Erick \u201cPork Chop\u201d Cox, 32, in an angry construction-site clash in DeBary, Fla., in June, used his front-end loader to dump two heaps of dirt onto his boss. Perry Byrd, 57, was buried up to his waist before co-workers intervened. Cox said Byrd had taken the first swing and that he had only accidentally engaged the loader when trying to turn it off. Byrd claimed that Cox was laughing during the episode. Cox was arrested.<\/p>\n
New World Order <\/strong><\/p>\n As an alternative to the more costly in vitro fertilization, researchers in Dresden, Germany, announced they had developed a motorized device tiny enough to fit around a sperm\u2019s tail. This device could be commanded to propel the sperm to swim faster toward the target egg, increasing the chances of fertilization. A prototype is still in the works.<\/p>\n The Continuing Crisis <\/strong><\/p>\n \u2014 As Libya\u2019s central bank struggles to stabilize a halting economy, it could use the estimated $184 million in gold and silver coins that Moammar Gadhafi minted. Gadhafi left the coins buried in an underground vault in the coastal city of Beyda, but the treasure is inaccessible because central bank officials don\u2019t know the lock\u2019s combination. The latest plan is to have a locksmith squeeze through a 16-by-16-inch hole in the outer vault\u2019s concrete wall. Once inside, the locksmith will try to crack the lock. If unsuccessful, the government\u2019s bureaucrats likely cannot get paid. But even if successful, various anti-government factions may go to extremes to snatch the coins.<\/p>\n \u2014 Convicted murderer Charles Flores was on Texas\u2019 death row for more than 16 years before the state\u2019s highest criminal appeals court finally ruled that the execution might not be justified. A witness whom the police had hypnotized provided the most important evidence. Hypnosis used to gather evidence was a popular hypothesis in the 1980s and 1990s, but largely discredited today. The trial judge, and the jury, had accepted that hypnosis could lead to recovered memory. There was no physical evidence against Flores, and the trial court was ordered to rethink the validity of hypnosis.<\/p>\n Bright Ideas <\/strong><\/p>\n Argentina\u2019s TV channels have many of the same taboos as U.S. broadcasting, including restrictions on women\u2019s hands-on demonstrations of how precisely to examine themselves for breast cancer. However, as AdWeek reported in March, the agency David Buenos Aires apparently solved the problem with an explicit TV public service announcement featuring a model, topless and facing the camera, showing exactly how such an exam should go, for example, where to press down, where to squeeze. The secret? The model was an overweight man with generous-sized man boobs.<\/p>\n Wait, What?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2014 Video surfaced in May of students at Winston Churchill High School in San Antonio, Texas, playing jump rope with the intestines of cats that had been\u00a0dissected in biology class. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were not pleased, but school district officials called the exercise a valid demonstration of the \u201ctensile strength of the organ\u201d and only reluctantly agreed to investigate further.<\/p>\n \u2014 Triston Chase, 20, missed his court date in April in Harnett County, N.C. He had been brought up on financial fraud charges. When he missed his court date, it was revealed that his arrest in December had come when he had been found \u201cresiding\u201d illegally, as a civilian, in a barracks at Fort Bragg. This facility houses the Army\u2019s 3rd Special Forces Group. According to a prosecutor, Chase had been posing as an explosive ordinance disposal specialist \u201cfor months.\u201d The official investigation of Special Forces\u2019 barracks security was still underway at the time of Chase\u2019s court date.<\/p>\n \u2014 Robert Williams, 38, was arrested on June 1 in Calhan, Colo., after challenging his daughter to a duel with handguns. Williams had pointed a gun at his daughter, then demanded that she grab one too. The daughter\u2019s age was not reported, but police said she and Williams both got off shots that missed.<\/p>\n Everyone Deserves A Second Chance <\/strong><\/p>\n \u2014 Efrain Delgado-Rosales was sentenced to five years in prison in March for smuggling noncitizens into the country. The Border Patrol had caught him 23 times previously, but had declined to file charges.<\/p>\n \u2014 Sean Pelfrey, 38, told a judge in May that the two assault charges against him in Framingham, Mass., did not make him a \u201cthreat to society.\u201d His current arrest was his 38th.<\/p>\n \u2014 Matthew Freeland, 29, was convicted of several home-invasion offenses in Kingston, Ontario, in May. The judge, considering a proper sentence, found only two previous probation orders. But after looking further, the judge found 59 convictions and sentenced Freeland to more than two years in prison.