the struggles of “people of color” or out-of-closet gays. Sample worries were isolation (because there are so few rich-rich); stress, caused by political hubbub over “inequality”; and insecurity over the question of whether “friends” really just like one just because of his money.
The Free Lunch
In October, The Washington Post and the New York Post reported recent episodes of government agencies keeping high-earning employees on the payroll for more than a year with no job assignment because the agencies were unable to adjudicate employees’ misconduct cases. Almost 100 shelved Homeland Security employees turned up in a Washington Post Freedom of Information Act request. One information technology analyst warehoused by the New York City employee pension fund said she had earned $1.3 million over 10 years by doing absolutely no work for the city. “I watched movies,” said Niki Murphy. “I crocheted — right in front of supervisors.”
Updates
— In October, the federal government finally unloaded the two New Hampshire properties it seized in 2007 from dentist Elaine Brown and her husband after a nine-month standoff. The couple said they would die rather than pay their back taxes to the IRS. Their 100-acre compound became a magnet for an array of “sovereigns” and tax-resisters, who were rumored to have booby-trapped the property to ward off law enforcement. In the 2015 auction, it was not guaranteed that the property was free of hidden explosives. The Browns, who have resisted U.S. taxation for some time, are serving 30-year prison terms.
— White supremacist Craig Cobb hasn’t given up. News of the Weird noted in 2013 that he was attempting to buy property in Leith, N.D. (pop. 16) in an effort to turn the town into a deluxe Caucasian enclave. But there was local resistance. And Cobb was revealed by a DNA test to be 14 percent “sub-Saharan African.” Cobb is now targeting either Red Cloud, Neb. (pop. 978), or Antler, N.D. (pop. 28). The latter town is seeking crowdsourced funding online to buy the vacant property Cobb has his eyes on.
The Continuing Crisis
— For an October report, Vice Media located the half-dozen most-dedicated collectors of those AOL giveaway CDs from the internet’s dial-up years. Sparky Haufle wrote a definitive AOL-CD collector’s guide; Lydia Sloan Cline has 4,000 unique disks; Bustam Halim at one point had 20,000 before he weeded his collection to 3,000. The AOL connoisseurs file disks by color; by the hundreds of packaging styles; by number of free hours; and especially by the co-brands, such as Frisbee and Spider Man. Their collections, said Halim and Brian Larkin, are “beautiful.”
— In 20th-century Chicago, according to legend, one did not have to be among the living to vote on election day, and a 2013 policy of the city’s community colleges has seemingly extended rights of the dead — to receive unearned degrees. City Colleges of Chicago, aiming to increase graduation numbers, has awarded a slew of posthumous degrees to former students who died with at least three-fourths of the necessary credits to graduate. (The policy also now automatically awards degrees by “reverse transfer” of credits to students who went on to four-year colleges, where they added enough credits, hypothetically, to meet City Colleges’ standards.)
People Different From Us
It would be exhausting to chronicle the many ways in which the woman born Carolyn Clay, 82, of Chattooga County, Ga., is different from us. For starters, she was once arrested for stripping nude to protest a quixotic issue before the city council in Rome, Ga.; for another, her driver’s license identifies her as Ms. Serpentfoot Serpentfoot. In October, she filed to change that name — to one with 69 words, 68 hyphens, an ellipsis and the infinity sign. One judge has already turned her down on the ground that she cannot recite the name. (The woman did offer to shorten it on legal papers to “Nofoot Allfoot Serpentfoot.”)
Justice Served
Hinton Sheryn, 68, on trial at England’s Plymouth Crown Court in September, denied he was the “indecent exposer” charged with 18 incidents against children dating back to 1973 — that he would never do such a thing because he would not want anyone to see his unusually small penis. In response, the prosecutor brought in a prostitute known to have serviced Sheryn, to testify that his penis is of normal size. Sheryn was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Police Report
A 27-year-old owner of the Hookah House in Akron, Ohio, was fatally shot by an Akron narcotics officer during an October raid for suspected drugs. The man had his arms raised, according to the police report, but dropped one hand behind him, provoking an officer to shoot. Only afterward did they learn that the man was unarmed; they concluded that he was reaching only to secure or to push back the packet of heroin he felt was oozing out of its hiding place in his buttocks.
