xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

North Korea’s Kim Jong-il was touted by a spokesman in August 2005 as one who never forgets a phone number or even a single line of computer code. (Among his previously publicized skills in News of the Weird reports dating back to 1994 are writing operas, flying jets, producing movies and shooting 11 holes-in-one on the first round of golf he ever played.)

The Anchorage, Alaska, zoo has now completed the elephant treadmill it promised last year for its venerable “Maggie,” age 23, and will unveil it in November, even though in the intervening year, she has lost about 1,000 of her then-9,000 pounds, through exercise and dieting. The treadmill is merely a humongous version of a treadmill for humans.

Los Angeles has become the U.S. epicenter for surgery for women seeking to “firm up” their genitals, with Dr. David Matlock the leading practitioner of “vaginal rejuvenation,” according to a dispatch in Toronto’s Globe and Mail in August. Much of the impetus comes from patients’ (or their husbands’ or boyfriends’) desire for vulvas as trim and youthful as those of actresses in porno movies. News of the Weird first covered the phenomenon in December 1988 when a Dayton, Ohio, gynecologist was accused of surgically tightening a woman’s vagina without her consent (at the behest of her husband during surgery for another condition). The doctor, James C. Burt, who wrote an early book on the subject, “The Surgery of Love,” eventually lost his license and a $5 million malpractice verdict.
(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