xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

The school superintendent of Beverly, Mass., William H. Lupini, decided to leave that $130,000-a-year job in May and take the $148,000-a-year job as school superintendent in Brookline, Mass. However, since Brookline’s school year did not start until July, and since Lupini perhaps felt there were no other “school superintendent” jobs available covering the interim month of June, he applied for $2,332 in unemployment compensation for that month, as reported in the Beverly Citizen newspaper.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported in November that Illinois officials had decided to spend $115,000 in federal money to distribute 2.4 million condoms to help reduce sexually transmitted diseases among the young, but also concluded that the young might need special incentives to actually use the condoms. Consequently, bureaucrats decided that 900,000 would be in colors (orange, green, red or blue) and that 300,000 others would be flavored (orange, lemon, grape, cherry), to encourage their use in oral sex. State Sen. Steve Rauschenberger objected to the distribution of what he called “French ticklers” and suggested that all condoms should be “army green, utilitarian, low-priced.” (Update: Gov. Rod Blagojevich subsequently eliminated the colors/flavors option.)

In November, the Federation of American Scientists revealed the existence of a recent U.S. Air Force-paid study of psychic teleportation prepared by true-believing Nevada physicist Eric Davis, who wrote that moving oneself from location to location through mind powers is “quite real and can be controlled.” An Air Force Research Lab spokesman defended his agency’s use of UFO and spoon-bending reports and Soviet and Chinese studies of psychics, telling USA Today, “If we don’t turn over stones, we don’t know if we have missed something.”
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