Bright Ideas
In September, village officials in Uzbekistan’s town of Shahartepeppa, alarmed that Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev would drive through and notice barren fields (since the cotton crop had already been harvested), ordered about 500 people into the fields to attach cotton capsules onto the front-row stalks to impress Mirziyoyev with the village’s prosperity.
Undignified Deaths
A woman was killed in an accidental head-on collision in Houston on June 18 as she was racing after another car. She was angrily chasing her estranged husband, who was with another woman. Neither of those two was hurt.
Least Competent Criminals
Jorge Vasconcelos, 25, was traffic-stopped in El Reno, Okla., in October because he was reportedly weaving on the road, but deputies detected no impairment except possibly for a lack of sleep. Then, “out of nowhere,” according to a KFOR-TV report, Vasconcelos, instead of quietly driving off, insisted that he was doing nothing wrong and that deputies could check his truck if they thought otherwise. They did — and found an elaborately rigged metal box in the engine, containing 17 pounds of heroin, worth over $3 million. He was charged with aggravated trafficking.
Weird Norway
— Norway’s notorious 77-murder terrorist Anders Breivik complained in September that he was feeling so oppressed behind bars that if conditions didn’t improve, he would go on a hunger strike and starve himself.
— In July, artist Hilde Krohn Huse, who was shooting a video alone in a forest near Aukra, accidentally got hung upside down naked in a tree for nearly four hours.
— In October, hunters who had shot two elk near Narvik were informed that they had inadvertently wandered into an area of the Polar Park zoo, and that, thanks to them, the zoo’s elk population was now down to three.
A News Of The Weird Classic (July 2010)
In the midst of 2010 World Cup fever, readers might have missed Germany’s win over host Barbados in June for the Woz Challenge Cup. It involved an eight-team polo tournament with players not on horses, but on Segways. The sport is said to have been created by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, whose Silicon Valley Aftershocks competed in Barbados. Wozniak lamented that his polo skills were fading. But the San Jose Mercury News reported that Woz’s fearlessness on the Segway was undiminished.
The late Dennis “Stalking Cat” Avner incrementally cut, chipped, tattooed and pierced his body in an effort to make himself look like a human feline. Newer to the body modification scene is Britain’s Ted Richards, 57, who is working to become a human parrot. With 110 colorful tattoos, 50 piercings and a split tongue, he currently seeks a surgeon who can turn his nose into a beak. Even without the beak, though, Richard says becoming parrotlike “is the best thing that has happened to me.” London’s Daily Telegraph published astonishing photos of Richards, and asked, rhetorically, whether we’ve reached “peak plastic surgery.”
This Stuff’ll Kill Ya
High school principal George Kenney believes he has a gift to aid students’ ability to concentrate by using hypnotism on them. He practiced hypnotism extensively at North Port High in Sarasota, Fla., until 2011, when three of his students died in separate incidents — two by suicide. While Kenney enjoys retirement in North Carolina, the Sarasota school board didn’t close the chapter until October, 2015, when it granted $200,000 settlements to the families of the three students. The lawsuits against Kenney complained of Kenney’s unlicensed “medical procedure,” which, attorneys said, altered the “underdeveloped” teenage brain. But Kenney pointed to improvements in studying by other students.
Snitch On Board
In September, Audrey McColm, 25, was pulled over in Randolph County, Indiana, for driving “erratically.” She was ratted out by her child. When Mom denied having been drinking, her daughter, 7, blurted out, “Yes, you have, Mom.” McColm registered 0.237; had nearly hit another officer’s car head-on; and was so hammered she “urged” an officer to “shoot her in the head.”
The Comforting Tarantula
Untrained “comfort animals” are used by those diagnosed with panic attacks or depression. In an October report on college students hoping to keep their pets in dorms, The New York Times noted that school officials have entertained student requests for such comfort animals as lizards, potbellied pigs, tarantulas, ferrets, guinea pigs and “sugar gliders” (nocturnal, flying, six-ounce Australian marsupials). Informal Justice Department guidelines rule out only animals that are aggressive or destructive or that trigger other students’ allergies.
Matching Alcohol Levels
In October, an intoxicated 20-year-old man in Macomb Township, Mich., accidentally swerved into the midst of a sheriff’s deputies’ roadside stop of another alleged drunk driver. Coincidentally, both arrestees registered 0.17 blood-alcohol readings.