<\/p>\n Least Competent Criminals <\/strong><\/p>\n Grady Carlson, 58, went to the Carolina Title Loans office in Spartanburg, S.C., on May 25 to apply for a high-interest payday loan. He nervously paced while answering questions. The Carolina employee asked if anything was wrong, and Carlson allegedly disclosed that he needed money fast to purchase methamphetamine. A subsequent police search turned up a glass container and drugs.<\/p>\n Recurring Themes <\/strong><\/p>\n In the most recent instance of a landlord ordering a resident to make his home safe for burglars, Kevin Sheehan of Abingdon, England, was told by his housing association in May that he would be evicted unless he removed his above-ground backyard fish pond and relocated the 80 koi carp and goldfish. The landlord was concerned that if a trespasser jumped the property wall, he could not anticipate if he would land in the pond and might hurt himself.<\/p>\n Recurring Themes (Cow Edition) <\/strong><\/p>\n \u2014 For years, India has been concerned about the gas-release problem posed by its nearly 300 million cows and 200 million more gas-intensive animals. Researchers in Kerala state revealed a promising breeding answer in May. Dwarf cows are about one-fourth the size, producing somewhat less milk but one-seventh the manure and one-10th the methane of normal sized cows.<\/p>\n \u2014 In the early years of News of the Weird, urban readers learned of the custom of Western locales\u2019 charity cow-patty bingo games, in which cows are fed and turned loose on a field of wagered-upon squares. In fact, in 1997, Canada\u2019s Nova Scotia Gaming Control Commission temporarily banned the game while it investigated whether it could be fixed by training the cow to favor certain relief spots. The event lives on, but a charity fundraiser in Great Falls, Mont., in May was halted when the cow jumped over a fence. Rather than await the nervous cow, the contest winner was selected by random draw.<\/p>\n Weird News Classic (2012) <\/strong><\/p>\n \u2014 All U.S. states have forms of no-fault divorce, but England still requires that couples prove adultery, abandonment or unreasonable behavior. This leads to strange claims. For instance, one divorcing woman\u2019s petition blamed her husband\u2019s insistence that she speak only in Klingon. Other examples of unreasonable behavior: a husband\u2019s objecting to the \u201cmalicious\u201d preparation of his hated tuna casserole, another\u2019s 15-year silence except for writing him Post-It Notes, a husband\u2019s distorting the fit of his wife\u2019s outfits by frequently wearing them, and one\u2019s insistence that a pet tarantula reside in a glass case beside the marital bed.<\/p>\n \u2014 Chinese media reported that (in 2012), at the Xiaogan Middle School in Hubei province, high school students studying for the all-important national college entrance exam worked through the evening while hooked up to intravenous drips of amino acids to fight fatigue. A director of the school\u2019s Office of Academic Affairs reasoned that before the IVs were hung, weary students complained of losing too much time running back and forth to the school\u2019s infirmary for energy injections. After the media reports, the public backlash was less against China\u2019s placing so much importance on the exams and more complaining that the government was subsidizing the cost of those injections.<\/p>\n App Nauseam <\/strong><\/p>\n In May, the Norwegian Consumer Council staged a live, 32-hour TV broadcast marathon. This broadcast included a word-for-word reading of the \u201cterms of service\u201d for internet applications Instagram, Spotify and more than two dozen others. The broadcast script totaled 900 pages and 250,000 words of legal restrictions and conditions that millions of users \u201cvoluntarily\u201d agree to when they sign up. A council official called such terms \u201cbordering on the absurd,\u201d as consumers could not possibly understand everything they were legally binding themselves to.<\/p>\n Government In Action <\/strong><\/p>\n The Defense Department still uses 1980s-era 8-inch floppy disks on computer systems that handle part of America\u2019s \u201cnuclear umbrella,\u201d including ballistic missiles. Also, according to a May report by the Government Accountability Office, systems using 1970s-era COBOL programming language are still used for key functions of the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service, and Veterans Affairs, for tracking beneficiary claims. Agencies have reported recruiting retired employees to return to fix glitches in operating systems long since abandoned by Microsoft and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Erick \u201cPork Chop\u201d Cox, 32, in an angry construction-site clash in DeBary, Fla., in June, used his front-end loader to dump two heaps of dirt onto his boss. Perry Byrd, 57, was buried up to his waist before co-workers intervened. Cox said Byrd had taken the first swing and that he had only accidentally engaged [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":303,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[65,40],"yoast_head":"\n