xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

Harvard University this year hired a recent graduate as a full-time promoter and coordinator of social activities, apparently because so many at the school are too busy to relax. According to Associate Dean Judith Kidd, “(T)he kids work very, very hard here. And they worked very, very hard … to get here. They arrived needing help having fun.” (By contrast, two weeks later, a police raid in Durham, N.C., turned up 200 noisy Duke University students, many of them bikini-clad women, wrestling in a plastic pool of baby oil in the basement of a fraternity house, apparently inspired by a scene from the movie “Old School.”)

A 40-year-old New York City man was killed when, inebriated, he fell and broke a fish tank, fatally slashing an artery; he had recently purchased the tank to help his girlfriend’s kids learn responsibility (December).

The Las Vegas Sun reported in January that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency has begun phasing in an underpublicized policy of ending all walk-in traffic. Eventually, all immigration offices, to improve efficiency, will do business only by appointments made over the Internet (even though many immigration clients, most notably migrant workers, obviously do not have convenient Internet access).

After five years of the New Mexico government always accepting Viola Trevino’s child support claims against Steve Barreras (over the vasectomied Barreras’ objections), a court in Albuquerque finally ruled in December that the child never existed. The judge concluded that Trevino had lied numerous times and had forged DNA evidence, birth certificates, and other documents and that Barreras had been unjustly forced to pay $20,000 in support, even though Trevino had never publicly produced the child. In December, having run out of excuses, Trevino borrowed a little girl from a stranger on the street and took her into the courtroom to “be” her and Barreras’ daughter (but the stranger followed Trevino inside and exposed the ruse). Gov. Bill Richardson ordered an investigation as to how so many state officials had been hoaxed for so long.
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