Justice
A 2015 decision of the Georgia Supreme Court has created a puzzle for the policing of drunk drivers. In Georgia, blood alcohol tests are “voluntary.” But the Georgia court has ruled that a “consenting” driver might be “too” drunk to appreciate the notion of consent. In that case, the test results would be inadmissible in court. Prosecutors would be forced to argue that the driver who was too drunk to handle a motor vehicle was sober enough to give conscious consent. Atlanta’s WSB-TV reported in October that judges statewide are grappling with the issue.
Familiar Weird Behaviors
— Funerals and burials aren’t always staid. One man was lowered into the ground inside his beloved Cadillac. It’s not unheard of for corpses to be dressed in fanciful outfits (such as that of the Green Lantern). In October, after Jomar Aguayo Collazo, 23, was killed in a shootout in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the family outfitted his body in his favorite blue tracksuit and propped him up at a table in his mother’s tavern. He appeared to be playing dominoes. Friends and relatives passed by to pay their respects.
— A chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals demanded that Pennsylvania officials erect a roadside grave marker near Lancaster at the spot where a tractor-trailer hauling 80 pigs overturned, killing several pigs. The “terrified animals” that suffered traumatic deaths should be memorialized by the community, PETA said. The pigs, of course, would have eventually found their way to a slaughterhouse, and it is possible that the ones euthanized as a result of the accident died more peacefully than the survivors will.
— In October, a truck driver in Ashton, England, was working for a company called Dachser Intelligent Logistics when his tractor-trailer got stuck in a narrow alley to which he had been directed by his GPS system. It wasn’t the first time satellite navigation had directed a vehicle to the same alley. The town has even placed a traffic sign at the approach to the alley: “Do Not Follow Sat Nav Next Left.”
Problems Of The Super-Rich
Among those struggling with psychological issues in modern America are the rich “one-percenters” (especially the mega-rich “one-percent of one-percenters”), according to counselors specializing in assuaging guilt and moderating class hatred. London’s The Guardian, reporting from New York, found three such counselors, including two who barely stopped short of comparing the plight of the rich-rich with the struggles of “people of color” or out-of-closet gays. Sample worries were isolation (because there are so few rich-rich); stress, caused by political hubbub over “inequality”; and insecurity over the question of whether “friends” really just like one just because of his money.
The Free Lunch
In October, The Washington Post and the New York Post reported recent episodes of government agencies keeping high-earning employees on the payroll for more than a year with no job assignment because the agencies were unable to adjudicate employees’ misconduct cases. Almost 100 shelved Homeland Security employees turned up in a Washington Post Freedom of Information Act request. One information technology analyst warehoused by the New York City employee pension fund said she had earned $1.3 million over 10 years by doing absolutely no work for the city. “I watched movies,” said Niki Murphy. “I crocheted — right in front of supervisors.”
Updates
— In October, the federal government finally unloaded the two New Hampshire properties it seized in 2007 from dentist Elaine Brown and her husband after a nine-month standoff. The couple said they would die rather than pay their back taxes to the IRS. Their 100-acre compound became a magnet for an array of “sovereigns” and tax-resisters, who were rumored to have booby-trapped the property to ward off law enforcement. In the 2015 auction, it was not guaranteed that the property was free of hidden explosives. The Browns, who have resisted U.S. taxation for some time, are serving 30-year prison terms.
— White supremacist Craig Cobb hasn’t given up. News of the Weird noted in 2013 that he was attempting to buy property in Leith, N.D. (pop. 16) in an effort to turn the town into a deluxe Caucasian enclave. But there was local resistance. And Cobb was revealed by a DNA test to be 14 percent “sub-Saharan African.” Cobb is now targeting either Red Cloud, Neb. (pop. 978), or Antler, N.D. (pop. 28). The latter town is seeking crowdsourced funding online to buy the vacant property Cobb has his eyes on.
