xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
The president of Baptist-affiliated Gardner-Webb University (Boiling Springs, N.C.) admitted in September that he raised a star basketball player’s grade-point average so that he would be eligible to play in the 2000-2001 season, during which Gardner-Webb won the National Christian College Athletic Association championship. (The president, Christopher White, resigned in October; the class that the player failed, for cheating, but which was not counted on his GPA, was in religion.)
Following a Detroit Free Press interview in November with bulk e-mailer Alan Ralsky (who gloated that his success at sending “spam” advertising had paid for his $740,000 home), Internet spam-haters tracked down Ralsky’s West Bloomfield, Mich., address and inundated him with thousands of unsolicited hardcopy catalogs and mailings.
In another case, following news that the Pentagon had hired former Reagan administration official John Poindexter to oversee the creation of software that could track nearly all consumer transactions in the country, an SF Weekly (San Francisco) columnist released Poindexter’s home phone number, and Internet activists set up a Web site for tracking all of Poindexter’s personal transactions.
In November, Jason Morris, 30, was acquitted by a jury in Greater Manchester, England, of the charge that, using ordinary pliers, he pulled out 18 of his girlfriend’s teeth, leaving her covered head to toe in blood. The case turned when the girlfriend, Samantha Court, 25, took the witness stand and admitted that she pulled the teeth out herself, during an April drug binge during which she tried to get rid of a green and pink fly that had darted down her throat. Court said the couple has decided to stop doing drugs.
In 2001, a woman filed a federal lawsuit in Minnesota (Engleson vs. Little Falls Area Chamber of Commerce), seeking to recover for injuries she suffered when she tripped over an orange traffic cone. The lawsuit was dismissed in November 2002 by Judge Donovan Frank, who said the law does not expect anyone to warn people that there’s a warning cone up ahead.
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
