xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
David Duvall and his 2-year-old daughter were hospitalized with burns on the head suffered during the Maryland Renaissance Festival in Crownsville in October after a female acrobat mishandled a flaming wand. The woman, seeking a volunteer from the audience, asked Duvall, in front of his family, if she could set fire to his bald head, and Duvall said, “Sure.” Said Duvall’s wife, later, “We thought they knew what they were doing.”
Cary, N.C., software developer Brian T. Schellenberger, 43, told FBI agents in December 2003 that he had been influenced by a workplace motivational poster, “Achieve Your Dreams,” that energized him to fulfill his own dreams. His major life transformation, unfortunately, was that “I decided to get rid of the obsolete idea of morality.” Specifically, he told the agents that he was inspired to move beyond his mere passive collecting of pornography and to begin creating his own child pornography to satisfy long-held fantasies about young girls. (He also later enlisted a man, unsuccessfully, to kill his wife in exchange for pornography from his collection.) In October 2005, Schellenberger, though subsequently remorseful, was sentenced to 100 years in prison.
Jim Porcellato endured about 30 seconds of excruciating pain in October in Sooke, British Columbia, when he attempted to shut off a Bobcat construction vehicle but accidentally stepped on the floor lever that raises and lowers the vehicle’s bucket, at the same time that he was, unfortunately, straddling the bucket. Porcellato, with one foot and his body’s weight on the lever, had no leverage to stop the bucket, which as it moved, trapped his head and other leg. A co-worker rescued him, but the result was “many” lost teeth and the need for “hundreds” of stitches in his face, according to the Sooke News Mirror.
(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