The Continuing Crisis
— For an October report, Vice Media located the half-dozen most-dedicated collectors of those AOL giveaway CDs from the internet’s dial-up years. Sparky Haufle wrote a definitive AOL-CD collector’s guide; Lydia Sloan Cline has 4,000 unique disks; Bustam Halim at one point had 20,000 before he weeded his collection to 3,000. The AOL connoisseurs file disks by color; by the hundreds of packaging styles; by number of free hours; and especially by the co-brands, such as Frisbee and Spider Man. Their collections, said Halim and Brian Larkin, are “beautiful.”
— In 20th-century Chicago, according to legend, one did not have to be among the living to vote on election day, and a 2013 policy of the city’s community colleges has seemingly extended rights of the dead — to receive unearned degrees. City Colleges of Chicago, aiming to increase graduation numbers, has awarded a slew of posthumous degrees to former students who died with at least three-fourths of the necessary credits to graduate. (The policy also now automatically awards degrees by “reverse transfer” of credits to students who went on to four-year colleges, where they added enough credits, hypothetically, to meet City Colleges’ standards.)
People Different From Us
It would be exhausting to chronicle the many ways in which the woman born Carolyn Clay, 82, of Chattooga County, Ga., is different from us. For starters, she was once arrested for stripping nude to protest a quixotic issue before the city council in Rome, Ga.; for another, her driver’s license identifies her as Ms. Serpentfoot Serpentfoot. In October, she filed to change that name — to one with 69 words, 68 hyphens, an ellipsis and the infinity sign. One judge has already turned her down on the ground that she cannot recite the name. (The woman did offer to shorten it on legal papers to “Nofoot Allfoot Serpentfoot.”)
Justice Served
Hinton Sheryn, 68, on trial at England’s Plymouth Crown Court in September, denied he was the “indecent exposer” charged with 18 incidents against children dating back to 1973 — that he would never do such a thing because he would not want anyone to see his unusually small penis. In response, the prosecutor brought in a prostitute known to have serviced Sheryn, to testify that his penis is of normal size. Sheryn was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Police Report
A 27-year-old owner of the Hookah House in Akron, Ohio, was fatally shot by an Akron narcotics officer during an October raid for suspected drugs. The man had his arms raised, according to the police report, but dropped one hand behind him, provoking an officer to shoot. Only afterward did they learn that the man was unarmed; they concluded that he was reaching only to secure or to push back the packet of heroin he felt was oozing out of its hiding place in his buttocks.
Bright Ideas
In September, village officials in Uzbekistan’s town of Shahartepeppa, alarmed that Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev would drive through and notice barren fields (since the cotton crop had already been harvested), ordered about 500 people into the fields to attach cotton capsules onto the front-row stalks to impress Mirziyoyev with the village’s prosperity.
Undignified Deaths
A woman was killed in an accidental head-on collision in Houston on June 18 as she was racing after another car. She was angrily chasing her estranged husband, who was with another woman. Neither of those two was hurt.
Least Competent Criminals
Jorge Vasconcelos, 25, was traffic-stopped in El Reno, Okla., in October because he was reportedly weaving on the road, but deputies detected no impairment except possibly for a lack of sleep. Then, “out of nowhere,” according to a KFOR-TV report, Vasconcelos, instead of quietly driving off, insisted that he was doing nothing wrong and that deputies could check his truck if they thought otherwise. They did — and found an elaborately rigged metal box in the engine, containing 17 pounds of heroin, worth over $3 million. He was charged with aggravated trafficking.
Weird Norway
— Norway’s notorious 77-murder terrorist Anders Breivik complained in September that he was feeling so oppressed behind bars that if conditions didn’t improve, he would go on a hunger strike and starve himself.
— In July, artist Hilde Krohn Huse, who was shooting a video alone in a forest near Aukra, accidentally got hung upside down naked in a tree for nearly four hours.
— In October, hunters who had shot two elk near Narvik were informed that they had inadvertently wandered into an area of the Polar Park zoo, and that, thanks to them, the zoo’s elk population was now down to three.
A News Of The Weird Classic (July 2010)
In the midst of 2010 World Cup fever, readers might have missed Germany’s win over host Barbados in June for the Woz Challenge Cup. It involved an eight-team polo tournament with players not on horses, but on Segways. The sport is said to have been created by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, whose Silicon Valley Aftershocks competed in Barbados. Wozniak lamented that his polo skills were fading. But the San Jose Mercury News reported that Woz’s fearlessness on the Segway was undiminished.
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