xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

Citing a police press release, the German news organization Deutsche Welle (DW-World) reported in November that the reason that motorist Julia Bauer of Bochum, Germany, lost control and smashed into a parked car and a lamppost was that she was preparing cereal and milk on the passenger seat while driving to work and tried to catch her bowl as it was falling to the floor. The cost of her breakfast (in damages) turned out to be about US$27,000.

Sex-despondency among women is apparently such a problem in Japan that business is booming for counselor Kim Myong Gan’s 4-year-old company of trained male professionals who invigorate them, according to a November Agence France-Presse dispatch from Tokyo. Kim charges the equivalent of US$190 for the initial consultation and scheduling, and his men provide hands-on assurance to the clients of their attractiveness and desirability. Most clients are either middle-aged virgins or wives whose husbands have grown to treat them as their sisters.

Zimbabwe, facing a severe food shortage, is considering an unlikely program to bring rich foreign visitors to the country, according to a government announcement in November. The information minister proposed an “obesity tourism strategy,” in which overweight visitors (especially Americans) would be encouraged to “vacation” in Zimbabwe and “provide labor for (government-confiscated) farms in the hope of shedding weight.” Americans, the proposal noted, spend $6 billion a year on “useless” dieting aids and could be encouraged to work off pounds and then flaunt “their slim bodies on a sun-downer cruise on the Zambezi (River).”
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