Byline: CHUCK SHEPHERD
A German television station reported in January that as many as 50,000 former Nazi SS troopers might be receiving up to $600 a month in German government pensions for World War II injuries (including more than 3,000 who live in the United States) -- while no comparable government benefit exists for concentration camp survivors. One example cited by The Washington Post was that of Heinz Barth, 80, an SS officer serving a life sentence for his part in a 1944 massacre in France, who gets $450 a month because he lost a leg.
In May, a San Francisco Chronicle feature alerted readers to the problem of people addicted to lip balm, and especially Chapstick brand. According to one addict who studied the problem, the Chapstick ingredients fuse with the skin, requiring constant re-use. Another source cited a better, nonaddictive lip balm: a person's own nose oil, which is reported to have been used by watchmakers for years to lubricate tiny gears.
The Hong Kong Standard newspaper reported in February on the thriving business of a Dr. Liu, who runs a virginity- (hymen-) restoration practice in Ghangzhou province, China, charging about $500. ``So many Hong Kong girls come to us,'' she said. ``They come just before their wedding. They don't want their husbands to know they had many boyfriends in the past.'' And New Scientist magazine reported in January that the German government, fearful of immune-system reactions and the spread of ``mad cow'' disease, has banned the popular sheep-fetus injections that men and women have been receiving to firm up their buttocks.
POLICE BLOTTER
Following in the footsteps of her completely unsuccessful predecessors (Mr. Mellon E. Bank and Mr. Roadway V. Express, reported in News of the Weird in 1989 and 1996, respectively), Keisha Yvette Gregory was arrested in Durham, N.C., in March and charged with theft of a check made out to the Tension Envelope company, which she tried to pass off as a personal check made out to Ms. Tension Nicole Envelope.
The trial of National Institutes of Health police officer Bruce Blum ended in a hung jury in April on the Dec. 19 accusation (based on a surveillance videotape) that he stole the current issue of People magazine from the NIH library in Bethesda, Md. And Rhode Island state traffic court clerk-typist Sharon James, 30, was fired in March for stealing a bag of potato chips and some coins on the counter of a blind vendor in the traffic court building.
In March, in cases in San Diego, Calif., and Norfolk, Va., prosecutors came under fire for allegedly allowing witnesses in a gang murder case and drug case, respectively, to have numerous conjugal visits in government offices after business hours while in custody as part of deals to coax their testimony.
A 24-year-old, unidentified woman was arrested in Waukesha, Wis., in April on suspicion of child abuse. Her son had complained of a nose infection, which she said was caused by acid from a wristwatch battery that he had put in his nose several months earlier, but which she had declined to help him remove until the battery started leaking.
Peter Lerat, 33, was arrested in Toronto, Ontario, in May and charged with two robberies, one in a doughnut shop while he was carrying a goose and one on the street while he had a raccoon. In each case he threatened to kill the animal unless someone gave him money. He $60 from a woman in the doughnut shop, but a prospective victim in the second robbery ran to call police, and Lerat was captured.
In January, West Palm Beach, Fla., police officer Ed Wagner filed a lawsuit against the city for removing him from the SWAT team following a complaint he made about a neck injury. The injury occurred at a car-crash scene in 1993 when one of Wagner's colleagues playfully grabbed his head and gave him a noogie. And Franklin, Tenn., water and sewer director Eddie Woodard was suspended for three days in February after he goosed police chief Jackie Moore at a fire scene.
Richard Lee Hamrick, 28, was picked up in Longview, Wash., in February, suspected of being the guy who robbed a Safeway a few minutes before. Not only was the robber wearing bikini briefs on his head, backward, with eye holes cut in the derriere, but, according to the officers who had to book the evidence, they were soiled.
CLICHES COME TO LIFE
Life Imitates the Three Stooges: Julio Guaman, 31, landed in a tree, with a broken pelvis, after a five-story fall from his Queens, apartment in December. According to his wife, Julio had lunged at her in a fight in order to push her out the window, but she ducked, sending him out.
Life Imitates Prison Movies: Joshua John Jaeger, 25, housed at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre in Toronto in January, and David Anderson, housed at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville in April, became the latest inmates to escape by tying bedsheets together and lowering themselves to the ground. (Anderson even left a pillow-and-blankets dummy in his bed as a decoy.)
NO LONGER WEIRD
Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation:
The person easing into the parking lot of the driver's license office, either arriving for the exam or just completing it, who accidentally crashes into the office's storefront, as a woman did in Hillsboro, Ore., in May and a man did in Barrie, Ontario, in March. And the burglar attempting to enter an establishment from the roof via a vent pipe but who gets stuck and must be rescued by the police, or, as with a 20-year-old man in Dayton, Ohio, in December, who suffocated.
The thousands of times a year (about 50 in the past year in Fremont, Calif., alone) that trial-bound defendants and others cheerfully place their belongings on the X-ray machines at the entrances of courthouses, only to have their illegal drugs detected. The burglar who sneaks into a home or building intending to loot the place but who falls asleep before he can get to work, as allegedly did Brian Hodgson, 28, who was arrested in September after the ceiling at a Pompano Beach, Fla., McDonald's gave way, disturbing his slumber.
The family that leaves behind one or more members at a highway rest stop and fails to realize they are short-handed until way down the road, as happened in April to a 9-year-old boy whose father left him in Lloydminster, Manitoba, and did not miss him until he got home to Red Deer, Alberta, nearly 200 miles away. DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES
In April in Chandler, Ariz., Johnel Trinidad, 18, sitting on the toilet inspecting a gun he planned to buy from a friend, accidentally shot himself in the knee. Said police Sgt. Matt Christensen, ``Bathroom gun safety and gun safety in general pretty much dovetail.'' It was Chandler's second such shooting in a year. In July, Harold Hughes, 52, was on the toilet, his gun on the counter and his pit bull lounging nearby, when the dog became startled and knocked the gun to the floor, where it fired a shot into Hughes' leg. WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME
On Sept. 29 in rural northeast Vermont, the car in which Michael O'Keefe, 44, was riding was hit by a 700-pound moose. O'Keefe was taken for treatment of cuts and returned to the road a few hours later in his own truck, which was then hit by another moose.
FIRST THINGS FIRST On an Israeli TV program in January, Hamas militant Rashid Saqqer, who was captured by the PLO last year before he could carry out a scheduled suicide bombing in Israel, waxed rhapsodic about his love of soccer. He said he was such a fan that ``I couldn't (kill myself) in (an Israeli) soccer stadium. Yes, they are Zionists (and) unbelievers. But I couldn't do it (there).''
The New York Times reported in November on the project by the Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway Township, N.Y., to create more environmentally friendly bullets while still maintaining the bullets' killing power. (Three years ago, the federal government closed a nearby firing range because spent, leaded bullets were contaminating the soil so as to endanger people and animals.)
According to Vladimir Zelentin, 40, testifying in January in New York City against his cousin Rita Gluzman, 47, Rita planned the murder of her husband, talked Zelentin into being the hit man, and calmly bought all the murder supplies at Home Depot. However, according to Zelentin, when he went to light up a victory cigarette in her kitchen after the ax-slaying, she screamed at him, ``No smoking (in here)!''Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, Box 8306, St. Petersburg, FL 33738 or to weird@compuserve.com
