xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Even though India now has 80,000 licensed dentists, nearly 100 “street dentists” continue to operate in dusty, open-air “offices,” performing extractions and “fitting” used dentures for, typically, 1 percent to 2 percent of what a licensed dentist would charge. One patient of practitioner Mahender Singh, observed for a June dispatch from Jaipur in The New York Times, was “spitting streams of blood into the gutter” after removal of an incisor that, said Singh, “was not working right” and “kept turning left and right when he ate.” Singh uses anesthetic but said some patients still pass out from the pain.
Four days apart in July, two 19-year-old men (in Sheboygan, Wis., and Louisville, Ky.) fell to their deaths while car-surfing at high speeds. (According to a witness, the Sheboygan man’s fatal fall came shortly after he yelled to his driver, “Is that all you got?”)
A French bus line filed an unfair-competition lawsuit against a group of cleaning ladies in Moselle, who used to be customers but who recently began car-pooling to their jobs across the border at European Union offices in Luxembourg. Transports Schiocchet Excursions wants the ladies fined and their cars confiscated.
In Tokyo in July, a group of French-language schoolteachers filed a lawsuit against the city’s governor (asking the equivalent of almost $100,000) for his having denigrated the French language, calling it a “failed international language.” Said Malik Berkane, head of a French school in Tokyo, “(I)t’s unacceptable for him to insult French in this way.”
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD
