xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
A man fled the motor vehicles office in Leesburg, Va., after a September incident in which he, silently and calmly, presented a DMV employee with a postcard photograph of a banana being shot by a bullet, and the legend “banana=DMV.” The man then hurried out, and when several employees got to the parking lot in pursuit, there were bananas strewn around the lot but no one in sight. Said the Leesburg police chief, “This (man) is a different (kind).”
After a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge, FBI agent James Hanson III paid a $105 fine and $12,000 in restitution to the Barbary Coast hotel in Las Vegas for a May incident in which he, for some reason that he has yet to make public, fired two shots from his service weapon at a lobster in a walk-in cooler. It was a late-night incident, with no one in the vicinity, but Hanson was captured on a surveillance tape. Hanson was in Las Vegas for an accounting seminar.
In August, around the time that the Ten Commandments monument was moved out of the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery because of a federal judge’s ruling that it was too much of a religious statement for government property, Ms. Blanca Castillo petitioned county commissioners in Fort Worth, Texas, to remove a statue in front of the county’s administrative building because it was insulting of religion. The offending statue, of a sleeping panther, struck Ms. Castillo as too paganistically feline, and therefore “sinister,” and she recommended a statue of something else, such as a steer.
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
