xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Inga Kosak won the first World Extreme Ironing Championship in Munich in September, beating 80 contestants (from 10 countries), who are judged on the degree of difficulty they can create for themselves in order to iron. One ironed while bouncing on a trampoline, another while surfboarding on a river, and another hanging upside down from a tree. Enthusiasts have photos of themselves ironing in remote mountain locations, where power for the steam iron must come from a generator (or a very long extension cord). The activity’s founder, Phil Shaw, says he does it because ironing itself is particularly boring.
Baptist minister James Andrew Smith, 42, was arrested in Fort Worth, Texas, in November for a September graphics presentation (to a logistic company) that he was making with his computer; he had clicked the wrong line and inadvertently called up a photograph of a nude boy, which led to a search that police said yielded much child pornography.
Mike Rucker, running for county commissioner in Tallahassee, Fla., apologized for urinating in a voter’s yard in October, attributing it to a prostate problem and not anger that the voter had moments earlier refused to post Rucker’s campaign sign.
Republican Lamar Alexander, running for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee, reportedly turned a hand-shaking opportunity into a hand-squeezing contest with an opposition voter who had mischievously slipped Alexander a Democratic brochure in Dickson, Tenn., in October.
And Makinka Moye, running for city supervisor in San Francisco, was revealed by the Bay Area Reporter in September to have been arrested earlier this year for bludgeoning and butchering a goat on a vacant lot near a city recreation center.
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
