xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

James Filson was fired as a Big Ten conference football referee in 2005, following a reporter’s disclosure that, after a bad accident and the installment of a prosthetic, Filson had been officiating games with one eye. Filson filed a lawsuit in July, pointing out that he had been refereeing well enough for the previous four years that no one noticed his condition, but the conference said that, now that the word is out, he would be a magnet for criticism on close calls.

Pedophiles Fight Back:
–Phillip Distasio, 34, told a judge in Cleveland in August (in preparation for his September trial on 74 charges) that he’s been a pedophile for 20 years, that what he does can be therapeutic for the child, and that it’s part of his Arcadian Fields Ministries religion, of which he is a friar.

–Three men in the Netherlands announced in May that they have formed the Charity, Freedom and Diversity party and will field candidates for office, advocating freedom to be naked in public and a reduction in the age of consent for sex to 12. The new party, said one, will give them “a voice.” “(P)oliticians only talk about us in a negative sense.” In 2001, News of the Weird mentioned William Lyttle, then age 71, of North London, England, who was notorious for obsessively digging tunnels underneath his 20-room home. That year, he had dug past the property line for the first time and created a 15-foot hole in the street. Earlier in 2006, Lyttle was temporarily evicted when his tunneling threatened the integrity of the entire street, and building inspectors feared that his accumulation of junk would cause the house itself to sink into the ground already weakened by 40 years’ worth of burrowing. Engineers are considering cementing in all the tunnels.
(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