News of the Weird 2.0 (June 17, 2013)

News of the Weird 2.0
Angst, Confusion, Cynicism, Ridicule

Prime Cuts of Underreported News from Last Week, Hand-Picked and Lightly Seasoned by Chuck Shepherd
June 17, 2013
(datelines June 8-June 15) (links correct as of June 16)
© 2013 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.

★ ★ ★ ★!

Britain’s “weirdest support group," AMMACH, got a nice write-up in the Daily Mirror. The “Anomalous Mind Management Abductee Contactee Helpline” comforts about 1,500 true believers a yr, including the lady who inexplicably has been abducted more than 1,000 times. Co-founder Miles Johnston uses a wall stud detector to find the alien “signature” on the abductee’s skin’s atoms--a signature sure to have been registered by the other dimension--and the atoms show up under UV light. These people need support precisely because they’re sane, i.e., being sane, they know full well that all of us know they’re nuts. Daily Mirror

Sounds Like a Joke a Nestlé Marketing Executive Who’s Just Taken Sodium Pentathol: Introducing the company’s new bottled-water, “Resource,” which is just “water” but for a woman “who is a little more on the trendy side and higher-income side”--a reflection of who she is as a woman in the very deepest and most personal sense of her very being, the executive said. It’s for the woman who is “proud to carry around Resource as her bottled water accessory . . ..” In other words, it’s for women who were crushed to find out that Walmart sells Evian. Salon.com

Beauty Park Medical Spa in Santa Monica offers the $575 “Male Laser Lift,” aka “tackle tightening”--removing hair, discoloration, and wrinkles on the scrotum. It was supposedly inspired by a joke George Clooney made a while back in an interview--that H’wood’s latest craze was “ball-ironing,” which itself was just a step up from Lewis Black’s observation that Wall Street executives’ latest perq was the personal ball-washer. Yo, gettin’ real. Salon.com

More Things to Worry About

Journalist Stacie Borrello toted the numbers up, and it’s 11 to 4, or 21-4. “4" is the number of Americans killed domestically so far this year by terrorists (all in Boston). “11" is the number of Americans killed by gun shooters aged 3-6. Add 10 to get the number wounded by gun shooters aged 2-6. OpposingViews.com

Scotland’s parliament will vote soon on a bill to formally assign a social worker to every child in the country. It’s still to be determined just how active or powerful the shadow parent will be. In principle, it’s as much to help dumb parents as it is to rescue at-risk children. Still . . .. Daily Telegraph (London)

Wait, What? Elementary school teacher Carie Charlesworth was fired by a Catholic school near San Diego . . because her husband was threatening to kill her--which supposedly put her kids in danger. KNSD-TV (San Diego)

The Aristocrats!

Destination--Ninth Circle of Hell: Cheryl Tchida, 51, has a 19-yr-old daughter with dwarfism and a mental age of 5 so the thing to do with her, Cheryl thought (according to police), was pimp her out at $200/per to several men over a six-week period, and now the kid’s pregnant. New York Daily News

Laura Fong, 18, of Barrow, Ga., ignored several reasonable inquiries by her mother as to who had eaten her fried chicken, and then apparently grew weary of the inquisition. Fong was arrested later after her mother, her shoulder bleeding from a deep bite and a dumbbell attack, called the cops. Barrow Patch

Pictorial Aristocrats (from last week’s The Smoking Gun collection): a toothless Hal Holbrook and a young Jabba

Weekly Cite-Seeing

Complaint About Smelly Juror Collapses Kingston Oceana Murder Trial --- Your Local Guardian (London)

Marshall U. Dismissed from Bottle-Rocket-Shot-Out-of-Anus Lawsuit --- West Virginia Record

8-Month Erection Leads to Malpractice Lawsuit --- United Press International

Saudi Prince Sues Forbes Over His Rank on Billionaires List --- Los Angeles Times

Strange Old World

Recurring Theme: Oldenberg, Germany,’s annual cow beauty contest is back, with 250 contestants. The money fact here is that there are 12 professional cow hairdressers who work the show, trimming belly and leg hair (to display the veins, the powerful legs, bulging udders, and strong bone structure). The Local (Berlin)

Colombian poet Raffael Medina Brochero, vowing that he’d never run out of money again on the road while performing, said he’s aiming to pre-fund his upcoming trip to Europe . . . by selling his testicles for US$20,000. Colombia Reports

Urban Legend? Probably not, since, after all, it’s Japan. Teens’ latest craze is when a girl lets you lick her eyeball. Apparently it’s like getting to 2nd base with her. Ophthalmologists are horrified (pinkeye and eye chlamydia) Shanghaiist.com

Americans Starting to Suck at BS’ing

The best Aron Roy, 23, could do when arrested for kidnaping a teenage girl in Fremont, Calif., was to ‘splain that it was an accident, that he got into the wrong car, which is why he ordered her to take off her clothes. ABC News

In Fort Pierce, Fla., Martin Perez, 33, took off his shoes to reveal that he had a packet of cocaine between his toes . . but that it wasn’t his cocaine, that it belonged to someone else. TCPalm.com (Stuart, Fla.)

Rodger Kelly, 50, was arrested in St. George, Utah, for rape, but, y’see, what happened was that he put his penis inside the woman only to warm her up because it was cold outside where he found her, and he needed to get her temperature up. Seriously. Salt Lake Tribune

Your Weekly Jury Duty
[In America, you're presumed innocent . . . until the mug shot is released]

Randy Zipperer, 49, arrested in Deltona, Fla., for stabbing his brother because he thought the guy stole his mac-and-cheese. The brother also might have made Randy spill his beer. [ed.: Sometimes ya need to take a look at the victim, too, before you judge.] WPBF-TV (West Palm Beach)

Newsrangers: Steve Manousos, Aaron Nachsin, Steve Dunn, Bob Wagner, and Perry Levin, and the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors