xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Punta Gorda, Fla., inmate James “Happy” Borland, 41, suffered a near-fatal concussion in December from being roughed up by inmates Lemuel “K-Money” Ware, 32, and Corey Andrews, 32, because Borland had accused Ware of stealing his pet spider and renaming it “Pinky.” According to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement report, Borland had demanded his spider back, but Andrews intervened. Ware, who said he had purchased the spider fair and square, felt he had to go after Borland because Pinky (in a small box in Ware’s shirt pocket) “told” him to.
After the police chief of Portland, Ore., defied a local judge and said he would continue to examine suspicious people’s garbage without search warrants (because, he contends, curbside garbage is public property), reporters from the local Willamette Week newspaper examined (under cover of night) a December day’s curbside garbage thrown out by the chief, the district attorney and the mayor (who is officially the chief’s boss). The newspaper published an inventory of each official’s trash, finding much banality (e.g., what the mayor planned to watch on TV) but nothing illegal or improper. When told what the reporters did, the police chief got hostile, and the mayor, said the reporters, “went nuclear.”
The former Bob Craft filed a lawsuit in November against the owners of the reckless-stunt-filled MTV program (and movie) “Jackass,” claiming it has defamed him, in that five years ago, he had his own name legally changed to “Jack Ass,” which he thought would call attention to his national campaign against drunk driving. Ass, who lives in Montana and filed the lawsuit there, claims that the TV show and movie have damaged his reputation (“which I have worked so hard to create,” he wrote) to the tune of at least $10 million.
London’s Observer reported in November that the British government is exploring whether to require convicted pedophiles to receive microchip implants that would allow them to be tracked by satellite after their release from prison. The government would know not only whether pedophiles visited schools or parks but, based on a proposal by one company whose software monitors astronauts’ bodily functions in space, whether the pedophiles are feeling nervous or excited (but so far, sexual arousal cannot be tracked by the software).
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
