xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd .

James Anibella filed a federal lawsuit in October challenging the constitutionality of the Colorado law that sets a voter registration deadline of 29 days before an election, a deadline that Anibella admitted he knew about but was too busy to bother with; Anibella characterizes the 29-day deadline as merely “some snafu in the law.”

After Bryan Furrow, 17, was charged in Manchester, Conn., in August with masturbating in front of 10 children (and sexually touching five of them), his mother, Lenora Furrow, told reporters that Bryan had simply “made a wrong judgment call.”

Conscientious workers at the ARO Campulung auto plant in Romania offered in October to help pay off the company’s debts by selling their sperm to a fertility clinic in the city of Timisoara, at the equivalent of (U.S.) $50 a session. Said the plant’s union leader, “We have found (a solution) that even the best economists have never thought of.” (However, to pay the equivalent (U.S.) $20 million debt in full would require 400,000 sessions, or 400 sessions for each of the 1,000 males at the plant.)

In October, all 21 volunteer firefighters of Elgin, Iowa, submitted letters of resignation after they were told they could no longer keep beer at the firehouse. (Later in the month, they backed off in exchange for the City Council’s agreeing to open an investigation of Councilwoman Jean Roach, who is the person who allegedly first ratted them out to the city’s insurance carrier.)

Japan, in a long economic stagnation, posted an encouraging 0.8 percent growth in personal consumption in August, but economists noted the main component was a 34 percent rise in spending on funerals.

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd

NEWS OF THE WEIRD